Page 90 of The Poet Empress
He spun towards me sharply. “Spit it out already. You have been spying on my behalf for months, and you choose this moment to lose your speech?”
“Perhaps he is afraid of being replaced,” I said in a tiny voice, and immediately flinched as if I expected him to hurt me. I was getting good at this.
He understood my implication at once. “Ah, of course. He sees that I am relying more on you now, and does not like sharing his control of my affairs.” His anguish was plain on his face. “After he came to serve me, I killed or deposed all my other advisors. I allowed him to be my only ally for years, and now I see that it was a mistake. The moment he sees me listening to someone else, he finds me compromised and plots to remove me.” A bitter laugh. “Perhaps he has never been loyal to the nation at all. Perhaps it has all been a front to gain power. Perhaps that was all he ever wanted, same as everyone else in the palace, and I was a fool to have assumed him any different.”
My chest felt heavy. Somehow, this seemed the cruelest part of my scheme—this making of an honest man into a villain.
At least when Siming killed Taifong, the eunuch had died true to himself. But with Hesin, nobody would know the depth of his loyalty. His stories would only ever paint him as a lying and power-hungry traitor, if his stories were told at all.
“I wonder what my brother promised him to switch sides. Even more than what he was getting from me?” Another laugh, even more bitter than the first. “Or perhaps Maro didn’t need to offer him much at all. Hesin has always liked him more anyway, ever since we were children. Just like everyone else.”
He went to his wall, plucked a glass jar of wine from his shelf, and downed it all in one drink. Then he let it fall to the ground with a deafening shatter.
This time, my flinch wasn’t feigned.
“Although, thereisanother possibility.” His sigil flashed, and all thepieces of the glass sharp enough to respond shot up in the air, spinning until their tips pointed at me. “There is the possibility that youdoknow how to read, and that Hesin is onto you. That you knew he was coming with evidence against you, so you have come to me first.”
My mouth went completely dry, my heart pounding furiously. “Terren, I—”
“But I don’t think that’s the case.” He let the glass pieces clatter to the ground again, looking satisfied that he had managed to frighten me. “If you knew how to read, you would not have been lying in bed after our wedding night like a butchered rabbit, bleeding out from that knife wound in your chest.”
If you could read,I knew he must be thinking,surely you would have used one of my Blessings to mend yourself.
A knock on the door interrupted us. It was the young eunuch, returning with a crate of memorials.
Terren drew a few scrolls from the crates, unrolled them, and read them. His expression became darker and darker, sigil flickering with increasing malevolence.
“Go fetch my advisor,” he said to the servant, and this time, there was enough anger in his voice to make even me shiver. “Tell him I wish to discuss… poetry.”
After the servant scurried off, he opened another jar of wine.
My heart raced even faster. Very soon, I would find out if my plan would work. So far, everything had been going my way, but only because Hesin was not present to defend himself. As soon as the eunuch arrived, he would be able to talk to Terren, explain his own side. And Terren could…
I watched as he drank his second jar of wine, staring at the moonlit valleys outside his tower’s window. Terren could conceivably figure out that I had set Hesin up. He was certainly clever enough to.
Clever, but not always rational. I knew him well by now. I knew that sometimes, he was not a person so much as a monster, one with only violent intent and drunken anger. When Hesin came, he could win with reason—but only if Terren listened to it.
I couldn’t let that happen. Tonight, I needed him to be a monster.
I said, “You didn’t kill her.”
It was an abrupt change of topic, and he spun towards me with rightful suspicion. “What are you talking about?”
He hadn’t killed the carp. He hadn’t killed Taifong. He had killed many, many people, done many wicked deeds, but he had not doneeverythinghe had been accused of.
I voiced a suspicion I’d had for a long time. “Your mother. Lady Autumn. Everyone believes you killed her. But you didn’t, did you?”
He dropped his jar.
It fell onto a rug this time and didn’t break; instead, rice wine poured out its opening, drenching the bottom of his floor-length gown.
He blinked. Then he blinked again. “I…” His breathing had become fast and shallow, his eyes unfocused. “I…”
Ten long heartbeats passed, and he was still standing frozen in the same position, utterly incapable of speaking.
I was honestly shocked. I had intended to get a reaction out of him—insinuate that Hesin had killed Lady Autumn to get his post, if my guess was a lucky one—while fishing for truths to write my poem. But I had not expected anything near this extreme. For a while I could do nothing but stand there, watching the quick rise and fall of his chest, his hands clenching on nothing.
“Wei,” he finally croaked out. “Give…”
