Mei grinned in spite of herself. “That’s impressive—I mean, dangerous, Your Highness.” She quickly turned back to dusting the furniture.
The princess didn’t say anything for a few moments. But a slow grin had spread over her face, too. “Thank you, Mimi. You are very kind.”
Working at the Imperial Palace tired out the twins more than fieldwork and schoolwork with Grandpa and their parents ever did. The third night, they went to bed earlier than everyone else.
Then something strange happened when they woke up.
It was morning again, but the rooms and hallways were empty.
Mei blinked and looked around for the other maids, but no one was around. The same thing happened on the opposite side of the palace where Yun was bunked. He called for Chef Fan and the others, but the hallways were quiet as tombs.
The twins raced through their respective quarters and out the doors. The sun was unusually bright—blinding, in fact. The courtyards were empty, too.
“Hello?” they shouted.
Across the distance, each sibling’s call echoed as if they were right next to each other. They blinked. A moment later, they were standing across from each other, a mere few feet away.
The twins were too surprised and confused to say anything at first.
“What happened to you?” Mei finally said, eyeing the burn marks and what looked like bird pecks on Yun’s arms.
“Don’t ask,” grumbled Yun. He rubbed his hands, which were raw from salting and smacking animal meats and bones over the last few days. But his grumpiness quickly vanished, replaced by relief. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you for days.” He sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. “Are you wearing perfume?”
“It was Princess Zali’s. She let me try some. Where is everyone?”
“That’s what I was wondering.”
The desolate palace reminded the twins a little of the City of Ashes, except nothing was broken down here. In fact, everything seemed pristine, the colors brighter, the sky a shade of yellowish orange. Familiar wisps of colored smoke rose from the edges of their fields of vision, giving everything a distinctive blur, rather like Lotus’s dream chamber.
“Yun,” Mei gasped, making the connection aloud. “Are we...dreaming?”
“The exact same thing at the exact same time?” said Yun.
“It’s not as if it hasn’t happened to us before,” Mei pointed out.
“I know, I know. It just feels different this time.”
Mei understood what Yun was getting at. Until that moment, neither twin actually believed the other was truly there when they were dreaming. They’d always assumed that even if they were each dreaming the same thing, they were doing it independently.
Mei suddenly frowned. “Are you the real Yun?”
“What? Of course I am!”
Mei crossed her arms. “What’s Baba’s favorite food?”
“Come on, Mei, are you serious right now?”
“What’s his favorite food?”
“Fried dumplings!”
“And Mama’s is pickled cucumbers. All right, so you’re real, more or less.”
“That’s...interesting, to say the least,” said Yun. He knelt to inspect a fluttering flower. The blue petals opened and closed, as if winking. The flower’s behavior seemed to make perfect sense. (That was the peculiar thing about dreams, how they feel perfectly normal even if you’re being chased by a flying dragon.)
“Yes. And more importantly, we can communicate at last, after days apart! Hurry, before we wake up. Where have you been?”
Yun shared his stories of what had passed the last few days. As he did, the garden vanished. The twins found they were now standing in the imperial kitchen, next to the unlit hearths.
Then, when Mei told Yun her stories of Princess Zali, the kitchen was replaced by the princess’s quarters, the colors in the bright room unusually muted. The yellow drapes over her bed were almost gray, the pieces of furniture mere shadows, as if someone had washed the colors out of them.
Their tales seemed almost like a dream itself, the fact they’d broken into the Imperial City and infiltrated its lower ranks. They laughed, sighed, and commiserated. When the subject of Fu-Fu came up, both twins rolled their eyes.
“He comes to bother the princess and me several times a day,” Mei complained.
“He keeps asking me to do ridiculous tasks!” responded Yun. “I should’ve beaten him up when we had the chance.”
“You’ve never beaten up anyone in your life.”
“I surely could’ve, if not for the fact I choose to rise above such immature behavior.”
“Sure,” said Mei. “Well, don’t worry, we’ll get our stuff back somehow. The important thing is, what’s our next move?”
“We have three days until Grandpa arrives,” said Yun. “I haven’t picked up any information about the City of Ashes by conversing or eavesdropping, so I think at this point I must resort to more aggressive tactics. I have some ideas on how to get a look at the records. They’re rather complicated—”
“I have an idea too,” Mei interrupted. “And it’s rather simple. I’ll ask Princess Zali to help us.”
Yun’s jaw dropped. “Are you out of your mind?”
“She’s smart and capable and she’s read about the City of Ashes. When I mentioned the Noble General, she seemed to know all about him.” Mei shrugged, not quite knowing how to explain. “I just have a good feeling about her.”
“You can’t,” argued Yun. “It’s not safe to trust people here.” He left out the part about how he’d accidentally revealed his own name to Chef Fan.
“We have to take a few risks if we’re going to get anywhere, Yun. The important question is, Can we try to meet tomorrow when we’re actually awake? Who knows how long this dream is going to last, or if it’ll happen again.”
“Good idea. The chefs were talking earlier about how there’s a show for the palace children tomorrow evening after dinner.”
“Where?” asked Mei, remembering Fu-Fu had mentioned something about the event, too.
“I don’t know. But we could follow the crowd and meet backstage. I bet there will be lots of servants around. We wouldn’t stick out.”
“Agreed.”
The twins were silent for a few moments as they stared at the clouds in the hazy sky. One of them looked oddly like the magic cloud the Jade Rabbit had conjured. In the back of their minds floated the pressing question, What if I’m the only one dreaming this? In the physical world, it was easy to tell what was real and what was in their imagination. In the dream world, that distinction was blurred.
“I wish Grandpa was here to answer our questions,” Mei finally said. “I wish he could explain to us more about what’s going on. With the fog. And the mooncakes. And this dream, and how we’re able to talk to each other as if we were awake. As if this were...real.”
“I guess before this, we never really had a need to talk to each other in our dreams,” suggested Yun. “We were always together. We saw each other every day.”
“Maybe,” said Mei, frowning. “Most of all, I wish Grandpa didn’t lie to us about our parents.”
“He was trying to protect us,” said Yun gently. “Plus, he didn’t really know what had happened to our parents any more than we did, remember?”
“But grown-ups are supposed to know everything.”
“They don’t. They make mistakes just like us. They just hide it better.”
“True...” agreed Mei.
When the twins blinked again, they were back in their beds. It was the middle of the night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
十五
A Royal Act
Dreams often fade away when you wake up. Many people have trouble remembering any of their dreams from the night before. Dreams aren’t part of the physical world, after all.
When the twins woke up the next morning, however, their dream—and their plan to meet—stood out vividly in their minds. They comp
leted their tasks anxiously throughout the day. Finally, after dinnertime, they followed the palace children and their caretakers to the evening’s spectacle, which was held in an enormous theater.
Despite the crowd, the twins spotted each other backstage immediately and ran toward one another.
“Did we have the—” began Yun.
“—same dream?” finished Mei.
The twins were stunned. Something wondrous had happened, something that seemed impossible, yet to what end, they weren’t quite sure. They thought of the Jade Rabbit’s words about the dream world, and what it meant now that they had seemingly traveled through it consciously together the night before.
Before they could continue their conversation, several servants abruptly ushered the twins into a dressing room. Men in elaborate cloaks and painted faces roamed the space, tying up their hair and putting on makeup. A musician played the erhu, drawing out long, elegant, forlorn notes from the two-stringed instrument.
“You can’t go onstage without costumes,” said a performer carrying a tasseled broadsword. “Here, try these.” He tossed the twins a pair of itchy costume robes—tacky green with peacock feathers for Mei, bright red the shade of Madam Hu’s lipstick for Yun.
Bewildered, the twins hurried to explain they weren’t actors. They started to head back out when the seemingly ever-present crane-like man stepped in front of them and blocked their path.
“As you will recall, earlier this week Master Fu-Fu requested the two of you perform in the show tonight,” he said, crossing his arms. “In fact, he’s pestered me about it daily.”
“You mean we have to go onstage?” Yun said, his face pale.
“We don’t know how to act,” Mei tried to explain.
“That sounds like your problem.” The crane man snapped his fingers at a nearby performer whose face had been painted into a green-and-red scowl. “Keep an eye on them so they don’t sneak out. I have better things to do tonight than to babysit whiny servants.”
After he left, the green-and-red man tried to cheer the twins up. “It’s a variety show for the royal children,” he said. “Anything goes! Tell a story or sing a song.”
Mei and Yun knew plenty of stories from Grandpa, and some from their parents. Somehow, Mei and Yun didn’t think this particular crowd would appreciate a simple story without singing or dancing. And the only songs the twins knew were ones they’d learned as toddlers, tunes that were full of clapping hands and nonsensical rhymes about farm animals. The twins had not met any professional actors in their life at the village. They’d heard of traveling acting troupes, but had never seen one in person.
“Acting’s not that hard, either,” continued the performer. “I’ve been doing it for years. There is something magical about acting. An individual steps into character and becomes absolutely anything they want, be it a dragon rider, a demon, a decrepit tree. The timid are suddenly bold, the fearless suddenly meek. Combine acting with storytelling and music, and you get hours of entertainment that enchants a crowd.”
“A crowd,” muttered Yun, looking queasy.
“Come on, it might not be that bad,” urged Mei. She peeked behind the velvet curtain at the audience. There were at least a hundred people, perhaps thirty of them children. She spotted Fu-Fu waiting impatiently in the front row, wielding his ever-present bamboo stick.
“No way.” Yun shook his head vigorously. “We need to remain inconspicuous, keep a low profile. Going onstage is the opposite of that!”
“Unfortunately, we might get arrested if we don’t go onstage,” Mei responded grimly. A small, sleepy toddler in the second row had caught her attention. There appeared to be a faint, soft blue mist forming above the toddler’s head. The mist drifted over the nearby audience members before vanishing, the way smoke from a match disperses into thin air. Something about the familiar color reassured Mei.
She walked over to a trunk holding miscellaneous props. It held all sorts of interesting and odd objects: hoops, matches, wooden puzzle boxes, fake swords, and gaudy necklaces only someone like Madam Hu would wear. She dug through the trunk, then took out two wooden toy swords. “How about we duel for the audience?” she suggested. The swords weren’t real, but at least they were an upgrade from the branches they normally used.
“No thanks,” Yun said flatly.
Mei rummaged the trunk and extracted a small brown pouch. “I wonder what this is?”
She pulled back the drawstring on the pouch. An explosion of gold glitter filled the air.
“On second thought,” she said, coughing, “maybe we can just read a nice poem.”
“You won’t find any at the palace,” said the green-and-red-faced performer. “Written poems are hard to come by around here.”
“Why’s that?” Yun asked.
The elderly actor took a deep breath. “Well, as the story goes, there once was a high official from decades ago who hated poets with a passion. Said poems were ‘dangerous.’ He tried to burn all the poetry scrolls and books he could find, and even went so far as to suggest to the previous emperor that the palace’s entire poetry collection be destroyed.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Yun. “Our fath—someone we know was a scholar here, and he never mentioned that the palace’s poetry had been destroyed.”
“That’s because the previous emperor did the exact opposite,” said the actor with a wink. “He had the poetry safeguarded in the Imperial Library, just in case the official got any ideas. I guess his son hasn’t remembered to bring it back out again since he ascended the throne. I hope he will one day, though.”
“That high official sounds awful,” said Mei.
“Oh, yes, he was an absurd fellow. You know how the famous saying goes: Better to be a salamander than a babbling commander.”
“I’d never heard that until a few days ago,” said Yun, who knew many famous quotes.
“Oh, maybe it’s just a saying around here in the palace. You young ones wouldn’t have any reason to know this, but it refers to that particular official. He only spoke in riddles until the end of his life.”
At those words, Mei’s suspicions were confirmed. She pulled her brother aside and quietly relayed what Princess Zali had told her about the Noble General.
Yun looked stunned. “Impossible.”
“The official’s long dead now,” said the actor with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Not a lot of people remember him anymore. I only knew of him briefly when I was younger.”
Mei and Yun glanced at each other. This could be a chance for information—maybe a big one.
“What else do you remember, exactly?” Yun asked, trying to keep calm.
“About the babbling commander? Well...he was not well-liked in his time. He was pushy and rude, and, as I understand it, he liked to blackmail people. He hadn’t always spoken in riddles—that was the odd thing. The riddles came out of nowhere....After that, he spent his later years in hiding.”
“Hiding?” Mei repeated.
“Yes, hiding. Barricaded himself in his office over in the palace’s military wing. People say he went off the deep end.”
“From what I hear, he at least had excellent penmanship,” said a voice behind the twins. They turned to see the performer with the broadsword standing nearby. He smiled and said, “My grandfather was a palace messenger. He told me all about his job when I was growing up, and I remember him talking about that official. The official went by some pompous name—the General Noble or something like that. Apparently, he’d write out orders on pieces of paper.”
“Huh,” said the twins.
“Makes sense, doesn’t it, if that’s the only way you can communicate? No one could understand him otherwise, when the riddling got bad. Almost makes you feel sorry for the man.”
“Tough luck,” agreed the first performer. “Anyhow, I wish we could see all those poems that got locked away. I’ll bet we could create a lot of good performances around them.”
“Why don’t you ask for them to
be brought out?” asked Yun. “It’s been years and years.”
“Because I’m just a lowly performer,” said the actor, confused.
“We can’t simply ask the emperor to do something,” explained the broadsword performer. “People like us have very little influence in the palace.”
“Everyone’s voice is valuable,” argued Yun. “They are all necessary for a functional society—”
“First-act jugglers in position!” a servant suddenly called. “The show begins in three...two...one!”
Yun looked at Mei in alarm. “What are we going to do again, exactly?”
Mei also seemed nervous. “We’ll just have to wing it, I guess.”
“Improvisation, I love it!” the actor said to the twins with a wink. “Good luck. No offense, you’re going to need it. Children are some of the sharpest critics in the world. You can fool an adult, but you can’t fool a kid!”
Out in the palace theater, the lanterns dimmed, and the audience fell silent. Mostly silent. The younger children, especially those under the age of four, had yet to master the art of sitting still and not giggling every five seconds.
A few times a year, the imperial court held an evening show for all the children at the palace. One of the emperor’s officials had explained it was held so that the young minds “could develop a deep, curated appreciation for the fine art of theater,” but some of the older children suspected the show was likely just to keep them entertained while the servants inspected their quarters for stolen treasures and contraband. (Indeed, the year before, one of the kids found that his hidden stash of firecrackers went missing, and the next morning the palace guards had held an impromptu fireworks display.)
Fu-Fu sat on his velvet seat cushion in the front row with a bored expression. The nine-year-old didn’t enjoy sitting still for too long. His arms and legs were always jittery, itching to climb a pillar or to run down a long corridor looking for trouble. He loved finding trouble: stealing a mooncake, smearing dirt on the carpets, sneaking somewhere he shouldn’t. Trouble was fun. Everything else was so boring.
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