The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(4)

She did not come, as her late mother had once threatened, with a battalion of mammoths to bring down the walls of the Palace of Gleaming Light. Instead, she had come with only an honor guard that was barred from the inner palace, and so she walked down the long hallway to the court of the emperor all alone.

We had been scolded and smacked and told that if we raised our eyes to the future mother of the emperor we would be relegated to cleaning the kitchen refuse pits. I could not help myself, however, and I glanced up to see her pass by.

History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read. She was barely taller than I was at ten, and built like an ox drover’s daughter. Her two long braids hung over her shoulders as black as ink, and her face was as flat as a dish and almost perfectly round. Pearl-faced, they call it where she came from, but piggish is what they called it here.

She walked past with her spine like one of these birch trees, and she wore this dress, which is as white today as it was then.

The seal that the dress was made from was killed by her brother on his first hunt. Patient as the unending ice itself, he had stalked it for days at the breathing holes where they come up, and when it rose, it was as large as a man. The toggle is one of its teeth, carved by her uncle. Her brother and uncle, whose names are now only spoken in the mortuary halls of Ingrusk, were killed just a year before, at the battle of Ko-anam Fords.

She would bring with her a wealth of salt, bushels of pearls, and enough whale oil to keep the palace alight for twenty years or more, one of the finest dowries ever to come to an emperor of Anh, but that was still a week away. When she first came to the Palace of Gleaming Light, In-yo was alone and empty-handed, wearing a splendid seal-fur dress that the ladies of the women’s quarters could only call strange and barbaric.

She never wore this dress again in the palace, but when the emperor sent her into exile, she asked me to pack it carefully. I was thirteen then, and it was my job to look after it. I packaged it so carefully between layers and layers of crisp paper, and every ten days I brought it out to brush away any possible moth eggs or larvae.

Even though there was a fashion for seal fur in the capital when In-yo became the empress in truth, there never was a dress like this one again. There could never be. It is beautiful, but every stitch bites into her history, the deaths she left behind her, and the home she could not return to.

Do you understand?

*

“I am not sure I do, grandmother, but I listen, and Almost Brilliant will remember.”

Rabbit flinched a little, as if she had forgotten herself. For a single faraway moment, she looked like something other than a simple servant woman, but it was there and gone so fast that Chih could not say for sure what it was.

“That is your calling, isn’t it? To remember and to mark down.”

“It is. Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations. We are taught to be content with that.”

Rabbit tilted her head, looking at Chih carefully.

“Are you? Content with that, I mean?”

“After my novitiate, they sent me to the kingdom of Sen, where Almost Brilliant and I were to take an account of their summer water festival. We were just meant to be there to record populations, dances, fireworks, things like that, but on the ninth day of the festival, a brown carp cleared the final gate of the city’s dams and became a calico dragon. It twisted over the city, bringing down a month of holy rain, and then it was gone. Grandmother, I am very content.”

Rabbit smiled, standing to pick up the dishes and to offer Almost Brilliant a gentle stroke along her crest.

“Good.”

That night Chih dreamed of a man in a field of blinding white, waiting at a breathing hole with the patience of the damned for a seal to come up. In their dream, the man heard a call and then, with a smile on his round face, he turned and walked away, leaving his spear behind.





Chapter Three


Cup. Polished mahogany inlaid with silver. A silver spider is inlaid into the bottom of the cup.

Five cubed dice. Bone and gold. The figures inscribed in silver on each side include the moon, a woman, a fish, a cat, a ship, and a needle.

Game board. Pale wood and gold paint. Drawn in six circles are the moon, a woman, a fish, a cat, a ship, and a needle.



Chih smiled faintly at the game they’d pulled from underneath a sleeping platform, tucked among dusty extra bedding and a half-dozen pairs of extra slippers, all alike. They tumbled the dice into the cup, rattling them to make a hollow sound.

Rabbit glanced over from where she was pulling out long lengths of yellow silk from a compartment in the floor, banners that were designed to show when the emperor was in residence. As far as Chih knew, no emperor had ever come to Thriving Fortune.

“Do you play?”

“Who in the empire doesn’t? My mother put the dice in my hand on my fifth New Year. The board was paper and the dice only stone, but it was the same.”

“I wondered more if your vows prevent it, but here.”

Rabbit came to kneel across from Chih, passing them a handful of pebbles. “Go on.”

After a moment, Chih placed all of their pebbles on the lady, elegant, smiling, and dressed in the clothing of the doomed Ku Dynasty. Rabbit pulled up her sleeve to reveal a ropy scarred arm, and she shook the cup high and low before tumbling out the dice with an exhalation of “dah!” like a professional dealer.