Page 16 of The Poet Empress
I should have kept my mouth shut and my head down, the way Ma always said that city boys liked. But perhaps it was the creeping darkness giving me urgency, or because part of me knew that when Pima had said,You ought to ask the prince himself,he’d been right—I knew I had to at least try.
I owed it to Ma and Ba, and to the Rui sisters who had given me their only goat Myrna. I owed it to everybody in my village who had released a lantern that night on the hill, who counted on me being brave enough to bring gifts back.
“I would like your help.” My voice came out tiny and frightened. “To send my brother to school. Bao is very clever, and learns things quickly, and if he goes to school he can become anything. And… I would like to send some food home. The famine has torn my village apart, and we are all suffering. I have seen how much abundance there is in the Azalea House, and thought that perhaps… perhaps a few barrels of rice can be spared.”
“There is no greatness without suffering,” Terren said. He set downhis paper at last and met my eyes. “Our dinner is getting cold, Wei. You should eat.”
My palms began to sweat. It was the same almost friendly voice he had used on Zhen, and it told me that this was a trick.
“What is the matter? Are you afraid of me?”
No,I tried to say, but the lie was too large to make it out of my throat.
He leaned in with interest, his ward beginning to swirl like a winter gust. “Was it what I did to Zhen, during my selection? Or was it something you heard about me even before? Tell me, was it the slaying dogs, or the bloodying servants, or the cutting tongues like snipping roots off bean sprouts?”
The worst part was that his curiosity didn’t even seem feigned. It was like he truly wanted to know.
“Perhaps you’ve even heard about the time I cut a scribe’s body into twenty pieces and laid him in the sun to dry.” When his mood shifted, it shifted suddenly, like storm clouds that had sprung from nowhere. “And yet you came to my selection anyway, greedy thing.” He jabbed his chin at the food on the table. “Eat.”
With trembling fingers, I picked up my chopsticks. He did not pick up his. Instead, he watched me intently, dark eyes following every hesitant bite I took.
By the time I had finished my bowl of rice, he still hadn’t touched his own.
“Surely that can’t be all you’re having,” he drawled into the lingering silence. “The cooks in the palace work very hard. The food they prepare is among the best.” His sigil gleamed as he floated a knife from the ceiling towards us and used its tip to scoop more rice into my bowl. He watched me until I finished it. When I was done, he filled my bowl again.
My stomach stretched with a fullness I was only beginning to get used to. “Have you eaten yet, Your Highness? The food is getting cold.”
“I would rather my betrothed get her share first. My mother has taught me how a man ought to take care of a woman.”
“I… I am satisfied, Your Highness.”
“I am disinclined to believe that. After all, this is what you have come for, isn’t it? You were starving, and you imagined there to be a bounty of food in the Azalea House, and so you attended my selection. Most of yourkind don’t make it all the way to the capital. But somehow, like a rat into a kitchen, you’ve slipped through.” He filled my bowl again.
I stared at him, my blood running cold. I was beginning to realize how dangerous he truly was. The last time I had seen him, he had been hideously drunk, to the point that his violence could almost be excused as a wine-induced whim. But now, seeing him with lucid eyes and a cutting smile, it was clear how much intent there was behind his cruelty, how much intelligence.
He was still watching me expectantly. I could not stomach another bite, but I had little choice. I ate the third bowl and shuddered as a wave of sickness swept through me. He gave me a fourth.
“If I have any more,” I said in a small voice, “I fear I may be sick. And I do not want to disgrace Your Highness with such unpleasantness.”
He waved a hand. “I have seen plenty of body fluids, most of it spilled by me. I am not squeamish.”
I felt his eyes burning into me as I ate the fourth bowl, bite by slow bite. It was like swallowing stones. Halfway through, I felt my insides churning. I threw down my chopsticks and rushed to the basin-room, where I sicked everything I had eaten into a bucket. For a moment I just sat there shivering, my gown soaked through with sweat.
Then I took a few deep breaths, wiped my face with a cloth, and returned to the table.
This time, I didn’t wait for him to prompt me. I picked up my chopsticks and kept going. There was a fifth bowl, a sixth, and I was sick twice more. By the seventh, there was a change in Terren’s demeanor, a darkening, as if the joke had turned sour. There was an eighth and a ninth. I swallowed it all down and sicked it all up. I ate until there was no more rice in the basket, and then I sicked one final time, hunched over the bucket on all fours, heaving and heaving until I expelled only acid and burning air.
I was so weak after that I could barely stand. As I made my way back to him, step by agonizing step, I had to use the walls as support.
While he waited, he had been polishing a sword from off the wall with a different one. When he saw me again, he said the last thing I wanted to hear, the thing I had been dreading all day: “I am tired. Let us abed.”
Servants came in to empty out the bucket and clean the basin-room. Then they prepared a hot bath for me infused with ginseng andpomegranate blossoms, both aphrodisiacs the apothecary had shown us. Listlessly, I scrubbed the soft red flowers over my bare shoulders.Pomegranate will make the night calm and tranquil,I could hear the apothecary saying.In the calm, Heaven’s magic gathers.
When I was clean again, I stumbled to Terren’s bed, cold and shaking with dread. But he wasn’t waiting to take me. He was already turned on his side, fast asleep.
I couldn’t believe it.
While washing myself, my mind had run through a hundred ways he could have forced himself on me, each more horrible than the last. Wasn’t the whole point of this ill-fated selection for him to plant me? To produce an heir for the nation?
