The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(12)
Lu did her best to ignore the idea of bearing Set’s children. “Is that all?” she sniffed. “Since it seems my lesson with Shin Mung has been canceled, there are other matters I’d like to attend to.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re thinking of running to your father to wheedle an appeal to his decision, I wouldn’t bother. He indulged you—indulges you—far too much. It’s made you ignorant to the ways of the world. Do you think his choice of an heir was all his own to make? Do you truly believe all it takes to rule an empire as vast as ours is one man with a blessing handed down from the heavens? Not even you could be so simpleminded, surely.”
Her mother had never been kind to her, but she had never before been quite so openly cruel. Or so open at all. While she henpecked Min in a way that could almost be described as doting, her disapproval of Lu was largely one of silence, discernible through absence rather than action: the lack of touch, the emptiness in her gaze, the indifference to her joys and triumphs. Min was their mother’s project, while Lu was their father’s. No one ever said as much, but it had been the unspoken rule of their family.
“What do you know of me?” Lu demanded, the words lashing out of her. “You know nothing of what I am capable. How could you? You’ve never paid me any mind.”
“I know more than you think,” the empress said. Her eyes drifted toward the door, where a moment ago Lu’s nunas had exited. “I have eyes and ears everywhere, child. They tell me everything. And I know far more than you.”
A sour jolt of betrayal lanced through Lu’s gut. It was known the empress had spies embedded in each department of the court staff, but it had never occurred to Lu that any of her own handmaidens might be among them.
Stupid, she told herself quickly. She’s lying. Lu had no reason to suspect disloyalty among her nunas—and yet, like a poison, the idea spread hot through her veins. Uncertainty, once felt, could not be unfelt. Her mother was trying to throw her off balance. Lu saw it, but that didn’t make the doubt any less acute.
Her mother sighed. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now that your father did speak for you, against his advisers. But,” her mother shrugged, “he is easily swayed, easily shamed. He has no resolve. But he did have faith in you, even if it was misplaced.” And then, with just a trace of bitterness: “He loves you.”
“Love?” Lu spat. “He humiliated me. In front of the entire court! The entire city!”
“Yes, well, that is one thing at which he excels: humiliating others. You’ve learned that lesson today, and now it is time for you to learn another. This is the end of your childish aspirations. It is time to put away fantasy and focus on the life you have.”
Lu barked out a laugh. “You’re enjoying this. You love tearing me down, you always have. You never wanted me to succeed.”
The empress sighed again. “Don’t flatter yourself, child. This has nothing to do with you. I’m merely satisfied to see the empire set down the right path. That is what matters. Not your vanity, nor your hopes, nor your happiness.”
“So, I should settle to be miserable and powerless, like you?”
For a moment, Lu thought the empress was going to hit her. Absurdly, she felt a sudden prickle of fear. They had come a breath away from blows before, but their mother always stayed her hand, as though she knew Lu wouldn’t hesitate to strike back. Or, more likely, her father’s favor had protected Lu like a shield. The fury with which her mother beheld her now, though, looked set to tear through it.
Instead, her mother stiffened, then folded her arms carefully across her chest. “Listen to me, girl: you will never rule. Men may derive some amusement from a spirited girl, but they will not tolerate a willful woman, let alone deign to be ruled by one. You were never destined for anything greater than what you have—far less, truly. You can bend to that reality, or you can be broken by it. I won’t waste my time with you further. Come see me when you’re ready to learn your place.”
She strode across the hall, the clack of her high pot-bottomed shoes methodical against the floor. At the doorway she paused to call back:
“Do you know, when you were born, I came here and lit a candle before each ancestral portrait, from your late uncles to Kangmun. To thank them you were a girl.”
Lu stared at her, met those glacial gray eyes in confusion. Her mother regarded her unblinking. “Had you been born a boy, you would have been so much harder to crush.”
The doors swung shut hard behind her. At their close, Lu sank to her knees, suddenly exhausted. As though her mother had wound all the energy in Lu’s body around her wrist like a ribbon, dragging it behind her as she left.
She cast her eyes upward, to Emperor Kangmun’s portrait. Her great-grandfather’s painted face gazed back down, ferocious and square jawed and unyielding, wreathed by a backdrop of stars and fire, a tiger pelt hanging from his shoulders.
“Help me,” she whispered. No answer came but for the frantic thumping of her own heart.
Kangmun’s effects were displayed beneath the portrait in a glass case: a slender sword in a beautiful scabbard of onyx, gold, and emerald, and close beside it, like two lovers lying side by side, a rather more crudely hewn blade of iron—his first sword, from his days as a slipskin king. A marriage of his two identities. Beside the two weapons were arrayed a handful of rings and seals, a scrap of paper that bore his calligraphy, and a lock of hair bound with gold thread.