Page 75 of The Poet Empress
May it rest here, where all light is tempered.
—GUAN MARO, AZALEA DYNASTY, YEAR 628 (COLLECTED POSTHUMOUSLY)
After their separation in the Eriet Mountains, it would be another three years before Maro wrote again of his brother. It described a summer morning made mild by fog, which he had spent practicing with his cloudstaff deep in the Aolian temple. A staff was not a sword; each technique, ethereal and air-light, was designed not for combat but meditation.Balance. Concentration. Detachment.
“Your Highness,” someone said, startling him.
It was a familiar voice, one he hadn’t heard in many years. Maro dropped to the ground, lowered his staff, and turned to face the visitor. “Siming? It’s good to see you!”
They went to share tea in one of the temple’s many meditation rooms. Small incense pots of Ao and Li stared at them from the windowsill, and the room was redolent with pine smoke and sacred herbs.
Song Siming shifted uncomfortably. “I know that as part of your recovery, you are not to concern yourself with worldly affairs. But still, it would be nice if you showed your face.”
Maro laughed fondly. “I am not even supposed to speak with you, let alone take off my mask.”
“You’re not subject to their rules. You are the crown prince, Your Highness, not a disciple!”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t observe their ways.”
Siming lowered his eyes, presumably to avoid looking at Maro’sdraping Aolian robes, his white mask, the staff made of mystic metals tied at his back. “Then will it be hard convincing you to leave the temple?”
At once, Maro stiffened with alarm. Doctor Shu had ordered that he not be disturbed until he was fully recovered. If Siming had gone against orders, had ridden all the way here, there must have been a good reason. “It may not be,” he said cautiously, “depending on what news you bring.”
Siming cupped his hands around his ginger tea and spoke with urgency. Terren had spent the past three years in Tieza. He’d spent the beginning of it training in his magic, but by the end he had recaptured the contested northern region for the empire. Now he was advancing slowly eastward, a slew of military achievements following wherever he went. They called him the Winter Dragon.
“Now more than ever,” Siming said, “everybody is speculating that His Majesty will switch his named heir. Not only that, they arepressuringhim to. Some of the leaders of the Great Clans have been sending not-so-subtle messages in praise of the second son’s achievements.”
“I see.” Maro stared at his hands. None of this came as a surprise to him, really.
“Your Highness, you know as well as I do how long his faction has been planning to overthrow you! I fear they will succeed imminently.”
“Then let them.”
“What?”Siming slammed his cup down so hard the tea splashed on the rug. “You’re just going to give up the fight?”
Maro looked out the window. The temple was calm, the fog threading through the pines serene, his own heart steadier than it had been for years. His headaches still came from time to time, but it was nothing so ferocious as before. “My brother has always been smarter than me. Kinder. And his magic is what the nation needs. Siming, I’ve been thinking about it at length while I’ve been up here, and I thought, maybe I was never meant to fight him. Maybe it had only ever been someone else’s fight, and I had been tricked into thinking it was mine.”
The wind, born only to run.
“Kinder?” Siming echoed, incredulous. “Guan Maro, if you do not return and wrest political control backimmediately,Tensha will fall into the hands of a cruel and vicious tyrant!”
Maro turned back to his friend, uncomprehending. “Tyrant?”
Siming’s hand began to tremble. “You really haven’t heard, then.”
He told him everything, and it was all the same as in Hesin’s account. Inside the palace, dead animals everywhere. Moonflower-rabbits with their heads lopped off, entire rooms full of dead pigeons. Servants punished left and right for minor wrongdoings, with flayings, or cut-off tongues, or knives through their hearts.
Outside the palace, in the battlefield, heads and severed limbs piling up like leaves in autumn. Blood flowing in the streets like rivers.
“No,” Maro whispered. He felt like he was falling once again—into a chasm deeper than any he could have imagined. He tore off his mask and rode straight for the palace.
His council met that same afternoon. His tutors, friends, and old allies were all gathered in the newly inhabited West Palace. The parlor was still largely empty, but some servants had brought in pots of trumpet flowers from the now-vacant Dawn Pavilion, and they made it seem at least a little like home.
“You must not see him,” Master Ganji said. “He’s too dangerous.”
“He’s my brother,” Maro said, bewildered. Part of him still didn’t believe it. The boy who was scared all the time, who hid when there were loud noises, who had trouble even picking up a sword—how could he have turned into what Siming described?
High Eunuch Umei sighed. “We have sent four messengers to the East Palace already, Your Highness, in an attempt to negotiate. All we asked was that he fight more peaceably, to not harm innocents in his bid for power. In an act of remarkable irony, he killed all four.”
