Page 57 of The Poet Empress
All the Azalea sons might have stood near each other during the ceremony—the closest they had ever been to seeming like a family—but now they were separated again. Isan and Kiran were fraternizing withtheir own courts. The empress, with the little prince Ruyi cradled in her arms, had taken up an entire quadrant along with her Sun-bannered allies, and they were all laughing about something secret. Their glasses clinked.
Even a snap of a twig or the clinking of glass,Hesin had said,could startle him into tears.
And now he was afraid of nothing.
My husband—even thinking the word made my stomach twist with revulsion—sat alone on the dais, one hand cupped around an open jar of wine, the other holding a military treatise. The Aricine Ward circling him like white chains—and the eight unsheathed swords he kept hovering around him—seemed to deter people from bothering him with platitudes.
“O Tensha, all under sky! The greatest nations will never fall. The greatest empires will never die.”
There were three empty jars of wine on the ground next to him already.Good,I thought. The more he drank, the less of a chance he would be awake when I went to our wedding chamber.
“I mean, I do now.” Silian gave a small laugh. “But then? I was only fifteen, and so far from home. I didn’t even know what he looked like until I was standing up on that terrace, about to do my four pledges. Every girl is a little frightened, I think, when they give themselves to a man. Even a kind one. Even one she expected to marry since she was old enough to know what the word meant.”
“You were expecting to marry him?”
“My cousin is a childhood friend of his. Just after I was born, my father paid a lot of money to my uncle, in hopes—”
“O Tensha, motherland! Enemies tremble before our might. Kingdoms fall at our command.”
Silian looked at the singing girl with distaste, even as the military men around her laughed and downed wine in praise of her performance. “I tire of this song. Shall we take a walk?”
We passed by Terren’s other concubines and my servants on our way out. Ciyi had been in the middle of tearing into a chicken leg, next to Jin Veris’s scribe, Ah Ronta, but looked up when we passed by on our way out. “I have never had such exquisite food before, Lady Yin! The last imperial wedding, I had not even been invited to the banquet!”
I could not help but smile, relieved that somebody, at least, wasenjoying my wedding. “Take note of the dishes you like,” I told him. “I will have our cooks try to replicate them in the Cypress Pavilion.”
Day had passed into night. Outside, the snow had finally stopped, leaving behind only a coat of it on the ground that glowed pristine in the moonlight. Silian liked its softness. I could tell because she shuffled as she walked, leaving longer footprints than she needed to.
We went around the portico of the hall, towards the back gardens.
“Have you ever been in love?” Silian asked, after we were out of hearing range of everyone.
If the empress or anyone else had asked me that, I might have been on edge. But Silian already knew enough about me to convict me. She must have been merely curious. Possibly she wanted to know how much like her I was. I would have wondered too, had I been in her position.
“I think so,” I said, after a pause. Even now, I was not sure if that had truly been love, though I hoped it had. “I had a friend called Cai Xi’er, in my village. Sometimes we walked to the market together, just the two of us, to sell peppers and rice.” I remembered thinking that he was funny and kind. I remembered deciding that if he ever asked me to run away with him, into the clouds, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. “But he was not a city boy,” I hurried to add, without really knowing why. “His family didn’t have much money.”
“Was he sorry when you left for the palace?”
“He… will be pleased to know I have made it, I think. He has given me necklaces to put in my offering basket, after all.” That cold morning in Guishan, the local officials had taken our baskets and promptly vanished. I did not think the offering had even made it to the Azalea House. “And I think he would be doubly pleased I returned with gifts.” The more I spoke, the more embarrassed about my inexperience I grew. “What about you?”
“Maybe a few martial heroes, from the stories.” She gave a sheepish smile, one that made her look young. “When I was a girl, I owned a fan with a water-painting of Li Zhi the Lionheart. I spread it so often to look at it that the silk folds had become smooth over time. It didn’t matter that the heroes weren’t real. In fact, it made marrying one seem even more possible.If I were also not real,I remember thinking,I could fight demons with them all day long.”
We both had a laugh at that, because it was true. There was not a childin Tensha who had never dreamed of being a hero, before we had learned to be practical.
“Thank you for corroborating my story today,” I told her.
“There are no altruists in the palace,” she replied modestly. “I needed to clear Maro’s name.”
“Allies come rare enough in the Azalea House. Altruists or not, I am still grateful for them.”
Her smile deepened as she turned onto another walkway, her lotus dress trailing behind her. Under the frosted balustrades, a pair of pine-feathered larks played in the snow. “Speaking of allies—how far have you gotten in your poem, now that you have Maro’s testimony?”
I was glad she asked. “A lot further, actually. His journals have given me a far more complete picture of Terren, from his childhood all the way to when he was sixteen.” The year the carp was poisoned, Taifong was found dead, and his mother had been killed—all in quick succession. The year the brothers met in the peach garden for the last time. “But my words are not magic yet. I am not sure what’s missing.”
I had poured myself into reading and composing over the past month, writing and rewriting each verse. On some days I swore I could feel “the warmth of magic under my pen,” as Maro had put it; on others, the ink remained cold and lifeless. Working on the heart-spirit poem had made me empathize, viscerally, with Maro’s long struggle to write his first Blessing.
Especially since, like him, I had a deadline.
The emperor lay in bed, gravely ill. So ill that he had not even attended his own heir’s wedding. His absence on Selection Day could have been explained away—the duties of the Inner Court were not in his domain but his empress’s, after all—but the dragon throne sitting empty today, in front of thousands of distinguished guests, confirmed just how serious his condition was.
