The Secrets of Jin-Shei (73 page)

“She bound me to, in the name of
jin-shei
,” Tai said, “and if ever you had fears that she wanted anything from you, you can probably lay them to rest now. She has proved that she does not. She has turned her back on the city, and all that it stands for. She will never willingly come back here.”

“She is the closest thing,” Liudan said with an effort, “that I have to an heir.”

“You don’t know …” Tai began hotly, but Liudan stopped her with a practiced imperial gesture.

“I know,” she said bleakly. “Even the
ganshu
readers know. I made mistakes when I was young—when I really did think I would live forever. Now I see the far shore of my days in my future.”

“You are still young,” Tai persisted. “You have all the time in the world to …”

“It’s my mess and I have to deal with it,” Liudan said. “I could probably wed, even now—but who would trust me with it? Everything I do is tainted with what I have already done. And without marriage, there will be no children who can inherit the throne, and without that, Syai will …”

Tai stood for a moment in anguished silence, her hands twisted into fists at her sides. It would be a betrayal. It could be many layers of betrayals. But it was time for some things to be revealed. Long past time.

“There is,” she said slowly, “a child.”

“We are here,” the cart driver said, peering into the curtained interior of the cart. Tai came to sharply, returning to the present.

“Help me down,” she said, holding out her hand in an imperious manner that Liudan herself might have envied.

“Shall I wait?” the cart driver said after she stood beside the conveyance, the dust of the country road settling on her embroidered city shoes.

“That won’t be necessary,” Tai said, hoisting up her small bag and passing a handful of coins to the driver. “Thank you.”

He bowed respectfully and climbed back into the driver’s seat, clucking to the mule in the traces, and the cart lurched forward again, slowly disappearing into the cloud of dust it left behind. Tai brushed fastidiously at the fine white dust settling on her sleeves, and started out in the direction of
the farmhouse she could glimpse through the trees at the end of a long, rutted driveway.

It was Zhan she came across first, a Zhan very different from his earlier incarnations of Court dandy and the Imperial Army Captain. This was a man whose skin was burned brown by the sun, and whose hands were roughened by honest toil. He had been pruning back some bushes by the side of the narrow roadway leading off to the farmhouse, and had been unable to do more than stare at first as he saw the apparition walking toward him, in her dusty court brocades.

Then he had whooped like a boy and ran to her, and took both hands into his own.

“Tai! By all the Gods’ miracles, Tai! What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to see my
jin-shei-bao,
and make sure you’re taking care of her,” Tai said with a smile.

“We are taking care of one another,” Zhan said, “and it’s you we have to thank for that. It’s been too long, Tai. It’s been so long.”

She squeezed his hands in return. “I know,” she whispered. “And yet … and yet it was yesterday.”

“Come,” Zhan said, dropping her hands to reach for her baggage and motioning her courteously forward. “Amri will be overjoyed to see you.”

“Amri?
You
call her that now?” Tai said with a grin.

“It took some doing,” Zhan said, with an answering one.

He ushered her down the side of the house and toward the back, to where a hand-made wooden chair had been set beside the open back door. A woman was sitting in it, a woman with an unmistakable blaze of red hair.

“You have a visitor,” Zhan called to his wife, just as she reached into the basket of raw wool at her feet for another handful to feed to her spindle.

Tammary looked up.

“If it’s young Mei, tell her the herbs are on the table in the kitchen,” she said, but something in Zhan’s expression made her drop the wool and sit up sharply. “What? What is it?”

“It isn’t Mei,” Zhan said, and stepped aside.

Tammary dropped her spindle, snarling the thread but heedless of the damage, and surged to her feet.

“Tai!” she cried, throwing her arms around the younger woman with the joyful abandon of a small child. “Oh, Tai, it’s good to see you.”

Tai, laughing and crying, returned the hug generously, and then held Tammary out at an arm’s length, giving her an approving once-over from head to foot.

“You look well,” Tai said. “Motherhood agrees with you.”

“This place agrees with me,” Tammary said, throwing out an expansive arm to indicate the house at her back, its windows flung open to summer sunshine, and the sweep of sward which fell toward a line of trees and the distant glitter of sun on water. Beyond the house, a range of mountains reared on the horizon, some snow-capped even this late in the season, beyond a swathe of forest on their lower slopes. “No walls,” Tammary said. “No fear. No expectations. Nobody here knows me as anything other than Zhan’s wife, Jovanna’s mother, the wise-woman who can deliver an infusion against a headache or a poultice to help heal a cut or a paste to rub on an infant’s gums when it starts teething. And I am content, Tai.”

“You were always fascinated by people, loved to watch them,” Tai murmured, “but you are so isolated out here. Don’t you miss it sometimes?”

“The city? No, Tai. Never. Not once.” Tammary said gently. “It is a part of what made me—but now that I know about that part of my heritage, that is all it is, the past. There is nothing left for me there anymore. But tell me your news.”

“It has been a hard year,” Tai said, her voice tight with the pain of the recent months. “There have been too many funerals. Do you remember my wedding, Amri? All of you standing around me—Yuet and Qiaan and Xaforn and Nhia. All of them gone now. And Khailin has disappeared. I got a letter from her, only one since she vanished, and she said that she was content where she is—but she did not tell me where that is. She seems to have found a home, and a mate.”

“Maxao?” Tammary said, her eyes wide.

“No,” Tai said, smiling despite herself. “I don’t think it’s Maxao. She let it slip in the letter that maybe, if Cahan was willing, she will learn what it is like to have a different kind of immortality. I think what she meant was that she was hoping that she might one day have children of her own. I don’t think Maxao has those plans in his future.”

“It is strange,” Tammary said, “of us all only you … you and I …”

“I thought I saw Khailin at Nhia’s funeral, but she disappeared before I had a chance to try and speak to her, if indeed it was her. She, more even than you, has turned her back on the city. I think that she, too, is seeking
this—exactly this.” Tai lifted her eyes to the mountains, and then beyond them, to the clear summer sky streaked with high feathery clouds.

Tammary’s eyes were full of tears. “I wept for all of them. The streets of Linh-an must be empty for you.”

“There is nobody left but Liudan and me,” Tai said. “And Liudan … Liudan is what I came to talk to you about.”

“Did you tell her where I was?” Tammary said, and a wary, almost haunted look came into her eyes for a moment.

“No,” Tai said, “but she does know that you are alive, and happy, and that I know where you are. And I will say no more than that, not without your permission. But she has changed, Amri. The events of this last year have changed her utterly. She has had a great burden to bear, and she almost broke underneath it.”

“She chose it,” Tammary said. She folded her arms across her chest, hugging her shoulders, and paced across the grass before her home. “She wanted it. She wanted to be the Dragon Empress. She put her own shoulder to the wheel, and would accept no partner to help share the load. I know all this. All of you told me the story in your own way at some time or another—you, Yuet, Nhia. What has changed now?”

“Everything,” Tai said. “The future has changed shape, and Liudan is tired. I don’t think she even realized how much she depended on Nhia until Nhia was no longer there.” Tai’s voice broke a little at this last, and Tammary reached over to squeeze her shoulder in mute sympathy.

“You must miss her so,” she whispered.

“Antian was my first
jin-shei-bao,
but Nhia was the friend of my childhood,” Tai said. “We grew up together, she and I. We remember the same back streets of Linh-an. Our mothers bought our food at the same markets, and drew our water from the same wells. When she and I became
jin-shei,
it was not a new thing for us—it was as though we were giving a name to something that already existed, that had been there between us for many years. Yes, I miss her. There are times that I cannot believe that she is gone; sometimes I think I can hear that dragging step of hers, when her foot particularly hurt her and she began to limp hard from it, and I turn to greet her, and there is only empty air.”

“The ghosts follow you,” Tammary said. “I could almost hear it, too.” She shivered slightly, as though a shadow had just quenched the liquid summer sunshine that streamed about her. “Would you like some cider?”
she said abruptly. “A local apple farmer traded a batch of it to me for a sovereign physic against colic; he said it had been a small price to pay in order to have a few hours’ respite from his newborn son’s screaming misery.”

“Yuet would be proud of you,” Tai said, smiling.

“I hope so,” Tammary murmured, looking away.

“Where’s your daughter?” Tai asked as they entered the house.

“She’s down for her afternoon nap,” Tammary said. “Would you like to look in on her?”

Tai smiled; Tammary’s smile bloomed in return, a mother’s smile, proud and contented.

“She’s in here,” Tammary said, opening a door to a bright bedroom, its walls painted with vivid scarlet flowers and multihued butterflies. In a crib in the corner, a small girl slept with her thumb firmly in her mouth, long dark lashes curled over her cheeks. Her hair, a rich brown chestnut, was braided in two long pigtails and tied with lengths of red wool.

“It took me forever to make Xanshi stop sucking her thumb,” Tai whispered, smiling, careful not to wake the sleeping child. “What did you say her name was? Jovanna?”

“That’s what I call her,” Tammary whispered back. “The Traveler version of it. Zhan insists on calling her Yehovann, or even just Yovann. He said that’s right, and proper, and it’s even a royal name.”

“Antian’s mother, the Ivory Empress, was Yehonaia,” Tai said. “He might be right.”

“She’s Jovanna to me,” Tammary said, smiling, but a hint of stubbornness in her voice. “She always will be.”

“She is beautiful,” Tai said, “under any name.”

They lingered for another moment, bestowing a final glance on the child as Tammary reached to tuck the coverlet more securely around her sleeping form, and then padded carefully out again, closing the door of the bedroom behind them.

“Who did the room?” Tai asked. “The flowers, the butterflies?”

“Zhan,” Tammary said, and dimpled at the thought. “Who knew that I married an artist?”

“I used to sketch, a long time ago,” Tai said. “That’s how I first met Antian, the Little Empress. I loved drawing butterflies, too.”

They talked of times past, and of the present. They spoke of their children, as mothers do; Tammary had fond memories of young Xanshi, Tai’s daughter, and of the child’s insistent covetousness of Tammary’s bright hair.

“She still asks sometimes,” Tai told
her jin-shei-bao,
laughing. “She’ll ask at the most unexpected times. Sometimes she makes up stories about a fox called Tami who prevails over all other beasts and men through wit and wisdom and sheer good looks. And she’ll haul out that lock of hair that you gave her once. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, I told her if she slept with it under her pillow her hair would turn that color eventually,” Tammary laughed.

“I think a part of her still believes that,” Tai said. “But she’ll hold that up and say that her Tami is that color all over. I think she misses you.”

Tammary gazed at her visitor with suddenly brooding eyes.

“Tai, you haven’t just come to talk over old times with me,” she said. “I am glad to see you—it’s been a long time, and too much has happened, and I’d forgotten how much joy I always took in your company—but I know you didn’t travel all this way to tell me that your daughter remembers me with fondness. What has really brought you here?”

“The future,” Tai said, after a moment’s pause.

“You want my child,” Tammary said, her cheeks suddenly flushed as though with fever.

“I dreamed of all of this,” said Tai helplessly. “I wrote to you about that. I dreamed about your child, and about what she might grow up to represent. But it’s all been vague, so vague, until this bitter spring came, and we were all that was left in the
pau-kala
of the circle, and you were the only thing that linked Liudan’s empire and the years to come. You, and Yovann. Zhan may have been right to call that a royal name.”

“You told Liudan I had a daughter?”

Tai hesitated. “Yes,” she said at last. “The Dragon Empress has lost her fire. She still has no heirs. She does not even want to think about that, not now, not yet, not when everything still lies in ashes around her—but there is one way the line of the Empire can continue unbroken. However that came about, you come of the same royal line; and Zhan has some of that blood too. Yovann is the natural heir, the only one who can lead the Empire peacefully into the future. The alternative is more conflict, as others try to carve their niche into what Liudan leaves empty when she goes.”

“Liudan chose her path!” Tammary said violently, turning away. “She is still young enough to have children of her own if she so chooses! Why my baby?”

“It would not be now. It would not be your baby, not that sweet child asleep in the other room right now. It would be years before she is needed, before she is called.”

“But why? Why do I have to give my child to be chewed and spat out by the Empire? Liudan would have killed me if she had the chance. For merely existing, for having had the temerity to have been born. Why would I now give her my daughter?”