Heart and Soul
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Tags: #Alternative histories (Fiction), #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Good and Evil
Contents
THE STRANGE DESTINY OF ENOCH JONES
A DASHING OFFICER OF HER MAJESTY
FRAGRANT STREAMS AND GOOD HARBOR
WHERE THE ROSE IS NOT WITHOUT THORNS
THE PILL OF A THOUSAND EFFICACIES
THE ELDERLY DRAGON OF PEARL RIVER
HOW TO RECOVER MAIDENS NOT IN DISTRESS
To my husband, Dan Hoyt. Always.
AMBUSH
Nigel looked out at the bright pink sky of early dawn, calm and serene as an angel’s heart. He glanced sideways at Mr. Perigord. “We should make landfall in the Cape within two days,” he said.
Mr. Perigord nodded. “No small thanks to you. It takes a good flight magician to predict the weather so well, and to steer with it, not against it.”
Nigel permitted himself a small smile at the praise, but whatever he was going to say got drowned in a shriek of magical sirens. At the same time, the ship faltered and trembled in a flutter of wood, a tinkle of glass, and a confusion of screams.
Nigel grabbed hold of the flight field as soon as his mage sense felt it falter, and threw all of his magical power into keeping the ship going, and keeping it steady.
“What the—” Mr. Perigord said, his pale lips forming the words that Nigel couldn’t hear above the din.
At that moment, from either side of the glass wall that ran across the front of the flight room, dragons appeared—one blue, one red, one pale green, and yet another an indefinable shade of violet.
“Chinese dragons,” Nigel said to himself—because he was not foolish enough to think anyone else could possibly hear him.
And yet Mr. Perigord’s voice echoed behind him. “Man your stations! Grab your powersticks!” he bellowed with certainty and command, loud enough to pierce the noise of the alarms.
The dragons flew closer, seemingly heedless of the danger. Suddenly, as if on command, they all flamed. A curtain of fire covered the glassed-in front of the room, blazing red and orange and gold and obscuring everything else from sight….
DEATH IN THE DRAGON BOATS
Red Jade held her breath as her brother prepared to
set fire to the paper boats and the hordes of carefully detailed paper dragons. She wanted to close her eyes and shut out the scene, but her will alone kept them open. Through the screen of her eyelashes, she saw Wen approach the altar upon which the funerary gifts for their father had been set. Above that, another altar held the tablets of their ancestors.
Red Jade had supervised and arranged it all. She had made her father’s women cut and glue and color and gild for days, so that on the lower jade table there stood a palace in paper—the palace her family hadn’t possessed in millennia. To the right of it stood row upon row of paper boats, minutely detailed, like the barges upon which Red Jade had spent her whole life. In the middle stood representations of the court—men and women meant to be her father’s servants in the afterlife: a coterie of pretty paper dolls for a harem, and a group of broad-shouldered male dolls for the hard tasks her father’s spirit might want done, and to protect him from whatever evil he might encounter. On the left, in massed confusion, were perfect, miniature paper dragons. Herself, in dark red. Red Jade. And Wen in blue. For some reason, seeing them there, before the palace that would never be theirs, made the tears she refused to let fall join in obscuring her sight.
Her brother, whom she must now think of as the True Emperor of All Under Heaven—though their family had been in exile for many centuries and she doubted the present usurpers even knew of their existence—held the burning joss stick in his hand and dropped slowly to his knees.
Let him not fall,
Red Jade prayed. She wasn’t sure to whom, though it might have been to her father’s spirit. Only she didn’t know if her father cared, and she wished there was someone else she could appeal to.
Let Wen not fall,
she told herself, sternly, and felt a little more confident. It was insane to think she could keep Wen upright and within the bounds of proper behavior through the sheer power of her mind, but then…She always had, hadn’t she? And she had hidden his addiction from their father as well.
When had she ever had anyone else to ask for help? So when she saw Wen’s head start to bob forward, like the head of one overcome with sleep, she willed him to stay up, on his knees, facing forward.
Wen straightened. The joss stick swept left and right, setting all the pretty paper images aflame. And Red Jade fought against the sob climbing into her throat even as the sound of her father’s concubines erupting into ritualistic screams deafened her mind. She would miss her father. She was afraid for Wen and her own future. But, in this moment, all had been done well, and Wen was behaving as he should.
She finally allowed her eyes to shut as Wen’s voice mechanically recited the prayers that should set their father’s soul free and make it secure in the ever-after.
Their father was dead. He’d been the Dragon Emperor, the True Emperor of All Under Heaven, the latest descendant of the ancient kings of China. Wen, his only son, must inherit. Because Wen was the right and proper heir. And because only Wen could protect his half-sister, the daughter of the long-dead, foreign-devil concubine.
She followed him to his room after the ceremony. It was her father’s old room, in the main barge of their flotilla. Servants and courtiers prostrated themselves as Wen passed by, knocking their foreheads against the dusty floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. Wen was tired and anxious. His eyes kept darting here and there, as though he had trouble focusing both sight and mind.
The men surrounding him—his father’s advisers—probably knew as well as she did that he longed for his fix of opium, but they gave no indication of it. It was all “Excellency” this and “Milord” that as each competed with the other, asking boons on this, his first day in power. Repairs to this barge and additions to that one, and a promotion in the precedence of yet another.
All of them Wen ignored, walking just ahead, his eyes blindly seeking. But as the entourage prepared to follow him into his quarters, he spun around and clapped his dismissal. At the back of the group of followers, Red Jade stood waiting, not quite daring enter her newly powerful brother’s room without his permission. For years she’d protected and helped him, but now he was the emperor and her ascendancy over him was gone.
Yet seeing her at the back, he smiled and motioned for her to approach, which she did, closing the door behind her.
“We’re done now, Red Jade,” he told her, his man’s tones distorted into a child’s whine. It was a voice that had only developed after he started smoking opium. “I’ve done what you wanted, and now I’m tired.”
Part of Red Jade felt sorry for him. They were of an age, she and Wen, though Wen was the son of the first lady, their father’s official wife. Red Jade was only the daughter of a concubine with red hair and blue eyes who had been stolen off a foreign carpetship.
And though Red Jade looked Chinese, with her long, smooth dark hair and black eyes, she knew her eyes had a blue sheen, and there was something to her features that wasn’t quite right. She was also too tall.
Her father had teased her about it, telling her they’d never get her a husband. No man would want to look up at his lady.
The recollection that Zhang would be out there, prowling and planning to make her his, sent a shiver of fear up her spine, and made her catch her breath. “Not yet, Older Brother,” she said. “We must be able to lift and move the Dragon Boats. I—” Lifting the Dragon Boats for the first time after the emperor’s death and the new emperor’s ascension was something only the emperor could do. After that, everyone could lift them and fly them. But that first time was the confirmation that the new emperor had the mandate of heaven.
He gave her one of the startlingly cunning looks that he could give—a sudden expression of knowledge that belied the normal dreamlike tone of his days. “You mean
you
must lift them.”