Qiu-Lin, Year 5 of the Cloud Emperor
It is very quiet out there tonight.
Tai paused, lifting her brush from the page of her journal, listening to the silence.
This was the first year that she had been in the Summer Palace without her mother – Rimshi had developed a debilitating cough and chest infection over the previous winter, and her physician, the healer Szewan who attended the women of the Imperial Court and who had been sent to take care of Rimshi by the Empress Yehonaia herself, had counselled against travel. But this was the second year of jin-shei between Tai and Antian, the Little Empress, and Tai had been invited along in her own right as a guest of the Court. She had not been given the quarters she and her mother usually occupied, out on the fringes of the Palace, in the outer courts. She had a room to herself this summer, close to Antian’s own suite – a room with a window that looked out into the garden, a room full of billowing curtains and soft cushions. There was even a servant who left a beaker of iced tea in the room every morning, when the heat came, as she did in all the women’s chambers.
Tai felt awkward accepting all this. She also felt isolated. That she was jin-shei to Antian was an open secret in the Court – but there were times that the hallowed precepts of jin-shei did clash with the more traditional strictures of status and class, and many of the inhabitants of the plush women’s wing in the Palace did not much like it that a commoner was invited to live amongst them. Antian was of age now, however; Tai had been a guest at the Little Empress’s Xat-Wau ceremony only that spring, and was witness to Antian’s grandmother, the old and fragile Dowager Empress, placing the red lacquered hairpin through Antian’s lustrous piled-up black hair. Antian was an adult, according to Syai custom. She was also a senior member of the Imperial household, with her own personal court which was now her responsibility. She had asked Tai to the Summer Palace, and the other women had to at least be polite.
Or that was the theory of it. Tai had learned to tell the difference between three very specific kinds of women in the Court where she was concerned. There were those who were genuinely pleasant, and offered a smile or a kind word in passing even when Tai was not accompanied by Antian and they felt constrained to be polite in the presence of Tai’s powerful friend and protector.
There were the ones who would pass Tai in silence if they came upon her alone, but smiled and fawned upon her when she was in Antian’s company; Tai soon learned to recognize a smile that did not reach the eyes and the touch of cold, reluctant fingers.
And then there was Liudan.
In the two years of her jin-shei tie to Antian, Tai had completely failed to get anything but cold hostility from Antian’s sister Liudan. It had started on the very first day of the jin-shei, when she and Antian had been walking in the very gardens that her room now gazed out into, when she had pointed at a flower and seen Liudan’s recoil from her.
That was my sister. My angry sister.
Antian had explained about Liudan, later.
‘I was only two when she was born,’ Antian had said, ‘but my mother was the Empress and everyone spoiled me. Every concubine’s child is taken to belong to the Empress, of course, but when Liudan was born, Cai – that’s her mother – did not wish to give her up to be raised by a wet-nurse and then the Court.’
‘Which one is Cai? Have I met her?’ Tai had asked.
‘No,’ Antian had said, shaking her head. ‘Cai is dead. She was at the Court for only a few years, but she lived her life like a comet.’
‘Where did she come from?’
‘She was a daughter of a poor farmer, up in the miserable rocks and stones of the north country. He could not afford to keep her – she was the ninth child in the family, the sixth daughter – and so he took her and two more of his daughters and brought them to Linh-an, and sold them into concubinage. Cai was the only one who made the Imperial Court.’
‘What of her sisters?’ Tai had asked, her eyes wide.
‘Who knows? Cai never did, or at least never spoke of them after to anyone here in the Court.’
‘So what happened?’ Tai had asked, held rapt by the sorrow she could sense between the lines of this tale, by the tendrils with which this sorrow had snared Liudan herself.
‘She might have been happy,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t know, I was only a child. Cai caught the Emperor’s eye quickly enough, but rumour had it not for long. She did bear him a daughter, though. One of only three daughters, including me, that he sired on his women. And we were all more or less born at the same time, too – there is just over a year between me and the next daughter, and then another year between her and Liudan. She’s the youngest of the female line. The rest, well, his line runs to boys. His sons, now, range from their twenties to babes in arms.’
Tai was old enough to do the numbers on this. Inheritance went through the female line in Syai; the Emperor might rule the land, being male and having that power vested in him, but he came into his power through the woman he had married and who had been his path to the throne, and his legacy rested in the daughters he had sired. So the Emperor had secured his succession, and then provided a couple of spare heirs to the Empire, two other daughters, in case anything happened to the Little Empress. The boys would be married off well, and were of no further importance.
But Liudan was the Second Spare, born of a mother who, once her duty was done, became a shadow in the Court, no longer noticed, no longer needed, supplanted by other women in the Emperor’s retinue of concubines. The only thing of value Cai would have had would have been her child …; but Tai had extrapolated from Antian’s earlier words. Cai had not wished to let others raise her daughter – and perhaps, if she had borne a son, she would have been allowed to keep the child and rear him. But she had borne a potential heir – one twice removed from the throne, to be sure, but a potential heir nonetheless – and the child was taken away from her not long after it was born.
‘She must have been very lonely,’ Tai had said.
‘She had two of us she grew up with,’ Antian had said, misunderstanding and applying Tai’s words to Liudan, of whom she had just been speaking.
‘I meant Cai,’ Tai had said. ‘What happened to her after Liudan was born? When did she die?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Antian had said thoughtfully. ‘I do know they said that she was pregnant again less than a year after Liudan was born – but after that, I don’t know. It may be that it was thus she died – in childbirth – her and the babe both because when she disappeared from the Court there was no child left in her wake that I know of, male or female. But then there were the rumours.’
‘Of what?’
‘She was in some sort of disgrace,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t recall what, but she had done something that reflected badly on her. And that meant on Liudan, too, on her child.’
And Tai had suddenly understood Liudan’s recoil in the garden. ‘She was the one left behind, wasn’t she?’ Tai had whispered. ‘The child of the erring one. Without friends. Except you, Antian. Except you.’
Antian had looked at her with lustrous dark eyes. ‘You see? You always understand. Yes, she grew up as the Third Princess, the youngest in protocol, the last in line, the not-quite-needed. And her mother had fallen from grace, and nobody wanted any part of her other than her continued existence.’
‘And she was afraid, wasn’t she? That morning in the garden, she was afraid that she would be the price of my coming into your life. She’d be abandoned if you chose another companion.’
‘Oh, she was never a companion