Page 10 of The Poet Empress
They seated themselves on the carpet, behind the rows of cherrywood tables facing the throne. Cold dishes and clear wine were already set up. The guests picked at them while they socialized and laughedoh ho hofrom their bellies. I had seldom seen men like these before. Men with soft plump faces, shaven chins, and gowns as bright as a bee-eater’s feathers. They were as different of a creature from the men of my village as the city girls were from me, and I could not stop staring.
Each brought their own servants with them, who carried poles draped with tasseled, rectangular banners. On them were huge characters and sigils, which I could not read, but guessed they contained their ranks, titles, and clan affiliations.
“Empress Sun Ai!” announced the herald, suddenly loud. “Matriarch of the Sun Clan! And her son, the Fifth Prince Guan Ruyi!”
As the first members of the imperial family entered, the crowd fell into a hush. I craned my neck over the other girls to have a look myself, at the woman who had survived to be empress when so many of her competitors had died ofaccidents.
She had cunning eyes, long nails, and lips painted in sharp vermilion. A golden gown trailed behind her like daylight, shimmering like it was hot to the touch. She was not monstrous looking—rather very elegant—but even so, I could not help but wonder what wicked things she had done to get where she was.
In her arms was a sleeping infant, whose cheek bore half a seal. Though the floral outer ring was present, no character gleamed from within.
Prince Ruyi, I knew, was too young to have magic. Though a prince was always born with that half-formed seal, it was not until he was nine or ten, the age a boy first started to become a man, that he came into his power.
Last autumn, when our fifth prince had been born, everyone in Lu’an had gathered to guess at his powers. Ma had bet it would be a military one like Terren’s Dao, but stubborn Aunt Lien had insisted it would be an economic one like Maro’s Lu.Commerce runs in the Guan Clan’s blood,she’d said with a huff.Just look at our emperor and all his dead brothers.
The little ones, Obe and Sangka and Rui Dan, had all hoped for something spectacular.Like the Yan power of the First Emperor, whose pillars of flame can be seen a thousand li away.
“The emperor isn’t coming, then,” whispered a girl behind me. She had a moon-pale face and cautious eyes. “If he was, he would have been with his empress.”
The girl behind her, with rosy cheeks, scowled. “If he can’t even make it to his own heir’s selection, he must truly be as ill as the rumors say.”
The empress took a seat on the dais, her son like a doll in her lap—right as the herald announced another imperial guest.
“Prince Guan Kiran! Bringer of the Storm, and Fourth Son of the Azalea House!”
A gust of wind swirled into the hall, rustling the lilies on the walls. Thousands of heads turned towards the gate, watching as a procession of men in blue ribbons set down a cloud-white palanquin. Out stepped a boy, bony and dark and with ruffled hair.
Other than his?/Feng power, I knew little about the thirteen-year-old prince. Few stories about him had reached Lu’an, perhaps because his reputation was far outshone by his elder brothers.
“I heard his mother is a commoner,” whispered the moon-faced girl, as Kiran and his men took their seats by a cabal of South Sea sailors. “That our emperor, while on a military campaign, had planted his seeds all over the nearby villages. Heaven must have smiled on the nation that day, because one of them turned out viable.”
The rosy-cheeked candidate scoffed. “No wonder he’s not half as pretty as the rest of them.”
I still could not decide if the Azalea House sons were ugly or beautiful, though everyone else seemed already convinced.Born marked by Heaven,the ladies in Guishan sighed—and even the radish sellers at the wet market would have a wistful shine in their eyes.From a father with imperial blood and a mother handpicked out of millions. Is it so surprising that they are all as lovely as legends?
But in the end, ugliness and beauty were traits that belonged to people. And no matter how hard I tried, I could not make myself see them aspeople.
The next prince to enter was Isan; I caught the scent of ripe fruit before his palanquin even appeared. He and his men wore gowns of blossoms, and carried with them baskets heavy with mandarins and apricots. When they sat, it was next to the River Province’s governor, the Minister of Revenue,and several palace literomancers in black. They were gifted a fruit basket each.
“Now that one looks more like a prince ought,” the rosy-cheeked girl said. “Though I hear he is cowardly and overly soft. Bends to people as easily as reeds in the wind.”
The moon-faced girl snorted. “It’s not like he has a choice. You know already how unthreatening his magic is.”
I thought of the sweetness of that peach on New Year’s, of Bao’s delighted laugh as he picked a hawberry from its bush. I could not decide whether I was grateful to the third prince for having gone to Guishan at all, or if I resented him for having only gone once.
“But where isourprince?” the rosy-cheeked girl muttered. “Shouldn’t Prince Terren have been the first to—”
She hardly finished her sentence when the earth began to rumble, making us all jump.
Plates and teacups rattled on tables; swords clattered on the ceiling. Everyone turned to stare as stone and moss burst out of the wooden floor, alongside blooms of yellow chrysanthemums, and a path paveditself,like a rolling carpet, from the gates all the way down the length of the hall to the still-unoccupied throne.
“Prince Guan Maro!” The herald wasted no time with the announcement. “Carver of Rivers, Builder of the Salt Road, and First Son of the Azalea House! And his wife, Lady Song Silian!”
With hair that swept past his waist, robes of shimmering white and gold, and a cloud-etched staff tied at his back in place of a sword, Maro looked every bit the Azalea House prince of stories. His?/Lu sigil, of roads and passageways, shone even brighter than his brothers’.
And then I thought, maybe I did know what they meant when they saidas lovely as legends.
Guan Maro: the eldest, the most honorable, the one who should have been heir. I had heard the most about this prince. All through Guishan, and even farther away, the common people sang about the roads he had paved, the rivers he had carved, and the remote villages he had connected to bustling cities. It was said that at the young age of eleven, he had even built the Salt Road—the most important trade route in all the nation.
