The Secrets of Jin-Shei (58 page)

Tammary smacked him on the shoulder. “I’ll take it from Tai, but I don’t want my lovers calling me by a name I bore when I was ten.”

Zhan had tried not to wince at the plural, but Tammary noticed it anyway, and her playful smack turned into a caress instead, her fingers trailing along his jaw.

“No, that is over,” she murmured. “One way or another. But Zhan, I cannot marry you.”

“Why?” he said sharply, gripping her shoulders with both hands and holding her so that she had to face him. “Because I said you’ll be protected? Believe me, although I want to do that, it is not the reason I want you as my wife. I’ve wanted you as part of my life ever since I first crossed verbal swords with you in the teahouses, long before anything else happened between us. My reasons may be almost wholly selfish, in fact—I want you, I want you near me always so that I
can
protect you.”

“Zhan, you are part of the royal Court,” Tammary murmured.

“What has that got to do with anything?” he said, genuinely startled.

“Liudan will take this marriage as a declaration of war,” Tammary said. “She will take any marriage I make as such, because it is possible to draw my line of descent through the Ivory Emperor, and although I was not born of a royal wife or an acknowledged concubine, someone out there could make the case that I was in the line of succession, and therefore any man I marry is a potential Emperor. And you … you are already linked to the Emperor’s family. Liudan would take that only one way—that I was reaching high. Too high.”

“I am only a nephew of the Ivory Emperor. I was never in the line of succession, and if I were it I would be so far down that I would be dismissed as utterly irrelevant by the powers that decide these things,” Zhan said. “Besides, anyone at Court who knows anything about me at all knows that I am too much of a coward to take on the mantle of Emperor. Or maybe too sane. Either way, I don’t want it—I have never wanted it. Don’t make this an obstacle. It isn’t. Damn it, Tammary. I can’t lose you again.”

“And besides,” Tammary said, “there is always … what I was … what I
am … all the things I have done. You may not wish to be tied to someone whose reputation will haunt your house. A child …”

“I know you have had other men. Many of them,” Zhan said. “The thought has driven me mad sometimes, when I thought of you in someone else’s arms. But from here on, any child you bear while under my protection will be my child. And woe to any wagging tongue that dares to suggest otherwise.”

“I can’t,” Tammary said. “It would hurt you, your standing.”

“Tammary, if I have to leave Syai in order to have you as my wife, I will,” Zhan said in a low voice.

“I will … come to you, and live with you, and be yours,” Tammary said. “Let us not talk of marriage until we see how that goes. They may never accept me, you know.”

“We’ll see about that,” he said, and gathered her into his arms again. “And as far as I am concerned, it makes no difference from here on whether someone says the words of the ceremonies over us or not—your people don’t wear the thumb rings anyway, so for you it would not be a symbol.” He lifted one of her hands to his lips and kissed it. “But from this moment on you are mine.”

Liudan, predictably, did not much like the news, seeing in it only a new danger. But the rest of the
jin-shei
circle gathered in Zhan’s rooms only a few days later to celebrate what everyone considered, in all practical terms, a wedding. When Zhan kissed Tammary’s hands and whispered, “I will always be with you,” Tai announced that there was no further ambiguity in the matter at all and that she considered Tammary finally and safely bestowed.

“And don’t tell me now that you don’t know how to be happy,” she said. “I cannot dance for you, like you once did for me, because that is not my talent. But I have brought you this.” She held out a rolled-up scroll of ivory silkpaper, tied up with a red ribbon. Red, for joy.

“What is it?” Tammary asked, accepting it.

“It’s your wedding poem. I wrote it for you after you left my house that afternoon, with the tea cold in the pot and the biscuits untasted but with the joy of all the ages in your eyes. Stay safe, and be happy.”

“If ever you have doubts about fulfilling your vows to your Antian,” Tammary said, tears sparkling in her eyes, “you can tell her ghost that you have acquitted yourself well. I could not have hoped for a more loving guardian.”

Tammary celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday quietly, with Zhan. She had found a haven, and was calmer and happier than any of the
jin-shei
circle could remember seeing her since she had arrived in the city

“Perhaps it is an omen,” Yuet said, “and we can all look forward to some peace.”

“Not soon,” Tai said. The thoughts that she committed to her journal these days were dark ones.

The months slipped by. Spring came without the Magalipt invasion, although Liudan moved a substantial part of her army to the passes after all, to guard the passage into Syai. The skirmishes in the city became bolder and bloodier as spring passed into summer, but Lihui was still elusive, Qiaan was still missing, and Liudan was still kept at fever pitch. Maxao and Khailin could not seem to come up with a plan that would draw Lihui out into the open. Nhia, uncharacteristically, seemed to have decided to try a leaf out of Tammary’s old book, and embarked on a series of short and repeatedly disastrous relationships with unsuitable men. It was behavior as irrational as Liudan’s own wild mood swings and seemingly random decision-making, and it was triggered, perhaps, by the same situation that was fraying Liudan’s own nerves.

Tai flitted from Nhia’s chambers and her tears, to Khailin’s laboratory and her frustrated pacing, to Xaforn’s quarters in the Guard compound where the young Guard seemed to have succumbed to a short but potent guilt fit at her failure to extract Qiaan from Lihui’s grasp—comforting, listening, soothing. For once, Tai found herself fleeing to Tammary’s quiet rooms to get some peace instead of the other way around. She was there when Yuet swept in one day to look in on a Tammary who was looking decidedly wan after several days of violent nausea, and announced that there was a very good reason for her feeling so sick—she was pregnant, and the child would be due early the following summer.

Less than three weeks after that announcement, with the greensick tinge still warring with an astonished joy on Tammary’s face, the Traveler girl disappeared.

She had gone to the market with Tai that morning, and they had said good-bye at the edge of the stalls, going their separate ways. Hours later, Tai was surprised to see Zhan present himself in her living room, trying not to look worried.

“What brings you here?” Tai asked, nonplussed, laying aside an embroidery
hoop with a half-completed vivid bird of paradise. In this fractious time she had taken refuge in what had always given her peace, her silks and her cottons and the embroidery her mother had left as her legacy

“Did Tammary decide to spend the day with you?” he asked, his eyes darting around the room as if Tammary was hiding behind a screen.

Tai rose to her feet. “What do you mean? We went to market this morning, and then I came home, and she went back to hers. Zhan, what is the matter?”

He swayed, reaching out to support himself on the nearest wall. “She never came home,” he said. “I thought at first that she was with you, but then it was hours later and I’d had no word, and that wasn’t like her—I thought that at least she would let me know if she had changed her plans.”

Under different circumstances Tai would have gone straight to Liudan and demanded assistance to turn the city upside down looking for Tammary. But the circumstances were what they were—Liudan would not be easily approachable on this subject of all subjects, and the army and Imperial Guard, those still in the city and not shipped out to await the Magalipt invasion which was starting to obsess Liudan to the exclusion of almost anything else, were being kept occupied by Lihui’s incursions. Tai swiftly examined and dismissed other options in her mind, until she finally narrowed it down to two.

“Go and get Yuet, and meet me at Khailin’s house,” she said to Zhan. “We have to do this ourselves. Go, hurry. I will tell my husband to spread the word in the Temple.”

Zhan left, almost at a run, and Tai, after a swift detour to Kito’s booth in the First Circle of the Temple, presented herself at Khailin’s laboratory. Khailin, wearing a black cotton smock dyed cheaply with walnut-shell dye, was bent over a row of what looked like tiny potted bean plants in flower, delicately probing their blooms with her fingers. She glanced up as Tai was shown in, and then straightened quickly, searching Tai’s face with a more probing glance.

“What is it? What has happened?”

“They took Tammary,” Tai gasped.

“What? Who did? Sit down. I’ll get some tea. You look like someone has stolen your own children. Breathe, Tai. Just breathe for a moment.”

“I sent Zhan for Yuet, and they are on their way here,” Tai said. “I cannot go to Liudan with this, she would not help.”

“You mean she might be grateful that somebody has taken the problem of Tammary off her hands?”

“Zhan already did that,” Tai said. “But now that both Qiaan and Tammary are missing, both potential pretenders to her own tiara, she will be more unreasonable than ever. Now everyone will be out to get her. And in a way, this one is worse—at least she knows who has Qiaan, and who to guard against. We have no idea what happened to Tammary yet. Or where to start looking.” She hesitated. “I thought you could ask … Maxao and his people might hear …”

“I will do what I can,” Khailin said. “Have you got Xaforn?”

“Not yet, I thought Yuet had a better chance. She is still a healer. These days people trust the Guards less than they used to.” Tai’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Cahan, Khailin! All Tammary ever wanted was peace, and someone to love her. And now, with Zhan, and the child … What are they going to do with her?”

“They will keep her alive. She is no good to them dead,” Khailin said. “We will find her, Tai. We will.”

The door to the laboratory opened and Yuet came in, followed by a Zhan whose face was the color of cold ashes. Tai leapt to her feet.

“What happened?”

“I went back home first, before I went to get Yuet, just in case she … just in case.” Zhan said. “And I found that someone had delivered this.”

He clutched a small tasseled envelope fashioned from scarlet silk, as though he would never let go, as though he was about to let it slip from perfectly nerveless fingers. Khailin reached out and took it from him.

“Was there a message?” she asked.

“Yes,” whispered Zhan. “
We have her, and she is the key to power. Don’t try to find her
.”

Khailin started opening the small silk package, upending it carefully over one hand. “And what is this?”

“Proof,” said Zhan through bloodless lips as a rope of loosely braided fox-colored hair poured itself out into Khailin’s hand.

T
ammary woke, very suddenly, and with a low-level, pulsing headache that beat in her temples. She felt sick, but it was a different nausea than the one that had plagued her in recent times, the one she had finally learned to almost look forward to, a daily affirmation that she was part of a family, that she was about to be the foundation of a family That she would, perhaps, get a chance to be Tai.

This was a nastier feeling, her mouth feeling coated with bitter oil, her gorge rising, her nose feeling seared by something; at the same time she was tasting something foul at the back of her throat and she had the feeling that she had lost her sense of taste altogether. It was an unnatural queasiness, induced. A faint memory stirred in Tammary’s mind of a whipcord-strong arm snaking around her from behind as she made her way back home from the market, an oily rag being wrapped around her mouth and nose, a rag which smelled much like what she was now gagging on.

She was flat on her back, a position she found uncomfortable to sleep in at the best of times but which now, with the nausea, she found actively distressing. She tried tried to sit up, retching dryly. She found herself unable to move, her wrists tied by cords to the edge of a slatted bed on which she lay. The bindings were loose, but tight enough to prevent her rising. She struggled with them feebly for a moment, and then turned her head sideways, coughing, trying to get rid of the foul taste in her mouth.

“Are you awake at last? Good! I was beginning to think that they overdid the drug.”

The voice was male, familiar, but Tammary couldn’t quite place it—not until she turned her head and saw the man who had spoken. He was short, wiry, very dark, a thin mustache framing a thin-lipped mouth; but his physical size was almost irrelevant beneath an almost palpable aura of pure arrogant swagger that wrapped him like a second skin.

Tammary knew him.

Once, it seemed like so very long ago now, they had been lovers. His name was Eleo, they had met in one of the more risqué teahouses. He had been fulsome in his praises; overwhelmed by the sheer power of his personality, she had raised no objections when he had swept her off her feet—but once had been enough for Tammary to learn that he was far more aroused by cries of pain than those of pleasure. She had walked away from him without looking back. He had tried to contact her, later, several times—sending messages, sending flowers, arranging assignations to which Tammary never came. But he never seemed to quite take no for an answer, and now, it seemed, he had decided to take matters into his own hands.

A sob tore itself from Tammary’s throat.
Not now, oh for the love of Cahan, not now! I may have made my share of mistakes, but I was happy, I was happy …

“What do you want?” she asked, her lips dry.

“You, my dear,” said Eleo. “You might have told me you were a path to the throne, you know. We could have done great things when we first met. Now it might be too late—we have two of them to deal with, the Empress and that other witch they raised as her successor. But you see, Tam—they can’t make a case for Qiaan to be Empress, not quite, not without twisting the succession rites beyond any form of understanding. If she had been the legitimate offspring of a royal concubine, born in sanctioned congress between her and her Emperor, she would have been raised in the Palace as a royal princess. She wasn’t. Therefore all she is, all she can ever be, is a royal by-blow from an abandoned Palace woman who couldn’t help lifting her skirts for some passing vagabond. It is true that all concubines’ children are raised as the Empress’s own—but this does presuppose that their father
was
the Emperor, and hers wasn’t. Yours, however, was, my dear.”