six

Mei Feng, ever since we came to this rat-infested island, you have been telling me that there is not and can never be food enough to feed us and all those we brought with us. Even if we eat the damned rats. This is a solution, this is the only solution, and there will never be a better time than now. Don’t you see …?”

Sometimes, Chung did very devoutly wish that he had never gotten himself mixed up in the affairs of royalty. He should have been a fisherman, or a dock worker like his father. Then he could have stayed safe, or as safe as war and weather would allow. At any rate he wouldn’t need to be here, nervously on his knees, staring down at his fingers while the powers of the palace raged around him.

As far as he could tell, he didn’t actually need to be here anyway. But Mei Feng had summoned him and not sent him away, and now the emperor was here and he didn’t dare move, not a muscle. Most especially he didn’t dare lift his head, because either one of them might catch his eye and who knew what that might lead to? A swift execution for impertinence would be a kindness. Far worse and much more likely, he could find himself called into the argument, on one side or the other. That would be … unimaginable, except that he could imagine it all too clearly. Unimaginably awful. Irrecoverable.

Not his soul, but his service belonged entirely to Mei Feng, so should he side with her? And disagree with the emperor? Face to face, tell his majesty he was wrong?

It was unthinkable. But so was the opposite, to stand against small fierce Mei Feng who commanded his body and his loyalty, if not quite his soul. Even if he thought the emperor was right.

Chung wormed his way backward, till the soles of his bare feet pressed into the painted wood of the wall. Shen had told him of adepts in the high mountains—nothing, he was assured, like the little foothills that were called mountains here on Taishu—who could pass through crowds or stand alone on a bare plain and be not invisible but entirely unseen in either place. At the time Chung had been defensive, pointing out that his own home mountains might not be so foolishly, unnecessarily high and might not have mad old men lurking in their caves pretending to be invisible when actually nobody was looking, but they did at least have jade at their hearts and jade tigers in their forests.

Now, though? Now he concentrated so hard on seeming a native part of the room—over here there was just floor and walls and corner and Chung, nothing worth noticing—that the argument he was trying to avoid just slipped past him. He was only snagged back into it when Mei Feng turned and marched toward the door, snapping her fingers for her loyal messenger to follow.

Turning her back on the emperor, walking out on him. And taking Chung with her, mute partner in this horrendous offense, under the eyes of so many courtiers and eunuchs …

He rose because he had no choice, and tried to scuttle out in her furious shadow; but an unexpected voice snagged them both, as light and sharp and delicate as a fishhook: “Forgive me, majesty, but actually there is a way to take the fleet across the water to Santung.”

Mei Feng stopped dead in her tracks, and Chung perforce stopped behind her. When she swiveled around, she had to push him physically before he recovered enough sense to move aside, to let her see who spoke.

When he looked—and so much for all his invisibility, here he was side by side with her, inextricably aligned, if the emperor deigned to notice—he saw that it was one of the eunuchs. A young man, a new face. There was only the one new eunuch in the emperor’s service, strangely come and oddly accompanied and bizarrely breaking into the discussion now.

That was it, of course, that had always been the killer point: that they could not send an army to Santung if they wanted to. It was Mei Feng’s triumphant parting blow, though Chung heard it now only in his memory, groping back.

And the eunuch thought he could deny it. Indeed, the eunuch did deny it simply by being here, even before he said, “We sailed here by the goddess’s grace, majesty, and in defiance of the dragon.”

“Oh, and can you guarantee that grace again, to sail a fleet back?” It was Mei Feng necessarily who flung the challenge, and now it would be a disgrace in Chung to back away, to dissociate himself from her. He stood boldly at her side, and really wished he didn’t have to.

“I believe so, lady, yes. If we take the child.”

Mei Feng felt betrayed, and twice betrayed; Chung could see that in her. He could have seen it if he didn’t know her, he would have known it sight unseen. She had won this man a place here, for himself and the child that he came with; and now—

Now he was using that against her, the place he had and the child too, and she had no answer to it.