Page 118 of The Poet Empress
Beneath the terrace, Terren was still sprawled on the ground, not moving.
The Crown bellowed, then raised itself—with great difficulty—onto its four claws. Its vicious eyes fell on the prince, splayed out on the far side of the arena, and it began to move towards him with slow, rumbling steps. I couldn’t breathe.
Terren, don’t die.
Not now. Not like this.
The West Palace already knew I had betrayed them. If Terren did notmanage to tame the Crown, and it passed to Maro, I would be the first person the new emperor beheaded.
The dragon was close enough that the steam from its nostrils billowed the prince’s hair. It reared back, thenthrewits head forward, jaws snapping—
But not around Terren. He stopped it just in time, fast enough that I barely caught it happening: three of the swords on the ground shooting underneath the dragon’s chin,lifting—with a flare of the?/Dao sigil—the dragon by the bottom of its head, high enough that when the jaw did snap shut—a colossal snap that shook the balustrades and rattled the plates on the tables—it caught only wind. And the swords didn’t stop there. They kept rising, and rising, until the dragon was near vertical—then theyflungit back, and the entire enormity of it sailed across the air and smashed against the literomantic barrier with a sky-shatteringboom. The shock of it made an entire section of the balustrade crumble away, startling the men who had been leaning on it.
The dragon slid down the side of the barrier like it was glass. It landed on the ground and lay still. Even its wounds were hardly leaking salt anymore, as if whatever store within it had run out.
The audience rioted with awe and cheer.
On the far side of the arena, Terren tried to push himself off the ground—and collapsed immediately. He tried again, and managed to make it onto his knees but no further. There he stayed. Hunched over, with his head hanging, blood dripping onto his tattered gown and the salt-dusted arena.
He must have been exhausted beyond belief. That last use of magic—the one strong enough tohurl a dragon across the arena—must have taken everything he had. If something like it had been easy, he would have done it much sooner.
But he has still won,I thought, even as I felt my palms sweat.He is still to become emperor. The fight is already over, the dragon subdued. He only needs a moment to gather his strength, and—
“Prince Maro is going in!” someone from below shrieked.
I rushed to the balustrade with everyone else and looked down. They were right. Amidst the chaos, the first son—in his gold-and-white splendor—had found his way to the arena. He was pressing a palm to the literomantic barrier, and his sigil—of roads, of tunnels, ofpassageways—burned like the sun. And then a moment later, he stepped through with a ripple, as if all that magic was only a curtain of water.
With cold horror, I remembered what he had pledged to Master Ganji after his failure in the peach garden.I won’t fail you next time. I won’t let you down again.Maro never had a chance to make good on that pledge—not until now, when Terren was on his knees, with his ward down, so gravely injured that he could not even stand, let alone defend himself.
65A BEATING HEART
Everyone was shouting in alarm now; the wind, already relentless, became even more frenetic. The tapestries flapped precariously, the torches sputtered out, and Maro kept walking calmly across the empty arena towards his brother, stepping over salt and scales, crushed stone and blood.
Terren could not even lift his head. His sigil flickered feebly from where he knelt, summoning his swords. But only two of them responded to his call. And even then, they only stayed in the air a moment before falling to the ground like dead things.
“He’s going to kill him,” someone in the crowd screamed.
He really was. I watched, uselessly, as Maro reached Terren, closed both hands around his throat, and lifted him off the ground.
The despair I felt then was like being buried by a mountain. It was over. It was truly over. Terren was going to die, and Maro was going to tame the already subdued dragon and become emperor. And because I had betrayed Maro, because I had not cast the heart-spirit poem as planned, he would—
I sucked in a breath.Wait.
The heart-spirit poem.
My pulse was racing. I all but sprinted back to the tent. My section of the terrace had been abandoned; everyone had poured towards the balconies on the far side of the arena, where the brothers were, to be closer to the action.The heart-spirit poem.I tore out my pen and started writing on the rug, frantic, one memorized character after the other.
In my periphery, I could see Terren struggling in his brother’s chokehold. His mouth was open as he gasped for breath, and his face had turnedan alarming shade of red. He tried again to summon his blades—?/Dao sigil flickering like a dying flame—but his magic must have been spent entirely. The swords stayed motionless on the ground. Weakly, he pried at the hands around his throat, but it was no use. Maro held firm.
I had very little time.
The heart-spirit poem was developed in the early Ash Dynasty,Ciyi had once told me,as a potent derivative of the more commonplace healing spell.
A spell that can find its way directly to the heart.
Maybe it did not have to be a killing spell. I scribbled down one hurried character over another, line after line. Maybe finding someone’s heart did not have to condemn them to death. Maybe it could, instead, give themlife.
I would not even have to change my poem much. Everything was already there. I needed only to change the framing of the truths I had already laid bare—add a few characters, imbue it with my new intention—and then it would tell another story entirely. A story not of tragedy or suffering, but of joy, of love.
