Page 34 of The Poet Empress
He only looked at me with hard eyes. “And have them grow up to covet my position? To compete with me for a place in history? To potentiallykillme? Hesin, I am not a fool.”
“If you do not have sons, Your Majesty, what happens to the nation after you die? Who will inherit the Crown?”
“Let it go to someone with merit. Whoever is capable of seizing the throne will be the most qualified person to occupy it. And if he must rule without magic, so be it. Heaven knows that men have been doing so long before the First Emperor.”
That is not to say he did not use his own magic while ruling. Muzha would not have killed his brothers without having a plan for the nation’s recovery, and his plan involved making generous use of his?/Yan seal.
Salt had been a scarce commodity before his reign. It had been so expensive that Caeyang Corridor merchants used to disguise barrels of it as wine, so as to not be targeted by bandits.
And after? Well, perhaps you have seen the effects of it even in your village, Lady Yin. I heard that, even far from the capital, there was a time when flakes of salt fell from the sky like snow, and white crystals of it bloomed out of the ground like wildflowers.
The first thing Muzha did upon his ascension was pull out all the Yan Blessings he had written in his youth, Blessings he had hidden from the rest of his family, and use them to make salt. When he ran out of them, he began using his seal magic, riding the dragon every day to amplify his power. Soon, ships heavy with barrels started setting sail for Orsagh, Seen, and Moonshadow Bay, to even farther places where snow covered the ground all year long. Caravans went northwest in droves. Traders returned with bars of gold and jade, to be exchanged for the loyalty of mercenaries and stone to build walls.
It worked for a while. It might have worked for even longer had it not been for the famine.
Nobody saw it coming. The rice crops failed first, paddies drying all over the nation’s south. Then everything else edible—wheat, millet, pepper, and soy—began dying as well. Tensha, once the greatestnation in this corner of the world, was quickly on its way to becoming the poorest.
The Yongkai Emperor made more salt to compensate, and when everything was sold, he made more still. But it was not enough. Salt prices were decreasing rapidly, because of oversupply, and at the same time, his health was failing. He had drawn so much magic from himself that he’d become frail and sickly. Some days, he could not even rise from bed.
“Why did you do it?” I asked him.
With great effort, Muzha propped himself up on his pillow. I passed him a cup of hot medicine, which the imperial doctors had prescribed, and his fingers shook so hard he could barely hold the porcelain.
“I suppose you mean the manner in which I took the throne,” he said.
“Your brothers could have helped you, had you not killed them.”
“I had to kill them to ensure the Mandate of Heaven is mine.”
“Or you could have forced the eldest to name you heir, killed only him, and spared all the others. You did not have to rule a nation by yourself.”
“If that is truly the case, why is there only one emperor, one Crown? Why is there only one—” He dissolved into a fit of coughs. A moment later, he cleared his throat and took a sip of the herbal concoction. “Why is there only one name passed down in history,” he finished, weakly.
“Plenty of names are passed down in history, Your Majesty.”
“But only a few so often as the First Emperor’s. Or the Wenning Emperor. Or my father’s father. There is only so much room for names like those.” The more agitated he became, the worse his rasp. “What other chance did I have, being born the fifth son? Tell me, Hesin, what could I have done besides what I did?”
“Your Majesty,” I said quietly, “you will have no legacy if your dynasty falls. If Tensha ceases to exist, nobody will be left to write your history or sing your name.”
He was a wise emperor, all things considered, and did not behead me for speaking difficult truths. But still he did not listen to me. Nomatter how dire the situation became, he refused to take concubines and try for sons.
Stubborn: it was another way he was like his father.
One day he fell off his dragon.
It was a dark autumn evening, the sky torrenting with rain and the mountaintops flashing with lightning. I had been holding meetings on the emperor’s behalf all day, and had not known he was going to ride the Crown. But even from the Hall of Supreme Merit, I could hear the dragon’s blood-churning roar when it came, a sound so loud it rumbled the walls. I knew immediately something was wrong.
Outside, a brilliant light went to the sky like a beacon. The Crown was signaling to us.
“Please pardon me,” I said to our guests hurriedly, and then I sprinted out the door towards the light, along with just about everyone else in the palace.
I reached him first. Halfway down the mountain, in the thick of the forest, he was lying face-down beside the Crown’s claw. His body was half-submerged in the torrent of rainwater rushing downhill.
“Your Majesty!” I raced to his side and turned him over. As soon as I saw the empty barrels next to him, barrels he had intended to fill with salt, I knew exactly what had happened. Despite all the doctors’ warnings not to use his seal magic, he had tried to ride the dragon anyway.
I shook him in desperation. “Muzha.Muzha.” If he died, there would be no more seal-bearing sons. Nobody to inherit the throne. And I knew enough of history to know that when thrones sat empty, nations crumbled to dust.
Soon others arrived too. Doctors and literomancers in the darkness, casting spell after healing spell to try to save the emperor. For a long time, we didn’t know whether we were too late—but at last, Muzha stirred and gave a weak cough. We took him to his bed. He slept for many days, during which more doctors, literomancers, and apothecaries from distant provinces came to heal him.
