The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(11)
“They are different. There are fewer stars in the newer chart, and even the ones that are meant to be there are shifted perhaps? Or twisted?”
Rabbit laughed hollowly. “Yes. The ones marked like this, they are wrong, or perhaps they are poorly made or made by fools. It is perfect, is it not? Who thinks that a village fortune-teller will have perfect sources? There are so many jokes about them making up the placement and the movement of the stars already.”
Chih looked at the altered star chart more carefully, and as they did, they thought they could see a rhythm in the seeming carelessness and chaos.
“A code,” Rabbit said. “A nearly invisible way to get information through the countryside when all of Anh knew that she was mad for oracles and fortune-tellers. Everyone knew that she talked to them all, the great and the mediocre and the frankly bad alike. It was a joke in the capital. The empress will not get out of bed unless a fortune-teller reassures her that it is all right to do so.”
She paused for a moment, shaking her head.
“In all fairness, she did a great deal of business from her bed, still in her nightclothes. In-yo used to say that if she were going to be doing this kind of business, she might as well be comfortable.”
Chih touched the altered star chart, looking at the offset stars, the missing planets, and a star road that arched in a curve that was foreign to them. If they had run into it in the market, they would have said it was a singularly poor example of the astrologer’s art, a pretty picture at best, and trash at worst. With Rabbit’s explanation, it became something altogether other.
Their fingers brushed over the character in the corner, and Rabbit almost flinched.
“Lucky?”
“He wasn’t, unfortunately.” Rabbit’s words were clipped as though with a seamstress’s scissors. She pointed to a small volume half-hidden on the lowest shelf. It sat in shadow, and Chih wouldn’t have noticed it until they got there.
“That’s the catalog. You may choose to use it instead of marking down each of the charts yourself. It will save you some time, at any rate.”
Chih opened their mouth to thank her, but Rabbit shuffled quickly out the door, sliding it closed behind her.
“Lucky,” they repeated, and then they shivered.
Bad luck, during the reign of the last emperor, could be very bad indeed.
*
I missed Kazu after she was sent back to the Palace of Gleaming Light. I didn’t think I would. She was noisy and lazy and always more interested in fun than she was in anything like work, but she livened up the days, and at night she could be convinced to tell the bawdy stories that she learned from the rough men at the inns. You laughed with Kazu around, sometimes because she was so insolent, sometimes because she was so lazy, but most often because she was so much fun.
She was the only girl who ever cried when the Minister of the Left returned to bring her back to the palace, and when she asked to stay, he frowned at her, his mouth turning into the slash of a sharp knife through scraped hide.
“Of course your love for the empress does you credit. Perhaps in a year or two, when you may be spared from court.”
I felt a cold and heavy stone settle in my stomach at his words, but Kazu brightened up considerably.
“Well, a year or so, that’s not so bad. Then I’ll be back and I’ll have all sorts of games to play from the capital, won’t I, In-yo? Won’t I, Rabbit?”
“Oh, you stupid girl, I can’t stand to hear your prattling.”
In-yo turned impatiently to the Minister of the Left even as Kazu looked at her with hurt in her bright eyes.
“Do not send her back. She will not stop talking or gaming, and you can be sure she did not do her chores.”
The two other girls nodded wisely, and the two girls the Minister had brought to replace them with made quiet notes to themselves that the empress did not care for chatter. Kazu drooped like a poplar in drought, and even as In-yo turned around as if the matter bored her, I watched the Minister.
His eyes slid between the empress and Kazu and back again. I could see the grim math being worked there even if Kazu could not. Finally, he tucked his hands into his sleeves and nodded.
“I will endeavor to select better when next I am called upon to choose maidens for your home, my empress.”
In-yo shrugged as if the entire matter was dull to her, and she never looked up to watch Kazu leave with the minister and the two other girls, whose names we had never bothered to learn.
Years later, In-yo tried to find Kazu, looking with both the chroniclers and the executioners, who kept their own secret records. Neither scholar nor killer could remember Kazu. There was a record of her in the registry of accessory wives when she first entered the Palace of Gleaming Light, and a record of her sojourn to Thriving Fortune and her return. After that, nothing.
The records close to the end of the emperor’s reign were spotty and confused at best. It was easy to see how one humble and never very popular accessory wife could be lost. One night, In-yo and I became very drunk, and we talked about all the ways that Kazu might have escaped. She might have stolen away on a ship that went across the sea, or perhaps she was picked up by a passing god in disguise who could not resist her delighted laugh and her terrible luck at card games. Perhaps she had fallen in love with some intrepid maid or stableboy, and they had run off together, seeking fame and fortune on the frontier.