Page 81 of The Poet Empress
The last girl to speak to me was Qin Chen.
“My grandfather is the Magistrate of Dusu.” She was nearly in tears. “For ten years, he has been wrongfully imprisoned. They say that he was corrupt, that he took a large bribe, but that’s not true at all. He’s the most honorable man I know. When I was little, he would not let me eat dinner until I had memorized a list of Aolian virtues.”
“The Magistrate of Dusu,” I echoed. I vaguely remembered seeing a memorial mentioning him, buried deep on Terren’s desk. The prince received so many papers every day that some of them inevitably slipped his notice.
“As long as another trial is conducted, the truth will come to light. Our friends and family have enough evidence of his innocence. But”—her lip trembled—“the memorial for the appeal has not been approved for years. We… we have no idea why.”
“I can help,” I said, and marveled that it was, for the first time, true. It would be easy, too. I would not have to doctor anything. All I had to do was bring that one forgotten memorial to the prince’s attention—slip it somewhere near the top of his stack—and I could free an innocent man.
“Lady Yin.” Chen’s smile was as true as any in Lu’an. “Thank you.”
That afternoon, I finally found a chance to speak with the empress.
The firecrackers had made Prince Ruyi cry without end, and even his wet nurse could not calm him down. So eventually, Empress Sun sighed, set down her wine, and took him out to the gardens personally.
I followed her out and watched her try, unsuccessfully, to coax him into silence.
She looked up at me after a while. “If you are going to intrude in my gardens, at least have the decency to help me.”
She must have been truly desperate if she was asking me. I took the tiny prince into my arms and rocked him the way I used to rock Bao when he was little, pacing gently around the garden and giving him little kisses on his forehead, his eyes, his nose. All the while, I sang him a song I knew from Lu’an. It was a wistful one, about a ghost-child who was lost in the rice paddies, looking for his way back to the Ancestors.
It took a long time for Ruyi to fall asleep. When I handed him back to the empress, she did not thank me.
“I take it you want something from me, Wei. Let me guess. You are here to talk about what I did during your wedding.”
“No.” I had about as little love for the empress as she held for me. There was one reason, and one reason only, why I would willingly speak with her, and that was to find material for my Blessing. “I wanted to ask about Lady Autumn.”
In Hesin’s account, she had hated her son. In Maro’s, she had supported him wholly, even going with him on his missions. I guessed that the truth was somewhere in between.
Getting earnest words out of Terren might be one part of finishing his poem, but I knew that this part of it lay with the empress.
She barked out a humorless laugh. “I have not heardhername in a long time. Just as well you ask—I am about to visit the one you speak of.”
We walked together, through the gardens. Ruyi remained asleep on his mother’s shoulder, ignorant of the magnolias and plum blossoms dotting the sky above. Winter was already going away, chased off by the eager winds of spring.
“She was many things, Wei. She was beautiful and vindictive, charming and hateful, clever and ruthless. When she was in a room, everyone was looking at her, wanting to speak to her. The way she carried herself, it was like… like she was not a real person. Like she was someone who existed only in legends.”
At first, I was surprised by how the empress spoke to me so freely. But then I remembered Hesin. The eunuch had been so eager to tell Jinzha’s story, and that of his even more wicked son and grandson. Maybe some stories were like jarred butterflies, I thought, fluttering free as soon as someone broke the glass.
Or maybe she suspected the truth.
Maybe she had guessed that I was using it to write a heart-spirit poem, to kill her friend’s killer, and this was her own way of helping me.
“All the same,” the empress continued, “we could not help but like her. Autumn was very good to us, the girls in the Inner Court. She was selfless, generous, and made no enemies; whenever she had the opportunity, she helped the other girls get ahead. Even though she came in without a clan, without a distinguished name, she was beloved by all in the palace.”
I had learned some of this already, just by asking around. I had heardthat she was the daughter of a merchant, from Angkin City in Tieza—although the claims conflicted. Some said that she was not from a mercantile family but a family of herders. Some said that she was not from Angkin but farther north, near Besh.
“Is it true that she is from Tieza?” I asked.
“She has ties there, certainly. It was one of the reasons why she kept visiting the district, with her son, even after his military campaigns were over. But I do not know much about her past. She did not speak of it.”
“You never asked?”
“I never felt the need to.”
I had the sense that it was not quite the truth—that there was something she was holding back—but I did not press her.
We passed under an arch, into a new section of the garden. There was still some snow here, dotted with the fresh hoofprints of deer.
