Page 99 of The Poet Empress
She stopped speaking when she found me next to her, pointing a blade at her forehead. I had plucked it off my ceiling in the Cypress Pavilion before leaving.
If there was anything that I learned in the palace, it was that knives were more convincing than words. Aunt Ahma hadn’t listened to words, so I had little choice but to pull out a knife.
“The truth,” I said, and let its tip press into her skin.
The truth was, for seven years of his life, the young prince had been brought to the Violet Heron Tower. For seven years, his mother and Aunt Ahma had worked together to arrange the childmaking duties for him and teach him how to plant his seeds.
Arrangewas the word Aunt Ahma had used, but what she really meant wasforce upon.
Teach himwas what she’d said, but what she really meant was punish him—violently—when he couldn’t manage it.
He cried in the beginning.
In the beginning, they had to physically drag him into the room for his duties. Several girls had to hold him down while he kept crying and kicking and screaming. He grew calmer as time went on. He stopped resisting and took his treatment silent and still. Sometimes he asked for one of his toys to hold. They interfered with the act, so they did not always let him, but sometimes Lady Autumn was in a generous mood and indulged him.
The treatment lasted from when he was nine to when he was sixteen, the year she had died. It was more intense for the first few years, when he was still in Tieza for the war, almost every day; after that, it had been a few weeks at a time, whenever he had a break from his campaigns or his obligations in the palace.
Lady Autumn had known how badly she was hurting him. She just hadn’t cared.We have done our duty for the nation already,she would say to excuse it.It is his turn to do his.
Aunt Ahma had found the enterprise profitable, so she had not cared either.
The shine in the fireplace was Niu Niu. When I fished the object out, I saw that it was a petrified snail shell. Most of it was covered in soot, though a few of its crystal spirals were exposed. I could only imagine that Tiger and Little Sparrow had been in that fireplace too, their fur and wood having caught fire much easier.
“Why did you have to burn his toys?” I asked Aunt Ahma, not kindly.
I was tremendously angry at her.
It was not a burning anger, one that would have made me want to crossthe room and throw her against the wall, but a cold one. A frost-anger, an anger that permeated so deep it made me too numb to do anything, except perhaps step out of my body and marvel at it.
And it was not only because of the unforgivable cruelty of what she had done to a child—which was worth more than that kind of anger by itself—but the unfathomable shortsightedness of having done it toTerren, a prince, who held the magic of blades and the power of dynasties.
A thousand people like me could die and the world would not stop turning, but breaking one person like him could break a nation.
Aunt Ahma was still shaking, even though she no longer had a blade pointed at her head. “No,” she sobbed. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t burn the toys.”
“Thenwho?”
“He did.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “One day—it was just after he’d liberated Tieza—he came here, finished his duties, went to the fireplace without a word and… and threw them in. He didn’t even stay to watch them burn. I guessed he had finally grown out of them.”
I wanted to kill her, I really did. I went as far as to imagine how warm her blood would be on my hands when I sank my knife into her skull. But I had told her I would not hurt her or punish her, so long as she gave me the truth—and she had, in the end, even if it had been a hard road to get there.
I left her soon afterwards, having gathered everything I needed from the Violet Heron Tower. I did not want to be in that place a moment longer than I had to.
When I stepped outside its arched entrance, into the cool summer night and the gentle murmur of Angkin City’s commerce, I found a ghost.
55SPEAKING WITH GHOSTS
The ghost was perched atop my carriage, which was still parked in front of the Violet Heron Tower. It was a sparrow the size of my palm, sitting in a bed of azaleas and glowing faintly. I recognized it immediately as something not from this world.
A ghost bird. Just like the ones I had seen everywhere in the palace.
It cocked its head at me and fluttered off. Suspecting that it would lead me somewhere important, I left my servants and followed it outside the city, across the Aricine River, and into the surrounding meadows, where fireflies played.
I was right. There was a ghost boy there. About nine or ten years old, kneeling among the wildflowers. Even without the red seal on his cheek, I would have recognized him. He looked just the way I had pictured him from all the accounts, small and wide-eyed and timid.
He was doing something with his hands. Making a sword. His sigil glowed as he brushed his palm across its side, leaving a red-hot trail wherever he touched.
“Terren,” I said.
