The Secrets of Jin-Shei (38 page)

“I’m sorry, little
jin-shei-bao.
I am tired and afraid and out of sorts. Perhaps this
was
exactly what I needed.”

Nhia pondered on the reader’s words, reading over the notes on the scroll she had been given, for another brace of days—and then, finally, without telling anyone else, sent a note to Liudan in her spidery
jin-ashu
writing. It said simply,
I am ready.

Liudan sent a liveried squad of Imperial Guards the very next day to accompany the sedan chair she had arranged to take Nhia to the Palace. Liudan herself waited for Nhia in the anteroom of the Palace entrance hall.

“You could have dressed to the occasion,” Liudan said, her tone gently teasing. Nhia wore only a moderately resplendent gown, with no jewels, and her hair was dressed as simply as Palace protocols permitted.

“I don’t own any grand garb,” Nhia said.

“We’ll have to remedy that—but for now it’s just as well. Simplicity is exactly what we want.”

They walked up the corridors, with their rows of expensive glass-paned windows, arm in arm, and only at the door to the Council chamber did Liudan squeeze Nhia’s arm and withdraw hers.

“They will announce you when I’m seated,” she said in a low voice. “And don’t look so tragic, this is going to be fascinating. Our friend Zibo is here today.”

“Whatever for?”

“He follows me, waiting for me to make some mistake so that he can point a finger and tell everyone he told them so,” Liudan said. “Fat old fool. Whatever brain he had to begin with must have been digested to form all those chins. I’ve invested your Co-Chancellor and partner some time ago, as placeholder, and he is in there now—possibly the best thing that could be said about him is that he is not and never has been Zibo’s creature, and that he has been properly grateful for the increase in his fortunes.” Liudan smiled. “You belong here,” she said, unconsciously echoing the words of Yuet and Qiaan. “It’s time you came in and took your place. Remember that.”

She nodded at her herald to precede her and swept into the room, leaving Nhia waiting with another herald just outside the Council chamber door.

Nhia had not expected to be announced with a title, but she found herself entering the room to a cry of “Co-Chancellor Nhia of Linh-an!” Liudan, having been persuaded by Yuet of the wisdom of adopting her backup plan while Nhia vacillated, had appointed a distant princely cousin to the position of the other Co-Chancellor. Nhia’s partner-in-office, as Liudan had told her he would be, was sitting in the Council chamber as she entered, his own Chancellor’s chain on his shoulders. He greeted her with a regal inclination of his head, the expression on his face carefully schooled.

“Today I am confirming the appointment of my second Co-Chancellor to her office,” Liudan announced. “Herald, bring the chain and the seal!”

The herald obeyed and Liudan, glancing around, smiled maliciously as her gaze swept the small number of people seated to the side as spectators and observers, as she sometimes allowed for the more public of her Councils. “Emeritus-Chancellor Zibo, you know I have always been a great admirer of your powers and your abilities. Would you do me the honor of investing your successor with her chain of office?”

Zibo, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, waddled over to where Nhia stood awaiting the herald and his paraphernalia. “With the utmost of pleasure, my Empress,” he said. He placed the chain over Nhia’s head, none too gently, and hissed close to her ear as he did so, “You are her mistake! She has finally overreached herself!”

“You may,” Liudan said pointedly, “go back to your seat now,
sei
Zibo. Nhia, take your seat, we will begin as soon as the Imperial Sages arrive—they are very late this morning.”

As if on cue, the door herald knocked on the wooden floor with his staff and announced the Nine Sages of Syai. The men were all gray-haired to varying degrees and getting on in years, with the single exception of Ninth Sage Lihui. He had a spring in his step and a proud carriage that spoke of the prime of life, even of youth.

I gave him that,
Nhia thought, her fingers at her throat where Khailin’s amulet burned with cold fire. Her other hand, quite involuntarily, crept to where a white streak now gleamed in her piled-up hair.

When he saw Nhia sitting at the table wearing the Chancellor’s chain, Lihui’s eyes turned a glittering black, but it was he who finally broke the gaze that locked their eyes on one another as Liudan spoke directly to him.

“You are looking well, Ninth Sage Khailin-Lihui. Marriage agrees with you.”

T
he summer epidemic and then the events of the following autumn had effectively sidetracked Yuet, but she had not forgotten the Traveler child, the girl whom Tai had once called the snow dancer—now, incredibly, almost a year ago.

The Blackmail Books had yielded one other piece of pertinent information—the identity of Jokhara’s sister, a woman by the name of Jessenia, who had taken in Jokhara’s child after her death.

“What if she never told Tammary anything was amiss? What if Tammary believes herself to be her aunt’s natural daughter?” Tai had demanded, when the subject of Yuet’s traveling up to the mountains to find out the truth behind Szewan’s account had come up again in the spring.

Yuet shrugged. “Then the story dies there.”

“Yuet, if you don’t meddle in it now …”

“And what of your dream, then?” Yuet said. “You know there is more to this than just digging up the grave of a woman long dead and the scandal that was buried with her. This stretches into the future as well as the past. I want to make sure she is protected.”

“Liudan or your Tammary?” Tai asked with a small smile.

Yuet shot her a startled look. “Sometimes you ask disturbing questions,
jin-shei-bao.
”

“When we were all there in the village last year, with Liudan, I got the distinct feeling that our presence made every person in that place hold their breath until we went away. What were they all afraid of?”

“That they might be held responsible for sheltering Tammary, for making sure she survived? That they might be accused of a conspiracy against the Empire? It would not be hard for Liudan to see such a conspiracy. She’s never trusted anybody—except perhaps Nhia.”

“Conspiracy to do what?” Tai asked, perplexed. “Travelers have always seemed to me to be drifters on the wings of the wind. I didn’t know so
many of them could ever settle down together in a permanent village, like that one up on the mountain.”

“You look almost disappointed to have found a Traveler community living in real houses, on solid ground,” Yuet said, smiling, allowing herself to be diverted from a contentious subject.

“Well, when I was little, my mother told me stories of them, and they were always on the road, in bright wagons pulled by those big horses with white socks.” Yuet had to laugh out loud at that, and Tai waved an impatient hand. “You know what I mean! The ones with the hairy feet. I thought the Travelers were so … free. They could go where they wanted, do what they pleased. It sounded wonderful to me.”

“I don’t think there’s a child in Syai who did not feel the same,” Yuet said. “Who wouldn’t want to grow up into a life of music, song, carnival, acrobats and trained animals, and cooking at a campfire every night?”

“Um, there were times, when it was raining hard outside …” Tai murmured.

Yuet laughed again. “You are an incurable romantic with a resolutely practical streak,” she said.

“So what are we going to do up there, then—just blunder in and start asking questions about things they would rather remain forgotten?” Tai asked.

“So you are coming with me?” Yuet said, smiling.

Tai scowled. “If I hadn’t started it …”

“Actually, I don’t know that you did start it—but you certainly made sure I finished it,” Yuet said.

“Yuet, I can’t stay away …”

“Don’t worry, I’ll organize someone to look after Rimshi while you’re not here,” Yuet said, guessing Tai’s concern before she had time to fully articulate it. “We won’t be away for long.”

The inn they took a room in was the same one they had stayed at with Liudan on her “retreat.” It was run by a round-faced, black-haired widow whose coloring and physiognomy, coupled with a reedy voice and a flat-lander’s accent, made it immediately obvious that her connection with the Traveler community in the village was confined to the fact that her warm common room was the favored gathering place for those locals still in the village when the winter snows cut them off from the rest of the world.

“She says that they come on different nights, the Travelers and the rest,
the others in the village,” Tai told Yuet over dinner on their second night there, after trying to cajole their polite, reserved hostess into a conversation that did not directly involve matters of the inn’s hospitality “Apparently only the men come into the common room when it’s the turn of the locals. Their women don’t go out drinking around here—and they don’t like being here on the nights that the Travelers come because they
do
bring their women along, the married women. And the Traveler women flirt shamelessly with the local men, who appear to find it all quite unseemly.”

The corner of Yuet’s mouth quirked. “I see.”

“I also found out,” Tai said, “that there’s a fair in the next village in two days’ time, and that most of the Traveler clan will be going down—to sell their stuff, and, at least according to
her,
for the revelry,” Tai said. “I can’t decide if she disapproves of that or is jealous of it, and I’m not sure if the licentiousness stretches to the unmarried maidens, but the Traveler women definitely seem to live by different rules.”

“Did she mention any names?” Yuet said, entertained by Tai’s wholehearted embrace of the role of spy.

“Only in that the stuff to be sold includes woven cloth, and that one of the finest weavers around is a Traveler woman by the name of Jessy,” Tai said complacently.

Yuet laughed out loud. “Well done. We will go to this fair, and see if we can find out if this weaver is the one who took in our motherless child.”

The fair was a surprisingly large one, considering how early in the year it was and how far most of the participants had had to come in order to be there for the designated two days of the fair. For Tai it was a trip back to childhood, reviving echoes in her mind of the much larger and more sophisticated shows that the Travelers had once regularly brought to Linhan. This was no big city fair, and much as Tai had her heart set on it there didn’t seem to be anyone around who did anything at all with fire, a vivid memory of her childhood. There were, however, bolts of finely woven woolen cloth for sale, dyed in various vibrant colors, and Tai had practically burst into tears when she came across a stand selling long brilliantly colored ribbons which she associated so strongly with the gift her mother had made to her when she was a small child. Yuet bought her a bright red one, almost as long as she herself was tall, and Tai wove it into her hair immediately, letting the ends trail down her back and flutter in the breeze.

“They’ll know you for gentlefolk,” Yuet said, teasing. “You look good enough to attend Autumn Court.”

Tai flounced, setting her ribbons dancing. “I do not,” she retorted. “Look, are those cheeses?”

“Goat’s cheese, I think,” Yuet said. She was half-laughing and half-exasperated. “Tai, settle down! We’ll go back and get some goat’s cheese later, if you like. The weavers’booths are over there. Come on.”

Tai subsided, without quite losing the broad grin she wore like a charm, and followed Yuet to the cluster of tables piled with the weavers’ samples. Several women, not all of them Travelers, bustled around the back of the display tables with a proprietory air. One, a large, raw-boned Traveler woman with her fair hair dressed in two braids pinned up over the crown of her head, was perched on a three-legged stool and sewing a plain serviceable garment. Tai happened to be watching her when the voice of another customer, one obviously familiar with the wares, brought the woman’s head up from her work. The language was fluent, flowing, but unfamiliar—except for a single word, a name, which caught at Tai’s ear.
Jessy.

Tai elbowed Yuet in the ribs, surreptitiously, and was rewarded with a quick scowl and a shake of the head.
Stay here, stay quiet.

The woman hailed as Jessy laid aside her sewing and came across to the man who had hailed her, another of the Traveler clan, his yellow mustache hanging over his upper lip and trailing in two long, neatly twisted tails down to his chest. They struck up an easy conversation, in the manner of two good friends who had been apart, and Tai whispered to Yuet, “Well, we’ve found her. What now? Are you sure she even speaks a language we can understand?”

Yuet, about to reply, suddenly clutched at Tai’s wrist. “Look,” she said.

Tammary approached across the open sward in the middle of the circle of fair booths and tents, her fiery hair loose down her back, carrying a wicker basket. Her path brought her an arm’s length away from Yuet and Tai. Judging by her expression, she had not volunteered to be here, and she was entirely too consumed by her rebellion against that to notice the interested gaze of the two ‘customers’ by the table.

She planted the basket by the stool where Jessy had been sitting, barking out a single word in the Travelers’ language, and then whirled with a swish of her bright skirt and a flurry of curly hair and stalked off again.

“
Rucha
,” Tai repeated softly. “Lunch? I wish they’d speak in a language that I understood.”

“We understand, if you wish to bargain,” said a voice to the side, accented
but suddenly miraculously comprehensible. Tai’s voice had obviously carried farther than she thought. “Something you like?”

Yuet turned and met the eyes of their quarry, the woman called Jessy.

“Actually,” she began carefully, “we were looking for you.”

The woman’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I thought you weren’t from around here,” she said. “Was it Sevanna who finally sent you?”