Page 85 of The Poet Empress
I tightened my grip.
“But you forget I don’t fear death, Wei. I have already decided, long ago, to go echo-step with the first prince I served. And this”—he made a gesture encompassing himself—“is what remains.” He placed a hand over my trembling one holding the knife. “And besides, you know that I am not a fool. I would not have gone into your pavilion without contingencies. Terren already knows I am here, and if you kill me, he will know exactly who is responsible. A pity that I will not be around to talk him out of exterminating your familythen.”
With his hand over mine, he began prying the blade away from his neck.
I kneed him in the stomach. There was enough force in it to loosen his grip and send him sprawling to the ground. He was right about the killing, of course, but there were other ways of subduing him. I pinned him down with the weight of my body, and when he started to cry for help, I shoved a shoe in his mouth to muffle the sound.
He might be cleverer than me, more experienced than me, but he was not stronger than me.
He was old. I was young and raised on a farm, to do hard work. Even having been famine-starved my whole life, it was not difficult for me to overpower him.
The door swung open. Wren had arrived. With one look she seemed to glean the situation and helped me pin the struggling eunuch down. She shoved a silk handkerchief in his mouth to keep him silent.
“Keep holding him,” I told her. “But don’t hurt him.”
I knew he had not been bluffing. If he was harmed at all in my pavilion, Terren would suspect me. It was not the only reason I didn’t want Hesin harmed—he was still innocent, even if he was an enemy—but it was the reason I cared about more.
“What do we do?” Wren whispered. Her eyes went to my poem, still glowing faintly where I’d dropped it on the desk.
“We let him go. He’s tried talking to Terren already. The prince won’t believe him if there’s no evidence.” With Wren holding the eunuch down, I went to my desk, set down Hesin’s knife, and lit a lantern. I took out each piece of my poem and, one by one, put them to the flame. I had spent long enough working on it that I knew it all by heart anyway.
The scent of burning paper filled the room.
After tonight, there would be precious little time. Days, if I was lucky. As soon as Hesin was freed, he would begin the investigation. He would turn over everything in the Azalea House, interrogate everyone, until he found proof to convict me. I did not think any of my servants or Ciyi would tell him anything—to avoid their own executions, if nothing else, since they were all complicit—but one of them might let slip something by accident. Or Hesin would chance upon a piece of writing I had forgotten to burn, or uncover one of my doctored edicts. He was bound to findsomething.
I had to disarm him—permanently—before he could scrounge up evidence against me. I had to get Terren to distrust Hesin before Hesin could get him to distrust me.
I finished burning the papers. We let him go. Then I went straight to the West Palace.
48A FIGHT FOR DAWN
It was a stale morning,Maro wrote in his journal, about the day he met with his brother in the peach garden for the last time.The blanket of mist covering the ground was as high as my waist, and the air hung so still that blossoms fell like stones.
Terren was sixteen now, and grown.
Standing twenty paces away, across the bridge and on the other side of the pond, the second son had gained a new menace in his posture. Eight swords hovered in a ring around him.
“Brother,” Maro said.
He did not reply or move.
“Why must you stand so far away? We are family, are we not?”
Silence.
Maro took a tentative step forward, towards the bridge. The peach garden smelled wetly of rotten blossoms and abandoned things. The cobblestones had gone unswept, the bushes wild and untrimmed, the pavilions into disrepair. Swallows dove in and out of the cracks in the pagodas’ roofs, having made their nests among the wooden beams.
Anything that happened here, nobody would know.
“You left this back in the mountains.” Maro made it to the middle of the bridge and set down the chest he’d been carrying. He hoped that Terren could not see his hands shaking. Somehow this was harder than diverting the Aricine River, worse even than the long months building the Salt Road.
Terren still didn’t move from his shore, but his eyes drifted to the ornate tortoises carved in the mahogany.
Maro knelt next to the chest, trying to ignore the frantic pounding ofhis heart. “I’ve brought you something.” He unclasped it, drew out a heaping plate of flower-shaped desserts, and set them onto the bridge. “Mung bean cakes. Would you like to share some with me?”
Terren’s eyes narrowed, likely suspecting poison.
Maro had prepared for this possibility. He took one of the cakes and placed it into his own mouth, biting open the tiny antidote vessel that he kept in the corner of his cheek. He swallowed it along with the cake.
