by T. A. Miles
“We were attacked by a large force of men wearing the likenesses of beasts rather than armor. Their fierceness and costuming was such that it was difficult for any of us to properly discern whether or not they were merely men, or some form of creature.”
“Werebeasts,” Tarfan inserted, more fascinated than critical now. He gave a nod. “Aye, we’ve heard the tales of such monsters from the southern lands in Stormbright as well.”
“But they’re not real,” Taya put in, more hopeful than certain.
“I’ve seen enough just with our recent travels to know better than to overlook the possibilities of most things, no matter how bizarre or fantastic,” Tristus said to her. “Think of the centaurs…”
“I’d rather not,” Taya answered.
A look of sympathy found its place with usual ease on the knight’s face, and he said gently, “But we’re far from Caleddon now, Taya, and from the Aeran valleys as well.”
The dwarf maiden shuddered mildly. “As long as Xu Liang doesn’t tell us that such things exist here.”
Xu Liang shook his head when eyes moved in his direction inquiringly. “No,” he said to all of them. “Sheng Fan harbors no legends or accounts of such creatures that I’m aware of.”
“Good,” Taya said with some relief. “Because you’re aware of a lot.”
It was then that Alere looked across the space at him, as if to allude silently to what they both were aware of regarding beasts. Xu Liang had never been quite so near to a tiger; it was nothing he would soon forget. And he doubted, for that matter, that the elf would either.
Autumn had not yet brushed the Imperial City with its withering touch. There remained abundant green in the trees and the grass, and as yet there were many late blooms flourishing in the gardens. It was a last act of beauty before the gradual descent into the cold barrenness of winter. The impending change of season reminded Han Quan in many ways of the women of the court—the Lady Song Bin Ce in particular, who had perhaps passed prematurely into her season of cold. She had lost much, and faced with the bitterness, she seemed to only grow icier. Han Quan was surprised; it was true that he would have thought her more eager to reach for the glory that had brushed by her. But she walked down a passage of opportunity without so much as pausing to glance into the doorways left open. Han Quan had not decided if she was a disappointment, or to be admired.
He found himself in silent debate while he walked alongside the late prince’s widow, through the Path of Ancestral Glory. It was a walkway flanked by ornately carved pillars and covered with a roof of tiles meant to represent a dragon’s scales. On the underside of the long series of connected roofs were panels depicting the ancient histories of Sheng Fan. Many scenes were from the Creations—Sheng Fan’s first Spring Era. Others were from events occurring before the current Celestial Calendar had been initiated by the first Song Emperor. The first in a line of imposter leaders…
“What is it you yet believe I can accomplish that would suit your ambitions?”
The question brought Han Quan away from his digression. He looked upon the as yet fair-flower features of a woman who was not old, but who was no longer a young maiden. Though she was only twenty-nine in years, she was considered among the matrons of the Empress’ handmaidens. And that brought Han Quan to the answer to her question.
“You are yet a lady of the court,” he reminded. “And an adopted member of the Song family.”
She looked ahead of her while they strolled slowly beneath the comfortable shade of the Path of Ancestral Glory. “Yes, and with very little influence.”
He found her recalcitrance antagonizing, and cast out his next words sharply. “You have eyes, do you not? You have ears?”
“I will not become your spy,” the insolent widow replied at once. Her eyes darted swiftly in his direction. “I’ve refused each time you’ve asked. I’m uncertain why you continue to try.”
Han Quan allowed her a moment to collect herself, and himself a moment to realign the trajectory of his verbal arrows. If she would not be swayed by near misses, then he would take aim directly. “You sit alone on a frail bough,” he said to her. “Sooner or later it will break, or be sheared. Let me guide you closer to the fruit.”
Song Bin Ce put her hands together and drew in a breath, looking at her soft fingertips as they touched one another in a display of emotional discomfort. Han Quan believed he had struck her. And then she let go the breath she’d gathered and said, “I would not eat by your recommendation, Lord Han Quan. I believe it would be bitter, if not poison.”
His own hands clenched together near violently beneath the sleeves of his robes, but he strove to keep the upset from his expression and tone. Flexing his fingers to help them relax once more, he said, “When you are famished enough, you will beg for what the worms have bored through.”
And now the lady came to a stop along the corridor. For an instant, she looked at him directly, but she quickly thought better of direct confrontation. With a careful glance over her shoulder, toward others walking distantly behind them along the path, she stepped toward the railing. She stood for several moments beside a pillar wrapped with a carving of a dragon’s form, then spoke in a tone that could easily be mistaken for conversational. “You are eighty years old, Lord Han Quan. What can you accomplish at eighty that the Empress cannot accomplish by the time she reaches twenty? What can you accomplish that my husband couldn’t within his brief reign as Emperor?”
Han Quan move toward the railing as well. He took slow steps, eyeing the fanciful weaving and pinning of her hair and the way the shorter strands along the hairline feathered against her still soft-appearing skin. “Your husband was barely regarded above his station as Prince, even by our Imperial Tactician.” When he arrived at the pillar, he looked upon her profile, watching the nervous searching of her eyes. She felt very uncomfortable now, perhaps enough to let go of her misplaced pride. “I yet have enough time to lay down a foundation for a greater Sheng Fan than an empire segmented and in conflict. You are young enough to yet establish a path for yourself, one that carries you further than this forgotten place of grief and strain.”
Her gentle brow became creased by a frown. “It is not a strain for me to support my husband’s sister.”
“But is that who the Lady Song Bin Ce is supporting?” Han Quan continued. He had her strings, he believed; he had no intention of letting them go. “Or is it that we are all supporting the silent ambitions of the Imperial Tactician? He has become an impressive warlord in his time, seeding chaos, cultivating glory from—”
“No!” the lady interrupted. “Emperor Song Bao believed in him, and I am still devoted to Song Bao’s vision. I know that Xu Liang toils over that same vision. My husband saw that as well.”
The lady looked quickly over her shoulder to see if anyone had been nearby enough to overhear her. Han Quan looked as well, but only with his eyes. Those who had been encroaching had left the covered pathway. Their conversation was in no danger of being caught by anyone else.
“And is that all that your husband saw, Lady Song Bin Ce?” Han Quan asked her. “Is that all? I wonder where Song Lu’s heirs are.”
The lady turned about to strike him. Han Quan blocked her with an upheld hand, and a spell which coagulated the dust in the air, creating several particles that scraped against her skin when she raised her hand with force. The sting caused her to recoil.
“Your words are of treachery!” she told him. “The Empress will—”
“The Empress will not hear you,” Han Quan reminded. “I have already set a drop of poison against you into her delicate ear. She looks upon you with suspicion, for as she grows nearer to womanhood, her love for Lord Xu Liang grows. I need only prod the drop I have planted for her to believe that you convene with Xu Liang not as Song Lu’s widow, but with aspirations on becoming Xu Liang’s wife.”
“You’re a madman,” Song Bin
Ce insisted.
“And when I speak to Xu Liang of the heir you carried, and lost…”
The Song widow turned from him abruptly, and left the path in defeat that Han Quan fully believed would hold her silence. She was no longer consort to a prince and had been consort to an emperor for such a fleeting hour that not even her father recognized her worth within the walls of the Imperial City. She had risen a mere shadow, and fell now, a withering flower on a disused terrace. Her value to Han Quan was that she would eventually break. She would become an instrument of his establishment as the next emperor of Sheng Fan, and while his physical reign would be brief, his legacy would be everlasting.
The Yellow Tortoise of the River
By the time the land displayed more of grassy knolls than drifts of snow, the company was nearly half completed with their journey from Dhong Castle to the Imperial City. A mist hung above green stands of trees along the horizon on the morning Xu Liang expressed to them that they would have to exercise an excess of caution for the sake of relations. It had been days since they’d left the stronghold in the mountains, where they’d been very nearly sequestered in quarters that were abandoned enough by their original occupants to have felt like a prison. In the course of the single night they’d stayed, they’d seen very little of Xu Liang, and were offered only the minimal comfort of the mystic’s guards to ensure them that they had not somehow been taken into custody, rather than taken in as guests.
According to the mystic, they were still in the kingdom of Ying, and it would not be until they had crossed a river and traversed several more miles that they would arrive in the Kingdom of Ji, which housed the central stronghold of the Fanese empire. Shirisae was impressed with the extensiveness of Sheng Fan. Her own people had once been of an empire, long before the divide and spread that made smaller, separate cultures of all elves. History spoke of a striation of bloodlines that stemmed from war with humans. Different factions and family members could not agree on how to maintain themselves as a nation and versus the swiftly growing numbers of men. The Great Division marked the end of an elven empire on Dryth, and perhaps it was such a division in Sheng Fan which Xu Liang feared would bring about the demise of this hidden empire in the east, separating its people irrevocably.
Shirisae could only wonder if aiding Sheng Fan in this meant ensuring a powerful neighbor that the western lands might one day have cause to fear or war against. She reminded herself that Xu Liang’s vision of the Blades coming together was one of peace. She could not say how much she trusted that, but she had come to trust Xu Liang…at a more considered pace than she had declared love for a stranger she believed the Phoenix had chosen for her.
She knew now that she had read her god’s message too quickly then, and partly owed to being impressed by the godlike strength that had taken over Tristus. It had also been presented to her since that Tristus was not the only champion of higher forces among them—that they all were, as bearers of the Celestial Swords. Her mother believed that the Phoenix’s message was just that, and that Shirisae should partake of this assignment because it was what the Flame had willed. Shirisae understood the sense in that now, and admitted that her mother was the god’s current conduit, along with Firestorm. It was not her place to have behaved in such an upstart manner as she had upon returning to Vilciel with Tristus and the others. She’d been so affected, though…she couldn’t imagine with the way she’d felt at the time that she would have translated it any differently, even knowing what she knew now. Impulse was perhaps her greatest flaw, as stubbornness was her sibling’s.
Thinking about D’mitri, she sent him a silent prayer of wellness. Her gaze went to the sky, and she imagined the prayer being caught on a cloud, making its way across the lands of the eastern continent and the ocean on its way back to Yvaria.
“Lass,” Tarfan said from his seat behind her. “You’ve more hair than you need.”
She smiled while he grumbled about untangling the ends from his beard, something he tended to complain about only when the wind stirred or they had to move quickly. At times she braided it or wound it higher on her head for the dwarf’s benefit, but not always. Her hair was an expression of the Flame—as was the bright hair of any Phoenix Elf—and there were times when she would not bind it for any reason, not even the comfort of a surly old dwarf.
She could see the slightly waved ends of her hair being lifted by the breeze in the corner of her view. It had grown to the length of her thigh, and it still did not match the length of Xu Liang’s black locks. The mystic’s hair weighed behind him like a cloak. While many of the males at Vilciel also grew their hair to greater lengths than most humans of the west would consider—Alere was testament to the fact that the Verressi seemed to do so as well—Xu Liang’s choice in length seemed to surpass tradition. With the mystic, it seemed almost a symbol, perhaps of beauty—though he did not seem vain—or perhaps of establishment; establishment of his station, of his bloodline, possibly. It joined the many other details of their Fanese host that Shirisae desired to know. Since the resurrection ritual, it had dawned on Shirisae that the Phoenix had accepted Xu Liang—if not chosen him—to live. Not all who were brought before the Flame of Ahjenta returned to life. Even when she had initially offered that hope to Tristus in the Flatlands, Shirisae could not have promised Xu Liang would live. She had wanted him to, as a way at providing something important at the beginning of what she had presumed then would be her courtship with her future consort.
Having pressed through the veil of immaturity she had wrapped about herself—perhaps for too long, if her mother’s reaction was anything to gauge against—she realized that she was not only glad that Xu Liang’s life had been returned to him, on the merit that it was his life, but also that she was curious about him. Who was this man that the Phoenix had insisted remain physically among them? The Phoenix was an icon of salvation from suffering. Was it possible that in some way this shandon held the potential to fulfill that role on Dryth? If that were so, his life was to be as valued as that of the Priestess of the Flame herself, for it would mean that he had been chosen, separate of blood and lineage, to herald the rise of the Phoenix itself. The selection of an outsider meant that it had come time for them to extend their concerns and priorities beyond their isolated land.
Shirisae had nearly put that level of importance on to Tristus, but without the manifestation of the Phoenix. It was only just occurring to her that she had witnessed the manifestation of her god in the presence of both Tristus and Xu Liang, but Tristus had not been the Flame’s focus at the time. For a period, she had tried to convince herself—and her mother—that somehow he was. Ahjenta had been upset with the idea that her daughter had allowed an outsider to witness the ritual, but it had been overlooked, owed to the circumstances, which then already involved someone from outside. Shirisae realized now that she had not tried to imprint such value onto Tristus for her people, but for herself. She was aware of the eventual inclusion of someone not of elf blood in their book of prophecies, and she had childishly and selfishly wanted that moment to fall on her cycle as priestess. Now that she was reconsidering, and coming to the possibility that such an important event might indeed befall her time—though perhaps not so romantically as she imagined it would at first—she felt neither so bold nor as proud. She felt vain, and culpably young.
When she felt that she had given introspection enough free rein—something she had been avoiding since the guardian of the Aeran forest—Shirisae shook the confusing effects of it from her mind and raised her chin to the patches of sunlight on offer. The weather had been sporadic since entering Sheng Fan, not nearly as predictable as the Yvarian mountains or the Flatlands, both of which cycled through periods of relentless snow, bitter winds, and phases of melt with calculable regularity. Areas of variance, like what the Deepwood demonstrated, were the region’s anomaly. It wasn’t a wonder to have found the Night Blade and its adversely affected bearer in such a place. Malek V
orhaven had constructed a nightmare from night’s energy. It was the hope of all of them that Guang Ci would prove more resilient to the Blade’s more malignant properties.
Her horse flicked its ears and she gave his muscular neck a pat. Kirlothden was accustomed to long days or nights of travel. He and his fellows had been bred and raised for endurance and strength. Still, a journey of this length hadn’t been made since the Phoenix Elves were in their nomadic period, which had concluded before Shirisae’s birth. She had been born in Vilciel, amid towers raised by dragons and corridors hewn by dwarves…beneath skies populated by griffins and the waning glow of the Phoenix while it soared from the fiery resurrection of its sunlight hours, across the darkness of evening, scattering burning embers in its wake as it returned to its bed of ashes. It was said that all priestesses were born between sunrise and sunset, the hours of resurrection. They would ascend to their roles during a nighttime ceremony, the time of dormancy. It was symbolic of the greater cycle. The majority of a priestess’ service as leader would take place in the quieter phase of their god. Transition of power from mother to daughter always occurred during a rising phase. She was not too young, or too stubborn to be ignorant of the fact that they were at the start of a rising phase. She knew that was partly why her mother had encouraged her to partake of this.
“By the Heartstone!” Tarfan exclaimed suddenly.
Shirisae thought that the dwarf might have been lodging further complaint about her hair, but then she looked to the right of their caravan as they crested a shallow rise. A river lay below, one wide as many of the mountain caverns in Lower Yvaria, cutting through the green hills. It moved with the strength and grace of a serpent with both ends out of view, its motion noticeable only by the shimmer of light that chased its ardently moving form while it undulated. And across this great serpent’s back lay a tortoise.
