The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(5)

The dice tumbled across the board, coming up fish, ship, and moon.

“Ah, unlucky,” Rabbit said, sweeping the pebbles towards her. “You should never put all your money on one thing.”

“I like doing it my way,” Chih said with a smile and a shrug. “Was that how the empress played as well?”

“The empress . . . Well. She first saw the game after she had been living in the women’s quarters for almost a month.”

*

The new empress was like a ghost. At first, we were all afraid of her, because the women of the north were all thought to be witches and sorceresses. Then they discovered her great secret, that she was only a heartbroken and lonely girl, and she became of no account at all.

There were almost three dozen accessory wives in the women’s quarters at that time, but the most important by far was Kaofan, the daughter of the Kang clan of the east. Until she was banished south to live with the gravestone cutters and charcoal burners, she was more the empress than the empress, and she loved to play Moon Lady Ship.

One day, in the Chrysanthemum Room, where all the paper screens are filigreed with pale orange chrysanthemum petals, they were playing just as we played now, and Kaofan sat with one sleeve off her shoulder like a dealer in the water and flower district.

I was there, mending a robe that had torn along the sleeve, and so I noticed the empress just a few seconds before Kaofan did.

She stood in the doorway, her head tilted and her hands dangling by her sides. Her hair had been brushed and braided because the emperor had roared he was tired of seeing it in tangles, and there were great dark circles under her eyes.

“What are you playing?”

I am not sure any of us had heard her speak before this. Her voice was soft and deep, and it felt as if it came from a great distance away. For a moment, I was afraid that Kaofan would be cruel to her, as she so often was to the junior wives, but instead she smiled.

“Come here, and I’ll show you.”

She explained the game to the new empress with exaggerated courtesy, sending sly glances to her especial friends. She showed her how the pictures matched the images on the dice and how to place her stake on each picture.

“What are we playing for?” asked the empress.

“Oh, we were playing for jeweled buttons, but if you don’t have a stake . . .”

Silently, her face as still as a pond, the empress reached in her pocket to pull out buttons of jade set in jet. They were obviously of imperial make, and we were all reminded that whatsoever she chose to do with them, she was still the empress.

Do I need to tell you she won? It’s not a game of skill, not really. That’s why we teach it to little children at New Year’s, to give them a taste for winning and to give the old gamblers a reminder that they are, after all, only mortal. She won, and won, and won, and in the end, she had a small mountain of jeweled buttons in front of her, and Kaofan had empty hands.

“I’ll give these all back to you,” she said after a meditative moment, “if you tell me where you got this board from.”

Kaofan smiled, and In-yo dropped a fortune back into her hands as if they were no more valuable than pebbles she’d picked up off the street.

“There’s a woman who comes with games sometimes. She travels up and down the coast to bring us back entertainment and games and fortunes. Would you like to see another game she brought us?”

In-yo looked at her, and when I look back, I still cannot tell what she saw when she looked at the most beautiful of all the emperor’s wives. I wonder if she looked ahead to when Kaofan would end her life covered in charcoal and grit, or whether she saw the contempt that Kaofan had for her, and yes, even then, some of the fear as well.

I know very well, though, that In-yo never hated Kaofan. She may have pitied her, or been angry with her, or simply found her irritating or foolish or unfashionable. Hate, however, was reserved for equals, and as far as In-yo was concerned, she had no equals in all the empire.

Do you understand?

*

Chih thought for a moment before shaking their head.

“I think I come a little closer, grandmother, but no. I do not understand. Not yet.”

Rabbit smiled, showing off her strong, sharp teeth.

“You are clever, aren’t you?”

“So the clerics always thought, grandmother.”

“Good. That is a good thing.”

She went back to reeling out the yellow silk from the subfloor compartments and said nothing else that day.





Chapter Four


Bag of lychee fruit. Linen, ink, and lychee. Marked with a weight of 10 tan and a regional stamp for Ue County.

Bag of hazelnuts. Linen, ink, and whole hazelnuts. Marked with a weight of 10 tan and a regional stamp from Tsu.

Plum-sized mammoth. Gold, rubies, enamel, and iron. The mammoth is worked realistically rather than figuratively, every hair detailed and with rubies serving as eyes. The mammoth is caparisoned in blue enamel, and the mammoth’s tusks are capped with iron.



The magery that had locked down the entire region around Lake Scarlet for fifty years had kept Thriving Fortune’s larder fresh. As they turned the golden mammoth over in their hand, Chih swiped a handful of lychee fruit from the bag. When they broke the paper-thin rind with their teeth, their mouth flooded with ridiculously sweet juice, a taste now more rare than rare with Ue County having declared sovereignty and closed its borders.