The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(12)
It didn’t matter, of course. Whether she escaped or died, neither In-yo nor I ever saw her again.
She did make good on her word, however, despite how hurt she must have been by In-yo’s farewell. A month after we saw the last of her, the fortune-tellers came to call. Some of them were true mystics and some of them were such terrible frauds that we took pity on them and found them work in the countryside. Some were looking for royal favor, and others were looking for fame. Out of the lot, we found three who became integral to In-yo’s plans.
The oldest was Zhang Phuong, whose son had been killed by the imperial guards many years ago. Zhang’s wife had turned herself into a kingfisher out of grief and fled the land, and now all he had to remember his wife by was a kingfisher tattoo on his neck, and all he had to remember his son by was the grief in his heart. He read the future in ivory tablets that clacked on the floor like broken teeth, and whichever you turned up would tell you which way to go.
The youngest was Wantai Mai, a girl from the south. She was an actress born from a gravestone cutter and a dove keeper, and I do not think she could have gotten more disreputable unless she actually did sport a fox’s tail when she wasn’t paying attention. She dyed her hair a bright peppery red, and she painted eyes over her eyelids, frightening me badly until I got used to her. She told me once that she had a nose for trouble, and that it hung off In-yo like the scent of fish off a fisherman. Mai would read a person’s destiny in the lumps in their skull, scrubbing her stubby fingers through their hair and often at the same time surreptitiously feeling for their purse.
Between them was . . .
Ha, what shall I call him? In the missives, he was Lucky, though he was not. The first name that his mother gave him was after the fashion of their people, designed to make him invisible in the eyes of malevolent spirits. It was Bucket, and there was something truthful to it. He moved like a bucket on a rope, always on the verge of spilling all its water, tottering back and forth, faster than he intended to go. There was the name I called him, of course, but the habits of a lifetime die hard, and I do not wish that written down in any place where unfriendly eyes might see it.
When he was on assignment to the north, meeting with In-yo’s oh-so-deadly relatives, they called him Sukai, after a kind of migratory bird. In-yo told me that the sukai spends four months of the year in her homeland, but of the other nine no one knows, so I will call him Sukai here as well.
Sukai lacked Mai’s dashing and Phuong’s dignity, but he had a gift for loyalty. I didn’t know that the morning that he showed up, however. In-yo was in deep consultation with Phuong, and Mai was entertaining the two ladies-in-waiting, promising them fame and fortune and beauty that would echo through the ages.
I was peaceably scrubbing the floors outside In-yo’s quarters again, listening with half an ear to her discussion with Phuong and keeping half an eye out for anyone who might choose to do the same.
Unlike Kazu, Sukai did not surprise me. Instead, he waved until he got my attention from the sand below, until I could not help but put my broom aside impatiently.
“What is it? Have you gotten lost down there?”
He grinned. He was not handsome, with a face that looked a bit like a proper face had been made out of wax and then heated and pulled very gently askew. It was a good face, though, and I was already a little more sympathetic than my hard words suggested.
“No, sis, I’ve not gotten lost, but look at this.”
I watched from the porch as he scooped up one of the rocks from the beach, and then another, and then another. They were pale in his dark hands, and then he threw them up in the air, one after another. I watched with skeptical interest as he juggled for me, but just as I was getting ready to return to my work, I realized there were not three stones, but instead five, and then seven, all without him stooping to pick up another.
You must not think that I am a credulous little fool from the provinces, for all that I was born out here. I had seen some of the finest entertainers the world had to offer during my short stint at court, and as smooth and skilled as Sukai was, I was far from impressed.
He seemed to sense this and, one after the other, he threw the stones he juggled with unerring speed and strength, sending them to strike the trees nearby with a sound like the cracking of the ice in spring.
He came down to three balls, then two, and then the last one he threw right at my face. I squawked, falling back because a good shot with a stone that size could have broken my nose or killed me. I moved back so fast, I landed on my rear on the porch, eyes screwed up and afraid of the dreadful pain.
Instead of a stone striking me, however, I looked up to see a shower of peony petals falling down around me, pink and sweet.
Now Sukai levered himself up on the porch with a broad grin on his skewed face.
“Did you like that? I learned it from a woman who did magic in the low town, and she said it came from nature spirits—”
His words were cut off when in a rage I pushed him back off the porch. He landed with a thump on the soft ground below, but he stared up at me in shock. I must have been quite a terrible sight, my face still screwed up with fear and tears of panic and humiliation in my eyes.
“And now I have to sweep up all this mess! That was awful; don’t do that again!”
I don’t know what kind of response that would have gotten, whether he would have laughed at me or turned mean about how poorly I had taken his joke, but then we both became aware of the door behind me sliding open and In-yo striding out. She took in the scene at a glance, and glared down at the young man on the ground. Even as a young woman, In-yo had a tremendous glare, and Sukai scrambled to his feet, prepared, I suppose, to meet his doom like a man.