Page 30 of The Poet Empress
I asked for more stories, more meetings, after the first. Though I had begun speaking to Hesin from an inkling, the mere beginnings of a plan, I had gained a suspicion that I was on the right track.
As we met each morning in the fog, Hesin told me about his days serving the Yongkai Emperor and, after Terren and Maro were born, their shared boyhood; I listened in solemn silence, knowing it was my duty to capture truth and emotion. If only I captured enough, I could turn his stories into a prince-killing poem, the way a weaver spun silk into yarn.
One evening, after I’d returned to the Cypress Pavilion, Wren surprised me by running to me at the gate. “Lady Yin, Lady Yin!” Her voice was as excited as a young child’s. “Tel Pima, my friend, he has awoken!”
Joy and relief blossomed in my heart. “Wren, that is terrific news.”
She grinned and took both my hands. “He would want to see you before he leaves the palace. Will you join the servants for lunch? The others don’t know about Pima, of course, but I told them you are a friend…” She was bouncing up and down, as if nervous to even ask the question, as if I would not be overjoyed to accept. As if it would not be the first meal in the palace I shared with someone who did not point knives at my throat.
“I would love nothing more,” I said, and meant it.
It was bright and cloudless in this corner of the palace. The cypresses waved to us with their branches as we passed under their canopy; hidden within their rustling leaves, Hwamei birds sang their brightju-wee, ju-wee. In the far distance, by the lush peaks rising out of the mountainside, I could see the Crown of the Azalea House beginning its midday flight. Its serpentine body unfurled with ancient slowness.
A fond smile appeared on Wren’s face. “When I was little, you know, I had a chance to ride it.”
My eyes flew wide. “You aren’t joking?”
“Of course not. It would be poor form to joke with the lady I serve. I was sold into the Azalea House when I was four and nameless. Long before I worked in the East Palace, I was in the South as an attendant to the emperor’s magical menagerie. My first charge was to take care of a little orchid-wren; it was then that I received my name.” Her smile widened. “Soon, I moved on to the turtles and the monkeys, the ivy-maned horses and the soaring phoenixes. I did such a good job that I was soon given the privilege of attending the Crown itself. Once a month, I would climb onto its head and clean its horns of dirt and trapped leaves. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be up there once more…”
I had to admit I was envious. I imagined how the dragon’s red horn must feel under my fingers, rough and hot with magic. “Why did you leave the South Palace?”
“It wasn’t by choice. My superior—an irritable maid by the name of Bairon”—a scowl on Wren’s face told me what she thought of Bairon—“had wanted to climb the palace ranks for as long as I can remember. As the emperor’s illness grew more dire, as his heir came closer to taking his place, Bairon believed that serving the East Palace would be more fruitful than investing in the South. She bribed some people, and we moved here.”
How often was it, I wondered then, that the path we took was one forced upon us?
Not long after, we arrived at the servants’ pavilion. Lunch was already set up outside, among the azalea bushes. Soups, sweet plum juice, and rice in bamboo steamers crowded the cypresswood tables, and around them sat the pavilion’s twenty-three servants. They bowed to me as I neared, and I bowed back, though etiquette did not decree I needed to.
Wren introduced them to me in a playful, conspiratorial voice. “That’s Duan, the bookkeeper—he’s brilliant with numbers, but will forget his own age. That’s Aron, the oldest and most experienced gardener, but he’s terrified of cats. If one so much as nears the flower bush he’s trimming, he’ll yell like a boy until one of us chases it away! And that’s Aunt Ping, who cleans the windows. Gentle in the heart, yet foul-mouthed, verbose. All of us youngermaids avoid her, because she won’t stop telling us not to slouch, or to keep up our nutrition, or to drink hot water three times a day…”
It was true. As we ate, in the company of cicadas and sparrows, Aunt Ping had no shortage of words for me. “Ayah,Daughter of Huang, you must eat more,” she complained, piling more and more pork dumplings into my bowl. “A young girl like yourself must grow plump, like geese, heh? But you are more like the bones of chicken!” She prodded at my elbow with a chopstick.
She reminded me so much of Aunt Raia, from my village, that I could not help a grin. But that only made her frown deepen—and the number of dumplings in my bowl grow larger.
For the past few weeks, eating had been hard for me. After that first night with Terren, I could hardly spend a meal without feeling nauseous—especially when the scent of warm rice was in the air. But somehow, this time, it was easier. This time, when I reached for the rice, I was reminded less of that night with the prince and more of my family’s table back in Lu’an.
After lunch, the twelve-year-old maid Teela leapt onto the table, yelled, “I want to show Lady Yin a new song I composed!” and played a tune for us on her bamboo flute. As she did, the elderly eunuch Mo repeated a well-loved story. “Nobody had thought it was possible to shoot down the nine extra suns,” he said toothlessly, “but the Archer believed and did it anyway. It was thanks to him that the world was saved from its burning and fiery fate.”
It was that afternoon that I noticed the scars. Knife lines everywhere—slashing across brows, splitting lips. Duan was missing a finger; Fern, an ear. Du Hu, the old maid with gray-streaked hair, the one who had been mending the scarf, was missing her tongue.
That was why she hadn’t spoken to me the day of my selection, I realized with aching guilt. What I had been so arrogant as to have taken for dislike had been simple inability.
She was not sitting at our table, but on a stool at the edge of the clearing by herself. “Come join us,” I asked of her, but she only kept her head down and her shoulders hunched, and did not look at me even once.
After lunch, Wren and I went to the storerooms. Pima was where we had left him, tucked away behind barrels and shelves, reading a scroll by thelight of a paper lantern. I recognized it as a treatise by the Sun Dynasty explorer Mei Xian.
When he noticed me, he prostrated himself at once. “Lady Yin, I cannot thank you enough for saving me. I leave the palace tomorrow.”
His words were joyful, but his expression was somber. “Pima,” I said, bewildered, “what is the matter?”
His shoulders hunched. “When I go, it will be without my wages, without the honor of a palace position. How will I face my family? I may have escaped with my life, but what will become of my grandfather? Or my sister, who is too sickly to marry? Lady Yin, I do not mean to sound ungrateful, but going home will only be a source of shame.”
Wren bit her lip and turned away, as if to acknowledge the ugly truth in his words.
I hardly knew what to say myself. I had fancied myself so noble when I saved his life, forgetting that sometimes living was not enough.
That was why none of the East Palace servants could leave, I realized. They might have been intimately aware of the prince’s cruelty, but many of them had others who depended on them. And even if they did not, it was still shameful to leave a prestigious position in the palace, even if the palace did not care if they died.
A knocking upstairs interrupted us.
