worked upon it. The walls were sandalwood, the floor was marble.
Jian smiled at his screen when she walked in with her steward—a different man from the one this morning. (The one this morning was probably dead by now.) It was not, Tai thought, the smile she’d offered when they were alone on the road.
He’d asked, just before getting out to ride Dynlal the rest of the way, if she’d help him here at court.
This wasn’t about helping him, he decided. He might be wrong, but it didn’t feel that way. He felt cowardly sitting here. He wanted to confront Wen Zhou and his brother. He had a quick, clean image of drawing swords with them. Liu was hopeless with a blade. Zhou was likely a match for Tai, or more than that. It was an idle thought: no weapons were allowed here. He’d been made to surrender his when they arrived.
Seen through the screen, Jian looked very different: cooler, more serene, with a gravity that had not existed (could not exist) while she reclined in a perfumed sedan chair, peeling lychees, curving a bare foot against his thigh.
She was in green as well, with imperial phoenixes in the same pale yellow as his own dragons. He wondered if that meant something. Her hair was as before: the widely imitated, side-slipping style. It could do things to a man, looking at her.
There was a small, discreet door behind him. He could get up right now and walk out—if the door wasn’t barred. He wondered if it was. He wondered if there was a door behind the other painted screen, set diagonally to this one against the same wall, the two of them framing a space for Wen Jian and her friends, at Ma-wai, in springtime.
He stopped wondering about such things when Jian seated herself on a platform in the centre of the chamber, accepted a cup from the steward, and gestured for her guests to be admitted.
Tall doors opened. A number of men came in, no women. Jian was the only woman in the room. Even the servants, pouring wine into jade cups, were men. There were no musicians.
Among the arrivals was Sima Zian. A surprise. The poet was properly dressed and groomed, with a dark hat and his hair neatly pinned. His expression was alert, amused, as ever. Tai registered this, but didn’t look at him for long. His attention was pulled away. Not to the first minister, though Wen Zhou had also entered the room.
Hidden, silent, afraid, and fighting anger, Tai looked at his older brother for the first time in two years.
Liu had gained weight, it showed in his face, but he was otherwise unchanged. Smaller than Tai, softer. In a mandarin’s rich, sober black silk, with the dark-red belt of highest rank and symbolic key at his waist, he entered discreetly, bowed formally, took a place behind Wen Zhou, a little to one side.
Tai was staring at him. He couldn’t stop. Fear, and fury.
He recognized another of those who entered: the imperial heir. Another surprise, if Jian intended anything serious today. Prince Shinzu was notorious for sensuous luxury, though seldom seen in the city, and never in the North District.
Women were brought to him. He didn’t go to them. He was an even bigger man than the first minister, affecting a short beard, but wider than the mandarin fashion. He already carried a cup of wine, Tai saw. Scanning the room, from a position he took near an open window, the prince smiled at Zian, who bowed, and smiled cheerfully back.
Jian waited until her guests had wine, then spoke her first words to her cousin: inviting a poem, entertainment.
From behind his screen, Tai saw Zhou offer his confident, lazy smile. “We retain people to offer poetry, cousin. You ask the one man here whose effort would surely not amuse you.”
“But surely he will make an effort? If only to please me?” Tai could hear the sly smile in her words.
“I love you too much for that,” said Zhou. One man laughed appreciatively. Tai couldn’t see who it was. Wen Zhou added, “And we seem to have, for some reason or other, a poet among us. Let
A fair question: the poet had left the city under one of his usual clouds and it had to do with Jian and a poem. The Banished Immortal, as in heaven so on earth. That was the way the stories ran.
Jian only smiled. She had, Tai was realizing, more than a dozen ways of smiling. This one was closer to the cat with a mouse he’d sensed in the sedan chair. It occurred to him that she wasn’t really pursuing amusement here. He wondered if Zhou knew that yet.
He shivered suddenly. Wasn’t sure why. In the tales his nursemaid used to tell, you shivered that way when someone was walking across the ground where your grave would one day lie. If you never shivered so, she used to say, you were doomed to die in water, or lie unburied.
His brother knew those same stories from the same source. Liu knew the same orchard fruits, the same tree-swing in the farthest garden, stream for fishing or swimming, paulownia leaves on the path all at once in autumn, the same teachers, sunsets, birds returning at winter’s end, the same lightning-riven summer storms of childhood in a room they’d shared, listening for thunder.
“I am afraid to have Master Sima offer any lines after the last ones he gave us in the Ta-Ming,” said the Precious Consort. “A poem about an ancient emperor and his beloved.” She looked at the poet, and did not smile.
“It is a grief to my soul, and will last all my days, if anything your servant has ever written brings you or the Son of Heaven other than pleasure,” Sima Zian said earnestly.
“Well,” said the prime minister, grinning, “a number of them have failed to bring
Zian looked at him. He bowed again. “Some griefs,” he murmured, “we learn to expect in life.”
It was Jian who laughed this time. She clapped her hands. “Cousin, cousin,” she cried, “never play at words with a poet! Don’t you know that?”
Wen Zhou flushed. Tai was fighting an impulse to grin.
“I’d have thought a disgraced poet without rank or office would be the one who needed to be careful,” the first minister said coldly.
Tai looked instinctively to his brother. He had spent a good deal of his childhood looking at Liu, trying to read what he might be thinking. Liu’s face was impassive but his watchful eyes went from the woman to the poet, then quickly to the man who—unexpectedly—broke the ensuing silence.
“There are many ways of measuring rank, as the Cho Master has taught,” said Prince Shinzu quietly. “On the matter of taking care, as it happens, I have a question of my own for the first minister. Though I fear to interrupt our dear Jian’s pleasures.”
“You, of all men, need never fear doing so,” said Wen Jian, prettily.
Tai had no idea how to interpret that. Or the manner of the prince, leaning against the wall by a window, a cup held so casually it almost spilled its wine. Shinzu’s voice was more crisp than Tai had expected. He’d never actually heard the heir speak. He only knew the tales.
“I am, of course, at your service, illustrious lord.” Wen Zhou bowed.
He had to, of course. Tai didn’t think it pleased him. Already, from his place of concealment, he was exhausted trying to trace the lines of connection and tension here, read surface meaning, let alone what lay beneath.
“I am grateful,” said the prince.
He sipped his wine. Gestured to a servant, waited for the cup to be refilled. The room waited with him. When the servant had withdrawn, Shinzu leaned back again, at ease. He looked at Wen Zhou.
“What have you been doing with An Li?” he asked.
Behind his screen, Tai found himself breathing carefully.
“My lord, you invite a discussion of state policy here?” Zhou looked pointedly at the poet and then at two or three other men in the room.
“I do,” said Shinzu calmly. “Among other things, I would like to know what state policy
There was another silence. Did the emperor’s heir have the right to demand this of a prime minister? Tai had no idea.
