The Secrets of Jin-shei Read online

  “Have you got one?” Xaforn asked bluntly.

  “Yes,” Yuet said.

  “What do you do?” Xaforn asked, perplexed. The concept was both familiar and alien to her—she knew about the basic principles of jin-shei, but she had never quite got down to the bottom of this mystery. It all sounded very emotional and impractical, and she wasn’t convinced that any of it was useful to her in the life she had chosen.

  Yuet found herself telling the story of the Little Empress, for the second time in a handful of days, and in considerably more detail. Xaforn was listening intently.

  “I don’t think Qiaan has had one before, either,” Xaforn said, when Yuet had finished her story. “I wonder if she even knows what she has asked. You know a lot about it.”

  “No,” Yuet said, “only what I have seen, and experienced. That is not much.”

  “You have just one?”

  “I had another,” said Yuet, “a long time ago, but she died from the pox when she was fifteen and I was fourteen. After that, no, I didn’t have any more—until recently.”

  “Would you be mine?” Xaforn said.

  The question was so thoroughly unexpected that Yuet was momentarily left speechless in the face of the request. Xaforn saw her expression, and misinterpreted it. Her face started closing.

  “I only thought …” she began, but Yuet raised a hand to stop her.

  “I am sorry. You startled me. If you think Qiaan is not quite sure what she was offering you, do you know what you are doing?”

  Xaforn nodded mulishly She wasn’t going to speak again.

  Yuet blinked a few times, still astonished. “I have no idea why you wish it,” she said, “but I guess a Guard would find a healer jin-shei-bao useful, at that. So, little sister, if you really wish this …”

  Xaforn nodded again. “I do. You can teach me things, and then Qiaan won’t think I am stupid.”

  Yuet laughed. “So you have decided to accept Qiaan, too?”

  “Yes, I think so. There’s the cat.”

  “You’ll have to tell me about this cat some day,” Yuet said, entertained. “I’ll look in on you tomorrow. No fighting. I’ll know, remember? Send for the cat, if you have to, but stay still. Understood?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  When she left, Yuet was still smiling, shaking her head in amusement. Xaforn was left lying on her bunk, flat on her back, her head turned toward the doorway through which Yuet had left, the expression on her own face inscrutable.

  Nine

  When another summons came from the Palace, less than two weeks after her initial encounter with Liudan, Yuet was a little startled. Her initial surprise, however, quickly spiraled into outright astonishment.

  In a brocaded parcel tied with silk tasseled cord, addressed to her in elegant jin-ashu script, Yuet found three separate messages. The first message was a formal invitation to the Empress-Heir Liudan’s Xat-Wau ceremonies, to take place the following day at sunset. Yuet had almost expected that one—after her statement to the Council it was a matter of time, and she was sure that Liudan would have pressed for the ceremony to take place as soon as it could be arranged.

  The second message, a letter in Liudan’s own hand, took Yuet’s breath away.

  They tell me jin-shei should be based on any number of things, but that guarding one’s back is not one of them—and they are probably right. But you were right in that I find it hard to trust anybody at all. They took my mother away from me when I was a child and replaced her with nothing; and then I was left to atone for her fall from grace. I still don’t even know what it is that she was accused of, although I hear rumors all the time. I have few friends in this court. I hated your Tai for walking in without effort and taking the only affection that was ever freely shown me—Antian’s. But that jin-shei had been begun for all the right reasons, I understand. So because of that and because of what I cannot help but be, I tell you three things. One is that I will see your Tai, Antian’s Tai, once this ritual is over and I am my own mistress again. I make no promises further than this, but I will see her, and I will speak with her of Antian. The second is that I have no senior female relatives left alive in the Palace aside from my ancient honorable grandmother, the Dowager Empress, whose health has deteriorated badly in the last few months and cannot even make it to the ceremony unless we hold it in her sickroom, as you will be aware. I require someone, an adult female close to me, to put the red pin in my hair tomorrow night. There is precedent for jin-shei sisters to do this for an orphaned or otherwise isolated jin-shei-bao, so the third thing is this: I want you to put the red pin in my hair.

  The third message was a slip of fine silk paper tucked into the fold of this letter. It bore just the two words: jin-shei.

  A little Guard girl, and the Empress of Syai, all in the same week. And Yuet had thought that becoming jin-shei-bao to Tai, who had once been the Little Empress Antian’s, was reaching high.

  Liudan’s letter touched off a quivering strand of guilt as well as an ironic recognition in Yuet—guarding her back, although not the primary nor the only reason that she had offered jin-shei to Tai, had certainly been part of her own reasoning back in the mountains at the conclusion of that bitter, shattered day that the world had fallen apart around them all. Now she had been offered the same thing, on much the same terms; the difference was that Tai had not known the terms, not completely, and Yuet understood Liudan’s motives far more precisely.

  Still. Jin-shei. To an Empress.

  Her message to Liudan had been short, and to the point.

  Jin-shei. I will be there.

  The Xat-Wau ceremony was a small one, with a small circle of invitees, mostly only the barest minimum necessary for official purposes. Part of the reason for this was that the Court was still in mourning—and would be for a long time—so that lavish celebrations could not be put on in good conscience, but part of it was the simple haste with which Liudan had pushed this through once approval had been given. The attendees, apart from Liudan herself, included a handful of the women from the Imperial Court who were there as attendants for Liudan, the High Chancellor and two other Council members, a brace of Temple priests, Yuet and Tai.

  Tai had had to be practically bullied into going by Yuet.

  “She hadn’t asked me, I don’t belong there,” she kept repeating stubbornly when Yuet had first broached the subject.

  “She said she wanted to talk to you,” Yuet pointed out. “Isn’t that what you wished to accomplish?”

  “Yes, but she said later, when it’s all over, when she’s Empress.”

  “Tai, she will be Empress in days. And as for ‘later,’ she might as well have meant after the ceremony.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. Now come on, and work with me on this. I said I’d try and help you keep your promise to Antian, and I’ve got you this far. Now you’ve got to follow me.” She paused, startled by the sudden glint of tears on Tai’s eyelashes. “Now what?”

  “I wonder …” Tai began, and Yuet suddenly realized what the obstacle was. It would be Liudan who would get the sanction of adulthood, Liudan whose path to Empire would be smoothed.

  Not Antian.

  Yuet sighed, and reached to smooth Tai’s hair. “Who knows,” she murmured, “but that they were both born for this, Tai. And that you had some part to play in it all.”

  “What?” Tai said, wiping her face with the back of her hand with the swift smearing motion of a child. “Antian was a miracle to me, and Liudan is a promise.”

  “Exactly. The promise.”

  So Tai had capitulated in the end and had accompanied Yuet to the Palace as the sun dipped to the west on the following day, and they were admitted to the room where the Xat-Wau ceremony was to take place.

  All the other guests were there and waiting when Liudan was finally conducted into the room by two of her women, precisely as the last light died and the day dipped into twilight. She had been given special dispensation
to wear a sumptuous silk gown in flaming scarlet for the occasion, although she still wore white bands around her arms in recognition of her mourning. Her hair was down, combed into a smooth waterfall of black silk, held only by a pair of ivory combs. The attendants escorted her to a carved mahogany chair placed beside a small, silk-draped table which bore a profusion of hair-dressing pins and clasps such as crowded the dressing table of every woman in Syai. On a special cushion by itself lay one large straight hairpin, richly carved and polished to a satin-smooth sheen, dyed red.

  Two of the priests set up a soft background chanting as the hairpin, on its cushion, was brought by one of the women to the third priest, the highest-ranking among them. The priest placed his hands on the pin and laid a blessing of the ancestors on it, and the goodwill of the Immortals on the woman who would wear it into her adult life. Then he turned and held the pin out to Yuet.

  She had been holding Tai’s hand throughout the ceremony. Now, aware of everyone’s eyes on her—not all of them friendly—Yuet let go of Tai’s clinging fingers and stepped up to the priest. The pin was heavy; it was heavier than she had thought it would be. It was heavier, surely, than her own had been.

  It was heavy enough to bear the weight of an Empire.

  Yuet turned to where Liudan sat on her thronelike chair, straight-backed, gazing straight at her.

  I’m crowning her, Yuet thought for a moment. This was what this moment unofficially was—neither more nor less than a crowning ceremony, without which the young Empress could not lay her hand on the helm of her land. And she, Yuet, had wrought this. If she had balked at Liudan’s plan, Liudan might still have managed it, but not without casualties. As it was, she and Yuet had staged a minor coup, decapitating a regency in its infancy, channeling all the power into Liudan’s hands.

  Yuet nodded at the two attendants standing next to Liudan’s chair, and they bowed to the Empress, took up combs and clasps, and expertly started coiling up the shining mass of her black hair into the complex loops and coils of a Court lady’s coiffure, pinning it up with hidden pins and clips and then decorating it with the lacquered combs and jeweled hairpins, until Liudan glittered like a gem in the candlelight. When they were finished, the two women dropped to their knees beside the chair.

  Tai, in the audience, shivered as she watched. This was the image she had always carried of Liudan—glittering, royal, proud. Even at the Summer Palace, where women relaxed the rules of Court protocol, Liudan had worn her hair dressed formally with ornaments of flowers and butterflies and dragon combs and jeweled pins. It was as though she had always needed to remind everyone of her status, of the fact that she was royal. Antian had never needed that—Antian had had the innate grace of the highborn, could talk to people from every walk of life, from the highest to the lowest, and make all feel at home. She had still had that even when she had been running around the gardens with bare arms and her hair in a hoyden’s pair of long braids. Liudan’s royalty, on the other hand, was somehow far more fragile, and therefore treasured, and on display. If she had ever succumbed to Antian’s careless disregard of her own royal status, Liudan, the spare heir, could have simply been left on the sidelines, disregarded. She had been taught everything that an Empress would have needed to know but she had never been expected to have occasion to use that knowledge, not from where she stood in the succession. So she had always made sure that everyone knew that the knowledge, the royalty, was there.

  The hair was done.

  Everyone in the room—they had all been standing, Liudan was already technically Empress and nobody of lesser rank had permission to sit in her presence unless she bade them—went down onto one knee as Yuet, the only one still on her feet, raised the red pin of Xat-Wau and slid it smoothly into the crown of hair, her eyes holding Liudan’s.

  “Long life, and fair reign,” Yuet said, very softly, subsiding to one knee in deep obeisance at Liudan’s feet.

  She could see, in the candlelight, Liudan’s eyes shining with unexpected tears.

  Tai, shivering violently, could almost see the gently smiling ghost of Antian standing behind Liudan’s glittering form. Liudan’s own expression was inscrutable, and Tai wondered for one brief and infinitely painful moment if Liudan herself had spared any thought for Antian on this night.

  The others had departed, afterward, and Liudan retired to her chambers. It was there that the young deaf servant conducted Tai and Yuet within the hour. By the time they arrived Liudan had changed from her Court scarlet robe into a simple wraparound gown, and her feet were in silk slippers, a small but telling rebellion against the strict mourning rules. Her hair was still dressed in the Xat-Wau style, the red pin still in place, but her eyes glittered more brilliantly than any of the jewels she wore tucked into her dark crown of hair.

  “So, tell me,” Liudan said, her voice touched with a hint of outright malice. “Tell me about her.”

  “I never meant to come between Antian and those she loved,” Tai said in a low voice. “I don’t know why you believed that.”

  “Because she spent little time with me back in the Summer Palace after you came into her life. She had been kind to me, one of the few that were, the only one of those four whom I wear this for that I actually missed.” She plucked at a white ribbon in her hair. “Sometimes I feel like such a fraud. I do not mourn the man who was my father, because I hardly knew him. I saw him in private, in any kind of informal encounter, maybe twenty times in my entire life. And the woman to whom my mother’s concubine status made sure I belonged never wanted me, and was content to have me rattling around in the bottom of the royal basket as a backup heir in case anything happened to the Little Empress or Oylian.” She turned away suddenly, with a savage little toss of her head. “Everyone doted on her, you know,” she said.

  “Antian? You were jealous of her?” Tai said. “Why? You were both born to the Empire.”

  “She was. I should probably, if they had thought about it, never have been born at all. Even now, when I cried for her, every time I balked at something it was The Little Empress would have this or The Little Empress wouldn’t have that. It was hard enough living up to her when she was alive, but now it’s impossible.”

  “You aren’t her,” Tai said. “You must pursue your own happiness.”

  Liudan blinked at her, startled. “Don’t presume to tell me what I must do.”

  “Tai,” Yuet said warningly

  “But I must,” Tai said. “She said you were angry. Perhaps you have reason to be. But please don’t be angry at me for being happy that she chose me, or at her for loving me. Because I don’t think there will be another human being who will mean to me what she meant to me. And because of her … because of her … I made her a promise and I don’t have any real way of keeping it but at the very least I had to see you and tell you that if there was anything I could do, in any way, for her sake, I would. I know that I cannot do much and that you are thinking I am crazy with the grief of it to even speak this way. But—if the time should come—I had to say that. I had to see you and tell you that.”

  Both the older girls were staring at Tai with astonishment, but she had had her say and now she dropped into a deep obeisance to Liudan. “Thank you,” she said, her voice almost inaudible but very steady, “for speaking with me.”

  Liudan suddenly laughed, and Yuet, who hadn’t been aware that she had been holding her breath, let it out with a sigh.

  “I begin to see why she liked you,” Liudan said. “Very well. You have my word that if there is ever anything you can do for me you will have your chance, little jin-shei-bao.”

  Tai looked up sharply. “But she said …”

  “She said what?”

  “She said …” What Antian had actually said was that being jin-shei with her didn’t mean that Tai had to take Liudan on. But at the last moment Tai caught herself before repeating the sentiment in such undiplomatic terms, and rephrased. “I didn’t know it carried over,” she said.

  “It doesn’t,�
�� Liudan said. “It pleases me to claim it, since you offer it.”

  “I did?”

  “Of course. You made her a promise. You were hardly promising to protect me against the High Council—you can’t—just against the rest of the world when it gets to be too much. And for that, you’re jin-shei.” Liudan laughed again. “So we’re all sisters here, then. What a strange circle for an Empress to take her first steps into the world with—but with a devoted friend and a healer by my side it looks like it might be an interesting journey.”

  Later, after they had taken their leave of the young Empress still drunk on her first taste of power and Yuet had delivered Tai back to her mother’s house, Tai had sought out her journal again. She had meant to write an account of the Xat-Wau and of the way she had seen Liudan’s eyes glitter in the candlelight, and of all that Liudan had said to her that night. Instead, she found herself writing a poem.

  She steps on the dais of power, and her crown

  is her pride, and her wound

  is her fear.

  The world will come to her, asking,

  and I will be there to listen

  when she makes reply.

  Tai brooded over the words on the page, feeling oddly prophetic in that moment, and then lifted her head and listened as the night-noises of her neighborhood spilled into her room through the open window and wrapped her in their comforting, familiar cocoon—the yowl of a prowling cat, a distant echo of human laughter, the clicking sound that the shod hooves of the refuse-collector’s mule made on the cobblestones as he made his rounds with his cart in the darkness of Linh-an’s night streets.

  PART THREE

  Xat

  Ah, what a commotion is made here!