Under Heaven

There was another entrance, from the covered porch on the opposite side, a private space from which to look at flowers or the moon. The sliding, slatted doors had been pushed back, the room was open to the night. The gardens of the inn went all the way down to the river. Tai saw a star in the opening, quite bright, flickering.

She had changed her gown. She was wearing red now, gold threads in it, not the green of before. He wished it hadn’t been red.

“Good evening,” he said quietly to the daughter of Xu Bihai.

It was the older one, the one he’d liked: sideways-falling fashion of her hair, clever look in her eyes, an awareness of the effect she’d had, bending to pour wine. Her jewellery was unchanged, rings on many fingers.

The governor’s daughter was sitting on the edge of his canopied bed, alone in the room. She wore gold, open-toed sandals. Her toenails were painted red, Tai saw. She smiled, stood up, moved towards him, exquisite.

It was still unfair, in almost every possible way.

“My Kanlin guard … she’s just outside the door,” he lied.

“Then shouldn’t we close it?” she asked. Her voice was low, amused. “Would you like me to do that? Is she dangerous?”

“No. No! Your father … would be very unhappy if his daughter was in a closed bedchamber with a man.”

“My father,” she murmured, “sent me here.”

Tai swallowed.

It was just possible. How urgently, how desperately, did the military leader of two western districts want to keep Tai—and his horses—from rivals? From Roshan, as an example. As the best example. What would he do to achieve that?

He’d given an answer, hadn’t he, earlier tonight? I would sooner kill you, Xu Bihai had said, over saffron wine.

Was this—a lissome daughter sent to bind him—an alternative short of murder? It would preserve the horses for the empire. And for the Second and Third Military Districts. If Tai was killed the horses were lost. And Governor Xu, if known to have caused that to happen, was likely to be exiled, or ordered to end his life, for all his power and accomplishment.

But a man could be seduced by an elegant daughter with the worldly skills of well-bred women in Ninth Dynasty Kitai. Or he could be compromised, perhaps, forced to behave with honour after a night … lacking honour, defined by skills. There was that possibility.

And daughters—like sisters—could be used as instruments.

He was not, he realized, tired any more.

The governor’s daughter, tall, slender, came slowly up to him. Her perfume was delicious, expensive, disturbing, and the red gown was cut as low as the green one had been earlier tonight. A green dragon amulet still hung between her breasts on a golden chain.

Silk brushing against him, she glided past, to close the half-open door.

“Leave it! Please!” Tai said.

She smiled again. She turned towards him, very close. Large eyes, looking up, claimed his. Her painted eyebrows were shaped like moth wings. Her skin was flawless, cheeks tinted with vermilion. She said, softly, “She might become envious or aroused, your Kanlin woman, if we leave the door ajar. Would you like that? Would that add to your pleasure, sir? To imagine her looking in upon us from the dark?”

If, Tai thought, a little desperately, she was doing this on the instructions of her father, she was a very dutiful daughter.

“I … I have already been to the White Phoenix Pleasure House tonight,” he stammered.

Not the most poised or courteous thing to say. Her fingernails were also red, and they had golden extensions, a fashion he remembered from two years ago in Xinan. The fashion had reached this far west. That was … that was interesting, Tai thought.

It wasn’t, really. He wasn’t thinking very clearly.

Her breath was sweet, scented with cloves. She said, “I know where you were. They are said to be well trained, the girls there. Worth the cost to any man.” She cast her eyes down, as if shyly. “But it is not the same, you know it, my lord, as when you are with a well-born woman you have not bought. A woman who has risked a great deal to come to you, and waits to be taught what you know.”

Her right hand moved, and one of those golden fingernails stroked the back of his hand, and then, as if carelessly, moved slowly up the inside of his forearm. Tai shivered. He didn’t believe there was a great deal this one needed to be taught. Not by him, not by anyone.

He closed his eyes. Took a steadying breath and said, “I know this is foolish, but are you … could a daiji be within you?”

“That took longer than it should have!”

A third voice—from the small porch leading to the garden and the river.

Tai and the governor’s daughter turned, very quickly.

Wei Song stood framed in the space between the sliding doors. One sword was drawn, levelled at the girl.

“I can be a little dangerous,” he heard his Kanlin Warrior say calmly. She wasn’t smiling.

The other woman lifted shaped eyebrows, then turned, very deliberately, away from Song, as if from someone inconsequential.

“My name,” she said to Tai, “is Xu Liang. You know it. My father introduced us tonight. I am flattered you think me fair enough to be a daiji spirit, but it is an error. It would be another error if your woman-servant harmed me.”

It was said with the utmost composure. There really was something, Tai thought, about being well-born. You could call Kanlin Warriors woman-servants, for one thing.

It is an error. He glanced towards the porch. Song was biting her lower lip; he doubted she was aware of it. He was trying to remember if he had ever seen her look this uncertain before. It might have been diverting at any other time. She kept her sword levelled, but without force or conviction now, he saw.

He was still trying to define a proper target for his own rising outrage. Was there no privacy in a man’s life when he travelled with a guard? Or, for that matter, when some military leader encountered on the road decided to bind him with a daughter? Everyone could just wander into his room as they pleased, when they pleased, day or night, eliciting embarrassing fears of shape-changing spirits?

The daughter in question murmured, still not bothering to look at Song, “Did you not see my guards, Kanlin, in the garden? They rowed me here, to the water gate of the inn. I am surprised, and a little unhappy, that neither of them has killed you yet.”

“It would be difficult for them, my lady. They are unconscious, by the trees.”

“You attacked them?”

She turned to glare at Song. Her anger was pretty clearly unfeigned, Tai decided. Her hands were rigid at her sides.

“I found them that way,” Wei Song said, after a hesitation.

Lady Xu Liang’s mouth opened.

“They are not dead,” Song added. “No blows that I could see, no cups or flasks for poison, and they are breathing. If you have not been claimed by a fox-spirit, governor’s daughter, and used for her purposes, it may be … because something kept the daiji away.”

Tai had no idea what to make of this. Shape-shifting fox-women were the subject of erotic legends going back to the earliest dynasties. Their beauty impossibly alluring, their physical needs extreme. Men could be destroyed by them, but in such a manner, spun of world-changing desire, that the tales aroused fear and inchoate longings.

Further, not every man made the nighttime recipient of a daiji’s fierce hunger