The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(36)

“What did you say?”

Min looked down and saw her mother there as well. The empress had been stooped down beside a brazier, tending idly to its low-burning embers. As she spoke now, though, she rose, her voice stern and strong in contrast to the emperor’s dry rasp.

It was strange, seeing her parents alone like this. A hidden passageway connected the emperor’s apartments with those of his wife so they could visit one another with a sense of marital privacy, but nevertheless it was common knowledge that her mother rarely visited her father.

The emperor moved, and Min watched uncomprehendingly as he drew a long, thin silver flute away from his mouth. No—not a flute. She spotted the jade bowl affixed to its end, then the eerie, telltale blue smoke that unfurled dreamily from his nostrils, between his parted lips. He set the pipe on his night-stand beside a matching lacquered tray bearing an odd little lamp and some tools Min did not recognize.

Poppy tar? But it’s banned! She could not understand. Perhaps his physicians recommended it, for his pain, she told herself. But wasn’t that what poppy tears were for? And the physicians were always so cautious, so miserly in doling those out . . .

“When I was a boy, I sometimes wondered how I would die,” her father rasped again, interrupting Min’s thoughts. The way he said it, Min wasn’t certain if he was responding to her mother or just speaking for his own benefit. He blinked furiously, as though his eyes were dry, and his gaze was vacant. For a moment, he cast it upward and looked straight at Min—or rather, straight through her.

“It was a childish thought, only half-formed—pale smoke curling around the edges of my mind,” her father continued. “I could only understand death as being somehow apart from me. A thing that would happen only to some old man I might become, but never to me. You understand.”

“I do not,” her mother replied flatly. She was fiddling with one sweeping, embroidered sleeve of her robe.

“Only,” the emperor continued as though she hadn’t spoken, “only, it’s not like that. I didn’t see it until now. There is no mystery. There’s no distance at all. All the days of my life were with me then, even then, as a boy . . .”

Her mother drew something from her sleeve then—a silken purse. She loosed its strings and withdrew a small white porcelain vial no bigger than one of her elegant fingers. Min watched as she pulled the stopper, walked to the emperor’s bedside, and emptied its contents into a cup of tea.

“If only I’d been able to see, to truly see myself as I was, I would’ve seen my death there as well. Death has walked beside me all my days,” her father murmured.

“Drink this,” her mother said harshly, holding forth the cup of medicine and tea. “It will bring you relief.”

Her father looked at the tea, then into her mother’s eyes.

“I gave you what you wanted,” he said. “You have Minyi.”

Min jerked at the sound of her own name. What did he mean, exactly?

“I do.” Her mother’s words were fierce and taut.

“You remember what Tsai told you, about the girls’ fates being interwoven.” His voice was a whisper.

Her mother’s face twisted into a horror. The look lasted only for a breath, though—then her mother’s placid, beautiful face dropped back down like a mask.

Tsai? Min had never heard the name before. The unknown girl’s hand clenched tight around her own, like a claw.

“I will never forget what that creature said,” her mother said harshly, still holding out the tea.

“I’m dying,” the emperor said, looking at the cup. “I won’t be longer than another month. Maybe two.”

“I know.”

“Then, why?”

“You’re in pain. And you’re a coward. The going will be softer this way.”

“I cannot,” he murmured. “Lu. I must remain for Lu . . .”

At the mention of her sister, their mother went white. A horrible sound like a growl rose in her, and she flung herself upon her husband, one hand scrabbling at his throat and face. The tea sloshed over the cup she grasped in the other. Min held back a gasp. Her hand tightened in the unknown girl’s.

“We have to stop them!” she cried. But then she saw the hungry, rapt stare on the other girl’s face and understood she would receive no help from that quarter.

Below them, her mother had gained control over her father. Min watched helplessly as she closed one hand hard over his nose and pried his mouth open, dumping the contents of the cup into his mouth. She held his jaw closed as if he were a fussing baby.

Her father flailed weakly against the soft, coddling cushions of his bed, then went rigid. Min saw the muscles of his throat—sagging and thin beneath the regal collars of his robes—working as he finally swallowed the tea.

Her mother released him with a satisfied sigh. A strand of hair had fallen loose from its fiercely clean upsweep. She composed herself, but Min couldn’t stop staring at that bit of hair.

For a long moment, the emperor was so still he seemed to have stopped breathing. But then: “Would you stay?”

The dying man’s voice was low, husky, and yet there was something of a child’s plea in it. A whine, almost.

The empress stood, straightening her robes. “I’ve killed you,” she told him coolly. “You know that much, don’t you?”