Under Heaven

turned compliment.

Almost. She said, “You never answered about your brother, did you? Clever man. You might survive at court. They tried to kill you?”

They. Such a dangerous word.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“Twice?”

He nodded again. The palace would have known this several nights ago. Xu Bihai had written, the commander at Iron Gate had sent word. She would know what the Ta-Ming knew.

“Twice, that I know about,” he said.

“Was it Roshan?”

Terrifyingly direct. This was no girl-woman seduced by a turn of phrase. But he could sense apprehension, as she waited for his reply. There was, he thought, a reason she’d come to speak with him alone. This might be it.

“No,” said Tai. “I am certain it wasn’t.”

“He persuaded you of that yesterday?”

This had become a precise interrogation—amid silk and scent, with a bare foot against his thigh.

He had been certain that a report of yesterday’s encounter in the carriage by the road would reach the court, but the speed of it made him realize something, belatedly: she’d have had to travel half the night from Ma-wai to be here now. He calculated distances quickly. She’d have left almost as soon as word came of his meeting with An Li.

He didn’t know what to make of that. He had never been part of the court, never even near it. He was coming from two years of solitude beyond Iron Gate.

“He did persuade me, illustrious lady.”

“You believe what he told you was true?”

“I do.”

She sighed. He couldn’t interpret that. It might have been relief.

What he didn’t say, yet, was that he knew that what Roshan had told him was true because he’d already known who had tried to kill him in the west—Spring Rain had risked her life so he could know this.

He was going to need to see her.

Jian said, “Because An Li can order men killed without a thought.”

“I have no reason to doubt it, illustrious lady.” He chose his words carefully.

She smiled slightly, lips together, noting his caution. “But he still made you believe him.”

Tai nodded again. “Yes, my lady.”

He didn’t know if she wanted him to say more. It crossed his mind to consider that this questioning was being done here and in this way by a woman, the emperor’s dancer-love, his late-in-life dream of eternity.

It came to Tai that this was a part of why the Ninth Dynasty might be as precarious as it was dazzling. Why Sima Zian had said what he’d said yesterday: I feel chaos coming.

This matchless creature across from him, lovely as a legend, was the cousin of the first minister and the supporter (the adopting mother!) of the man who was his rival, and she had the trust and passion of an emperor who wanted to live forever because of her.

The balance of Kitai—of the known world—might be reclining across from him. It was, Tai thought, a great burden to lay upon slender shoulders.

He sat there, the sedan chair moving steadily along the road, breathing perfume in an enclosed, intimate place removed from the ten thousand noises of the world, and he waited for the next question. The one that could plunge him—all of them—into the chaos Zian feared.

It wasn’t Roshan? Who was it, then? she was going to ask him.

She never did. Either she knew already, or she was afraid to know, or to have it said aloud. Be brought into the world, compelling a response. Her hand lifted from his calf where it had been resting again. She selected a lychee from a bowl beside her, peeled it expertly.

She extended it towards him.

“Please,” said Wen Jian.

Tai took the ripe, slippery fruit from her fingers. It tasted like the south, and summer, like memories of sweetness lost.

That last, he realized, was what he was feeling. Something slipping away, almost gone. Yesterday’s encounter by the road and now this one. Both of them coming to meet him on the way. Entirely different encounters but also the same at their core. Power approaching, to know what he was going to do. Needing to know, because power always needed that—knowledge was how power preserved itself, or tried.

He had set out from a mountain bowl, the battleground his father had never left behind, determined to reach Xinan to do … to do what, precisely?

He had never decided, he’d been moving too fast.

Kill a man, he’d told the poet yesterday, as an answer for Yan’s death. But Xin Lun was dead already. No fault of Tai’s, no achievement of his, no credit to his name with Yan’s ghost by the lake. And Lun had only been an instrument.

What else? What else had he been racing here to do, straight down the imperial road past the cut-off south that could have taken him home? Deal with the horses, somehow, that life-claiming gift.

Life-claiming. The thought reverberated strangely in his mind. Tai hadn’t lived a life where enemies, on a murderous scale, had played any kind of role. But the first minister wanted him dead. On a whim, most likely. Because he could. Wen Zhou, who was this woman’s kin, holding office because of her.

He looked at Jian, across from him. She had peeled her own lychee and, as he gazed, placed it delicately between her front teeth and bit down. Tai shook his head, then smiled. He had to smile, she was so obviously playing with her own desirability.

“Oh, good!” she said. She licked her lips, glistening with the fruit. “This will be a tedious journey if you are serious all the time.”

The back and forth of it, he thought. Hard questions, ripe fruit bitten, a slow tongue tracing wet lips, a foot or fingers touching him, conjuring desire. Then the questions would come again.

In that moment, Tai arrived at a decision. It seemed obvious enough, and it had the virtue of simplicity. He’d only needed to finally grasp something: that he could never be subtle enough to match those waiting for him. He didn’t have time to know enough, or gain an awareness of relationships, at a level that would let him move with these men and women to their music. He wouldn’t even hear the notes they heard.

He wasn’t able to probe for what they knew or wanted, play the game of words spoken and unspoken with the court and the higher civil servants and even some of the governors, in and around the Ta-Ming Palace and the emperor.

He would be among them today. And he couldn’t learn that rhythm, not in the time he had. So he wouldn’t even try. He’d go another way, like a holy wanderer of the Sacred Path choosing at a fork in the road, following his own truth, a hermit laughing in the mountains.

Tai drew a breath. He said, “I offered the horses to Governor An yesterday.”

She stared, sat up straighter. Carefully put down an unpeeled lychee she’d just picked from the bowl.

“All of them?”

He nodded. “But I had a condition, and he declined.”

“An Li rejected two hundred and fifty Sardian horses?”

“I said they were his if he brought my sister back from the Bogu. He said he could not do it. The horses are yours, illustrious lady, if you can do this.”

“All of them?”

He nodded again. She was clearly shaken. Roshan had been, as well.

“I don’t … Is she your lover, your sister?”

He could not allow himself to be offended. This was the court. Such thoughts would occur to people. He shook his head. “Nothing like that. This is to honour my father as much as anything. He would never have let my