Page 97 of The Poet Empress
Now I understood why this vile thing, this thing that we could not even hold in our hands, thispower,was something women and men fought so viciously for. Now I had tasted it for myself, and it was as sweet as peaches, as wine.
I left my other servants to enjoy the establishment, as Aunt Ahma had put it, and followed her into her office to speak in private.
One way or another, I was going to find the whole truth.
54OFFERINGS
The owner’s office was on the top floor: a small space lit by a sea of flat yellow lanterns and filled with plush furniture, each embroidered with threads of gold. One side was covered by a large window, overlooking the waterfall and the baths eight stories down. I could see, not hear, the naked men below.
Aunt Ahma was fidgeting with her hands. “You are here about Lady Autumn, Your Highness?”
“I am here about the prince. But we can start with her.”
She was afraid of me. She hid it well, but her posture was shifting, uncomfortable. Her gaze flicked back and forth between the violet herons—real ones, killed and dyed and posed midflight—hanging from the ceiling. “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone by the name of Autumn. There are many pleasure houses scattered about Tieza and Caeyang, to serve the merchants of the Salt Road. If it’s a pleasure girl you seek, you ought to visit the Jade Tortoise Tower down the street, or Scarlet Crane the city over, or—”
“Don’t worry.” I leaned my elbows on the lacquered table between us, pushing aside little plates of sesame candies, pumpkin seeds, and dried dates. “I will not hurt you or punish you, so long as you tell the truth.”
“Your Highness, I—”
“So long as you tell the truth,”I emphasized.
She wiped at her forehead with a handkerchief, which came away white with powder. “She… she was here before the war. Back then, it was simply another tribute house—one of the many places along the border where the nation offered Tenshan girls to Lian men, to make them cease their raids.”
Offered.As if girls were currency, or a plate of sweet gao.
We’ll set up tribute houses at the northern border to broker peace,Hesin had said, when he’d told me about how he and Muzha stabilized the dying nation. Back then, I had not known what he was talking about. I hated that I knew now.
“She was nine years old when we bought her. I don’t remember most of the girls sold to the Violet Heron Tower—there were so many of them, sold by desperate families in droves, and they never lasted long—but I do remember her. How could I not? She had such bright, discerning eyes. You took one look at her and knew immediately that she was special. I remember thinking, if someone that brilliant had been born in a different time, a different place, she could have held the world in her hands.”
There was something catching in her hoarse voice. Fondness, perhaps—or regret.
“Her true home, family, and name we never knew. We only called her Qiu’er, after the season in which we received her.Autumn. She came in a wagon packed with girls, but the bright maple leaves from the journey had somehow chosen only her hair to tangle in.”
I imagined it: a little girl with bright eyes, on a crisp, cloudless afternoon, looking up at the twin heron gates leading to the tower. The place where she would beoffered. She must have been so frightened, to be so far from her home, away from her family and everything she knew.
She must have been relieved, too. In this place, she would not have to be hungry anymore. In this place, there were soft beds and roofs that did not leak. In this place, there was music and laughter and dancing. And even if she couldn’t read, she could at least kneel next to murals of poetry while she endured the offering and feel a part of something lasting.
“But someone that special,” Aunt Ahma continued, “could never have been content with a life as a pleasure girl. I should have seen it. How hungry she was, for something more—power, wealth, a place in history. Anything. I should not have been surprised when, the year the Yongkai Emperor put out a search for concubines, she stole a tremendous amount of money from my tower and vanished. She had only been fourteen, a year younger than the age of eligibility, but of all the lies she must have told to get into court, age would have been the least of them.”
I knew that feeling. Standing in the city square of Guishan, among allthe candidates with painted brows and sturdy shoes, at once terrified and desperate and hopeful.
I wanted to reach into that long-ago scene, of that young girl riding in a carriage to the palace, and take her away. To beg of her to turn back, to stay far from the Azalea House, to save herself.
But I was hardly in a position to judge her, when I had dreamed those same dreams myself.
Aunt Ahma picked absently at a pumpkin seed. “I didn’t hear from her for a long time. Not until the war. The Violet Heron Tower might have been a tribute house before, but while the Evening Tide’s army was here, the House repurposed it to be a place for soldiers to enjoy, to keep morale high. It was only after Prince Terren liberated Tieza-North that we converted it to a moneymaking establishment—a pleasure house, a luxurious one, to serve the wealthy traders doing business with the West.”
“When she came back during the war,” I said, “did she bring her son with her?”
For a moment, she froze. But she gathered herself very quickly and said, “Yes, Your Highness. It was dawn and empty when she returned, just me sweeping the floor. When she showed up at the door”—she gestured out the window of her office, at the bustling entrance far below us—“I was tempted to have her immediately executed, for stealing all that money. But then I noticed she wasn’t alone. Her arm rested firm around the shoulders of a beautiful little boy, maybe nine or ten years old. A scarf was wrapped over his cheek. When Qiu’er unraveled it, a House Seal gleamed red and fierce, and it was then that I realized she had made it to the Inner Court after all. And not only had she made it there, but she had also become mother to a prince. The very prince who had come to Tieza to liberate us.”
“She brought him here for the childmaking duties,” I said, more a statement than a question. A vicious kind of hate was beginning to roil in my veins. Some part of me must have realized this truth long ago, but had refused to think about it until now.
He had been not much older than Bao. Bao, who had begged me to take him to Guishan on New Year’s, who had been delighted when I’d saved him a sweet prune. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became.
I still remembered vividly all the nights Terren had refused to plantme. How, even on the night the rumors came and he had no other choice, he still couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Don’t touch me. I’ll kill you.
