The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(10)

The grains of salt, they realized, were not really black, but instead a deep and dull garnet. When they bent their head down, they could smell a faint scent of spoiled milk and something underneath, something almost bloody.

“It’s iron,” they said with faint surprise. “Iron gives black salt its color, then?”

Rabbit nodded with some satisfaction. “It is. White salt is pure and comes from the sea, utterly innocent and utterly still.”

“And red from iron, from swords and shields and the bells that hang from the mammoths’ bridles . . . I imagine that black salt stands for something else.”

“Yes. You do understand.”





Chapter Eight


Astrological chart of the constellation of the Baker. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “lucky.”

Astrological chart of the constellation of the Crying Widow. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “mourning.”

Astrological chart of the constellation of the Rooster. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “open-eyed.”



Chih had thought the rear room to be a simple storage room at first. They had not expected to slide open the door and to be confronted with stacks of star charts filed into glass-fronted cabinets, indexed with a dab of dye in one corner and kept as carefully as the great scrolls of the abbey in Singing Hills.

Above them, Almost Brilliant whistled, though whether the sound was meant to be surprised or taunting Chih could not guess.

“Well, this is certainly a mess.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Do you think you can get through all of them fast enough to get to the eclipse?”

Chih bit their lip. It would be a close thing. They worked fast, but after a certain point, speed became the enemy of precision. Precision was the watchword of the clerics who had raised them, but the tug of the capital and the eclipse over the Palace of Gleaming Light was powerful.

Finally, they shrugged, going to the topmost shelf on the right and pulling out paper, inkstone, ink, and brush again.

“This could take all month,” Almost Brilliant said, alighting on their shoulder. Chih absently brushed the hoopoe off, ignoring the soft squawk of offense.

“It could. I hope it won’t.”

It would be, not appropriate, perhaps, but understandable to move on, to list the general contents of the room and to continue with the cataloging of Thriving Fortune. Another cleric could be sent, or perhaps Chih themselves could return at some point. By then, however, looters might have moved in and, as Chih listened to Rabbit’s footsteps shushing somewhere through the compound, things might be very different.

Empress In-yo, dead precisely a year before the upcoming eclipse, was one of the most well-recorded monarchs in history. She had brought the clerics of Singing Hills back from their exile beyond the borders of Anh, and she personally gifted them a gorgeous ivory and brass aviary to nest the next generation of neixin. Then she had shut off every record of herself before her ascension, every place she had lived between her banishment from court and her return six years later.

The clerics of the Singing Hills never liked gaps in their knowledge, but in return for their lands and their restored place in Anh, they had let it go. Eventually, the historian clerics knew, things would come out, whether it took five years, fifty, or a hundred.

If Chih did not finish their work here, they knew with the slow patience of seven hundred years’ worth of records at the abbey that it would be finished someday.

But I think this needs to be finished now. Soon.

The star charts ranged in quality from simple market scratches on elderly trash paper to beautifully elegant scrolls that described the heavens and their effect on those below in intense detail. Chih took a second glance at the ones related to their own birth sign, the Spoon, and was variously amused and impatient by turns to find predictions of varying accuracy. They had indeed come far from where they began in the foothills of Wa-xui, but they were hardly going to be called demure, maidenly, or docile.

A prickling along their back made them look up, and they turned to see Rabbit kneeling in the doorway behind them. She was not kneeling as if she were a dedicated servant waiting for orders, but instead, she knelt as if her legs would no longer support her, one hand on the door’s edge, the other fisted on her knee.

“Grandmother! Did you fall?”

Chih came over to help the old woman up, but she pushed Chih aside, coming into the room to sit with the star charts and the slips of astrological fortunes.

“Grandmother?”

“Have you seen the secret yet?”

“No, not yet, grandmother. I see a great many fortunes. I see as many stars as there are in the sky, but I do not see the secret yet.”

They thought Rabbit would tell them another story, but instead she merely pulled out two star charts. The first one Chih recognized from a famous old text that was part and parcel of every village fortune-teller’s tool kit. She opened it to the constellation of the Rabbit, and then she pulled down another chart, one that Chih had already noted, passing the ball of her thumb over the signature in the corner, the character for lucky.

“Now play eagle-eye and look closely.”

Chih did as they were bid, and after a few moments, they thought they had it.