by Alyc Helms
“Whew.” I collapsed on a bench and motioned for her to join me. She did, looking nonplussed. Whirlwind Missy, at your service. “You look almost as awful as I felt during the Zi Gong Hu.”
“I do?” Slender fingers flew to check her perfectly-coifed russet hair. If I took myself more seriously, I would have been insulted. Stupid non-aging friends being prettier than me. I chuckled away any jealousy.
“No. Not at all. You look perfect. You just seemed anxious. I figured you could use a break before you found a convenient bell-tower.”
She sighed and slumped. Since I’d never seen her with anything other than perfect poise, my alarm-meter jumped to Code Mauve.
“I should have no fear of this,” she said. “I’ve proven myself. I’ve passed all the trials. I’ve done this before!” She slapped her palm against stone, then sighed and closed her eyes. “Shui Yin says that I am being silly and just want more attention–”
“Whoa. He said that? That is way out of line.” I glanced around, hoping for his smirking face to appear so I could smack him one. She opened her mouth to defend the rogue, but I silenced her by taking her hands and given them a stern shake.
“Si Wei, it’s all right to be nervous. You have every reason to be nervous. Not because you don’t deserve this or because anything’s going to go wrong. You do and it’s not. It’s just that the last time you didn’t have anything to prove. You’d done the time, passed the trials, and it was all gravy. This time, people are watching you. Maybe they haven’t questioned you for a century, but this is like a big neon sign reminding them that you used to be dangerous. They’re going to be sizing you up, looking for signs they missed last time. It sucks, but there it is. But you know what?”
“What?” Her butt wasn’t doing the four-tailed mambo anymore. Maybe she’d just needed reassuring that she wasn’t crazy.
“I’m not looking at you like that. And since I’m the most important person here, that’s all that matters.”
“You?” She sputtered at my outrageous claim, a grin tugging at her lips. “I think there might be some who would argue with that.”
“Let them.” I squared my shoulders and lifted my nose. “I’m Lung Xin Niang…” I deflated. “OK, well, provisionally until Lung Tian unbunches his panties. Just give it another few centuries.”
She shook her head, but her willow-strong posture had returned. She was looking lovelier and more composed by the second. This was a good thing because I had some curiosities that needed sating.
“So, this whole gaining your fifth tail and becoming Wu Wei… is it, like, a surgical procedure, or do we actually get to play ‘pin the tail on the huxian’?”
I didn’t even try to duck her swipe.
* * *
For all Si Wei’s anxiety, the ceremony went off without a hitch. It was simple and beautiful, without a lot of the elaborate pomp I’d come to expect from the various traditional Chinese rituals I’d seen. Russet-furred foxes and russet-haired women filled the temple. Many of them wore masks, and most of them wore robes of various shades of russet silk. If I squinted just right I could make out the blur of white-tipped tails. I stopped squinting when Jian Huo reprimanded our daughter for doing the same thing. Apparently it was rude. Who knew?
Jiu Wei stood out in robes of palest cream, her silver hair flowing free around her. She anointed Si Wei with water from a silver basin, while Si Wei’s sister-foxes disrobed her, replacing the russet silk with robes a shade lighter. Then Jiu Wei led her into a chamber beyond the main temple, all the fox-women following behind. The guests were left to our own devices.
“That’s it?” Mei Shen looked around, confused. The ceremony was over before she could start fidgeting, which said a lot about its brevity.
“No.” Mian Zi’s response held the all-knowing disgust that only a sibling could muster. “The ceremony continues for the rest of the night, with each fox maiden saluting Si Wei – now Wu Wei – and bringing her to her pleasure in turn.”
The hall had emptied out, so there was only our little group left to gape at my son in shock.
Shui Yin collected himself the quickest. “R–r– really?” he sputtered.
“Nuh-uh,” was Mei Shen’s skeptical rebuttal.
“Where did you learn that?” Jian Huo’s tone, curious but not surprised, clued me to the possibility that all-night lesbian fox orgies might not be a factoid that my son had pulled out of nowhere.
I tamped down on my appalled shock and went for dire motherly suspicion. “Yes. Where did you learn that?”
Mian Zi shrugged. “Everyone knows that.”
I got the impression that his interest in the topic had only ever been academic, not prurient. He slid off the bench and followed his sister, who had already grown bored with the conversation and was running toward the gardens. That left the three adults glancing between each other, and the formerly innocuous-looking doorway at the rear of the temple, with renewed interest. Shui Yin still sported a shell-shocked expression, and I couldn’t help but smirk.
“I didn’t know that.” He turned to us, “Did you know that?”
“Of course.” Jian Huo’s smirk matched my own. He set a hand at the small of my back to escort me out to the gardens. Shui Yin was an amateur rogue compared to his brother. “Didn’t you hear Mian Zi? Everyone knows that.”
* * *
It took forever to coax the children to sleep. The day had been a long one, what with the excitement of the flight and the requirement to be on their best behavior. Their eyes were over-bright and their imaginations too active. Their latest ploy – after the usual requests for water, snacks, stories, songs, windows open, windows closed, and questions about lesbian fox orgies that I was not going to answer – was to tell me that there was something shifty about the nurse Jiu Wei had provided.
“She was clipping her toenails just before you came in. I heard her. She’s inviting ghosts to come and kill us in our sleep,” Mei Shen said. I didn’t want to discount the superstition, but I also knew my daughter’s penchant for tall-tales and exaggeration.
“Was she?” I pretended concern but glanced at Mian Zi, who ran every statement he made through a rigorous process of logic.
“Maybe,” he hemmed, trying to give his sister the benefit of the doubt. “I was nearly asleep. But Mei Shen wouldn’t lie about something like that. And the nurse is foreign. Who knows what primitive magic she might have?”
My son, the budding racist. I was going to have to work on that cultural elitism – not easy, when all the spirits he met were one step away from worshipping the twins as godlings. Still, it was odd that a foreign spirit should be taking care of them. I stole a quick glance at the nurse, who sat in a chair near the brazier, carving a bit of wood with a dull-looking knife.
“Excuse me?” The old woman glanced up when I spoke to her. Sure enough, her apple-granny features had a distinct Western cast. “How long have you worked in Jiu Wei’s house?”
“Not long my Lady,” the old woman responded. Points against her for that, but at least she was honest about it, “Si – Wu Wei brought me here to care for your children. We are old friends.” And opinion swung back in the nurse’s favor. The fox-girl would never bring harm to me or my children. I nodded thanks to the old woman and turned back to Mei Shen, whose chin was jutted out as though her point had been proven.
“There, you see! You see! She said ‘si’. Everyone knows that is an ill-omen. It means death.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Everyone knows that was Wu Wei’s name until a few hours ago. It’s not her fault that the number four is ill-omened.” Maybe my first instincts were correct, and this was another bedtime-resistance ploy. Mian Zi was already out, his serious little frown softened into a snoring rosebud. However, soothing Mei Shen’s worry would be no small task. I considered for a moment, then reached into the folds of my robe and pulled out a package wrapped in red, green, and gold silk.
“Here.” I placed the package on her lap. “Open it. I was going
to give them to Wu Wei as a gift, but I don’t think she’d mind if you wore them tonight. They’ll protect you from ghosts and death-omens and evil nannies.”
Mei Shen gasped at the pair of carved jade combs in the package. I took one from her and fixed it in her hair. She kept the other clenched in her fist. “There. Is that better?”
Mei Shen nodded. It was grudging, but already her eyes were unfocusing. For all her worry and resistance, she was as exhausted as her brother.
“Good. Then sleep tight. And don’t worry, Maybug. I would never let anything harm you.” I tucked the covers around her chest, kissed her on the forehead, and bid the nurse goodnight on my way out.
The hallways of Jiu Wei’s temple were unfamiliar, but I managed to find my way from the nursery back to our rooms. I found Jian Huo there with Shui Yin, who had decided that he was not cool with the all-night lesbian fox orgy portion of the ceremony. He was deep in his cups and declaring a pox on all red-haired temptresses.
“I hope that doesn’t include me. I’d hate to have a pox. Of course, if I’m not included then I think my feelings will be hurt. Don’t I rate high enough to be a temptress anymore?”
Shui Yin glared at me for several moments before grabbing his wine bottle and stalking off, muttering that know-it-all human red-haired temptresses were the worst of the lot. I laughed. Tormenting him was such fun.
“Did the children go down all right?” Jian Huo pulled me onto the low-backed couch. I nestled into his arms. “I was on my way to join you, but my brother insisted on stopping by to inform me what a trial fox-women are – as if I didn’t know myself – and how lucky I am to have met a sweet and biddable woman. The wine seems to be affecting his memory.”
“Biddable? He actually called me biddable!” I made a mock move to rise and hunt down the offender, but Jian Huo pulled me back.
“No you don’t. You’ve done enough, encouraging them as you have. I won’t have you adding to his misery.”
I pouted at being foiled, but he kissed it away and settled me more firmly on top of him. I propped myself up on my elbows so I could continue babbling at him. Resigned to this from long experience, Jian Huo ignored me in favor of undoing my robes.
“He really does seem bothered by it, doesn’t he? I wouldn’t have expected it.” I paused and Jian Huo hmphed, freeing me to continue. “I mean, sure, they’ve been together for over a decade, but they always seemed so casual.” I knew from long conversations over tea and plum wine that the fox-girl’s feelings were anything but casual, but I also knew from observation that they had never seemed to be fully reciprocated.
Jian Huo’s response echoed those observations. “She is his concubine.”
“I hate that word.” I growled, no longer distracted by his hands. He stopped to brush my wispies back from my cheeks.
“I know. But until now he – they both – have let that term define how they behave with one another. But you are right. Shui Yin is much more disturbed than he should be. I think after tonight that Wu Wei will no longer be his concubine.”
“Wife?” I asked. A lifted brow communicated the unlikelihood of that. “Some indeterminate in-between state, then.” My words skirted the unresolved issue of our own relationship; he tensed beneath me. I smiled and copied his gesture, sliding my fingers through the hair at his temples. “I can live with that.” Jian Huo relaxed and resumed fiddling with my robes. I looped back to his original question.
“As for the children, I’ve met political prisoners who’ve behaved more compliantly.” My voice took on a mocking, sing-song quality: “It’s too loud; it’s too quiet; we’re thirsty; we’re hungry; tell us a story; sing us a song; it’s too hot; now it’s too cold; our nurse is an evil, ill-omened hag who is plotting our deaths.”
“That is a new one,” he chuckled, but by the way he was nuzzling my throat, I was pretty sure he was only half paying attention. I started to stop paying attention myself.
“Mei Shen’s invention. Still not the winner of the day, what with Mian Zi’s anthropological knowledge of all-night lesbian fox orgies.” I felt more than heard the thrum of laughter in his chest. My last question emerged breathy and distracted. “How exactly did you know about that?”
His lips smiled against mine. “Didn’t you hear Mian Zi? Everyone knows that.”
Whatever response I might have made was lost in his kiss.
* * *
The moment I woke up, I knew something was wrong.
I’d like to claim a mother’s instinct or something equally arcane, but the truth of the matter was that I hadn’t slept late for over ten years, ever since the twins had mastered walking. My mornings started early with two imps bounding onto the bed, tangling themselves in the covers, and getting tickled near-to-gasping by their father and myself for their pains.
Diffused sunlight greeted my eyes as I cracked them open. I stretched against Jian Huo’s warm length, the silk of his hair sliding along my skin as he shifted with my movement. Magic hair. It never tangled or got caught underneath your arms or in your mouth. It entranced me. I reached down to grasp two long coils of it, intending to wrap myself in the silken warmth, when the wrongness of the morning hit me.
The children.
I sat up, rubbing away sleep, and looked around the room. Maybe it was some new, inventive game designed to send me into a panic. Jian Huo sat up as well, sensing my growing distress.
“What is it?” His hand rubbed up my arm, a futile attempt to soothe. I shrugged him away.
“The children. They’re not here. It’s late, and they didn’t wake us up.”
It was a testament to how regular our idyllic days were that he also recognized the wrongness of this. I scrambled from the bed, reaching for my robe. He rose more fluidly, eyes serious and pensive, seeking a rational explanation as he donned his own robe.
“The nurse?” he offered. “She doesn’t know them, or us. In all likelihood she wouldn’t let them leave the nursery. I have sometimes wished that our own nurse was half so diligent.”
I started to agree with this. We were in a strange place. The nurse wouldn’t know how much we indulged our children. It must have been a mighty struggle for her to keep them in the nursery. Even so…
“Since when would they let a little thing like that get in their way?” I asked.
He held my gaze for a beat. We broke, scrambling for the door and rushing down the hallway.
The strangest tableau greeted us when we burst into the nursery. The nurse was nowhere to be seen, but Mian Zi and Mei Shen sat in the middle of the chamber, playing a game. He laid down a set of colored sticks, which she studied intently before picking them up in reverse order. Then she laid them down, and he picked them up. They played with a level of concentration usually reserved for wei-qi, humming a tuneless drone. I’d seen Cronenberg films that creeped me out less.
They didn’t notice our entry. I don’t know how long we stood there watching them with growing horror.
Jian Huo interrupted the game. “Mian Zi. Mei Shen. What are you doing?” His words were quiet, his normally rich baritone strangled. I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. The children finished the round, stopped humming, and stood.
“Hello, Father; hello, Mother. Are we ready to go home now?” Normally the more reticent of the two, Mian Zi stepped forward. Mei Shen cast her eyes to the floor in proper feminine deference. There was no sign of the jade combs I’d given her the night before. Their skin was swarthier than it should have been and oddly grainy, their movements jerky and wooden, and when they looked at us, there was something wrong behind their eyes. I let out a choked gurgle. Pod people. My children had been replaced with pod people.
Tears welling, I wrenched my gaze away from these imposters. My eyes fell on the chair near the brazier, the one that the nurse had sat in the night before. Wood-shavings from whatever she’d been carving lay in a scatter; the dull knife sat abandoned amidst them. I stared blindly at the knife for a moment, then back up at the things pret
ending to be my children. Years of bedtime stories and folk lullabies had supplied a catalogue of dangers to warn them against, but some of those warnings weren’t meant for children. They were meant for parents.
Mei Shen and Mian Zi weren’t pod people. They were changelings.
Jian Huo started forward in fury. I rushed at him, grabbing his arm before he could strike the imposters and make it that much harder to get our own children back.
“Jian Huo. Wait!”
He turned to me. “Missy, these aren’t–”
“I know,” I interrupted. “Bring me eggs.”
What?” His fury had turned to surprise and suspicion. He had to be wondering if he had three pod people on his hands instead of just two.
“Please. I can’t explain, but I… I know what to do.” I choked on the words, doubt creeping up in conviction’s wake. I glanced at my children. Not my children? They were so wrong, everything was wrong. What if I was wrong, too?
And even if I wasn’t, that didn’t mean I knew better what to do than Jian Huo, who’d always lived this life. But he’d been about to strike the imposters. His hand opened and closed in impotence. Maybe basing my children’s recovery on instructions gleaned from a folk song was madness, but it had to be better than violence.
I shook Jian Huo’s arm. “Eggs, some kind of bread, milk – preferably spoiled – and rice with as much chaff as possible.” Thank god we were in Shanghai. Half the ingredients would have been impossible to get in Huanglong. “Oh, and a pot with hot water. I’ll need that for the brewing.”
His mouth worked as he struggled through a thousand questions, but then he just clamped his jaw, nodded, and stalked from the room. I walked over to the shavings and ran my hands through them, taking a moment to collect myself. The knife I picked up and slid into my robes. With a deep breath, I rose and turned back to the imposters, smiling brightly through my fear.
“So, my darlings. That is an interesting game you were playing. Why don’t you show me how to play it.”