The Secrets of Jin-Shei (72 page)

The servant gestured nervously at her, pointed to the goblet, to Liudan, mimed drinking.

For once Nhia had little difficulty in interpreting the gesture. The servant girl had brought a cool drink, something to revive the Empress. Liudan had gone very white, her skin clammy to the touch. Nhia was no healer, but she knew enough about posttrauma shock to nod approvingly at the goblet. “Get me a blanket, also,” she ordered, “and get her a clean robe.”

She reached for the goblet to pass the drink to Liudan, and paused as she realized that the servant had not moved, was still standing there, poised on the balls of her feet. Expectantly. Waiting. Nhia lifted her eyes and surprised a swift look of avid anticipation on the servant’s face—it was gone, instantly, almost too fast for Nhia to be sure she had seen it. The servant girl had dropped her eyes, veiling her expression—but she still stood there, rooted in place. The drink she had brought continued to give off the innocent scents of citrus and honey, but the goblet that Nhia held had changed—threat, instead of comfort.

Perhaps she was seeing things. Perhaps she was only seeing things because she was expecting them to happen—an attempt at Liudan’s life was the very warning she had come here to deliver. She brought the goblet to her own lips, touched them to the rim, took a careful tentative sip of the drink. Beneath the tartness of lemon, the sweetness of honey, there was suddenly something else, another taste that flooded her mouth, a sharp tang of something resembling ginger.

The taste of death.

Yuet had been her
jin-shei-bao,
and healers knew their poisons as well as they knew the healing herbs. There was no antidote to this venom. The mere taste of it in Nhia’s mouth was enough to tell her that it was already too late for regrets.

Holding the servant’s gaze, Nhia drained the goblet with a slow deliberation, and then set it down on the tray again, empty.

A life for a life.

In her mind’s eye two visions shimmered, two bright strands braiding into one another. Liudan, sweeping into the room in Yuet’s house where Nhia had been brought after she had escaped Lihui’s clutches. Qiaan, telling Nhia she could not hide away forever, that she had been made for greater things. Qiaan, sitting in Nhia’s office with one of her impassioned pleas on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed of the city. Qiaan, waiting to die in the cell in the Guard Compound. Liudan, taking the twisted pleasure of revenge as she planned Qiaan’s death. Liudan, smiling, waiting for Nhia as she was about to walk into the Council Chamber for the first time as Chancellor.
Ah, the winds of change that we will make blow through that stuffy old palace, you and I
…

She was too late for Qiaan. She had acted for what she thought was the best. But that vial of poison haunted her, and this goblet tasted of her guilt, of her fear, of her regret. Of her love, and of her loyalty.

“No,” she said softly, holding the servant’s gaze. “Not while I still live to protect her.”

For a long moment time had seemed to slow, almost stop; but Nhia’s words burst the stasis, and everything seemed to happen at once. Liudan’s eyes flew open, and they were lucid with sudden comprehension. The servant girl turned to flee, overturning the tray she had just brought, scattering the bandages and spilling the bowl of water all over Liudan’s silk carpet. The Empress, cradling her wounded arm, surged to her feet and yanked at a different embroidered bell pull hanging beside the wide hearth, heedless of the bloody smears she was leaving on it. The servant had been gone for bare seconds before a pair of Imperial Guards burst into the room, weapons at the ready. They were trained warriors, instructed to act on orders whatever the distractions of their circumstances and environment, but they could not help an astonished, suspicious stare at the chaos in the Empress’s private chambers, strewn with the objects scattered in the servant’s escape, littered with broken glass, streaked with blood. But Liudan barked orders at them and, after sparing a last swift glance into the room to make sure no hidden enemies still lurked there, they turned and ran to obey. Liudan, wrapping her sleeve even tighter around her arm, hurried back to where Nhia sat, the only still thing in the confusion of the moment, her eyes lifted to where a breeze from the broken window
stirred the silk curtains framing Liudan’s view of a formal garden full of carefully pruned dwarf conifers and bamboo groves.

The Empress sank onto the couch beside Nhia.

“Please tell me that was not the poisoned cup meant for me,” she whispered, her voice breaking, her anger suddenly spent.

Nhia’s eyes traveled slowly down from the treetops, and across to Liudan’s face.

“Ginger,” Nhia said. “The taste of ginger. Yuet told us all about it. The
baixin
poison. It tastes like ginger, but it has no smell at all. It’s easy to conceal underneath other things, to hide it, until it’s too late … and once you taste it, it’s too late. It kills—it kills without hope of rescue, and it kills fast.”

“Why, Nhia? For the love of Cahan, why?” Liudan cried. “Why does it have to end? Why must it end like this?”

Nhia reached up and laid her palm on Liudan’s cheek, an oddly motherly gesture. Her hand was cold. “You were wrong, my
jin-shei-bao.
You have been loved. You just never learned to understand that. Loyalty, Liudan, doesn’t mean a blind subservience to your will. We, who loved you, have always been loyal to what you are, to who you are—but not only because you are the Empress. You were our sister, and we cared, we all cared.” She paused to draw a deep breath, as though the mere act of shaping words was starting to tax her strength. “Cared enough to tell you when we believed you were wrong,” she continued, even more softly, so that Liudan had to lean forward to hear. “Cared enough to sometimes go against your orders, in your name, and then either step aside so that the glory might reflect on you, or step up and accept the blame.”

“That’s what you’ve been doing, haven’t you, these many years,” Liudan said. “Running Syai in my name, while I chased ghosts and shadows and sank into a darkness of spirit. The wisest thing I ever did was appoint you my Chancellor.”

“No,” Nhia said, her voice near a whisper now, “you appointed Yuet as your healer, and Xaforn as your protector. You have done many wise things.”

“And Khailin as my mage, and Qiaan and Tammary as my enemies,” Liudan said bitterly.

“And Tai, first and always, as your friend, the guardian spirit on this earth that your sister gave you before she died. You forget that. You had
forgotten much about the way
of jin-shei.
You had forgotten how to trust us, any of us.”

“I trusted
her
,” Liudan said. “That chit who just tried to hand me the poisoned drink. I trusted her completely, and only her. She did what I asked of her, instantly and without question, for so long, that I never considered the possibility that she could even think about trying to …” She shook her head, in anguished and impotent anger. “Cahan! The world I wrought for myself! It was a gilded cage I locked myself into, and gave the key into the wrong hands.”

“Trust the people who love you,” Nhia said. She closed her eyes and let her head sink back against the back of the couch.

Liudan’s hand tightened on Nhia’s.

“Hold on,” she said desperately. “I sent one of those Guards for the healer. She will be here as soon as she can.”

“Let her look to your arm,” Nhia said faintly. “There is little more to be done for me. Liudan, take back your country. Take back your people. It is not too late. And Tai … take care of Tai. She started out caring about you because you were Antian’s legacy to her, but it has long since passed beyond that. For many years now she has loved you and worried about you and agonized over how to help you bear your burdens, and it has not been because the Little Empress told her to do it.”

“Don’t,” Liudan said, and her voice broke on a sob. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me now.”

“But I will always be with you,” Nhia whispered, and added, with her last breath, “All of us who twinned our lives with you will always be a part of you. We are
jin-shei
.”

Liudan closed the now quenched dark eyes in her
jin-shei-bao
’ white face, and sat stroking Nhia’s lifeless hand in mute grief. Her life rose around her, steeped in the opulence of Empire, wrapped in silks and glittering with jewels, drenched in precious perfumes and echoing with the sounds of caged nightingales brought into her gardens to sing for her on hot summer nights full of white moonlight and the scent of jasmine that only bloomed after the sun went down.

And empty, with everything within it made into an exquisite shield against the possibility of getting hurt, of getting abandoned, of getting betrayed.

She had learned early not to care for anyone too much. Caring for
people led to pain. Pain would open her up to insecurity. It was better to be alone, to isolate herself in the tower of crystal and be content with the distorted glimpses of the outside world that she caught refracted through its protective walls. Blood kin had failed her—failed to nurture her, to protect her. When
jin-shei
had come, she had treated it the same way she had treated those other, earlier bonds—used it, and thought no more about it. But now, suddenly, faced with the memory of Nhia’s hands around the cup of poison, Nhia’s face as she drained it, Nhia’s voice as she stepped between Liudan and death …

Not while I still live to protect her.

“I did not protect you,” Liudan murmured, her eyes on Nhia’s face. “Any of you. And it’s only now, when I’ve lost nearly all of you, that I finally understand.”

Nhia’s voice came again, her final words, like a blessing; Liudan covered her eyes with her free hand and wept.
But I will always be with you. We are jin-shei.

T
he cart Tai traveled in was comfortable, as such conveyances went, but she could feel the ruts in the road even through the cushions in the back—especially when they turned off the main roads, which had been pounded hard and flat by decades of wheels and feet, and took a smaller, rougher road which branched off toward the lake on the shores of which Tammary made her home. But the jouncing and the occasional teeth-rattling pothole into which the cart’s wheels sank passed almost unnoticed. Tai’s mind was far away, arched between past and future; she was bracing herself for the encounter that was to come, and replaying the encounter in the Imperial Palace which had sent her on this journey.

Qiaan and Nhia had crossed to Cahan together, given to the fire on the same day; Liudan had attended both funerals, garbed in a white robe of mourning and her hair braided with white ribbons. She had stared long at Qiaan’s pyre, and finally whispered a prayer over it, asking forgiveness and giving it, in the name of the mother who had borne them both. At Nhia’s, she sank to one knee before the flames and bowed her head in recognition of the greatness of spirit of the one who was gone. She owed a debt here that she could never repay—but what she did was noticed, and whispered about, and heads were nodding in approval at Liudan’s having humbled herself before the ashes of the woman who had paid for the Empress’s life with her own. The priests from the Great Temple even came to consult with Liudan about the possibility of raising Nhia as a Holy Sage spirit and providing her with her own niche in the Second Circle.

“Immortality is not my gift to give,” Liudan said, and her voice cracked a little at the word, but she controlled it. “But I would be pleased if you wished to do this. She was worthy of honor.”

Tai had thought she had glimpsed Khailin at Nhia’s funeral—had thought that she had even seen her lift her hand in greeting, from across the
clearing, at the far edge of the crowd who had come to pay their respects. She had not been able to run across the pyre clearing to the figure she had thought was Khailin, and by the time the crowds had thinned Tai had lost the glimpse, could not have even been sure it had been there. But she had scoured the place, afterward, looking for the lost
jin-shei-bao.
She had found no trace of Khailin, and it had been as though she, too, was dead.

It was with all these losses still raw within her that Tai came to Liudan’s chambers after they had both attended the dedication of Nhia’s niche in the Temple two weeks after the funerals.

The Empress’s rooms were pristine again, new glass in the window, freshly cleaned rugs strewn on the floor, no sign of the elemental forces that had swirled within these dignified, serene walls only a short while ago. Liudan, too, bore few outward signs of it. She still wore a light bandage around her arm, but it was hidden by the layered sleeves of her court garb—and as she did not particularly favor her good arm over the hurt one, a casual observer could have failed to notice that there was anything amiss. But the inside wounds were deeper, harder to heal.

“My
ganshu
readers are tearing their hair out,” Liudan said to Tai, “because all they can see in my future is fog, and death, and destruction. Sometimes, though, I think they mix up what they are seeing. It seems to me that whatever my future holds could be no worse than what my past has handed me.” She paused. “I miss Nhia, terribly.”

“She said you hardly even spoke to her very much of late, still less listened,” Tai said, and choked.

“She was right,” Liudan said, after a pause, controlling her own voice. “She was so often right. I never knew what I had until I lost it. That is so often the way of things.” She turned to Tai, her face a study of cool alabaster. “So—it’s down to you and I, in the end.”

“There are still others,” Tai said, fighting to control her emotions. “I’m sure that was Khailin I saw at the funeral.”

“If it was, she obviously thought better of coming anywhere near me, and I can hardly blame her,” Liudan said. “I may have lost her, too, as irrevocably as I ever lost Yuet, or Xaforn, or Nhia, or even Tammary and Qiaan.”

“But Tammary lives,” Tai said.

A flash of an old fury leapt in Liudan’s eyes, and then quickly died. “I preferred to believe she was dead,” she said. “It was easier. So, you hid her from me, did you?” She tapped at her lower lip with her finger, a familiar
gesture of old when she was pondering something. “It might,” she conceded at last, “have been a wise decision at the time.”