four

Apparently Mei Feng could be angry at the emperor in a whole new way, for a whole new offense, without in any way affecting all those other earlier reasons she had to be angry with him. Angers could accumulate, layer upon layer, all sliding over one another like these awkward and ridiculous silks he obliged her to wear—and yes, even she did know and acknowledge that was unfair, that he would far sooner see her in the scruff-clothes she wore at their first meeting or indeed in nothing at all, if he only ever actually looked at her again. But he didn’t get the choice and neither did she, and so it was entirely his fault, like everything that had happened this morning.

It was afternoon now and laying toward evening, but these were the morning’s troubles just coming into harbor now, safe at last. Or safe for now, at least. Safe until the emperor chose to send them into danger again, his chosen children: into dragon-haunted waters with war beyond.

The war had made her angry first, but now it was the children. The little eunuch boy had inflamed her, but he was apparently only the start. He had been brought to Taishu in hopes of finding shelter, and was being used to wage war; this new girl had been fetched, deliberately fetched, for the same stupid purpose.

And Mei Feng’s own messenger had helped, apparently, but she wasn’t really angry with Chung. If she shouted at him anyway, it would only be to relieve her feelings, because she did need to shout and it was getting harder to shout at the emperor. These days, he was inclined to walk away. To seek out General Ping Wen, as often as not. She and he used to plan their palace together as a way to escape the stifling emptiness of the court; now he planned his war as a way to escape her.

And with Ping Wen, who was a traitor and meant to destroy him, and she still had no way to alert the emperor that would not betray her grandfather. She had tried, sinuously, to embed doubts and suspicions in him, but what would have been easy a season ago was suddenly impossible, because he was not listening to her.

Which was another reason to be furious with him, as he walked blindly to his own calamity. The empress his mother had tried also, and failed also. They needed to be less subtle, perhaps, but simply talking, telling him wouldn’t do it now. They wanted proof, a witness they could safely bring before the throne; and Ping Wen had been careful so far with his witnesses. There was only her grandfather, this side of the water and surviving.

The war, Ping Wen, the children: Mei Feng was exhausted, almost, by the effort of being so angry. Worse, now she was angry and provoked. She had come here to the dockside for the children, to claim them into her own particular care, and the emperor had taken them away from her.

There was the eunuch boy, with the perennial Jung carrying him in his arms; and then there were two girls, a young one leading an older as though she were blind or slow in the head. And because the emperor and Mei Feng were not talking, because what he did used to be what she did too and now was not, therefore he had contrived to take possession of them all with a word and a snap of his fingers, a flurry of palace servants like a flock of birds about the children, wafting them away up the hill.

Leaving her standing, stranded, alone on the quay.

Not alone for long, because there was Chung her runner whom she could compel with a snap of her own fingers, and shout at to her heart’s content—except that he was coming off one of the little boats with his friend from the emperor’s guard, and Shen was pale and hurting, with one arm bound up tight.

Mei Feng had never understood those two, from the first day when they tried to kill each other and came perilously close to achieving it. Now they were inseparable, when she would allow it. Occasionally she had valid need for her own personal runner; more often she used Chung because he was her own and she felt a need to assert it, to have some moments, places, people in her life that were not subsumed by the emperor; the rest of the time he might as well have been in the emperor’s guard himself, living side by side with Shen and sharing his duties and his training, his food and his blankets and his time.

She might not understand it, how they had gone from that to this, from swift hatred to a swifter love; but she knew pain and distress when she saw it. Shen was in pain and Chung was distressed, and now was not the time to shout at either of them.

She was really growing very good at swallowing down anger. She stopped them with the gentlest hand imaginable, just as though they were any other pair of soldiers disembarking. “How is he hurt?”

Chung seemed not to have the words; it was Shen who managed a smile somehow. “Not so badly as he looks, thank you, lady. My collar-bone is broken, and I have a cut to the ribs …”

“… Which is worse than you want me to know, and not as bad as Chung imagines. I understand you perfectly.” It would be sweet if she weren’t still so angry, swallowing it like bitter bile. “See where the lamps are burning, along the dock there? I brought doctors,” the emperor’s own, ordered down before the emperor could think of it himself. “There will be a wait, other men have been hurt perhaps worse than you, although Chung will not believe that; but they will see you as soon as they can.”

A nod of thanks to her, an odd smile that passed between the boys—something said already, that could not be said to her—and they moved on in that slow cautious shuffle, young survivors bringing their hurts home, still wary of the world and each other, wrapped entirely in the joys and pains, the relief and wonder of that survival.

She watched them go, still bewildered, thinking that men were so strange, so very strange; and now there was only her grandfather worth shouting at, and he would be a longer wait, the last man ashore. In the meantime, there were others coming down the quay. Some she knew and some were hurt, they were all exhausted; now that the emperor had seized his children and gone off with his generals, there was only her from the palace to speak to them, to walk with them a little way, to leave them feeling better than they had been.

So she drifted slowly away from her grandfather’s boat, just to the foot of the quay. When the flow died to a trickle, when it died altogether, when she looked back and saw just two more figures coming down the gangplank with her grandfather still stowing ropes while his boy washed down the deck behind them, then it was time to go and speak to him, perhaps to shout, if she could still find the energy; but she knew these last two before she saw their faces, just from their size and the way they moved, and they ought not to have been anywhere near this mad expedition, she was sure they hadn’t had the emperor’s permission to go—more, she was sure they hadn’t asked for it—and now perhaps she might shout except that she didn’t really want to, it was all too much for her, though she might yet want to hit them.

“Jiao! Yu Shan!”

“Ah.” They glanced at each other, as guilty as children caught in mid-crime. The mercenary woman, bored and wanting an adventure; the boy from the mountains, the jade-eater, unnaturally strong and fast, wanting to test himself against the world. She understood them both, she thought. And why they would need to sneak away, to avoid both the emperor’s gaze and Siew Ren’s.

There was something more, though: something in the way Yu Shan was standing, trying to shadow himself behind Jiao. He wasn’t hurt, not him, she wasn’t sure he could be hurt anymore. Something, though. And something in the way they glanced at each other, unreadable, a secret not for sharing …

Except that they could swallow all the secrets that they chose, but they couldn’t hide what Yu Shan was wearing, some new kind of armor it looked like, though why that boy in particular would ever want to burden himself with armor she couldn’t imagine. He looked uncomfortable in it even now, sweat-sodden; and the lowering sun caught it strangely, made it seem …

“Yu Shan, no. Tell me that’s not …”

It was, though. She could see it, she knew it from intimate experience these days, though even that stray thought was a soreness, a bruise tonight. He wore a long sleeveless shirt of linked scales, and every one shone with the true deep-sea green of imperial jade, the emperor’s own stone that no one else might wear, that they should not even touch except to mine it or to work it or to haste it on its way to the Man of Jade.

No wonder these two had been lurking aboard until the emperor had left the quay. That was death, right there on Yu Shan’s shoulders: the death they’d both escaped before, and this time even the emperor’s friendship wouldn’t save them. It couldn’t, in the face of such extravagant defiance. Mei Feng had seen most of the emperor’s treasures by now, much of the beauty that had come from the Hidden City; she had seen nothing remotely like this, wearable jade, a marriage of craft and artifice and wonder …

She said, “I ordered that for my lord the emperor. Not for you.”

“Well, but we had to test it. Before we could let Guangli—or you—give it to him. Didn’t we?”

Perhaps that was right, perhaps they did. She should be grateful, but it was hard to remember how; all her good feelings had been rubbed away. She took a breath, took a step back from her anger, said, “Tell me, then.”

It looked … magnificent. Imperial. A work of astonishing craft: supple and substantial, almost liquid in the light as Yu Shan shifted his shoulders and the stone shivered all down his body. But she hadn’t wanted it for beauty, or for an exhibition of its maker’s skill. They had plenty of those already, jades left almost natural because no carver would touch them, others cut so intricately they were like portraits of other cities, older days.

Jiao grinned, took Mei Feng’s wrist and pressed her hand against the shifting scales. It felt unexpectedly warm and yielding beneath her fingers; no wonder Yu Shan was sweating, on the inside of such a skin.

No doubt the emperor would sweat too. She used to enjoy making him sweat. Such a treasure as this, such a toy, she could have found inventive ways to do it, better than sending him to war …

That was no longer her interest. She frowned and said, “You feel like a snake, Yu Shan. It’s almost soft to the touch.” And smooth like polished jewels, warm like gold; it seemed to tingle just a little against her skin. She didn’t know how a dragon felt, but it should be something like this.

She didn’t want to think about the dragon. She was still too angry with all of them, for chancing their lives and one another’s—and the children’s, those especially—against the dragon.

She said, “That’s not what matters, though.” Not the beauty, not the craft, not the feel of it. No. None of that. They might be at odds, but he was still her emperor; it was her duty, to see him safe. Where she could. “Does it work in combat, is it effective?”

Yu Shan smiled, and gestured vaguely at himself. He was still breathing and apparently unhurt, unmarked; but she had seen him survive a fight without benefit of armor. He wasn’t a warrior, he didn’t have skills like Jiao, but he was lethal none the less. Did you test it properly, did you stand still and let them hit you? That was what she really wanted to ask.

Apparently, Jiao knew the question, all unasked. “Here,” she said, still holding Mei Feng’s wrist and guiding her hand to one patch of scales, over Yu Shan’s breast. “Here is where a flung dagger-ax struck him, point-first. It should have skewered him. Can you feel where the point broke through the scales?”

“No.” The shirt felt immaculate, there as everywhere.

“No. Here,” a tug on her wrist and then the pressure, touch again, low down on his hip, “here is where someone cut at him with a shipmaker’s blade on a long handle. It could have cut through oak. He’s no fighter, this boy, never saw it coming; and I couldn’t reach him in time.”

“You? You stood and watched.”

“I said, I couldn’t reach you. What should I do, then, turn away?” It was—almost—like the byplay of old, tussling in words, when they were intimate friends. Perhaps they were friends again, back end of a battle. Mei Feng was envious: may I come and fight with you next time, will that buy me the right to tease my lord and see him smile at me again?

But she was angry, and didn’t want to tease him. Nor to fight. Nor did she want to be jealous of her friends. She could be happy for them, at least until Siew Ren came to find them.

In the meantime, Jiao stroked Mei Feng’s fingers over the flowing warmth of the stone shirt and said, “Feel where the jade has chipped and shattered, under that blow?”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t feel anything …”

Not a mark, not a scratch. She wondered how they made the carvers’ blades, what could cut and scrape this stone. Yu Shan would know, no doubt, but it didn’t matter now. She said, “Yu Shan? How does it feel, is it hard to wear, hard to fight?”

He shook his head, pushed his hand through his hair, said, “You feel it, but it’s not like weight. Not dead weight. More like muscle, an extra skin, more power. It’s … wonderful.” He sounded like he didn’t want to take it off.

Perhaps Jiao thought so too. She reached over and pinched a sticky tuft of hair between finger and thumb, squeezed out an accumulated drop of sweat. “Hot, though.”

“Yes. Hot. Tell the emperor that,” grinning again, looking like a boy again, dressed up in soldiers’ clothes. “Tell him not to wear anything underneath it. I put a shirt on first, and that’s sodden …”

LATER, IN the late of the evening when old women and young girls do not sleep—perhaps for one reason and perhaps for another, but sometimes because their sons and lovers are hatching war with dangerous men elsewhere in the palace, and so they are perfectly free to hatch conspiracy themselves—she sat closeted with the empress in her shadows and unwrapped the folded wonder of the shirt and showed it her.

Even an empress, even a woman who has schemed and manipulated for the throne and all but stolen it entirely before the end, even she will apparently hesitate before she handles a coruscation of jade, before she lets it shimmer and run through her fingers in the transitory lamplight.

Even she will shiver afterward, and wonder perhaps quite who she is in league with here, quite how bold this girl will be.

“… Yes,” the old woman said at last, as though the weight of her own silence had dragged it out of her like a jewel on a chain. “Yes, this is a gift fit for an emperor. If it will fit him.”

“Oh, it’ll fit. Yu Shan says Guangli can add as many more scales as it needs, to make it fit; he has them all cut and ready. I don’t understand how they hold together, but it’s like links in a chain, he says, he can add them or take them away until the fit is perfect.”

“And if my son will wear it.”

“He’ll wear it.” She was just as certain about that, only this time it was her own certainty she offered, not someone else’s she had borrowed for the occasion. “You know how he is about jade, great lady,” you made him so. “He’ll love it. And it will keep him safe. Safer. On the battlefield.” Everything was contingent, diminishing, regretful. “Please, what can we do about Ping Wen?”

An armored shirt was no protection against treachery; and he would be far from either of his palaces, far from the watchful regard of his womenfolk, exposed and vulnerable. She couldn’t bear to think of him as vulnerable, but it was true.

“Child,” the old woman said, “leave Ping Wen to me. He will be here, left as governor despite his protests; his people are clerks these days, not soldiers. They will be … distracted, perhaps, and war is dangerous to everyone.”

“Are you saying”—her fingers reached for the shirt again, and not just to have something to play with while she fumbled for a handful of obvious, difficult words; it was astonishing, how hard it was to give it up—“are you really saying that you can have him killed?”

“I could do that, perhaps. Men do die, in wartime. And the Son of Heaven would be safer if he did. But I might not. Women too can die, old women insist on it sooner or later, and if the council thought that I had helped Ping Wen out of this world—well. I am allowed to interfere, but not that much. Half those old men would be afraid and mistrustful then, and I would not survive that.

“Besides, we have said the general is treacherous, we have told the emperor to be watchful of him. If he simply dies, all that work is lost, and my son will simply turn to another adviser. If we are shown to be right …”

“We have no proof.” No proof that they could bring forward; she would not, would not expose her grandfather. Whatever the cost elsewhere.

The old woman smiled. “Anything can be turned up, in war. A man can be found, perhaps, who will confess to sailing with your pirate, Li Ton I think was his name? Summoned by Ping Wen and sent to light that beacon, to bring the invasion here. There are men in the army who have not forgotten me, I think, nor my man who was emperor before yours. They will do as I ask, if I give them a reason. A prisoner will confess to anything, under the right persuasion, and my son will believe it when he hears it directly. Of course he will; it is true. The Son of Heaven can be deceived, he is young yet, but truth will shine at him when it is needful, like jade through common rock.”

And yet she was talking about deceiving him herself with false confessions; and about destroying another man, a stranger, an unknown prisoner, simply as a tool toward the destruction of Ping Wen. This was the palace, this was the life Mei Feng had now. This ancient spider was what she should aspire to, her best hope of life and influence.

And yes, she would plot with the empress to make this happen, to betray one man with another, because it might prove to be the only way to save her lord. And she would give him the jade shirt—somehow: they had yet to agree how best to do that—before he went to war, because that too might prove to be the one thing that would save him. She would guard against treachery with treachery, and she would guard against war with the gear of war, and it still wasn’t enough.

She was still as angry as ever she had been, but that made no difference here. He was her emperor and her man, and she was furious with him and would save him despite himself, despite her temper and his own best efforts, if she could only find a way to do it.

Outside, storm battered at the roof and the shutters. Mei Feng shivered; she did not believe in omens, but she did most definitely believe in the dragon. And in the dragon’s temper, which was worse even than her own.