The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(3)
Chih sat very still, and next to them, Almost Brilliant cocked her head to one side.
“It sounds like you knew of them, grandmother.”
Rabbit snorted.
“Of course I did. I came all this way with them, and it was I who told them to hire my father to come up every week with supplies from the main road. They never knew to tip him, or perhaps they thought their cosmopolitan beauty was tip enough. Pah!”
“I would be grateful, grandmother, for any stories you could tell me of the empress’s time here at Lake Scarlet. I do not have any money, but I will be more than happy to share my food with you, and if you have any chores that need to be done—”
“No, cleric, save your food and your labor. This house is very old, and you will have your work cut out for you if you want to be in the capital for the eclipse. But now I am tired, and I should retire.”
She blew out all save two lanterns, picking one up to carry comfortably in her hand.
“You may take the other and choose whatever room you care to take. I always get up early, and I will be happy to help you with whatever your work entails.”
She padded into the darker reaches of the house, and Chih and Almost Brilliant listened as her shushing footsteps faded into nothing.
“I would go outside if only there were not owls in the pines,” Almost Brilliant said unhappily. “I do not like the roof over this place.”
“And I’m not sure I care for the rest, but at least we have been made welcome.”
After a little bit of exploring, they found a storage room nearby, small enough that Chih could stretch out flat on the floor and feel the walls around all sides. They spread their bedroll on the polished wooden floor, and then carefully and deliberately, they hung their string of bells across the closed panel of the door.
Above them in the rafters, Almost Brilliant made a roost close to the eaves, watching but saying nothing. When Chih finally drifted off, a fold of their robe tucked around their body against the spring chill, they did not dream of ghouls or ghosts, but instead of sunlight on bright water and a rabbit nosing at the makeup stand of a fine lady.
Chapter Two
Robe. Silk, silk thread, ruby bead. Green background embroidered with darker green leaves. A single red ruby beetle bead rests on a green leaf on the right arm.
Sleeping robe. Silk, muslin, and silk thread. Mulberry muslin edged with white silk, the archaic characters for “Restful Sleep” embroidered inside the collar.
Tunic. White fur, black fur, suede, and ivory. White fur striped with black along the sleeves. A pattern of waves has been shaved into the fur. The inside is lined with suede, and the throat closed with an ivory toggle.
“That’s a tooth.”
Chih and Almost Brilliant looked up as Rabbit came in with four small bowls on a tray. One was filled with fatty scraps that she set in front of Almost Brilliant, who flapped down from the rafters to peck at them with pleasure.
“A tooth?” asked Chih, touching the ivory carefully. It was smooth under their fingers and carved with curling lines that hurt their eyes when they looked at it too closely. The entire sealskin tunic was made with consummate skill, but it was easily as heavy on its own as any four of the silk dresses that were bundled in the cedar chest with it.
“Yes. Come eat some pounded rice, and I shall tell you what the empress told me.”
Chih came to sit across from Rabbit with the tray between them. They had not lost their wariness from the night before, but in daylight, Rabbit looked like so many of the lay sisters who were constantly in and out of the abbey, as much fixtures as the stone hoopoes that studded the walls or the smell of wood pulp being milled into sheets of paper.
The pounded rice was still warm and flavored with birch water, and the two of them ate companionably for a while, scooping the rice into their mouths with spooned fingers and cleaning them in the bowl of water. Rabbit rinsed her bowl neatly before setting it aside, and she smiled at the white seal-fur dress as if it were an old acquaintance spotted in the marketplace.
*
I suppose you have guessed by now that I am quite at home in this old place. It is true that my family is from this region, but when I was only five, the county sent me along with one hundred san of birch water, thirty young goats, and fifty caskets of orange dye to the capital. It was meant to be fifty-five caskets of dye, you see, and they hoped if they sent me along that the tax collectors would be forgiving.
I suppose they were, and I spent the next four years scrubbing the Palace of Gleaming Light, never raising my head. I got to know the palace by the baseboards, the wood of the floors, the smell of the paper screens, and the way that lamp oil burned all night, never letting the darkness approach His Most Divine Presence the Emperor of Pine and Steel, Emperor Sung.
I might have been a rabbit-toothed girl from the provinces, but I worked so well that when I was ten, I had been promoted to cleaning the women’s quarters. I was so proud when they gave me the veil that marked me as one of the servants of the inner house. If I could have written then, I would have written to my father and mother of how their daughter, veiled and wearing household green, was lined up along the Paulwonia Hall with two hundred others to greet the new empress from the north.
The royal household agency positioned us before dawn, prowling up and down the lines as nervously as cats and lashing out with their horsehair whips when we slouched or yawned. More than one girl fainted, but I was a strong thing, and I stood like a statue until past noon, when there was a great commotion in the courtyard. We knew from the snapping of banners and the shouts of the guards that the empress had arrived.