Somewhere in the distance, a vash’ai roared.
The fist in her gut unclenched. Slowly. Ani peered around the tent, at the worn cushions and discarded clothes, the usual bits and pieces of another woman’s life. Ordinary things… but there was the cat’s-head lyre propped in its corner, waiting to be restrung. The cat’s-skull staff, blackened and dead. And the tent’s eyes, the stares of the embroidered beasts so heavy on her they made her skin crawl. She fled the tent at a walk and did not look back.
Ani was startled to find the sun still bright, and the air still merry with the sounds and smells of the people enjoying Hajra-Khai. She raised her face to the sky and stared up at Akari Sun Dragon until tears slipped from the corners of her eyes.
“I am not sure which is worse,” she told him, “an Atualonian invasion, or an angry dreamshifter.”
THREE
“I will remember.”
His mother handed him a package wrapped in yellow rice paper, and tied with cords of red silk. “Open this. It is yours.” Her eyes were bright. “I made this for you.”
Jian pulled the tasseled end of one cord and the massive knot slid apart smoothly. He unfolded the expensive wrapping with great care, ashamed at the rasp of his rough skin against the soft paper, and sucked in a breath at the bright garments within, yellow silk hot as the sun and heavily embroidered with thread-of-blood. “I cannot wear this!”
“It is your right, my son.” She blinked, pressed her lips together, and drew in a deep breath. “It is your right, and it is your duty. You represent the whole of Bizhan, now. You are Daechen tonight, and it is most important that you look like a prince, not some sort of… peasant.” Her hands fluttered to the silk like small birds, and then she held the robe up to his shoulder, and smiled the small, secret smile of a mother. “Besides, you will look so handsome. My son, the Daechen prince.”
Tonight was the Feast of Flowering Moons, and Jian’s sixteenth nameday. Tomorrow he would walk through the wide gates and become Daechen Jian, a prince of the Forbidden City.
A prince, Jian thought No longer a pearl-diver’s son, a boy who was at home in the water and ill at ease on land, a boy who was better with the flute than with words. A prince. Though he had been preparing for this day his whole life, the words were still a punch in the gut. He took the heavy robe from his mother and held it away from his body as if the embroidered serpents would bite him. The yellow cloth would have cost as much as a new roof, he knew, the pearls spent on thread-of-blood might have fed them for a year.
And when had she the time to make this? His mother was often up late, bent over her sea-charts or account ledger, trying to find one more bed of oysters, one more trade route, trying to pay their way for one more day. Every stitch, every thread was one more moment he had stolen from her life.
“Mother, I cannot…” I cannot take this, he might have said. Or perhaps, I cannot leave you, but they both knew that there was no choice. As long as the false king in Atualon threatened their lands, the emperor needed the daeborn for his armies.
“Hush,” she warned him, and held up her hand. Her hands were so small, frail little bird-bones, skin as thin as golden parchment. “It is the emperor’s right to demand your service. It is your right to wear this, and it is my right to give it to you.” A single tear defied her iron will. Jian caught it with a finger before she could wipe it away, and brought it to his lips. Then he crushed her to him as if he were still a child and could not bear to be parted from her.
For a long moment she clung to him, thin arms still surprising him with their strength, and then she laughed a little, and pushed him away. “Ai! Look at me, I am a mess. I will have to start all over again.” She smoothed her silvering hair with her hands, wiped at her face.
Jian’s heart ached to see her brave smile. “I would not leave you.”
“I would not have you go. But the world is woven of wind and tide, my son, and neither of us has the power to sway it. You are bound to the Forbidden City, as I am bound to the sea, and I would not change one single thing about you, not even this. I am proud to be your mother.”
In other lands, he had heard, the daeborn were free to do as they wished with their lives, with every right given to a fullborn human. It was even said that in Atualon, a man might belong to himself, and not to an emperor. Jian dreamed, sometimes, that the Dragon King might burn Sindan to the ground and free them all. That he might some day ride south and hear the long, slow songs of the golden sands, or west toward the Sea of Beginnings, and watch the sun set behind the dragonglass fortress Atukos.
In truth, the Dragon King was no likelier to spare his hide than was the emperor. The Daechen were born to kill, and to die, and that was all. If they rode to a foreign land, it was not for the pretty sunsets.
“You are proud that I am… cursed?”
“Cursed.” She snorted. “That is village-talk. No more of that for you, now. Are the blessed cursed? Is the emperor cursed? No more than you.”
“And my… father? Will you speak of him to me, now?” Jian looked away so that he would not see if his words hurt her.
She smoothed the hair back from his face, and leaned in to press her lips against his forehead as she had when he was a small boy with a hurt. “I cannot.”
Those words, from her, were a blade of obsidian plunged into his breast. Jian turned his face from his mother. “You will not do this thing for me, even on this day.”
“I cannot grow wings and fly. I cannot bend the wind to my will, not turn the tide, nor bid the moons to set ere their time. And I cannot speak to you of this thing.”
“Hyang told me that I was… that you were.” He swallowed. “That I was born of rape.” That had been the kindest thing Hyang had said about his father. Daeborn they called him, Daemon seed, an ill-luck child that should have been exposed to the elements at birth.
“Hyang has picked most of his brains out through his nose.” She snorted again. “I can tell you this much… you were not born of rape. By the sea, you were not.”
A weight Jian had not known he carried was lifted from his chest, and he took a deep breath. Not a child of rape… Hyang had seemed so sure. Then again, Hyang was a nose-picker.
“This room is too small.” His mother frowned. “You should have better.” She walked to the small window, tripping a little on the foot of his bed as she passed. “You cannot see the water.”
“I can smell the sea, if the wind blows just so. I can hear the ocean calling me.” I can feel her calling me home, he thought, but did not say the words. He feared that the calling, calling, calling of the sea would break his heart to pieces, like waves upon the rock.
She pressed her hands hard against her eyes, and then her mouth, and then her heart, before turning to face him. She was still so beautiful, he thought, the salt and the wind had scoured away what was soft and weak in her, and left a warrior-woman in their wake. Her eyes were creased from squinting out across the sunstruck waves, and her long hair was shot through with sea-foam, but men’s heads still turned as she whispered past, a gentle breeze with the promise of storms to come.
In her youth, her beauty had inspired the poet Jiao Jian to write about the maid who loved the sea, and Jian was proof that hers had not been a one-sided love.
“You will wear the silk.”
Jian went to his mother, and enfolded her in his arms, and he held her like that until she relented and hugged him back. When had she gotten so small?
“I will wear the silk,” he agreed. “I will make you proud.”
She fought her way loose and smacked him in the shoulder. “I would be proud of you if you went to the feast wearing nothing but a smile and a necklace of old clam-shells.” Her eyes laughed as he blushed, remembering a time when he was little and had showed up at a village feast wearing just that. “I would not recommend it, though.”
“Mother!” he protested. “I was only five years old… how long will you tell that story?”
“If wind and tide will
, I would tell that story to your children, and to their children.” She kissed her fingertips formally.
He repeated the gesture. “If wind and tide will.”
“Now—” she firmed her mouth “—I will leave you to get ready. I trust you do not need my help? No? We do not wish to give these city dwellers another story to tell, do we?”
He waved her out, laughing. “Goodbye, Mother. I can dress myself. I will see you at the feast tonight.”
“You will be the handsomest man in the city. You will have to beat the girls away with an oar.”
“Mother!”
“Have courage, my son. And hang up your clothes!” She slipped from the room, sliding the screen behind her with scarcely a whisper.
Jian touched his fingertips to his lips again, and pressed them against the screen. “Until we meet again,” he promised. “Jai-hao.”
When he could no longer hear the faint patter-patter of her feet on the bamboo floor, Jian went to the window. He looked out over the shining walls and palaces of Khanbul to the distant slopes of Mutai Gon-yu, the mountains that tamed the rains. If he craned his neck he could just see a glint of sunlight upon the Kaapua, whose wide blue waters danced their way from the foothills of Tai Damat and Tai Bardan all the way to Nar Kabdaan… and home. Beyond that lay the bright sands and brazen warriors of the Zeera, and the Araid-infested ruins of Quarabala far beneath the scorched earth. Hovering to the north of those fabled places, like the crown on an undeserving head, stretched the salt-rich lands of Atualon, home to the Dragon Kings who had ruined them all. He wondered idly if any of those people celebrated the first rains of spring. Did it even rain in the desert?
The air was heavy with the sweet-and-spice perfumes of many kitchens making ready for tonight’s feast. Jian heard children laughing, and the hum-thrum music of prayer bells spinning in the wind, and the occasional ratta-tat-tat as white-robed Baizhu monks twirled through the streets, tossing firecrackers at the feet of unwary lovers. For a moment he wished that he was a child among them, running wild with the pack of younglings, begging a treat from the sweet-seller’s cart or trying to snatch a rope of firecrackers to toss at the young girls, confident that tomorrow would be the same as today, every day as lustrous and alike as pearls in a bowl.
As a child, he had loved stories and songs, riddles, and poetry, and the tales he loved best were of the Dae. He smiled a bit, remembering the firelight and the sea-song, and his mother’s voice rising and falling with the waves as she read to him from the Book of Moons:
“Somewhere in the far away, past Kaapua’s flowered skirts, beyond the wind-scoured rocky shores, past singing cave and towering wave and the jaws of the great striped shongwei, rose a chain of islands shrouded in magic thick as fog. There, antlered kings and queens white-skinned raised conch-shells to their ruby lips, where daeborn creature fair and foul held endless feasts and games of death, and Daelords in their golden halls wove dream-sung spells into the wind…”
The worlds of men and Dae had been rent asunder by the corrupt magic of the Atualonian kings nearly a thousand years ago, and year by year the veil between the two worlds thickened. The Lords of Twilight came rarely now to the shores of men. Some said they feared whatever had frayed the weft and warp of land and magic. Others suggested that the Dae had caused the Sundering, but Jian refused to believe that the Dae would deliberately loose magic that would harm the great sea-beasts, their kin. He, himself, had seen the carcass of a shongwei, its hulk rent with gashes and bites so monstrous the mind shied away from wondering what might have caused them.
Jian had thought to scavenge the shongwei. Its massive tusks, longer than two tall men laid foot-to-head, gleamed pale and smooth in the morning light. That ivory would have been wealth enough to buy his mother freedom from her deadly work. Wealth enough to purchase a young man’s release from destiny. But the wind shifted as he approached, and the stench of the rotting corpse drove him to his knees.
He told no one of his find, and when he returned the next morning the shongwei was gone. It had been dragged back out to sea, leaving behind a trench in the sand deeper than his house was tall and one small tooth hardly as long as his forearm. Fear of whatever had taken the shongwei kept him from venturing into deeper waters for weeks, and now that tooth lay among the few treasures and wadded-up clothing of his childhood.
Sea-beasts or no, Jian had dreamed, deep in the undercurrents of his heart, that he might escape from the world of men. He would sail across Nar Kabdaan of a Moonstide night, when the waters were still as glass. On such a night it seemed all a boy had to do was stretch forth his hand and pluck the low-hanging stars from the sky, and taste the nectar of freedom. Sometimes Jian imagined that he would steal one of the Western barbarians’ dragon-faced ships and sail to the Twilight Lands. He would step onto the far shores just as his ragged craft fell apart, and surely such a brave and arrogant act would win him a place among his father’s folk, a place in his father’s heart.
No matter how far his dreams took him, Jian would always return to harsh reality. No boat in Bizhan was more than a mouthful to the shongwei, and no ship in the empire could get past the greater creatures of the deep. Though ships full of men had ventured out upon the blue waters of Nar Kabdaan in search of the Twilight Lands, none had ever returned. If the emperor’s ships were no match for the sea, what chance had a daeborn boy?
Some among the Sindanese blessed the Dae and begged their favor through small rituals and burnt offerings. Others cursed them as the spawn of Yosh, called them daemons or worse. Some few mortals might take a Dae lover on the one night of the year that their two worlds met, when the blood ran wild and nothing was forbidden under the stars. Any child born during the festival of Nian-da, the Two Moon Dawn, was said to be born of such a union.
A child of the Two Moon Dawn was said to be a citizen of two worlds, and welcome in either. Legend held that the youths were sent to Khanbul lest their Dae parents try to steal them away to the Twilight Lands. Jian’s whole life had been haunted by the vision of those islands rising blue and green and wild from the mists, the horn calling him to the Wild Hunt, and Issuq laughing in the waves.
He had studied his own face bit by bit in his mother’s small mirror. The high curve of his cheek, eyes so large and round, brown and deep as a seal’s, teeth that were just a little too sharp, a little too white. His heart had taken his wishes, his dreams, and his dread, and with those had formed a small, secret, perfect pearl of its own. His father, he felt sure, laughed and lived and loved among the Issuq. A tall man, like himself, sleek and dark and quick. A man who even now might wonder whether he had sired a child, years past on a Moonstide night, when the veil between worlds had thinned.
Jian had been born on the very morn of Nian-da, midwifed by the moons and the sea. His mother had claimed that she had not felt the pangs of birth before the time was upon her and she had gone to the sea to make prayers, but Jian had always believed that she had felt his true nature in her womb, and had honored that by giving birth in the foaming embrace of a two-moon tide. His first breath of air had held the tang of the great salt winds, and his mother gave him a fingerful of brine to suck before ever he tasted milk.
If the circumstances surrounding his birth had not been enough to name him daeborn, his appearance would have erased all doubt. Jian was born with the large, round, near-black eyes of his sea-kin father—never cloudy like those of other newborn infants, but bright and alert and merry as sunlight on the water. Tiungpei was filled to overflowing with joy in her son. When he was but a tiny infant she had a painting commissioned of him sitting on her lap, and this she hung in a place of honor on the wall behind her chair. When he was small he would sit at his mother’s feet as she worked at some bit of mending or needlework, and she would let him play with handfuls of imperfect pearls as she told him stories about his infancy. How he hung in his cradle-board wide-eyed and silent, never crying like the other babies. How he was first to walk, to talk, how he learned his numbers wi
th such ease the monks feared to teach him more, how he would toddle away down the moons-lit path, when he was scarce as tall as the salt-grass, and make singing prayers to the sea.
This last bit, he could remember. Pebbles smooth against the soles of his soft little feet. The cries of the sea-birds, calling him away, away. The warm waters that welcomed him home, on those rare occasions when he made it to the beach before his mother could snatch him up and carry him to bed. For he had swum in the water before he had walked on the land, and ever he longed for the sea.
He also remembered the heavy, jagged words of the man his mother had been married to, the hard looks thrown his way dangerous as stones. Little Jian had learned to walk quiet and wary around the house, always ready to duck aside. The man had been shorter than Jian’s mother and broad, with a square face and large, square teeth, and he had left the discarded shells of boiled peanuts on every flat surface. Jian could remember his mother complaining about them, and could remember that the empty, slightly soggy shells made excellent little toy boats.
One night the man had raised his voice, demanding that the boy be sent to live with the monks of Baizhu. Jian had huddled under the soft cotton quilt his mother had stitched together from her old dresses, and he fell asleep with the salt of tears upon his lips.
The next morning, he woke to the sound of his mother’s singing and the smell of cinnamon bread. The man was gone, and there were two goats tethered in their little yard, yellow-eyed milk does with striped faces and soft ears. It was many days before Jian could work up the courage to ask his mother whether she had traded her husband for goats, and when he did, she laughed until tears rolled down her beautiful round face. But she never did answer the question.
It had been just the two of them that day, and every day since. Though theirs was not a particularly quiet life—Tiungpei was as noisy as the sea, always singing like the waves, or laughing like the wind, or scolding her son like an irritated sea-bird—still, it was peaceful between the storms.
The Dragon's Legacy Page 5
