The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(19)

She’s still alive now, you know. Not long ago in the capital, I saw her in a festival crowd. She was completely unchanged, and she winked at me, one eye real, the other painted on her eyelid, before she disappeared into the crush. Maybe she was a fox girl after all, come to bedevil an empire when it was at its most fragile, or perhaps she only has a daughter.

The Minister of the Left remembered what In-yo had said about sending Sukai along when he was done with him. We were almost home, just finishing up at the shrine of the Brothers Lai, when a messenger appeared, stone-faced and with a large lidded leather bucket sealed with wax.

Mai dragged me away from that scene, and In-yo was the one who broke the seal and looked in. She sent the messenger away with a curse, and she and Mai came to sit with me.

I felt so very old. At less than twenty-five, before everything that came after, I had no idea how long life was. I sat with an empress on one side and a red-haired actress on the other, feeling their touch on my shoulders, my hair, and my face, their bodies close to mine.

As we sat on the bank above the river, the bells of the Brothers Lai softly chiming the sunset, I felt a chilly wind ruffle my hair. When I glanced up, it struck me that the leaves were browning at the edges, withering a little even as I looked.

*

“Well, cleric?”

“Grandmother?”

“What are you going to do with what you have learned here? You know where this ends, and if you don’t, I will not think much of the teachings of the clerics of the Singing Hills.”

It was Almost Brilliant who answered, whistling a few hollow notes even as she went to splash her feathers through the waves that lapped up towards their feet.

“Do you think this kind of information is new in Singing Hills’s records? It is not. The information in our archives could topple every throne in the world.”

Chih spoke more slowly.

“I think the real question is why you told it to us. You loved Empress In-yo.”

“With all my heart. Sometimes I loved her more, and sometimes I loved her less, but yes.”

“This information could tarnish her memory beyond repair, unseat everything that she spent her life working for. And you are telling it to me, painful as it is for you. Why?”

“In-yo is gone now. So are Phuong, my parents, and Sukai. My allegiance lies with the dead, and no matter what the clerics say, the dead care for very little.”

“And the new empress, who is even now preparing for her first Dragon Court?”

Rabbit smiled. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves. I am not worried for her in the least.”





Chapter Eleven


Painting of the rabbit in the moon. Silk, paint, and wood. Against an indigo background, a rabbit curves inside the silver moon.

Painting of the fox mother leaving her children. Silk, paint, and wood. As in the old story, a woman with a foxtail cries over her children as she prepares to leave them forever.

Hanging box containing a robe. Silk, silk cord, metallic thread, and wood. The red and gold robe, embroidered with a large kirin along one side, has been folded carefully and preserved inside the box. The box is plain with a loop of silk cord fastened to one end, meant to be hung or carried.



Chih looked at the robe, and then turned to Rabbit, who was sitting next to them expectantly.

“You have mentioned this robe before. The Minister of the Left wore it.”

“He did. In-yo came from people with conquest in their blood just as much as the people of Anh have. All of us believe in trophies.”

“Tell me the rest of it, grandmother?”

“Of course.”

*

By the time we returned to Thriving Fortune, we could see our breath hanging in the cold air. The leaves had fallen from the trees, and the sun would not come out beyond her robe of clouds for shame.

Mai and I had never felt winter before, and it was terrifying and exhilarating at once. It felt as if the world was dying around us even as the air grew crisper and sharper than anything we had ever known.

With every step we took into the cooling world, In-yo’s hair grew blacker and her eyes brighter. She woke up in the morning and breathed in great lungfuls of the cold air until she was almost drunk with it. She looked north, and her eyes shone with a viciously bright light.

One morning we came out of the inn to a dusting of snow on the ground and more falling down. It was the first snow in the Anh empire in almost sixty years, and as the people around us murmured with fear, In-yo started to laugh.

We returned to Thriving Fortune to find the Minister of the Left waiting for us with all his household guard. We arrived at dusk, when the dying light gave his pale features a bloody cast. I thought of what In-yo had not allowed me to see in that sealed leather bucket, and I thought I would be sick.

From atop her palanquin, In-yo watched him as he ordered her surrounded. She was calm, the calmest person there.

“Well, Minister?”

“We have word of events taking place along the border that necessitate returning you to the capital for your own safety, Your Majesty. I and my household troops will escort you there.”

In-yo looked around with exaggerated curiosity.

“What events are these that you speak of, Minister?”

“Do not play the innocent, Your Majesty. You know very well. And now you will come with me.”