The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(7)

“I’ve had magistrates and bandits, courtesans and opera singers, but rabbit-toothed girl, I have never had anyone like that.”

Maybe she said it about every man and woman she bedded, but I think there was something genuinely awed in her voice.

Later on, when I brought In-yo her bathwater and perfume for her toilette, she told me to stay with her while she bathed. I watched as she rinsed her strong limbs, her dark skin coming up gleaming from the water. She was as little like a proper Anh lady as a wolf is like a lapdog, and when I caught her watching me out of the corner of her eye, I sat up very straight indeed.

“I saw you that first day, didn’t I? You were the one who raised her face to me as I walked by.”

I nodded, and then said timidly, “I had not seen that you noticed, Your Majesty.”

She grinned at me, wrinkling her nose a little as she did so.

“They teach us to look out of the corners of our eyes when we are very young in the north. Less movement to startle the things we hunt or to attract the attention of those who would hunt us. What did you see when you looked at me?”

I thought about my answer carefully as I toweled her dry, spreading her cloak of black hair over a woolen cloth.

“I thought that you looked very strange to my eye,” I said finally. “And very alone.”

“I am alone,” she said, tying her robe herself. “But maybe I am less alone than I thought I was, hmm, Rabbit?”

I blushed and ducked my head, murmuring something about duty and being honored to serve, but deep down, I thought she would never be alone again, not if I could help it. Being close to her was like being warmed by a bonfire, and I had been cold for a long time.

Whatever deal they struck, two weeks later a little golden mammoth was returned to the palace wrapped in a twist of common cotton. In-yo looked at it and smiled, and I swear I had never seen anything so lovely.

*

Chih tilted their head to one side.

“Are you going to ask me if I understand? I am still not sure if I do.”

“Well, something like this, you understand or you won’t.”





Chapter Five


Broken broom with tin charms tied around the handle.

Broken makeup compact. Alabaster, grease, and carmine.

Birch bark scroll. Birch bark, black feather, lock of hair, and blue silk thread. The birch bark is rolled around the hair and the feather, and tied together with the thread.



Chih jumped when Rabbit came and took the birch bark scroll away from them, holding it in her hand as if she wanted to crush it.

“I will not ask if you understand this one, either, because if you were not born and raised in the Palace of Gleaming Light, you would not. In those days you could say a thousand things with your choice of ink and paper even before someone read a word of your poetry.”

Chih looked at the object in Rabbit’s hand, wondering why the hair and dark feather looked suddenly so grim.

“I thought it was just trash.”

“It is trash,” she said shortly, “but if you want to understand people who have gone, that’s what you look at, isn’t it? Their offal. Their leavings.”

Chih waited patiently. It was the bulk of their training, learning how to wait for a story rather than chasing after it, and soon enough, it came to them.

Rabbit sighed.

*

This came to her door after she gave birth to the imperial prince, who was Kau-tan, known as the prince in exile. They’d taken him against her wishes, to wash him, they said, but she cried exhausted tears, knowing well she might never see him again.

I’d washed and bathed her, and after they took the little prince from her arms, I crawled into the bed with her, holding her and comforting her as best I could. There is nothing that can comfort a mother whose child was taken so unwillingly from her arms, though, and after the first sound of grief, she never made another. Instead, she asked me to tell her stories of where I had come from, my people, and I reached into the depths of my memory to tell her about living in the inn, how my father cooked enormous pots of barley stew for the people passing by, and my mother had read the fortunes of the great and the small alike between her chores.

The ladies of the women’s quarters left us alone in the dark, and so we lay together, skin to skin, for almost two weeks as she healed and I told her about my life out of the palace. It did not matter that it was so humble; what mattered was that it was outside the palace gates, and that was what she craved most.

This came for her from the emperor’s own hand, much as you see it now. Strange how some trash survives, but precious things are lost, isn’t it?

I sat with her and showed it to her, and when she wondered why her husband would send her trash, I explained it to her, wishing that the sky would open up and swallow me.

The hair belonged to her mother. It was as long as hers was and sleek black threaded with iron, known as well to her as the smell of snow waiting in the sky and the taste of seal meat. Seeing it here and wrapped in birch bark, the empress knew her mother was dead.

The jacana feather was a sign of exile, hers. She was lucky it was not a shred of willow bark, which would have meant execution.

The emperor had his heir from the north. He no longer needed a northern wife.

When I explained it to her, she went silent and turned her face to the wall, still as the sky before a lightning strike.