by S. D. Tower
Even I could barely keep up with him. Halis Geray sometimes shook his head and grumbled, but I could see—though I never said it—that the student had overtaken the master.
I gave Terem as much help as I could, but I still wanted something to do on my own, besides be patroness of the Thousand Lilies Theater and the like. One moming, as we ate breakfast in the Opal Dining Room, I told him this.
“Hm. I do have an idea. I've been thinking about it for a while. Halis likes it.”
“Oh, good. Does that mean I will?”
“You might.” He pushed his plate to one side, waved the two servants out of the room, and put his elbows on the table. I perked up. This suggested something interesting.
“You’re very skilled,” he said, “at the profession Nilang and her instructors taught. You are extremely quick-witted and you can make people follow you.”
“All this is true,” I said modestly.
“Halis has finally brought himself to admit how inept his spies were, compared to the Despotana’s. He’s decided that a school like Three Springs would be very useful for training agents, not only young women but young men. But he needs someone knowledgeable to be in charge of it.”
“Nilang?” She’d extracted her daughter safely from her homeland, aided by lavish bribes provided by Terem, and now lived quietly in Kuijain. The faithful Master Aa and the others were still with her.
“That had occurred to me. However, Halis is very badly overworked these days, and within a year I want all secret activities transferred to the control of the palace. Along with that would come the school, which you and Nilang would have already organized. You’d be in charge, with her as your deputy.”
“Me?” I exclaimed. “A spymistress?”
“Well, why not? Your experience and talents are too great to waste.”
“But what sort of people would let their children enter such a profession?”
“There are more than enough foundlings in the world these days, sadly enough. Do as Makina did with the School of Serene Repose, but give the students a real choice and don’t force them into the trade—give them another one if they want it. And you could call on some of the girls from Three Springs. They might be willing to help. Why not put their abilities to the best use?”
I considered this. I knew where most of my former sisters were, for Halis had spent the past year digging them out of their hiding places. I’d prevented him from punishing them, however, because there was no point in it. The few whom Nilang considered dangerous had been exiled to Abaris or the archipelagoes, but with Mother dead, most of them seemed lost and sad, not vengeful. I’d seen to it that they took up their trades again, for real this time.
But now I imagined them as they had been in the old days: beautiful Kidrin, saucy Tulay, Temile with her lisp, and all the others I’d known in the Midnight School: scattered now, and as alone in the world as they had been before Mother found them.
But I could have some of them back. Bring them together in Seyhan. Make a family of them again.
“All right,” I answered. “I’ll do it.”
Epilogue
The spring sun is warm. I gaze across the flowery expanse of the school gardens, where the students stand in expectant rows. They inspect me carefully, thinking perhaps that the Dowager Empress is too old and shortsighted to see their quick darting glances. But there is nothing wrong with my eyes.
Or with my hearing, happily, because the younger students will soon sing for me, and then the graduates will come up to my dais for their seal rings. Until then, I can sit in the warmth, ignore the speeches of the tutors and tutoresses, and gaze across the river to Stone Flower Hill, where the imperial palace gleams in the sunlight. There, on the great dais that Terem and I ascended long ago, our son sits in the thirteenth year of his reign. And Terem, whom I loved all the days of my life, lies now under his tall green mound at the Eternal Mercy Gate, where I will, I suppose, soon join him.
I look down at my hands. The brown spots on my skin are many, one spot for every summer of my age, perhaps, although I have never bothered to count. I have outlived everyone I knew in my youth, from actresses to Despots. But there are no Despots anymore; the Emperor rules north of the Pearl and south of it, too, from the Juren Gap to the sea, just as Terem and I dreamed so many years ago.
I still, sometimes, disbelieve my life. How could I have imagined, when the palace sequina carried me toward my first meeting with the Sun Lord, that I was to become an Empress and my son an Emperor? Or that I would become, like Makina Seval, Mother Midnight? For that, by some odd coincidence, is what my students call me, when they think I cannot hear.
The speeches have ended. I smile at the Music Tutoress and incline my head. She raises her arms, and there on the grass in the spring sunlight, like small bright birds in the wilderness, the children begin to sing.