The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(15)

Thriving Fortune was also a refuge, at least for me. At the palace, I scorned the countryside as much as any of the other girls, more, because I was always worried they could smell the mud on me. Now I could breathe the fresh air and eat food as it grew straight from the ground. In-yo laughed the spring day I pulled up a full basket of spring radishes, but she ate them as quickly as I did. They were so fresh and spicy and perfect that if I sit in the spring breeze, letting the wind touch my cheek, I can taste them still.

Finally, Thriving Fortune became a war camp, and the general sat on the porch late into the night, looking north towards home and east towards vengeance. She took reports from her fortune-teller spies, sometimes under the very noses of the court ladies the Minister of the Left had assigned. In her eyes, I could see the watching spirits of her dead kin, who would rather their women died than be sent south unless they went as weapons.

In-yo’s two attendants were napping the hot summer morning that Sukai returned with a message from her northern fortune-teller. Sukai looked, to me, rather more grown-up than he had appeared the first day I met him, fuller in the face, more cautious in the way he held himself. It made him more attractive to me, but it wasn’t as if he had started out ugly in the least.

“You’ve brought word from Igarsk-Ino? What did he say about my luck for the coming year? I sent him three fortunes to interpret.”

The only thing that revealed In-yo’s impatience was the Lucky Stick she twirled through her fingers. I was the only one who knew how often she played with that stick, marked with the northern rune for death, which requires no interpretation.

Sukai passed her the first slip that had been copied down for her. The characters stood for coal, mountain, and spear, chu, ma, and rho. Ma Chiroh was a beast of a man, one of the little generals who saw the colonies as his personal hunting ground whether he was hunting for seals, deer, or women.

“As to the first fortune, the holy man says that it is most fortuitous. Your worries will be laid to rest, and they will never rise again.”

He never did. He disappeared on a hunting trip, and some years after that, he was found with a woman’s spindle in his eye, his clothes blowing like banners from his bones.

In-yo nodded with relief.

“That is very well-done. And the second?”

Sukai passed her the second scrap of paper, inscribed with the northern runes for hail, wheel, and south, or pah, lo, and tze. Po Lo-tsu was one of the imperial war mages who kept Anh in perpetual summer, a man of discipline and great dignity.

“Igarsk-Ino pondered over your second fortune for a very long time, Your Majesty, and at the very last, he said that your life requires caution and hope in equal measure. We may think that the sun will never rise at midnight, but it has been known to happen.”

Po Lo-tsu turned out to be the sun who rose at midnight after all. When the time came, he did as the north asked. That is, he did nothing, and in the chaos and bloodshed that followed, I am given to understand that he closed himself off in his quarters. They found him with the tin scent of strong poison on his breath, and a miniature portrait of his daughter in his hand. His daughter was a great beauty, and she had gone into the women’s quarters at the Palace of Gleaming Light many years ago, during the reign of the emperor’s father. She disappeared like Kazu did, like any number of women did over the years, unremarked, and their demise as unremarkable as surely they were not. One drunken evening, many years on, In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.

That day, however, In-yo only nodded, leaning forward with her eyes narrowed.

“And the third? What of the third?”

It was shi, erh, and kon, the name of the general who had killed her brother, and when Sukai shook his head, In-yo clenched her fists so tightly that her nails cut into her palms.

“The great fortune-teller consulted the stars and the old books, Your Majesty, and at the end, he merely said that some endeavors are too great to be attempted. Some ambitions must be left to lie until one is strong enough to conquer them.”

In-yo nodded as if she understood, but when it came to Erh Shi Kon, she did not want to conquer. She wanted nothing less than a slaughter. Instead, she thanked Sukai for his service, and asked him to stay for a little while so she might ponder over what she had learned. In-yo was very good at waiting, but that particular fortune she craved.

There were of course other messages to be sent and houses in the capital where Sukai could offer his services, houses where the topic of who sat the lion throne was less words written in stone than a fortune written on birch bark. However, it did not escape me that In-yo might have had another reason to keep Sukai at Thriving Fortune when she told me to take him hunting mushrooms early one morning.

“It is strange to see a shadow without the one who casts it.”

I scowled at him, looking up from where I was inspecting the loam.

“What nonsense are you about now? You will scare off the mushrooms if you are not quiet.”

He cocked his head at me curiously.

“Are you serious, or are you trying to get me to shut up?”

“Mostly the latter, unless you can speak some sense. Why are you speaking about shadows?”

“Because this is the first time I think I have seen you out of arm’s reach of the empress.”

“Because you have made a careful observation of all her movements and mine, and you know where we are at all times.”