Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix

by Julie C. Dao

  Jade knew who she was. She knew it in the way that she knew the desert was hot and the ocean vast: through hearsay, never with her own eyes and ears and heart. Amah reminded her constantly: “You are the daughter of Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Lihua, a descendant of the Dragon King.” Lihua had died many years ago, but Amah told Jade so many stories of the former Empress’s kind and beautiful spirit that Jade felt as close to her mother as though she still lived. That part was easy: loving and revering her.

  It was the other part she had trouble with. She wondered what her mother would think if she could see Jade now—a girl who would gladly give up her family and her name to be a monk.

  Empress Lihua would always be part of her, but that outside world would not. She was a girl, after all, and as meaningful to her father as an old shoe. Emperor Jun had tossed his three-year-old daughter into the monastery after taking a new Empress. Out of sight, out of mind, because Jade wasn’t the son he’d craved. Instead of fading over time, the bitterness of that truth had lingered on like a shadow. She had lived fifteen years as a humble penitent, her true identity kept secret from all but Amah and Abbess Lin, and she had worked as hard as any other monk for bed and bread, untouched by that old life.

  So why, now, did a stranger recognize her for who she was?

  The hour passed in a disquieting haze, and then the gong rang for the morning meal.

  “Finally. I thought my bones were going to grow into the floor,” Amah wheezed as Jade helped her stand. “Looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer to eat, though.”

  Abbess Lin stood waiting for them by the door. Neither Jade nor Amah were tall, but they both towered over her. “Would you join me in my quarters? I have news that concerns you both.” Without awaiting a response, she walked down the corridor, her footsteps nearly silent.

  Jade expected her nursemaid to make a joke, as she always did, but instead the lines on the old woman’s forehead deepened as they followed the abbess.

  Abbess Lin’s quarters were large, but every bit as austere as the rest of the monastery. A single table of weathered wood stood surrounded by a few old chairs. The woman gestured for Jade and Amah to sit down, then pulled out the scroll that had been delivered earlier. In the daylight, Jade clearly saw the seal that had stunned Auntie Ang. Whereas most seals were red, this was of onyx-black wax and depicted a dragon with something curved within its talons.

  “Do you know to whom this emblem belongs?” Abbess Lin asked Jade.

  “Yes, Abbess. It looks like the Emperor’s Imperial seal.” But as she peered at it, Jade realized the dragon’s talons contained a serpent with many forked tongues. She glanced at Amah, whose thin lips turned down. “But the dragon should be holding a forest, and not a snake.”

  It made Jade think of an afternoon many years ago. She had been swimming in the stream where the monks did their washing, splashing and ignoring Amah’s scolding. A snake had watched her with vigilant ruby eyes from outside the gates, its slender poisonous body as black and still as the night. She wouldn’t have seen it had it not been for the tongue darting in and out of its fanged mouth. It had slithered away as she ran screaming to Amah, and for years afterward she had dreamed of its watchful gaze like two drops of blood in the dark.

  “Correct. This is the Empress’s new seal. She has written to me.” Abbess Lin paused, then looked Jade directly in the eyes. “And to you.”

  Jade felt the same tug of foreboding as the abbess handed her a thin scroll that had been folded inside the larger one. The world had found her, after all. Amah’s blue-veined hands twisted in her lap, but she said nothing as Jade broke the black seal and unrolled the crisp paper.

  The calligraphy of an accomplished scholar met her eye. Each sprawling character swept across the page with bold, unyielding confidence. “‘Your Imperial Highness,’” Jade read aloud, continuing through a list of honorifics and titles she hadn’t even known she possessed. “‘And my own dear stepdaughter, jewel of His Imperial Majesty’s court . . .’”

  Amah let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like a snort.

  “‘I hope this missive finds you in good health. In the letters from your esteemed guardian to His Majesty over the years, you are by all reports a paragon of grace and integrity, and everything the Emperor has dreamed of in a daughter.’” Jade glanced at the aforementioned guardian. Amah seemed to be struggling to keep her eyes from rolling heavenward. “‘I regret the time and the distance that have separated us. It is a failing I take upon my own humble self, and I beg your forgiveness. Many duties have occupied my attention, but I can no longer deny the great wish of my heart: to meet you at last, and claim you as my own.’”

  Abbess Lin shifted in her chair, a slight frown marring her usual placidity.

  “‘Your revered father, Emperor Jun, wishes to hold a banquet in honor of your eighteenth birthday. I have sent a palanquin for you that shall come in two days, and you will be with your loving family again as soon as the gods will it. The Great Forest will rejoice, and the lanterns will shine for you like stars welcoming back the moon. I am, forever and always, your loving stepmother, Xifeng.’” Jade ran her trembling fingers over the beautiful name. The characters gave the impression of having been woven into the paper, rather than inked.

  Amah fidgeted in her chair, lips still twitching with words Jade knew she longed to say but would not in the abbess’s presence. “She does write beautifully, doesn’t she?” she said at last.

  Jade touched the phrase claim you as my own. “I don’t understand. Why does the Empress want me with her now, after all these years?”

  “You are the heir to the empire, as she and the Emperor have no other living children,” Abbess Lin said. “None of His Majesty’s stepsons, your half brothers, survived.”

  Over the years, Jade had heard much about Lihua’s three sons with her first husband. The youngest had died of illness. The second had been captured on a mission overseas, and although his eldest brother, the courageous Crown Prince, had sailed into enemy territory to rescue him, the attempt had been in vain. Both were reported dead, but whereas the younger man’s head had been returned to Emperor Jun, the Crown Prince’s body had never been recovered.

  “But that’s impossible,” Jade protested. “I can’t go, Abbess. I thought I would . . . I hoped to still persuade you to let me take the vows one day.”

  “You’ve been a joy to us these many years,” the woman said in a gentle voice, “but you are meant for a different role in this life.”

  Jade lowered the letter to her lap, a sensation of cold spreading through her chest as she imagined the gates yawning open, releasing her from the monastery’s warm, snug embrace. The forest, enchanting from a distance, became a woodland of cold mists that were full of watchful, unfriendly eyes and a large and looming sky, ready to consume her.

  “This is the role I want. I love our life,” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “You taught me yourself that we are closest to the gods in quiet prayer, and we do so much good here.”

  “This could be an even greater opportunity for you to do good.” Abbess Lin folded her hands. “We all thought the Emperor would father sons to inherit his crown, but fate had different plans. His Majesty’s health is declining, and it’s natural for him to want his only child at court.”

  Jade looked resentfully at Xifeng’s signature. “Then why didn’t he write to me himself?”

  “He might have been too ill to do so.” Abbess Lin’s eyes darted to Amah, who muttered something darkly. “Regardless, you must prepare yourself for the journey.”

  The letter fluttered, forgotten, to Jade’s feet. Everything she had ever known was coming to an end. She would trade her garden, her books, and her quiet reflections for a palace full of eyes and whispers—torn from the family she wanted and flung toward the one that had never wanted her. But Emperor Jun and his wife were her true family, and it was h
er duty to go.

  “I understand,” she heard herself say.

  Abbess Lin nodded approvingly. “We have valued your company, my dear, but the monastery has become a shield for you. Perhaps this summons comes at an auspicious time. That world,” she said, gesturing to the snow-blanketed forest, “is where you truly belong.”

  “Does she have a choice? That letter is a command, however much it is framed as a courteous invitation,” Amah spat, her jaw working. “Let us make no mistake about that.”

  “Come.” Jade stood as the abbess’s disapproving gaze swiveled to Amah. She slipped a hand beneath her nursemaid’s elbow before the old woman could say anything else indiscreet about the Empress. “We will eat, if the abbess will excuse us. I can hear your stomach rumbling.”

  Abbess Lin waved a hand in dismissal. “Ensure that you eat too, child, to gain strength for the journey. After all,” the woman added with a faint smile, “your stepmother is calling you home.”

  The gates opened the next afternoon, welcoming poor families who came each week for a hot meal donated by patrons of the monastery. The villagers lived on the woodlands’ edge, on the border between the Great Forest and the Sacred Grasslands, and Jade always looked forward to their arrival. At every meal, she would chat with the village elder, who was the only person aside from Amah and Abbess Lin who knew her true identity.

  She bowed low before him. Though the old man greeted her with the same smile he had given her for fifteen years, today his eyes in their nest of wrinkles held concern. “Amah told me everything. You are to leave us, then.”

  The monks moved around them, spooning steaming white rice into the villagers’ bowls.

  “I can’t imagine my life away from here . . . and you,” Jade said. “Sitting with you as I might with an honored grandfather, listening to stories about your village and the people who pass by on the trade route. It’s through you and Amah that I know the world.”

  The elder twinkled at her. “It was an honor when Amah asked me years ago if I would help her see to your education. That astute woman always suspected the Emperor would summon you one day, and she prepared you accordingly, even as she embraced your humble upbringing.”

  “But she never breathed a word,” Jade said, stunned. “I assumed she educated me because it was what she had done for my mother and grandmother, and that you taught me because you saw how I loved learning.”

  “Literature, history, and politics are not taught to most girls, even those with quick minds like yours. We had our reasons.”

  Memories flashed through Jade’s mind: Amah teaching her to walk gracefully, to keep her chin high and sit with a straight back as she learned calligraphy; basking in the elder’s pride as she recited the history of the Dragon Lords, the gods who had created Feng Lu in friendship and abandoned it after a rift in their alliance; listening to Amah describe the exported goods of each kingdom—lumber from the Great Forest, pearls and jade from Kamatsu, precious metals from Dagovad, rice and grains from the Grasslands, skins of desert animals from Surjalana.

  All these years, Amah and the elder had not been indulging an eager student.

  They had been training an empress.

  “Still,” the elder continued, “you must see the world for yourself and meet your true teachers: life and experience. Never in my hundred years have I been close to the Imperial Palace, and now you will experience it in all of its grandeur and beauty.”

  “But this monastery is in my blood. I can do good work here, training as Auntie Tan’s apprentice in herbal medicines and healing.” Jade nodded at the white-haired monk, who had stopped nearby to hand a young mother a tonic for her baby. “Your lessons paint a broken world of greed and corruption of which I want no part. I have no ambition for a throne. My father valued the idea of unborn sons more than he valued me, and his wife calls me back now only because they have no other options. All of a sudden, they care that I exist.”

  “Fifteen years in the monastery have not erased that worldly resentment of yours. I don’t blame you for your bitterness,” the elder added when Jade bowed her head, “but you cannot be a monk if you are unable to detach yourself from it, my dear. Haven’t the monks taught you compassion? To put other lives before your own?”

  She looked up, alarmed. “Yes, of course.”

  “And you said, just now, that you want to do some good?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He gestured to the people around them. “Observe these men, women, and children. See how their clothes hang from their bones and how sunken their cheeks are. Ours is not the only suffering village. You know this. All these years, you’ve heard me tell you that the empire is full of hungry babies, of women who go without food so their little ones can eat, of men who work until their backs break but still cannot afford a bowl of broth.”

  She took his frail hand in her strong, sun-browned ones, aching at the sorrow in his voice.

  “Feng Lu is dying,” the old man murmured, “rotting from the core. There is no more time for beauty, for music, for closing one’s eyes and feeling the clouds drift overhead. The heart and soul is being drained from this world, Jade, and its people feel the pain first.” Despite the milky film covering his pupils, she saw a ghost of his old vitality in his stern gaze. “Through Empress Lihua, you are a descendant of the Dragon King, the god of gods. His blood does not run through Their Majesties as it does through you. They do not feel this devastation, and they will not fix it.”

  There is no one left but me. The truth settled into Jade’s gut like a stone as she and the elder sat in silence, listening to men speaking in low voices, chopsticks scraping against wooden bowls, and the rustling of the monks’ robes as they moved around.

  “Strange to see the two of you so quiet,” Amah said, coming over. “Usually you’re talking nonstop about the radish tax in Kamatsu or the court policies of the king of Dagovad.”

  “We’ve been talking of what I owe my father and stepmother,” Jade explained, and her nursemaid’s lips twisted with disdain.

  “Xifeng isn’t fit to scrub the floor your mother walked upon.”

  The elder clucked his tongue. “Have a care, my friend. People have been imprisoned for saying less. Not for nothing is she called the Empress of a Hundred Thousand Eyes and Ears. Her soldiers are everywhere, watching and listening, and even the people are encouraged to turn in friends for speaking against her. They are richly rewarded with clothes and food if they do.”

  “Be that as it may, venerable one,” the old woman answered tartly, “she has no business ordering Jade about. Not when her crown truly belongs to Jade.”

  “Hush, please, Amah,” Jade pleaded.

  Amah had never hidden her feelings about Empress Xifeng from Jade. Almost all of her eighty years of life had been spent as adoring nursemaid and tutor to three generations of the royal family: Lihua’s mother, Lihua herself, and now Jade, who Amah considered the last of the line of true Dragon Kings, as Emperor Jun’s own blood ties to the throne were weak and diluted. Even so, Jade had no desire to find out what the loyal woman’s outspokenness might cost them.

  “Marriage is a weaker claim to the throne than being born to a centuries-old lineage,” Amah pointed out. “Before her death, your honored mother ensured that you would be next in the line of succession. Xifeng has done nothing but destroy us and send us into ruin.”

  Jade shook her head. “Taxes and poverty. Revolts and war and secret police. What can I possibly do with such hardship and devastation?”

  “You will have help and, gods willing, decades ahead in which to learn,” the elder said. “Feng Lu yearns for a ruler with a good heart. This world is vast and varied, and sometimes amidst the pain and sorrow, it can be beautiful too. Don’t spend your life here, praying instead of living. It is a noble thing to be a monk, but it is not a life for you.”

  Jade pictured the gates opening once more, and t
he forest breathing her into its dark embrace. “I have no choice but to obey the Empress’s summons,” she said, though her heart sank as she spoke. “I will stand by my duty to my family and our people.”

  The elder squeezed her hand. “You will be in my thoughts always.”

  “And I will be with you in the flesh,” Amah told her fiercely, “and protect you as I promised Lihua I would. You will have me and a mother who watches over you even in death. The gods know you’ll need both of us, walking into Xifeng’s court.”

  After so many years of loving Amah, Jade often felt she could hear the old woman’s unspoken thoughts. And she heard them now: We may never come back out again.

  A chill crept down her spine. “That comforts me. But I wish my mother were here, too.”

  “So do I, love.” The creases deepened on Amah’s forehead. “So do I.”

  You’re as restless as a caged tiger today,” Amah chided Jade the next afternoon during their daily lessons. “That’s twice now you’ve stopped midsentence to stare outside.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jade said, lowering the volume of Kamatsu poetry as her eyes strayed once more to the window. The wintry sky had already begun to darken over the forest. “But I thought I heard horses. Don’t you think the palanquin should have arrived by now?”

  “It’ll come when it comes, and no amount of fretting will change that,” the nursemaid said reasonably, sewing away at the blue-green brocade. “Now, read that poem to me again, and mind your pronunciation this time.”

  Jade did so, taking care with the lovely, lilting language. “You’ve never told me where you first learned the Kamatsu tongue,” she said, when she had read to Amah’s satisfaction.

  “Your mother’s first husband, Emperor Tai, always had foreign ambassadors at court,” the nursemaid explained. “Their women stayed with us in the harem and made it easy to learn about other languages and customs. That education was important. Tell me why.”