Page 43 of The Poet Empress
Ciyi jerked his chin up from the scroll we had been reading. “I didn’t know you were serious, Lady Yin.” He turned the shade of hawberries. “I thought you’d been joking about bringing a servant.”
I laughed. “Don’t stand so far away, Hu. Come join us.” I used some of the scrolls Ciyi had prepared for me to write for her a few beginner’s characters, teaching her the same way my eunuch had taught me. “Reading seems more daunting than it actually is. Even though our Ancestors have given us more than twenty thousand characters, they are not random. Some characters look like their meanings—watch.” I wrote for her?/Niao, then showed her how it could be seen as a spring swift.
Soon Wren began coming to learn too. She had been the one to ask.
“Lady Yin,” she had blurted out one morning as she was changing my sheets. “I keep smelling the ink on these, and I was thinking… well, Pima used to read to me. But he is in the capital now.” She spoke quickly, as if she felt the words too dangerous to be said one at a time. “But I miss those stories and poems, Lady Yin. And… and it would be nice to be able to write him letters too, and have him write me back.”
Ciyi’s eyes widened when he saw Wren enter that night. “That isnotpart of the bargain.” His eyes bulged even wider when Wren then brought two of the other maids a few days later, Fern and Eli, the latter holding an oak-furred kitten in her arms. When Teela, the rambunctious flute player, also joined in, he looked as if he was going to positively burst with anger.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him, grinning. “I am going to be empress soon. I will do the hard work; all you have to do is provide us with ink and scrolls.” He mumbled something under his breath as I produced a fresh paper and began to write for the newcomers.
Soon, enough of my servants knew about this arrangement that we no longer had to hide in my bedchambers. The storyteller Mo began to come, and so did the old gardener Aron; both of them were men, butthey’d never had the means to go to school. We turned the Cypress Pavilion’s parlor into a study, filled with the sounds of people reading aloud at night.Niao. Mu. Shan. Yue.We all knew that if one person told, everyone would be punished equally—even the servants who were not part of the lessons—so we all trusted each other to keep the secret.
As Mid-Autumn approached, moonflower-rabbits started coming out in droves, chirruping quietly as they played among the cypresses. We could see them outside the window, their fur glowing softly in the night.
The court had grown quiet. The concubines stopped trying to humiliate me. There was no more spilled tea, or broken strings on my erhu, or rats painted on fans. Perhaps the others had finally learned that with a prince like Terren, they could no longer play the game they had come to play. Perhaps they had grown afraid of me, just as Ciyi had predicted.
I found I did not mind it.
Terren still hurt me at night. In fact, he hurt me worse than before. But somehow, the pain felt lessened, because now I was not alone and not without power. I knew now that one day there was going to be an end to all this suffering, like the sun erasing the cold of night. All I had to do was finish my poem.
Wren was the only one who knew I was writing it.
“I have three pages completed,” I told her one night, after all the other students and Ciyi had left. I lifted one of the floorboards in my parlor and unfurled the scroll I’d hidden there. “Remember Hesin’s stories that I relayed to you? I’ve written my spell based on them. But I’m stuck. I don’t know where to go from here.”
“Let me see.” Wren held up the paper to the moonlight by the window, above one of the mandarin trees. She asked me about a few characters—she still could not read as well as I could—then laughed a little. “This is an angry poem, Lady Yin. When you were recounting Hesin’s stories to me, I don’t remember there being so much anger.”
Poetry was truth and emotion. When I’d written the lines down, I had not thought too much about the words, only followed the stirrings in my heart like Terren described. I’d written about the full moon in the Sanctuary, the smashed mandolin, the mandarin ducks in the water. Aboutthe pillar of light in the storm and the Yongkai Emperor’s scared voice in the darkness.
The heartbreak, the helplessness, the fear—those had all been in Hesin’s stories.
But the anger had been mine.
“When Hesin told me the story about serving the Yonghuan Emperor,” I said, “he mentioned something that I have not been able to forget.I have borrowed from the future.I don’t know what that means exactly, but it felt… selfish. Selfish and shortsighted. I can’t shake the feeling that Jinzha is responsible for everything.” My older brothers dead, Larkspur buried, Bao not able to go to school. “It made me very angry, and I felt the urge to put it into writing.”
My eyes moved to the verse below, and I heard the thunder in that unending storm again, felt the cold rain outside the emperor’s bedchambers. “And I was angry about what Muzha said as he was dying, too. When his country had been torn apart by famine, when the people were starving outside his walls, he had not thought of helping them. Not once. All he cared about was how to defend his country and maintain his legacy.” I exhaled, suddenly doubting myself. “Do you think I should not have poured all that anger in? It is mine, after all—not Terren’s.”
Wren shook her head fiercely. “No. It is a good thing, I think. Whenever Pima read me poems, he’d tell me a bit about the scholar who wrote them.Everyone who tells a story leaves a part of themselves inside it,he’d say.That is what gives it power. There is the feeling from the story, and the feeling from its teller, both working together.” She knelt next to me and held my hand. “But that also means, Lady Yin, that sometimes even the teller does not know the truth. They only know what they perceive. Perhaps you have not been able to finish your poem because Hesin does not know everything.”
“Doesn’t he?” He had served three generations of princes. He knew more about the country than any of us.
“Do you truly believe Hesin’s theory? That our prince has been corrupted by power?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they all have.” The magic of a Heavenly sigil, the gift of whispered truths and easy literomancy, the possibility of the Crown—how could one gain all that and remain the way they were?
“Or maybe,” Wren said uncertainly, “there is more to the story. Maybe Hesin’s experience with the first prince he served has colored his perception of the last. Maybe there is someone else you must speak with.”
Prince Maro.
I knew her meaning at once. In Hesin’s accounts, Terren’s brother had been the one person who stuck close by his side, the one person who knew him intimately. If there was anyone who could help me complete my poem, it was the first son.
But… it was not possible. Maro was of the Outer Court, a place someone like me could never go. He was also Terren’s enemy. Even if I did have a means of passing messages to the West Palace, I could not do so without arousing suspicion. How would the House punish me when they found out? How would the empress? How wouldTerren?
When I glanced out the window again, all the rabbits were gone. Whether they were hiding only for the night, or a predator had come, there remained only darkness in the courtyard.
27GENEROUS GIFTS
By Mid-Autumn, the beginnings of an idea had come to me. It was a risky one, and foolish. If it failed I would likely be executed.
