The Secrets of Jin-Shei (43 page)

As though that had been a signal, Xaforn and the last man standing paused for a moment, facing each other, and then laid down their staves. The last Guard’s sword came singing from his sheath, and Xaforn’s followed it. The crowd gasped. The two combatants in the arena stalked one another as the winded second man was hustled out of the danger zone, and then they closed, their blades drawing arcs of blue fire when they slid down each other’s deadly edges, ringing metal on metal as they met and met again in the bright air sliced into ribbons of daylight between the combatants by the weave of the sword.

A sharp shout of “
Hai!
” from the side halted the bout and the two fighters, both breathing hard, stopped, holding their swords up to one another in salute before sheathing them. They bowed to one another, and then to the Imperial box, and then the crowd exploded into applause and cheers as the two made they way out through the archway into the practice room corridors beyond.

Qiaan was waiting for Xaforn just inside the gate, an arch smile on her face.

“That wasn’t bad at all,” she said. “Looks like all that training they gave you wasn’t
totally
wasted.”

“Are Douber and Chu all right?” Xaforn said, tugging at her helmet fastenings with a weary hand.

“No thanks to you,” said Yuet, coming up to the two of them and reaching out to lend a helping hand. “One of them has two cracked ribs and will probably be turning an interesting shade of plum under his armor just about now. The other has a concussion—mild, but a concussion nonetheless. Did you have to hit quite as
hard
as all that? It was just an exhibition match.”

“So?” Xaforn said. “When you practiced making poultices, did you stop short of actually applying them?”

“Point taken,” Yuet said. “Now come on, the Empress wants to see you.”

“Now?” Xaforn said. With her helmet finally off, her face was flushed and her hair plastered to her small head with sweat. “I’m hardly fit for a royal …”

“Xaforn,” Yuet said, “the royal decides what you’re fit for, and you’re summoned.”

Qiaan fished a carved bone comb out of her purse. “At least fix your hair,” she said, reaching out and combing the straggling, sweaty strands that had escaped the tight braid back away from Xaforn’s face.

“I think that Liudan would benefit from the reminder that occasionally brilliance has to be paid for by mundane things like sweat,” Yuet said thoughtfully

Qiaan glanced at her. “It feels so odd to hear you speak of her by name,” she said.

“I am her healer, and I am her
jin-shei
,” Yuet said. “Sometimes I wonder how all that came about, but that’s how things are. That gives me her name. And, remember, you are second-circle
jin-shei
to her too, through Xaforn and through me.” She paused. Qiaan and Liudan had never met face to face, although Yuet had spoken of each to the other—mentioning everything except their remarkable resemblance to one another. It was still just a picture in Yuet’s mind, the faces of two girls who shared the eyes of a beautiful concubine painted on a Court miniature. Every time she allowed her gaze to rest on Qiaan, Yuet felt an irrational urge to engineer an occasion to put the two girls side by side and prove to herself if they did, indeed, resemble one another so closely or if the whole thing had been the product of an overwrought imagination.

It might be difficult for anyone to observe it here today, with Liudan decked out in her full finery and the aura of the Empire around her like a cloak. Qiaan was clad in a fine embroidered silk gown herself for the occasion, but she would appear plain beside the flashing jewels of royalty. There were none in the royal balcony whose attention it would be dangerous to draw to the resemblance between the Empress and the daughter of one of the captains of her Guard—only Nhia, who already knew them both, and a couple of attendants whose attention would be focused elsewhere, as Liudan’s would be—on Xaforn, the girl of the hour. Perhaps now was the moment, the only moment of grace Yuet would have.

“You’re keeping the Empress waiting,” Qiaan said into the silence. “Do you want me to wait in the back to help you out of that carapace, Xaforn?”

“No, come up with us,” Yuet said recklessly, casting the die. “I have spoken to her of you, too—of the work you did in the compound when the epidemic was still at its height. She was appreciative.”

“Yes, but she never asked to see me, nor did she ever come down there,” Qiaan pointed out.

“Now we
are
keeping her waiting,” Yuet said. “This is no time for wounded dignity, Qiaan. Come on, both of you. This way.”

Yuet made the introductions when the three girls reached the royal balcony, and Liudan inclined her glittering head to Xaforn.

“That was a deeply impressive display,” she said to the youngest Guard, who had gone down on one knee before her Empress. “I have been hearing of you, Xaforn, and now I have seen that what I have been hearing was not exaggerated. I think I have a position for you in the Court, reporting directly to me and to my Chancellor here.”

Nhia sat up straighter at this, and Liudan turned her head fractionally to nod at her.

“When you came to the Council,” the Empress said, “I promised you I would keep you safe from harm. I have had a Guard detail at your side for most of your tenure as Chancellor so far—and I know it hasn’t been easy on you, both the necessity of it and their constant physical presence. But now, I think we have a solution.” She turned back to Xaforn. “There will be new quarters made ready for you near Nhia’s on the Palace grounds, and you will move into those as soon as it may be arranged. You are, as providence would have it, both a guard and a companion, for there is a
jin-shei
link here, is there not?” Receiving a nod, she continued. “I will also reserve the right to take you back for my own purposes, when need arises for your remarkable skills.”

“Thank you, Dragon Empress,” Xaforn said, her eyes wide.

“You may call me Liudan, in this circle,” Liudan said with a regal wave of her hand. “Everyone else does.”

She had offered a few gracious words to Qiaan but it was obvious that she did not instantly see herself in the other girl’s face. As Liudan swept out of the balcony and her entourage followed in her wake, Qiaan hung back, clutching at Yuet’s sleeve.

“She looks … she looks so much like
me
,” Qiaan whispered to Yuet.

“I know,” Yuet said calmly. “You knew too—you’ve seen the Empress before. I know you’ve been to Open Court at least once.”

“From a distance,” Qiaan interrupted. “I have never been this close to the Empress before. And she looks like what I always see in my own mirror. I know, because I’ve always thought my eyes were set too close together, and I see the very thing I’ve always grumbled at in my own mirror on her face when I look at her.”

“She’s wearing a lot of makeup today,” Yuet said, playing devil’s advocate. “Perhaps that accentuates what you see.”

“You know something,” Qiaan said, her eyes narrowing slightly.

“Yes,” Yuet said, her voice calm and light although her heart had skipped a beat. “She has a way about her that has always reminded me of
you, and vice versa. It’s not the eyes so much as a way of looking sideways. But then, Tai might have been little sister to the Little Empress when you saw them together sometimes—when they both put their hair in long braids and scrubbed their faces clean. It means nothing.”

Doubt still sparked in Qiaan’s eyes, but she didn’t pursue the subject. For Yuet, however, it had crystallized. There was indeed a link between these two, the Empress and the daughter of the Guard. Although, on the face of it, the words had nothing to do with this conundrum, Yuet found the voice of a Traveler woman from the mountains of Syai echoing in her mind—
Sevanna had her own plans for Amri.
It was tangled, oh, it was tangled! But Yuet’s instincts had chased down Tammary’s identity, and now Yuet was equally convinced that the Tammary plot was not as obvious as it appeared. Those other plans that Sevanna—
Szewan
—had for Tammary were somehow involved in all of this, and so was Szewan, once again.

Tammary herself, the resentful solitary mountain child, had turned into an unexpectedly capable assistant. She had absorbed
jin-ashu
with surprising ease, and Yuet had grown to depend, in the space of a few short months, on the Traveler girl’s knack for mixing together medicines with skill and speed. Tammary seemed to have settled into her role for the time being, although Yuet had learned quickly never to send her to the market by herself for anything she considered remotely urgent because Tammary would lose herself in the marketplace for hours, sometimes, just wandering through the crowded aisles. She had developed a strange fascination for people. When quizzed on it, she’d explain that they had “different expressions” from the fair folk she had been used to, and she was trying to learn to “read” them.

“She watches them like she’d watch golden carp swimming in a pond, or animals in a menagerie,” Yuet said to Tai once, on just such an occasion, when Tammary was over an hour overdue from the market. “She goes into the marketplace and just watches people bargain for hours. I don’t understand it.”

“Oh, she does a bit more than that,” Tai had said. “I went with her once or twice, after that first time. She is learning—I am not sure what she is trying to teach herself, not yet, but I’ll find out in time. But I’ve watched her, and she is not just watching people like strange specimens in an exotic menagerie. She is trying to understand something.”

“What?” Yuet said in perplexity.

“Compassion, maybe,” Tai murmured. “Perhaps she
does
want to be a healer, somewhere deep inside.”

Yuet snorted. “That one? That one would do much better in the ranks of the Guards, I sometimes think. Give her a weapon and she will channel so much fury into it that it will turn into a sword of fire.”

Xaforn, who had met Tammary, had actually agreed with that assessment.

“She doesn’t show it,” Xaforn had said, “but I can sense it in her—there’s an anger there. Something to prove. She would make a fighter if she could bring herself to get off her high horse for long enough to take instructions from somebody.”

“She does take instructions from somebody,” Tai had said—for it was to her that this trenchant summary had been delivered. “I teach her
jin-ashu
”

“You don’t hit her to do it,” Xaforn said. “You try putting a quarterstaff into her hand and calling the fury that drives her by name in her presence. You’d run for cover pretty quickly.”

“Qiaan said that you weren’t much better when
she
was teaching
you
the
jin-ashu
script,” Tai had retorted, laughing. “She said she had to hold you down and make you do things sometimes.”

Xaforn scowled. “She says too much. I was not born to learn pretty letters.”

“Perhaps that is
your
fury,” Tai said. “Should I run for cover?”

“You’re impossible,” Xaforn snapped.

“I’ve been told that a few times, yes,” Tai said, laughing. “You, on the other hand, are improbable.”

Xaforn sat back, scowling, trying to work out if that remark amounted to a compliment or not. “Why?” she demanded at last.

“Not everyone scares a sorcerous Sage into retreat,” Tai said with a genuine smile.

Xaforn had become Nhia’s faithful shadow, in accordance with Liudan’s command. They had developed a companionable friendship, but Xaforn never forgot for a moment that her role was to stand between Nhia and danger, and even in their most relaxed moments within Nhia’s own quarters she was always on duty, always alert for anything out of the ordinary. Xaforn had been briefed that the Ninth Sage Lihui had harmed Nhia in the past, without being told the details of the tale, and was particularly on guard against him. There were times she had taken it upon herself to rearrange Nhia’s entire schedule so that any opportunity of Lihui coming upon her in less than a crowd or in other than some public place where all could observe the encounter could be carefully avoided. Nhia shied from
him, not avoiding his eyes when she felt his own burning gaze upon her but making sure that she was not often in a position where she would have to endure it for long.

Only once, close to the tail end of winter of that year, when she and Xaforn were waiting at a Palace gate for a sedan chair, did Nhia find herself cornered, with that gentle voice speaking from only a few paces away

“The white streak becomes you, my dear,” Lihui had said in his honeyed tones, the master-to-student manner colored with just the faintest glimmer of knowing intimacy

Xaforn had stepped between Nhia and the Sage.

“If it please you,
sei,
pass on,” she said quietly. She was a head shorter than him, her wrists fragile as a bird’s compared to his own, but Lihui had been in the stands at the autumn inauguration and he knew who Xaforn was.

Nonetheless, he was Lihui, and she was nothing.

“It pleases me to speak to your mistress,” he snapped, his voice shedding some of its sweetness. “As far as you are concerned,
I am not here
.”

Because they were watching for things like that, both Nhia and Xaforn saw him make the tiniest of hand gestures, his thumb and forefinger coming together in a circle, his right hand sweeping minutely down and away.

Xaforn exchanged an eloquent glance with Nhia.

“I bear the same talisman she does,” Xaforn said. “You cannot be invisible for me. Wherever you are, whoever you pretend to be, I will know you.”

“I could kill you right now, little gadfly,” Lihui said, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “I don’t have to be invisible to do it. And there is nothing you can do to prevent it.”

Xaforn reached for her white light, centering. “I don’t think so,” she said.

Lihui felt the instant in which she became the instrument of death, felt her falling into her time-out-of-time state in which she was a killing spirit, ready to protect that which had been given into her charge. He actually took a step back.

At this point a clattering in the yard announced the arrival of the sedan chair. Xaforn indicated to Nhia, with an economical motion of her head and without breaking eye contact with the Sage, that she should get into it. Xaforn herself stood her ground.