Jade Fire Gold(14)
There’s always a first time. The new voice in my head is silky and dark as a moonless night.
Pain explodes suddenly in my chest. I bend over and vomit violently, emptying my stomach. My knees collide with the hard ground, grit puncturing flesh.
“It wasn’t me,” I gasp to the empty alley. “It can’t be me.” Maybe if I chant it like a prayer, the gods will undo what happened.
My trembling increases. The sword in my shaking hand—it is a burden I’m bound to, sullied by the atrocity it witnessed. I drop it. The clang of metal on stone jolts me, and I run for my life.
4
Altan
“What did you say?”
“I was asking you to pass me a pear. Something distracting you?” Smirking, Tang Wei takes the bag of fruits from me. “Or should I say, someone? She was pretty, wasn’t she?”
“Who?” I keep my face perfectly blank, even though the image of the girl lingers in my mind. She was tall but slight of frame, like she needed a good meal or two. Her features were delicate, skin so pale and her hair so black it emphasized her pallor. She looked like a wraith. I didn’t think she was that pretty.
“You know who I’m talking about, but never mind.” Tang Wei takes a bite of her pear and launches into her usual rambling about Linxi.
Barely listening, I nod at what I hope are appropriate times. She’s smitten. It’s hard to believe this is the same person who used to flirt with anyone and anything in front of her. But after falling in love with Linxi, no one else can vie for her attention.
Half an hour later, we’re back at the inn and Tang Wei is still talking. I sink my forehead into my palms. Is that what people in love do? Talk incessantly about the lovers they long to see again? Hang on to every word they say? Make sacrifices that others would deem foolish?
Once, after we fled the palace, my sister and I asked our mother if she missed her home and her family.
“I miss them every day, but home is where your heart is,” she replied with a tender smile.
She had left everything behind—her family, friends, her life—for Father. Even if it was to be empress, she was a stranger in a foreign land. There were whispers in the palace corridors, sly glances whenever she did or said something that was uncommon for the Shi.
Mother tried to shield my sister and me from it all. But we knew. Royal or not, we were not of true Shi blood, and people would always have something to say about it.
I try to listen to Tang Wei now, but the noisy crowd in the inn is distracting, and my mind keeps wandering back to the girl who stole the mangosteen. Her eyes pierced me like a shard of glass in sunlight, and in that moment when she turned around, it felt like the anchor to my world shifted. It must have been the desert heat.
You are searching for something.
The old lady’s words—typical face reader nonsense. Probably. Yet, there was something about the way she looked at me that was uncomfortable, like she knew something about me that I didn’t.
The waiter appears with our tea, interrupting my thoughts. The deep woody scent of oolong leaves floats toward me, but there is something off about it. Steep it for too long and the oolong will turn bitter, Shīfù would say.
“How was Master Sun when you last saw him?” asks Tang Wei, finally deciding to talk about something else.
“Imprudently prone to adventure as usual. He talks too much,” I say as I pour us some tea. “Like you.”
“I have to do the talking because you refuse to,” she retorts. “Remember how he used to bring us to teahouses when we were children, and how he’d go on and on about leaf and philosophy? We must have drunk enough tea to fill an entire lake.”
“The best teahouse is The Green Needle in Beishou, there can be no doubt about it,” we recite together.
“You do know he still says that to me, right?”
Tang Wei laughs and gestures at her cup. “Let’s see if this is any good.”
“This is no yíxīng teapot; it’s not made out of purple sand,” I say, glaring at the offending piece of earthenware. I sip from my cup and make a face. “Tastes like watered-down grass juice. I wouldn’t feed it to a cow unless I want to watch the beast suffer.”
Tang Wei slaps the table, laughing harder. “Has anyone told you that sometimes you sound exactly like Master Sun?”
“I do not—”
Sudden shouts drown out my retort.
A man dashes into the inn and runs smack into a waiter. Bowls and plates crash onto the ground. The innkeeper tries to calm the man down, but he won’t stop shouting, his face contorted with fear.
“The alley! The alley!”
I’m about to step in when Tang Wei gives me a look, tapping her forearm near the crook of her elbow. Two other people have entered the place. Priests. They all have a tattoo there: a wavy vertical line, like a snake, with two dots across from each other, each nestled in the curved parts of the line. Their symbol.
The newcomers, a middle-aged man and a young woman, stride toward the innkeeper and the agitated man. They are dressed in rust-orange robes, their hair up in a topknot secured by an ivory cuff with that same Diyeh symbol branded on it.
The man whimpers, but the rest of the room is dead silent. Fear of the priests is a given, whether you are a Tiensai or not. We have all witnessed or heard of their cruel methods of flushing out people with magic.