The Poison Prince

by S. C. Emmett

  The sathron’s voice was one of the few true pleasures Kanbina had, as far as Yala could tell. “And my own playing is terrible; it would only grate upon your nerves.” She paused, to give the other woman the chance to speak if music would soothe her, then continued when the hesitation brought no answer. “Perhaps I could read you some poetry? Or we could simply be silent with each other.”

  “I like that best of all, but it is a poor hostess who requires such a thing from a guest.” Kanbina smiled. Each evening her close-servant— the girl with the scar— rubbed nia oil into her face with careful, gentle fingertips; Kanbina’s papery skin swallowed the oil and left no trace of its passage. “Have you heard from Kai?”

  He has but barely left. But Yala understood the longing. An adoptive son was far better than none at all, especially when he performed his filial duties. She could not imagine Kai doing otherwise. “No letters yet. I am awaiting the chance to fold my own to send with yours. If holding a brush tires you, Lady Kanbina, I am more than willing to take dictation.”

  “Now there is an idea. I miss his visits.” The elder woman stirred herself to reach for the bedside, but Yala was swifter, finding the tiny brass bell and giving a small, decisive shake.

  In short order, the servants brought paper, inkstone, brushes, and a small, cunningly designed wooden lap-desk inlaid with glowing Anwei shellwork. “A gift from my adoptive son,” Kanbina said proudly. “If you prop me up, I may brush my own characters. You may serve if I falter.”

  “With good grace, my lady Second Concubine.” Yala set herself to arranging covers, blankets, desk, and supplies. It was very like caring for one of Hai Komori’s ailing dowager or maiden aunts, but this Zhaon lady was far less querulous or demanding. “I shall occupy myself with watching the garden. This light is very strange.” She almost said unhealthy, but that might be taken as a comment upon her hostess.

  “Stormglow-in-summer,” Kanbina murmured. “An old word; they say it has its roots in Khir.”

  “I cannot recall seeing this light in the North.” There was no chair by the sliding partition to the water-garden with its pleasant, white-painted gazebo, but two embroidered cushions served very well and Yala sank upon them, arranging her skirts with habitual movements. “The storms in the mountains above the Great Keep and its city are dry at this time of year, though there is rain in the lowlands for the rai and other crops.”

  “Hm. Perhaps the term fell into disuse after the First Dynasty.”

  “Very possible.” Yala stilled as a babu water-clock thump-chucked in the garden. A faint haze hung over glimmering water and rustling babu. A handful of rai planted at the Knee-High Festival was also thriving, tall and green, ready for its buds to swell with life-giving seeds. The serenity on display almost managed to overcome the hushed breathlessness and gathering irritation of the approaching storm, Heaven and Zhaon holding themselves in readiness for a shattering assault.

  It was restful to sit and gaze, her hands folded and her wits at leisure. A lady’s life was held to be indolent by both southron and northern neighbors, but her duties were immense. Needle and thread, brush and paper, sathron and poetry, comb and earring, ceremony and intrigue— the list was endless. And after she married, the overall management of the household— steward and housekeeper, kaburei and servant— rested within her hands as well. Not to mention pleasing her husband, and producing heirs.

  And, if one married a prince, perhaps fending off assassins as well? If Mahara had kept her yue…

  But that was useless. She had not, and Yala had not been with her when it mattered. The yue could not defend against a horse-killer while riding, either.

  Had Yala been riding upon her princess’s other side, though…

  A sigh caught her unawares, and she lifted the back of her left sleeve to her mouth as if to trap a yawn or some other inattention. The risk of being seen, judged, or found unfeminine was a constant. Even if you are alone, Heaven’s eyes are upon you, the maiden-aunties of Hai Komori intoned, and it is the duty of a Khir noblewoman not to be found wanting under that gaze.

  What was her father doing right now? It was the day of the month reserved for Hai Komori’s high table, heads of the junior and extended clans or their approved representatives required to dine in the high, draughty main hall with Hai Komori Dasho upon the low dais available to judge matters both large and small between his kin. Far too early in the day for the feast, of course; housekeeper, steward, and cook would be hurrying to and fro while their master attended to preliminary business in the study, including matters which could not be spoken of openly but still needed addressing between the clan’s spreading limbs.

  Was he worried for her? Had news of Mahara’s death reached him yet, or news of her own shameful survival? And how could she tell him of Kai’s offer?

  Would it be better if he considered her dead? Bai was gone, and unless her father remarried and produced another heir, leadership of Komor would pass to a junior house. It was not quite an idea too terrible to contemplate…but it was close.

  Then there was the matter of Dao’s letter, and her own response. She would meet this merchant, see what Dao had sent from Khir, and judge whether a reply was necessary. If it were a prank or gift she could hold either close, a moment of relief among all these jostling cares and competing intrigues.

  And yet it could be news of an altogether different sort. There had been attempts upon Daoyan’s life before, and it was only recently that she truly comprehended what her childhood friend must have suffered. Before she left Khir, such matters had been left to older, male heads far above hers. It seemed knowledge of them had merely lain in wait to spring upon her once she had the means and experience to compass the implications.

  Yala, quite rudely, almost wished the Second Concubine would hurry through her letter. Leisure sounded enticing, but it gave her entirely too much time to brood.

  “Lady Yala?” Kanbina’s voice was a thin reedy whisper. “Perhaps I will need to impose upon your patience after all. My fingers are somewhat shaky.”

  “Of course.” Yala took another long look at the water garden and unfolded, somewhat glad to be pressed into service. She arranged her skirts and halted, glancing at the Second Concubine.

  Kanbina’s paleness was no longer fetching or indolent but startling. The fine lines graven at the corners of her mouth and eyes had deepened alarmingly. Even her lips were bloodless, her body withdrawing its vital humors to deep caves. Glimpsed without the screen of habit painting her in better health, she looked not just ill but deathly.

  Dowager Aunt Tala had looked so, before the great goddess of horse and hunt claimed that lady’s redoubtable self.

  It will not be long, Yala realized, and could not make the avert gesture to ward off ill-luck with her kind hostess watching. So she essayed a bright smile and sank again upon the chair at Kanbina’s bedside, settling the lap-desk over her own knees. “There,” she said, carefully twirling the brush upon the inkstone and covering the beginning of the letter with a blank, folded sheet to protect the Second Concubine’s privacy. “Proceed, Second Concubine Garan Kanbina.”

  “Do not write just yet.” Kanbina folded her hands upon the summerblankets. “Tell me, child, will it do you good to join my household? It would certainly do me good to have another lady present.”

  “You are kind to offer, and even kinder to ask.” Yala had given much thought to the matter since the Crown Prince had broached it, and was relieved to have an answer ready. “If I may be of use and the Crown Prince has no need of me, I would be honored. There is the small matter of one or two other ladies, of course—”

  “The Su girl, and the Hansei? I shall be glad of their company, should you wish to bring them. Not the Gonwa niece, she goes straight to her aunt.” Kanbina’s lips pursed briefly. “I would not have Lady Gonwa watching my household. She is very close to the Second Queen.”

  “Is that so?” Yala kept the brush poised over the inkstone instead of the page, to avoid splotching
. “I had thought Lady Gonwa would be sending her niece to a household with better marital prospects.”

  “Perhaps.” Kanbina’s expression said there was more to that observation than she would speak upon, which naturally was a matter for curiosity. “Then it is decided, especially if the Crown Prince wishes to take a holiday in the countryside. You shall alleviate my loneliness, and I shall alleviate the vexing question of where to place a Khir noblewoman in the current conditions.”

  “You are wise as well as kind,” Yala murmured. “I did not know quite where I would be placed, and it appears I may not return home just yet.”

  “I do not think my son would let you.” A dim sparkle of amusement lit Kanbina’s dark, very fine eyes. How beautiful she must have been, when young. “Has he asked you yet, my dear?”

  Oh. “Before he left, yes.” There was no reason to dissemble, but Yala’s cheeks warmed. It well became a maiden to blush when the subject was broached; at least she need not attempt to hide that response.

  “Good.” Kanbina’s chin dipped, the impression of a brisk nod. “Then I shall leave him in your care.”

  Yala again could not make the avert gesture, and unease curled behind her wide, low, silken sash. “Lady Kanbina—”

  “Hush. Write this…The garden is doing well, and the rai from the Knee-High is full of small beads. Lady Komor is writing now, since my hand shakes; I no longer play the sathron but am making arrangements for a visitor or two in order to hear the strings again.”

  Yala bent her head and wrote. Her cheeks were afire, and she was glad of the task to focus upon. Kai’s…affections…were no longer a secret, if they ever had been.

  Her own could not hope to remain unremarked for long.

  REWORKING

  The crossing of Shan’s border was anticlimactic at best since she was locked in a palanquin and dragged at a shuffle over an antique stone curve, the Enshuan River that the Shan named Golyeon instead receding grudgingly from its spring rush but still muscular enough to carry away weakroot trees, chunks of bank, or those unwary enough to attempt ford instead of bridge.

  Sabwone shut her eyes. Hooves moved clip-clop at a walk; pipes and drums and gongs drowned out the river’s retreating, purling chuckles. The moment the palanquin had tilted slightly downhill she was technically in Shan, and a bubble of hot sourness rose in her throat as she remembered that lurching decline. Even halting upon the riverbank afterward was hideous, the consciousness of being outside her native country acute and prickling like an old woman’s night-sweats.

  If she had expected any difference in the method of journeying, she was roundly disabused. They would not give her another horse, so she was closed in this shoe-casket for hours every morning and every long, hot, unendurable afternoon.

  She could not even open her palanquin’s slatted windows; chastity and custom demanded she sit inside the ridiculous overpainted box and sweat until the next stop. Her dress was not folded correctly, the ties and buttons were crooked, and she was ravenous. Her hair was inexpertly coiled, too, and the pin was sliding. Her ear-drops jangled unpleasantly, and she had read every novel surreptitiously stuffed into her baggage as insurance against boredom.

  In fact, she had read them twice, like a junior eunuch at lessons.

  There was the fruit-basket, and the horn-handled paring knife. The short, curved blade was sharp enough, and she had already rolled up her sleeve.

  Her wrist bore a slight, dark ring settled in parallel creases since she hated bathing at inns. She longed for the palace baths, for her own comfortable bed, for walanir with her breakfast and proper, not-sticky rai. And Lady Gonwa’s heaven tea, a mark of high respect from that old biddy.

  The knifetip pricked against a blue vein-line. Really, veins should glitter like rivers; it was unpardonable that they were so drab.

  Come now, princess. A little sting, and it is all over.

  A ruby drop welled. It really didn’t hurt that much at all. Less than a child’s scraped knee, or the cramping, hot-stone pain of her red time. At least travel was held to disarrange the humors badly enough to alter that steady cycle.

  It was almost like slitting a seam on a dress needing reworking. Was this what fabric felt when paired blades or a razor sliced with a satisfying dry sound?

  Sabwone loved that small noise, and was disappointed when her own skin did not behave so appropriately. Now there was pain, but it would be embarrassing to only perform halfway.

  The welling became a streamlet, running to either side of her wrist. Sabwone hissed out a long breath, looked at the palanquin’s roof, and applied more force to draw the paring knife up.

  The difficulty would come, she realized, when she had to make her right arm match. But she was a princess of Zhaon, and she would see this done.

  She only regretted she’d taken this long to set herself the task.

  REALIZE CONSEQUENCES

  A haze hung to the South, and for once it was warm enough even for the beautifully plump, lacquer-haired woman in viridian silk who smiled benignly, indicating a small round table with two straight Shan-style chairs. It was unlike the First Queen of Zhaon to take any sort of nourishment, whether liquid or otherwise, in a room with an open partition. Her gardens, though she did not often go sauntering about them, were highly regimented, not even a jaelo vine daring to stretch a curler in a stray direction.

  “I was somewhat surprised by your kind invitation,” Second Queen Haesara said coolly. If it irked her to perform the slight incline of her upper body due her slightly-more-than-equal coeval, it did not show; the lady of Hanweo was correct in all her movements, including the polite hesitation to allow her hostess to sink upon the chair instead of the cushions she preferred.

  “We are queens.” First Queen Gamwone visibly admired her guest’s hairpin, letting her gaze linger upon that decoration, but she did not move to compliment it. Her gown was quite amply cut, with wide sleeves and a longish hem, but the color did not suit her at all. Instead, it brought a certain sallowness to her complexion, but what else could you expect of such a woman? “That should make us true friends.”

  “Friends.” Second Queen Haesara repeated the word softly, without the lilt of a question. She took to the proffered chair and studied the cuff of her left sleeve, tiny exquisite crimson stitches upon flattering deep peach silk double-threaded in some cases to make a relief of the han-we-ohi characters of her birth clan. Her uncle Hailung Jedao would no doubt caution her not to be overt or hasty. Our fortunes rest upon you, he had told her those many years ago, and since then she had borne the weight— of a warlord husband, of children, of her clan’s survival— without a single word of remonstrance.

  “Oh, I know we have been at odds once or twice.” Gamwone’s smile did not alter. If it pained her to bend her tongue to conciliatory speech, she made no sign. She even poured for her guest, a mark of high respect from one who had every right to expect all other wives and concubines to busy themselves with such a task.

  Haesara found herself thinking of her eldest son’s eleventh autumn, the clashing of metal and the bright alloy taste of fear. The assassin— a man with blackened, decayed teeth and two new-moon swords— had reached the inner quarters of the house surrounded by citron trees in Hanweo-An, and the smell of those fruits was ever afterward associated with the deadly fear that her child, her precious firstborn boy, would take the woundrot or worse from one of those curved blades.

  Makar had killed the assassin, of course. Even at that age he knew what was expected and had performed without question, qualm, or incorrectness. I am not frightened, Mother.

  But he had been so very, very pale, and her heart, not to mention her liver, had known true terror that night.

  Haesara had known exactly who was responsible. Oh, it could not be proven, of course. Just as the true cause of the Second Concubine’s ill health, or the affair of the burning gloves in First Princess Sabwone’s fifth summer, could not be. Allusions to any of those matters— or quite a few more— wer
e deemed imprudent at best; investigation met blank walls, and Gamwone’s petty insults and unbearable smirking had, after all, been borne.

  Year after year, the millstones had pressed upon the second wife of a rising warlord, and when she was acclaimed Second Queen of Zhaon she had allowed herself to be thought pleased. She had done her duty, given Garan Tamuron two sons, and defended both those sons and her clan from an emperor’s neglect and this swelling, gloss-painted poison-toad without a single murmur crossing her lips even at night in the curtained recess of her bed. What she did not let escape her lips could not be turned against her.

  But it curdled. Yes, that was precisely the word. It clotted and soured within her.

  “Indeed we have.” Haesara barely touched her lips to the rim of her cup. It was not quite rude; she was known to have an aversion to sweet tea before noon. Certainly nobody could fault her politeness, trotting out into the heat when the Emperor’s first wife sent a careless little invitation.

  It was best to find out what the lacquer-haired bitch wanted sooner rather than later.

  “But now, with things as they are…” Gamwone patted delicately at her lips with a bit of folded, roseate rai-paper. “We are both mothers, after all. And mothers wish the best for their children.”

  Even in Zhaon’s summer, the Second Queen could imagine a block of ice encasing her entire body, an armor no less durable for being entirely imaginary. “Certainly.” Haesara had a certain reputation for calm— not like First Concubine Luswone’s masklike, aesthetic languor, but the true restraint of a Zhaon noblewoman. Decades of prudence and brooding served her well now, presenting a bland, sheer cliff Gamwone would find no purchase upon.

  Gamwone studied her narrowly. “Must you be obtuse? We will both find ourselves childless when our glorious husband ascends to Heaven.”

  Will we, indeed. “In the old days, we would be placed within his tomb.” Haesara set her tea down after the simulacrum of drinking, letting her sleeve fall gracefully. “It is comforting to live in modern times.” There was, she reflected, a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from watching the First Queen realize the consequences of her constant intrigues and petty jealousies.