Page 21 of The Poet Empress
“Make a cut,” he repeated, louder.
Shaking, I pressed the sword’s glistening edge to the palm of my spare hand, wincing as it sank into my flesh. A red line welled where steel met skin.
“Not there.” He sounded irritated. “On the battlefield, do you suppose fighting men would aim for the hand?”
I tried to hold back a sob but could not, and a tiny sound struggled out of my lips. I had no idea where fighting men aimed on battlefields.
“Don’t worry,” he said, after I still had not moved. “My magic’s affinity is blades, and that also extends to mending wounds made by them. Now, go on.”
It was the same almost encouraging tone as he had used on Zhen.Don’t worry. My aim is not very good.Still shaking violently, I brought the sword tip to the softness of my stomach. Was this what he wanted?
Every part of my mind was screamingno, no, don’t do it,but I forced all my terror aside, squeezed my eyes shut, and shoved the sword towards me in one decisive motion.
It would not budge.
When I blinked open my eyes, I saw the prince’s seal was glowing. He must have used his magic to prevent the sword from moving.
“Not there either. A stomach wound is fatal, Wei. We are only testing my magic, not trying to have you dead. I said I can mend wounds, not work miracles.”
My heart pounded so hard I could feel my pulse against the grip. Swallowing, I brought the blade to my leg instead. When I thrust it into my thigh this time, nothing held it back.
The pain seared like hot iron. Something like a sob, or a gasp, found its way out of my throat—then another, then another.
“Deeper,” the prince said.
It hurt so terribly that my eyes went blurry with tears, and I was now crying uncontrollably. But still I obeyed. I did everything he asked, just like the first night, because what choice, really, did I have?
He did not plant me that night either.
Before we went to bed, he mended my wound with a spell from his stash, just like he’d promised. Then he lay down and did not speak to me again.
As I sat on the corner of the bed, watching the Aricine Ward swirl languidly around his sleeping figure, I wondered if he was hiding some terrible secret. Maybe he was sick. Maybe someone had put a curse on him, one that made him unable to father a child. Maybe he was really a demonbeneath that wicked face, with the legs of a goat and the scaled belly of a snake, and nobody knew because nobody had seen him unclothed.
The skin on my leg was intact, as if nothing had happened, but I was not intact, I was broken and scared. Even with magic, he could not put back all the blood I lost, and my head kept throbbing and throbbing. Why was it not enough, I asked the Ancestors over and over, that I had lost Larkspur and all the others, that I had been born a girl worth nothing? Why must someone also have to hurt me?
Terren called on me often. Not every night, not even every week, but often enough that every day, when the afternoon light waned and the shadows of my windows’ lattices grew long on the floor, I would begin to breathe fast. My chest would tighten with the panicked hammering of my heart. I would taste bitter bile in my mouth just anticipating Hesin’s knock on my door, which would surely be accompanied by the dreadful wordsHis Highness calls you to his bedside.
What the astronomer had told us earlier, about the lunar cycle, was all a lie. The prince did not spread his duty out among his Inner Court, according to the patterns of the moon. He did not even call on his two Noble Consorts. The only one he ever summoned was me. And when he did, it was never to do his duties and plant me, only to torture me cruelly.
One night, he filled a tub full of mudwater and sedges, the kind that grew wild in rice fields. He then forced me to drink as much of it as possible without allowing me to a trip to the basin-room. “I heard that a paddy needs flooding for rice to grow. As you are a paddy creature, born from the mud, I have supposed you must need to be similarly watered.”
Another night, he brought in a barrel full of a hundred starving rats. “Since you have traveled so far from your village, I have brought for you a piece of home.” With a floating knife he smeared a stew of rancid meat all over me before forcing me into the barrel. He then let the piece of home swarm all over me until I would never again forget their moist bodies, their pittering feet, or that gagging, gutter stench of fur and rot.
Another night, he took me to the Palisade Garden, the biggest garden in the East Palace. “As you are not used to the House’s splendor, Wei, Iwish to share with you all its beauty.” He led me to the pond within the garden, swathed with mist and moonlight. “Please, do admire the carp,” he said, as he floated three dozen swords to make a cage around me, force me underwater, and hold me there amidst the fish. When I coughed or struggled, he told me that I was not appreciative enough, and had me admire the carp once again.
At first, I tried to figure him out. If there was a logic to his cruelty, I reasoned, possibly I could learn to avoid it.
But soon it became clear there was none. If I spoke to him, he hurt me. If I refused to speak, he took it as a slight and hurt me. He hated it when I acted terrified, and he hated it when I acted resentful, and he hated it when I tried to pretend I was neither and spoke kindly. My ignorance provoked his knives, as did any hint of cleverness. The days I cried, he hurt me worst of all.
Maybe hurting people was an itch for him. An itch that kept digging and digging until he scratched it. Maybe that was why he’d chosen me as his Empress-in-Waiting, the one person he could summon exclusively without raising eyebrows in court. I had no powerful family backing me, no political ties. He could hurt me and hurt me, and there was not a thing I could do but bear it.
13DAYS
Terren’s nights with me infuriated the other concubines. Everywhere I went in the Inner Court, I was met with tense smiles, whispered comments, and probing remarks.
It was not hard to guess why. The prince’s choice to summon me exclusively had robbed them all of what they had come here for. During my month in the palace, I had come to learn what favors a concubine could pull in a prince’s bedchamber. Ministerial positions given to fathers, money sent home to mothers, a brother promoted or an uncle pardoned. I had even heard the legend of Wang Li, who had snuck into an enemy state during the War of the Seasons, attendedthatstate’s selection, and become consort to its king. After gaining his favor, she had charmed him into ending the invasion of her homeland.
“The only one he ever calls on is you,” Liru Syra reminded me during tea in the mornings. “You must feel very lucky.” Her words were kind, but she spoke in the same tone Aunt Lien did, the year Asori got into school and her own son didn’t.
