The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(9)
They were harmless, really. There was nothing for them to tease out. Sixty years of warmth and the hot winds summoned up by the imperial war mages kept the winter at bay, and without winter the mammoths of the north were dull and helpless, inclined to die of strange southern fevers and heartsickness.
Some of those girls, I think, might have come to love the empress in their own time. I do not remember love from them, however, so much as ambition. They’d ridden high once and then fallen, or perhaps they’d only seen the high places and it made them hungrier.
Kazu, I am convinced, must have been an accident. She arrived at Thriving Fortune with a slightly confused look that she never lost, and when the two other girls she came with knocked their silly heads on the ground trying to outdo each other in their obsequies to the empress, Kazu was more interested in the house, the woods around us, and the lake.
It turned out that she was one of the emperor’s less successful whims, a beautiful inn girl plucked from the low city and elevated to the rank of an accessory wife. She should have gained glamour like a pearl gained nacre, becoming more beautiful, more refined. Instead, her most august setting only made her seem cruder, a paste gem in a setting of gold filigree.
Now, you must not think that I disliked her.
The first week Kazu lived at Thriving Fortune, she lay in bed and sulked, but she quickly grew bored with that. She learned very quickly that the other two ladies held no interest for her, and that left In-yo and me.
I was just sweeping the floor outside of In-yo’s room when Kazu scared the wits out of me by catching the edge of the porch and hauling herself up from the ground.
“Don’t do that! I thought you were some kind of wood spirit.” I scolded her as if I were her big sister, speaking before I thought. She would have been well within her rights to slap me, but instead she grinned.
“It’s boring here. Come on, I’ll teach you a game, and we can play together.”
“You can do what you like, but I am not going anywhere until I’ve cleaned this floor.”
Kazu always struck me as more than a little lazy, but she could stand boredom far less well than she could stand work. She stripped out of her robes, right down to her trousers, and she came to clean next to me.
When we were finally done, she came to sit at the low table in the kitchen and taught me Lo-Ha, which was a dice game that was very popular in the capital that year. It relies more on luck than on skill, and in short order, I was nearly as good as she was.
It was addictive, however, and I ran off to play with Kazu so often that In-yo came looking for me. I scrambled to my feet, humiliated to be caught idling, and Kazu wore the hangdog look of someone caught in the wrong, but unashamed of it.
“What in the world are you doing?”
And so Kazu taught Lo-Ha to the empress, who mastered it as she did all games of chance, with both skill and a nearly astonishing amount of luck. When she had beaten both of us roundly, she gave us an impatient look.
“Is this all there is?”
Kazu looked slightly affronted.
“Well, no. This is just for fun, right? People use this game for fortune-telling in the capital. When you throw a two, a five, and a seven like this, they look it up and they can tell your future. It’s not just a game for children.”
“It’s definitely a game for children,” In-yo declared, and then she narrowed her eyes.
“Do you have friends in the capital who know how to tell what fortunes you throw? Good ones, not cheaters and fakes.”
Kazu snorted. “All fortune-tellers are cheaters, but maybe I know some good ones.”
“They’re not. Fortune-tellers have the ears of the gods. They tell us about the world we cannot see.”
I heard a shushing step in the hallway, one of the other ladies shuffling away. Doubtless she was going to laugh at the empress’s simple faith in festival fortune-tellers. The court fortune-tellers were a different breed entirely, of course, with well-fed bellies and sleek robes of cool green. It was easy to believe that they might have an eye on the doings of the gods when they had risen so far in the world. A poor barefoot fortune-teller from the market, well, that was perhaps a harder sell.
In-yo picked up one of the dice again, tumbling it between her fingertips. I knew that something was sizzling in her brain, burning away like a bonfire, but she only nodded at the table.
“Come on, play with me some more. I’m not tired of winning yet.”
Every year, the north sent her a box of white salt. It gleamed like starlight, each grain perfect and clean. They sealed the boxes with wax so that the salt arrived as perfect as the day they harvested it from the sea.
In-yo had her secrets, sealed away inside her like a box with another box inside it and another inside that. Even as well as I knew her by the end, there was no end to the depths of her or the secrets she hoarded like a miser his chains of gold coins. I have no idea how she passed more than the faintest pleasantries with the north at that point, when all of her messages were scrutinized for codes, for invisible ink and pinprick holes that could spell out a message of rebellion.
All I know is that that year, the year that Kazu came to live with us, the year that we learned Lo-Ha, and taroco, and all the others, the north finally sent their exiled princess a box of black salt instead of white.
Do you understand?
*
Chih set the box of black salt on the table in front of them. After a slight nod from Rabbit, they opened the box again, looking at the black granules more closely. Almost Brilliant fluttered down from the rafter to inspect the box and the contents, pecking at the grains that Chih dabbed with a fingertip.