Page 6 of The Poet Empress
I stood up now, and the words came out angrier than I should have dared. “If it’s a joke as you say, then let His Highness Prince Terren laugh at my expense. Bring me back and see if it will please him to show everyone how ugly I am, how filthy, how thin. Let him laugh at this poor village girl and then behead her—it will be no loss to you.”
When I said all this, I did not expect him to actually listen to me. I only said what came to my mind out of anger and desperation.
I definitely did not expect him to smile a pearl-toothed smile or wave me into the carriage.
There was hardly any time for goodbyes.
Bao threw himself around my leg and cried and asked me to come back and visit soon. Ma wept.
Ba stood stone-silent; it was his own way of saying he would miss me.
4AZALEA HOUSE
The girl in the carriage with me was named Zou Minma. She was eighteen and the daughter of a literomancer. It had taken a while for us to speak—we did not much like each other, for clear reasons—but there was nothing else to do while the carriage rocked us over hills of famine-starved land, and so eventually we relented.
Her father wrote spells for mending clothing and blankets, which they sold in Guishan’s archives. Both her older and younger brothers had gone to school, so I gleaned her family was moderately well-off. I wanted to ask her if she had taught herself how to read in secret, but I knew that she would not tell the truth even if she had. Girls did not speak of learning to read, not if they wanted to keep their lives.
And besides, she was very suspicious of me.
“How did you get the money?” she kept asking, one inked eyebrow raised. “There’s no way you could have gotten in without bribery—you don’t even know the first thing about being a concubine.”
“And you do?” I said. When she didn’t reply, I tried to figure out how to get more information from her and settled on flattery. “It’s very impressive that a girl in Guishan should know what life is like in the capital.”
“Of course I do,” she snapped. “I’m not a dumb village girl like you. I know politics. I keep up to date with the succession war.”
“Succession war?” I played with my hands, trying to seem embarrassed that I was not aware.
Her lips curled up, clearly smug that she knew something I didn’t. “Do you think Prince Maro ishappyhis brother was chosen instead of him, when he had been heir all his life? Do you think with all his power andallies, he would let Prince Terren even close to the throne? The two have been fighting for the Crown since they were old enough to know what it stood for. If it were possible to kill Terren, Maro would have done so long ago.”
Brothers fighting brothers. Brotherskillingbrothers. I tried to imagine Bao hurting anyone, even a sparrow, and could not.
“Is it really true?” I asked in a small voice. “That our prince has a spell that makes him unable to die?” As with all rumors about our princes that made it to Lu’an, I had no idea if this was the truth or an embellishment.
Minma glared daggers at me. “The Aricine Ward? You besthopeit is true. If Terren does not live to become emperor, then what is the point of us serving as concubines? What is the point of us letting him plant us, over and over again, for the small chance that just one of the seeds will take?” She looked out the carriage then, at the hills barren of anything edible. “What is the point of suffering if we have nothing to gain?”
It was towards the evening that I had my first glimpse of the Azalea House. The carriage had crested a hill, and because I smelled flowers, I thought to open the curtains and have a peek outside.
For a moment, I couldn’t even breathe.
The Azalea House was beautiful in a way that made me understand why scholars wrote poems. Some kinds of beauty were too large to hold with simple prose.
The palace, vermilion and striking, sat between two lush peaks through which the setting sun bled its light. It was enormous and sprawling, with many-tiered pagodas and walkways and courtyards that were all visible only because I was still far enough away. Around it, flowers bloomed on the hills in ten thousand colors, red poppy and yellow rapeseed and blue hyacinth, and many others I did not know the names of.
A huge red dragon was unfurling in the sky like a ribbon, chasing its tail with the slowness of clouds. I had not noticed it at first, because its colors had blended in with the setting sun, but as soon as I knew it was there, I could not look away.
“That dragon,” said Minma conspiratorially, “is the Crown of the Azalea House. He serves whoever the emperor is, and amplifies his magic athousandfold. Guan Muzha now—but soon, Terren.” And then, with a calculated amount of threat in her voice, she added, “And after Terren, my own son.”
I tried to imaginemyson with the Azalea Crown at his command and found that I could not. It terrified me. I should have been more afraid of Prince Terren’s knife, the one that cut off tongues, but all I could think about was how much I did not want to be planted by him and have to hope that something magical would grow. And if by some miracle of Heaven it did, I did not want to carry it in my belly for nine months.
But then I thought of my family, who needed me. And Bao, especially Bao. And so I hugged myself to keep warm and tried to imagine it anyway.
I tried to imagine becoming a high-ranking concubine in the court, sharing tea with the prince in those beautiful pagodas. I tried to imagine bearing a son for Prince Terren, one with a seal. One that would please him enough that he would not hurt me, and instead send Blessings all the way back to Lu’an.
I closed my eyes and held on to that image, because if I didn’t, I thought I might cry. Why had I told Ciyi to bring me so I could be the prince’s joke? Why had I told him it was fine for me to be laughed at, to be beheaded?
Later, when the air grew cool and the stars winked into view overhead, the carriage, at last, pulled to a stop.
I thought I would see Prince Terren as soon as I stepped out, the sigil for Dao glowing stark on his cheek. I imagined him pointing his sword at me and having me cut up on sight when he saw how unsuitable I was.
