Page 74 of The Poet Empress
He must have been out for a long time. The ice had already caked over him, his hair, back, and collar frozen white.
“Terren,” I said again. The way he was acting, I was reminded of the scared child from Maro’s story. “Get to the temple.”
He did not acknowledge me.
“You’re going to freeze out here.” Did the Aricine Ward protect him from the cold?
He kept hacking away with his knife.
“Terren, the fish arealready inside.”
That made him finally look up.
“Come,” I said. I threw him his cloak, but he didn’t put it on. He just clutched it in his arms, as if he had no idea what to do with it, and stumbled dumbly after me. I led him through the knee-high snow for a cold forever, until at last, we were safe through the temple doors.
The summer he turned sixteen,Hesin had said,he poisoned all the carp in the peach garden.
I had believed it at first, because why wouldn’t I? Terren had killed many things. He had killed many, many people. If someone came and told me he had slaughtered an entire city, I would not have questioned it for even a heartbeat.
But, importantly, he hadnot killed those fish.
It was the most surprising thing I had learned from Maro’s journals, in one of the very last entries. I did not think I could ever write Terren’s poem without it.
Inside the temple’s stone doors, the loud of the storm had given way to a peaceful quiet. Several disciples were inside, copying classical texts with wooden blocks. Some of them knelt by the giant statue of Ao, a stone beast with eight legs and a mane like the sun. Others were offering incense to the statue of Li—a carved fish-creature with an eagle’s wings and scales like shining moons.
Several large tubs, low and made of lacquered ceramic, were spread around the hall. Each was as wide as a table, and each held several dozen of the carp.
Terren stood beside one of them, staring numbly into the water.
“I was here at the start of the storm,” I explained to him. “When I heard there was going to be a blizzard, I asked the disciples if I could move the fish indoors. They said the fish would be fine—they had survived many winters on the mountain before—but they did agree to help me in the end.”
He didn’t say anything, and at first I supposed he was having one of his quiet spells. Then it occurred to me that the cold might actually have hurt him. His lips were blue, his face gray as ice, his lashes still frozen with snow. Even the band of characters around him seemed to swirl slower than usual.
For a moment, I regretted bringing him inside. If I had left him out in the storm, maybe it would have killed him. I doubted his ward would have let him die, but still, I could not help but indulge in wonderingwhat if.
I moved one of the braziers in the hall next to him so that its flames might warm him. Around us, the Aolian disciples carried on with their rituals, as if we were merely ghosts, not of this world.
“Why?” Terren finally said, breaking the silence.
I assumed he meant saving the fish. “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.
Maybe it was because subconsciously, I knew he would want me to, and it was my own way of wielding the concubine’s weapon. Maybe it was because the poem he’d written as a child had affected me—even the summary of it, as retold to me by Hesin in his story.My life might be smaller than yours, but it is full of joy and worth living.
Maybe it was how helpless they seemed.
“Even if they would have been fine outside,” I said, as much an explanation to myself as to him, “I don’t doubt that if they had a choice, they would have gone somewhere warmer. We were the ones who confined them out there, made them at our mercy, forced them to face the storm. So when the storm did come, I felt it was only our duty to bring them somewhere safe.”
He fell back into silence. Sometime later, he finally seemed warm enough to hold a cup, so I brought him ginger tea. He removed the silver needle that he kept pinned in his hair and dipped it in the cup; his ward made him immune to poison, but likely he wanted to test my intentions.
When the needle did not turn black, he took a small and shaky sip and said nothing more.
42A NEGOTIATION WITH DOVES
A temple shrouds itself in dense fog;
Nothing can burn here. Nothing is remembered.
If the sun also wearies like we do,
