The Secrets of Jin-shei Read online

  Liudan chewed on her lip for a moment, thinking.

  “Perhaps it is even better,” she said. “You would understand.”

  “Understand what, Highness?”

  “I have told them I have started my cycles,” Liudan said abruptly.

  I should have known, Yuet thought to herself. With hindsight, it was obvious—no cycles, no Xat-Wau, a regency until Liudan could prove herself to have reached physical adulthood. If she could convince the Council that she was, in fact, due her Xat-Wau ceremony immediately, there would be no regency.

  “You told them you were bleeding, they wanted proof, you asked to be examined by a healer, hoping to convince the healer to go along with your story although it is not technically true?” Yuet said.

  Liudan flashed her a look, somewhat startled. She had not expected it to be summed up so baldly, without even an honorific to soften it. “They are just waiting,” Liudan said, “to put me away again, somewhere safe, for Cahan alone knows how long. I’ve always been the Third, the spare, and now my own body is betraying me. It’s not as though I would be lying, it’s going to happen, isn’t it? It happens to everybody, after all, and I’m already old enough for it to have happened to me over and over again, but …”

  “I understand,” Yuet said. “It never mattered, not with me, but I was your age, maybe only a few months off, when mine came.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  “Princess,” said Yuet, meeting Liudan’s eyes squarely, “my assistance to you, however willingly offered, may be short-lived.”

  “How so?”

  “You spoke of having expected ‘the old one’—Healer Szewan is dead. She spoke to me only hours before she died of drawing up papers elevating me to full partner. She died before she did so, to the best of my knowledge. I have told the Chancellor that I was her partner, which is the only reason I am here at all—otherwise you would have been seeing a very different face before you right now. But he spoke of credentials, and I am meant to produce those for him before tomorrow. If I do not, then my words carry little weight. I have a witness,” Yuet said carefully, “who will swear of Szewan’s intent. But I need to find a notary willing to draw up the papers, now, after Szewan’s death.”

  Liudan stared at her for a long moment. “I think I can help you with that,” she said at length. “If you do what I wish, I become Empress. If I become Empress, I can protect you. If I send you the notary before the day is out, will you tell the Chancellor that I am no longer the child that he believes me to be?”

  “I will swear to it,” Yuet said calmly. “I will even produce proof of it if he demands it. I will take such proof away with me now.”

  “What?” Liudan was not one to waste words.

  “These are women’s quarters, someone here is into her cycles right now. If you can find me a woman who is bleeding, her rags will serve as your proof if necessary.”

  Liudan considered this for a moment, and then strode across the room to pull a brocade ribbon that hung from the ceiling. It was a summons, and it quickly brought the servant girl from the anteroom. Liudan gave a series of swift signals with her hand, and the girl bowed and backed out again. Yuet watched with interest.

  “Sign language?”

  “She is deaf, and she cannot speak,” Liudan said. “There are times I find that useful. She and I communicate very well by sign.”

  “What did you tell her to do?”

  “Get your proof,” Liudan said. “It is something I had already considered, but they would not necessarily have taken my word for it, not when so much is at stake. I know that at least one of the Council princes was looking forward to a year or so of regency rule. I needed someone else’s backing.” Her eyes were smoldering with a slow anger. “They have always considered me someone they didn’t have to reckon with. All of them. Not a single person in this Court has ever cared about me.”

  “Not all, Princess,” murmured Yuet.

  Liudan whipped her head around. “What do you mean?”

  “I was at the Summer Palace when they all died,” Yuet said, her voice very low. “I was with your sister, the Little Empress, when she drew her last breath; I wore the rush of her heart’s blood on my robe all that long awful day while we looked in the rubble for the bodies of the dead.”

  “Antian,” Liudan said, with a sharp dismissive motion of her hand. But she had been an instant too late with the reaction, and Yuet could read a hurt there, the sense of abandonment.

  “Her last words, if you did not know this, Princess, were about you,” Yuet said.

  Liudan turned away, but not before Yuet had glimpsed the naked, raw need in her eyes. “They were?”

  She would not ask what Antian had said. There was a carapace of pride which she wore like armor, and she would not let anyone past that. Not yet.

  “She asked her jin-shei-bao to love you, in her name,” Yuet said.

  Liudan broke away, walked with swift angry steps to the open balcony doors, and tugged them shut with a force that shivered the glass within them.

  “She asked the one for whom she left me to love me?”

  “Tai said you hated her.”

  Liudan snorted inelegantly.

  “Princess, she promised to do it. She has no idea how, but she promised. You will be doing her a kindness, and your royal sister honor, if you would meet with her.”

  Liudan was watching her again, her eyes kindled. “And what is your stake in this?”

  Yuet met her gaze squarely. “I watched Tai make a promise to a dying girl, and I watched her agonize over that promise afterward. I watched her perform a small miracle in the chaos of the earthquake’s aftermath, all in your sister’s name. If ever there was love between jin-shei sisters, it was there with these two. It made my heart ache to see her left alone, just as you have been.”

  “I have not,” Liudan began haughtily, drawing herself up to her full height, her thin foxlike face sharpening into points and angles of outrage.

  Yuet cut across the protest. “I don’t know if you have jin-shei-bao, Princess Liudan. Perhaps, if you do, you will begin to understand what it took to make such a promise. And I … I promised my own jin-shei-bao that I would try and help her keep that promise. It is partly because of this that I am ready to help you with your plan now.”

  “Because of Tai?” Liudan asked. “You are jin-shei to Tai, too?”

  “We pledged after the earthquake, yes,” Yuet said.

  “I suppose she wants me to pledge to her, too,” Liudan said. “She’s had a taste of Court, and she …”

  “No, Highness. Not Tai. I wish you would meet with her. I wish that you did have a jin-shei-bao of your own. It would make what you face here easier for you.”

  “There isn’t a woman in this Court …” Liudan’s eyes lost focus for a moment. She had stepped back into her own mind, into her own memories. Of a time before, when she was young, and when whispers of her mother’s fall from grace had wrapped Liudan in the shroud of Cai’s sins. Of the way that the women around her would be flawlessly correct to her, but none would smile at her with a genuine warmth—except the Empress once or twice, distantly—and except her. Antian. The lost sister who might have been the only person at the court to truly love Liudan.

  But it was too late for that; that world had gone. What remained was only the protocol and the infinite politeness.

  “There isn’t a woman in this Court with whom I would want to tie my fortunes in this way,” Liudan said, finishing her thought with a sharp cutting motion of one graceful hand. “I don’t trust any of them not to betray me at the first opportunity.”

  “But you trust me,” Yuet murmured.

  Liudan smiled, a smile that was not entirely pleasant. “But then you have just told me something that gives me a hold over you. I can destroy you if you betray me.”

  “But it would have been nice to be able to trust without that safeguard, would it not?”

  Liudan scowled. “What do you want of me?”
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  The servant girl returned, scuttling into the room, bearing something wrapped in scraps of material. Liudan motioned for the package to be handed over to Yuet, and the servant did so, bowed to Liudan, and departed once again.

  “Will that do?” Liudan asked as Yuet lifted a corner of the wrapping and inspected the contents of the package.

  “I think it will, yes,” Yuet said, letting the wrapping drop again. “I go to the Council now. They will no doubt return their verdict to you in good time. If I may take my leave?”

  “Go,” said Liudan.

  Yuet made a deep obeisance, and retreated. At the door, she turned and looked back; Liudan had not moved, standing stiffly in the center of her empty, opulent room. “I would have a few more of these on hand,” Yuet said softly, indicating the package she held. “Just in case. And if you retire to bed for a while and plead feeling unwell—offer an explanation, if you are pressed, that it is cramping—it will probably go further to prove your status.”

  She bowed again and was about to depart when she heard Liudan say her name. She turned her head. Liudan’s shoulders had relaxed a little, and her face had softened into something resembling gratitude.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I will not forget this.”

  “Empress,” acknowledged Yuet with a small smile.

  Liudan actually managed to offer a thin smile in return. “Your Tai … I will think on it.”

  Yuet inclined her head, dropped her eyes, bowed deeply, and went out of the room closing the door after her. The Guard who had brought her here waited outside in the corridor when the little servant girl had let her out.

  “Take me to the Council Chamber,” Yuet said serenely.

  Eight

  There had been hostility in the Council Chamber. Regencies meant revenues, and, as Liudan had observed, at least one of the Council Princes had scowled rather too openly when Yuet informed the Council that, instead of planning a regency government, they should all start concerning themselves with preparing Liudan’s Xat-Wau ceremonies. They would have their troubles with that, given the tradition that a girl’s grandmother traditionally placed the red pin of Xat-Wau into her hair—Liudan’s grandmother, the Dowager Empress, had not been at the Summer Palace and had thus survived the earthquake, but she had been in Linh-an for the simple reason that she was bedridden, practically crippled and nine-tenths senile. Getting her involved in any kind of ritual would be impractical if not impossible, but all Liudan’s other senior female relatives were dead or missing in the earthquake. Thankfully, Yuet thought as she had left the sulky Council, that was not her problem.

  Her problem was Szewan, and whether Liudan would keep her word.

  She spent another few hours, after her return home, in Szewan’s office, sorting things out, refiling documents according to her own system, making sure that she was indispensable for making sense of the treasure trove that was Szewan’s store of records. Yuet did discover a deed to the house, which Szewan did get around to annotating properly before she died, and discovered that she had been made the sole heiress of Szewan’s home and her possessions. There really was no other family, it seemed. Yuet felt of a pang of pity for the old woman who had taught her her trade, who had apparently outlived everyone she knew, but a part of her simply smiled and filed away the document in a safe place. It would help with her claim to full partnership. Szewan had already, in a technical sense, designated Yuet her heir.

  Liudan did keep her word.

  Yuet had cleared the decks in preparation for the notary’s visit. She had asked the cook, couching the question in terms which implied that any answer other than yes could harm the servant’s own prospects as the household in which she worked disintegrated around her, if she had overheard Szewan’s words about making Yuet a full partner. The cook’s memory was suddenly full of instances where she had heard Szewan say just that.

  A notary from the Imperial Court had presented himself at Yuet’s door that evening, with full instructions. The healer’s cook and servant had been summoned and her statement that she had witnessed Szewan’s intent to raise Yuet into partnership taken down and sealed by the notary, who then drew up two copies of the articles of partnership. The task took him most of the night, and Yuet herself stayed up with him until he was done. The document was written up in formal hacha-ashu, which neither of the women could read but which both signed in fine jin-ashu hand and which was then countersigned by the notary himself as formal witness and as an agent of the government. In the morning, having given the cook a small bag of silver and a promise of perpetual employment in her household for as long as Yuet was head of it, Yuet presented herself and her “credentials,” the ink barely dry on them, to the office of the High Chancellor of Syai.

  She was still a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday, but Yuet was officially the Healer of the Imperial Court of Syai. She had done it.

  The formalities involved with laying Szewan’s body to rest occupied Yuet’s next few days to the exclusion of everything else. She arranged for the appropriate prayers and offerings in the Temple, for the cremation of the body, for the disposal of the ashes. Her patients—Szewan’s patients—had to be informed, and those not in need of urgent attention stayed away in deference to these arrangements, sending in messages of condolence and offerings of ceremonial honey cakes or white banners with inscriptions extolling Szewan’s virtues which Yuet hung from the windows of the house of mourning.

  She did take on the emergencies, though, especially ones associated with the Imperial circles. When an Imperial Guard came to her house at a late hour one afternoon to summon her to the Guard Compound to look at an injury, Yuet gathered up her things and followed him back to the practice yard.

  At first Yuet took the figure slumped against the far wall of the practice yard as some child who had snuck in to watch and had fallen asleep against the wall. A closer look revealed that the “child” wore the sparring garb of a trainee Guard, and that the arm lying across her ribcage was not laid there in a casual way but rather as a support enabling the hurt girl to breathe without too much pain. Yuet dropped into a crouch beside the patient.

  “What did you do to yourself?” she asked. “Let me look.”

  “I didn’t … do anything … to myself,” she was informed roundly, if breathlessly, by her patient, whose obsidian dark eyes glittered with both pain and annoyance. “He did it to me.”

  Another Guard trainee, head and shoulders taller than the young patient and maybe three or four years older, shrugged sheepishly. “I really didn’t mean it,” he said. “She was too damned good, and I first lost my temper and then forgot who I was fighting and fought as if I had one of my own classmates as a partner. I should have given her some leeway, she has hardly begun with the quarterstaff, and she doesn’t have the strength yet. But she’s too good, I say.”

  “Flattery … will not get you … off,” panted his erstwhile partner. “I’ll … get you … back … aaaah!”

  The last was a yowl of pain as Yuet’s fingers probed the girl’s side.

  “Not for a while, you won’t,” Yuet said. “I think he’s cracked a couple of ribs. I need to bind you up, pretty tight, and there will be no sudden movements for at least a month.” The flat rebellion in those dark eyes as they flashed up and met Yuet’s made her mouth quirk in a smile. “Well, I could say a few days, and you would go out and do things, and then you would come to me in three weeks and complain that you couldn’t lift up a kitten with that arm, and you’d be right. You want it to heal clean, don’t you? What’s your name, firecracker?”

  “Xaforn,” said the firecracker in question. “I’ll be out of commission for … a month?”

  “At least,” Yuet said.

  Xaforn shot her sparring partner a black look. “You wait,” she panted, “until I am … myself again … and don’t you dare tell me … you won’t fight me again.”

  “You’d better not,” Yuet said, amused, addressing the older Guard. “Or I have a feeling t
hat she’d crack your staff over your head.”

  “Rematch later, then,” said the older boy, laughing. “I should have known better than to take you on, Xaforn. You don’t give up!”

  “Damn right I don’t.”

  He saluted, still laughing, and withdrew. Yuet helped Xaforn hobble back to her quarters, and taped up her bruised ribs as she sat on the edge of her bed.

  “Xaforn,” Yuet said as she worked. “I have heard of you. You’re the fierce one.”

  Xaforn shrugged her shoulders, winced.

  “Don’t do that,” Yuet instructed. “In fact, don’t do that for a while. Find some other way of letting people know how tough you are.”

  “Are you sure about the month?” Xaforn said, scowling.

  “Why? Do you plan on giving me a hiding, too, when you can move again?” Yuet asked, laughing.

  After a moment, Xaforn laughed along with her. “I have no idea what to do with myself all that time,” she said.

  “Learn a craft,” suggested Yuet.

  “Will you teach me healing?”

  “You need to sit still,” Yuet said, startled but amused. “Not run around taking care of patients. Besides, you’re already taught field medicine as a Guard, aren’t you?”

  “Some,” said Xaforn. “I wasn’t … serious.”

  “I know,” Yuet said. “Is there anyone who can spend some time with you? A companion?”

  Xaforn hesitated for a moment. “I suppose I could always visit the cat.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I rescued a cat,” Xaforn said cryptically. “And now Qiaan wants to teach me jin-ashu.”

  Yuet regarded her, a little startled. “You don’t know jin-ashu?”

  “I was foundling,” Xaforn said. “Guard raised me.”

  “Ah.” There had been no mother to teach this little wildcat the niceties of her heritage. “And who’s Qiaan?”

  “She wants to be jin-shei,” Xaforn said. “I still haven’t told her yes or no.”

  “Well,” said Yuet gently, “now would be as good a time as any to learn jin-ashu. And a jin-shei-bao is a good thing to have when you are hurting and need help. I would accept your Qiaan’s pledge.”