Page 102 of The Poet Empress
I chose another torture spell. This time, the pain was even worse. It was like every capillary in my body was set on fire, every vein a devouring river of flames. I bit my cheeks and squeezed my eyes shut to keep from screaming, but that had the added effect of making me pause writing. The moment the branch stopped moving, the magistrate kicked me with a boot and said, “Keep going,” and I forced my eyes open and completed the spell.
There was a third round after that—I chose the safe one this time, since it would look suspicious if I never got lucky—and then on thefourth, I did scream, I couldn’t help it anymore. The pain was that unbearable. It was like nothing I had ever, ever felt before.
I kept writing. There was a fifth round and a sixth. Blood dripped out of my nose and my mouth, making scarlet spatters on the floor. A seventh, an eighth—every time I finished one, the magistrate immediately put out three new ones. I felt my body weakening over time, my mind slipping. At some point I fainted. When I woke again, shaking on the ground, there was a fresh set of spells for me to choose from.
“Again,” said the magistrate, without emotion.
I supposed they needed to push me to my breaking point, in case I reallywasliterate and hiding it. I wrote another spell.
“Again.”
Every part of me begged for the agony to be over. If I confessed I was literate, and I’d been plotting to kill Terren, and that I was not actually an empress but a villager who was worth nothing, knew nothing, maybe the pain would finally, finally stop.
I picked up the elm branch and kept writing.
One humid summer when I was nine, maybe ten, I had spent an entire day weeding the rice terraces without break. It had been an oppressively hot day, with no clouds to hide the sun, and I had been tired and so, so thirsty.
So I plopped myself in the paddy, hot water soaking my trousers, and threw a big tantrum. For a long time I screamed and kicked at the reeds, complaining of the heat, and the mosquitoes, and my hurting hands, hoping that Ba would come and tell me I could go inside and rest. But he never did.
When the sun was halfway down, and at last I wiped my eyes and looked up, I saw that Ba was still working silently. He had not even lifted his head up once.
I would never forget the sight of him, hunched over in the haze of heat, pulling up clumps and clumps of sedges. While I had been sitting there feeling sorry for myself, he had been working hard, enduring, suffering.
At nine years old, maybe ten, I had learned the price we must pay to live.
I kept writing. The pain kept coming.
And coming.
And coming.
And—
What happened next I was not aware of at the time. It was only afterwards that Mi Yung and Ciyi filled me in.
Everyone had been pretty sure I was about to die.
The exam had been going on and on, the magistrate ordering more and more rounds. Blood was leaking from my nose, mouth, and ears. I wasn’t breathing right. I had just finished a spell—the fourteenth, by Ciyi’s count—and the helpers had been about to put out another set, when Terren said from the back of the room, “That’s enough.”
The magistrate looked up, annoyed. “Your Highness, we are in the middle of conducting a sacred exam.”
“She has done fourteen rounds of the test already. Is that not enough proof for you?”
“A Heavenly trial cannot be aborted.”
“It can if I say it can.”
“That is not how that works.”
“If she keeps going, she will die.” Despite how quiet Terren’s voice was from where he stood, his anger seemed to shake the entire room.
“She is only a concubine.”
“She is my empress.”
The magistrate heaved a deep sigh and shook his head. “Whatever she is, I am still a representative of His Majesty the Son of Heaven. I do not answer to your commands, only those of the emperor himself. And seeing as he has not given the order—”
“My father?” Terren threw his head back in a laugh, and it was wild and not held back. “That half-dead creature lying like boiled radish in his bed? Tell me, when was the last time he has givenanyorder? The last time he was even coherent?”
