by Daniel Fox
Chung wormed his way backward, till the soles of his bare feet pressed into the painted wood of the wall. Shen had told him of adepts in the high mountains—nothing, he was assured, like the little foothills that were called mountains here on Taishu—who could pass through crowds or stand alone on a bare plain and be not invisible but entirely unseen in either place. At the time Chung had been defensive, pointing out that his own home mountains might not be so foolishly, unnecessarily high and might not have mad old men lurking in their caves pretending to be invisible when actually nobody was looking, but they did at least have jade at their hearts and jade tigers in their forests.
Now, though? Now he concentrated so hard on seeming a native part of the room—over here there was just floor and walls and corner and Chung, nothing worth noticing—that the argument he was trying to avoid just slipped past him. He was only snagged back into it when Mei Feng turned and marched toward the door, snapping her fingers for her loyal messenger to follow.
Turning her back on the emperor, walking out on him. And taking Chung with her, mute partner in this horrendous offense, under the eyes of so many courtiers and eunuchs …
He rose because he had no choice, and tried to scuttle out in her furious shadow; but an unexpected voice snagged them both, as light and sharp and delicate as a fishhook: “Forgive me, majesty, but actually there is a way to take the fleet across the water to Santung.”
Mei Feng stopped dead in her tracks, and Chung perforce stopped behind her. When she swiveled around, she had to push him physically before he recovered enough sense to move aside, to let her see who spoke.
When he looked—and so much for all his invisibility, here he was side by side with her, inextricably aligned, if the emperor deigned to notice—he saw that it was one of the eunuchs. A young man, a new face. There was only the one new eunuch in the emperor’s service, strangely come and oddly accompanied and bizarrely breaking into the discussion now.
That was it, of course, that had always been the killer point: that they could not send an army to Santung if they wanted to. It was Mei Feng’s triumphant parting blow, though Chung heard it now only in his memory, groping back.
And the eunuch thought he could deny it. Indeed, the eunuch did deny it simply by being here, even before he said, “We sailed here by the goddess’s grace, majesty, and in defiance of the dragon.”
“Oh, and can you guarantee that grace again, to sail a fleet back?” It was Mei Feng necessarily who flung the challenge, and now it would be a disgrace in Chung to back away, to dissociate himself from her. He stood boldly at her side, and really wished he didn’t have to.
“I believe so, lady, yes. If we take the child.”
Mei Feng felt betrayed, and twice betrayed; Chung could see that in her. He could have seen it if he didn’t know her, he would have known it sight unseen. She had won this man a place here, for himself and the child that he came with; and now—
Now he was using that against her, the place he had and the child too, and she had no answer to it.
A Chain of Days
one
For once, the dragon’s fury seemed not to be aimed at him.
He knew her rage from afar, as he knew her coming; when she landed on the Forge-top, he was there to meet her. There was nowhere to hide—how could there be, when she made shift inside his head?—so he might as well be mannerly.
Besides, he was curious. She had been raging for days, and he couldn’t understand it. His mind might be the simplest, easiest thing for her to pick apart; hers was a vast and complex array that he couldn’t hope to read except when she allowed it, what she chose to share. It was as much as he could do to sense her feelings and her movements. She was darkly, bitterly angry; that was not new, but the cause was. Something about her freedom to move, something that restricted her almost as though she were chained again, chained differently …
He couldn’t understand it. What could stand against her now? Except himself, fractionally? When she was first chained, the stories said a magician came to do it with prayers and spells and a monksmith at his back, whom he set on the Forge to keep her chains ever-fresh.
Actually, the stories said that he came with the monksmith, that there had only ever been the one in all these centuries. Han no longer believed that. He had seen the man, had seen him die, had seen nothing in him except grace and a sorrowful kindness that had done him no good at all, an apparent wisdom that had none the less not saved him. No hint of age-old endurance, power beyond the mortal, anything that could stand against the sordid folly of his death.
There must have been a magician, once; there must have been a first monksmith to build the forge and make the first chains. They might have been the same man. It didn’t matter.
This mattered, that Han had willfully undone as much of their work as he could in what was not quite a desperate random protest. To save Tien, he had loosed his own control over the dragon, or tried to; which was all the control there was, or seemed to be.
Nothing was ever as simple as it seemed. He had cut the chains, and she still was not quite free of him, nor he of her. Despite that, there should be nothing else to hold her. And yet …
AND YET here she came, in a surge of hot wet air, and her landing on the peak was almost clumsy. For a moment, he wondered if she would actually topple down the slope. And where he might seek shelter from her temper if she did.
She caught her balance, though, with a bizarrely graceless swing of her long tail; and when her head lunged forward he didn’t even try to deflect it. He understood absolutely that for once this was not an attack on him.
She showed him her terrible gape, her teeth, her livid lethal tongue, too close. He smelled the fierce salt of her breath; felt the sheer animal intensity of her that was not at all mitigated by the dreadful intelligence of her spirit; said, absurdly, “What can I do to help?”
He said it aloud the first time, which was like whispering into the muffle of his hands when he stood in the typhoon, when his voice was the last thing he should use.
He should have swallowed the question down, hoped to be lucky, hoped she hadn’t caught even a hint of the indignity of it. Instead he put it again in his mind, where she liked to lurk: Great one. How can I help you?
It was folly, even to be asking. She was dragon, he was mortal man; she was in every way his enemy. He waited for an answer none the less, and had one of a sort: an echo in his head like the slamming back of great bronze doors, a glimpse of roiling confusion, the raging turmoil that was her mind, vast storms and systems that he could not hope to encompass. There was nothing useful he could draw from that, nothing he could do but wait.
Until now, nothing had been more important, nothing had enraged her more than this negligible human, this mayfly creature who had yet some influence on her. Now, though, she settled slowly into the rock and ash and ruin on the peak there; she snapped her teeth a time or two and gazed at him with eyes that shone like a summoning; she said, Little thing, there is nothing you will do to help me. Not nothing you can do. He could walk willingly into her mouth, for example, only that he would not. Nor would he put himself within the clutch of her claws.
Tell me, then, he said, having nothing else to offer but a bare curiosity. Who has upset you, who could aspire so high?
She hissed, between her teeth. And, unexpectedly, told him.
There is a power, here in the strait. Your kind call her a goddess; I do not know. But she … cooperated with those who chained me. She held me prisoner, and claimed these waters. My waters, she claims them for her own.
And what, he said, you cannot teach her otherwise? Now you are free?
I said, she is a power. And I am chained to you still, and not myself. I cannot resist her, quite.
No more could he resist the dragon, quite, except in that little way that meant she could not eat him. Her stench made his head swim, unless it was her potency, unless it was the stress of her regard. Her eyes ate at him like acid. He said, Great
one, if you can bring me a boat, I would willingly be free of you. Not I will free you, nothing so impertinent; and willing wasn’t the word, quite, because he did feel monstrously guilty about it. Suo Lung set the chains on him without his consent, but discarding them would still be his own choice. Which would make him responsible for what followed, what must follow: the dragon free, with all that that implied. Tien would be unhappy.
Han knew the guilt of that, and would not let it stop him. He never had lived his own life, but he meant to do it now.
Bring me a boat, he said.
The dragon said, I tried, but she would not let me near it. She is not that strong, she is not—not as strong as a dragon, she meant, her body shifting slightly, crushing rock to dust—but she makes her people slippery. And I could not shift the water or the wind, to bring the boat here.
That was the confrontation that had stoked her anger to its incandescence. She had tried to do a thing, and had been prevented. That age-old helplessness, familiar through the long years of her captivity, her new freedom only an illusion after all—no wonder she was angry. The only wonder was that she had thought to come to him.
Bring me a boat, he said. What else could he say? I am not you, I am not anything like you: I cannot swim, or fly.
I could carry you, little thing, she said, not the first time but more determined now, or more desperate. If a dragon could know the taste of desperation. If you only hold still, and let me clutch you.
He said, Bring me a boat.
THIS TIME when she left, she rose in a sudden storm of dust and rock and ash that stung his eyes and skin. By the time he could see again, she was gone. Into the sea or the sun, he could not guess.
Until he reached a moment later for her mind and found her plunging deep, trying to wash fury from her heart as easily as she could the filth from her scales.
He wished that he could plunge like that, suddenly out of the world’s skin, this scant scrap of fabric between the deep waters and the wide sky. Here was where the trouble clung; it might be good to be gone.
Except that she was still troubled, whether she swam or flew, and he was maimed and heartsore and so very much not a dragon. He couldn’t understand where she might look for her pleasures, in what her ambitions might consist; his own were bounded within simple lines. He wanted to be with Tien, comfortable and settled, far from war. Not frightened, not in pain. Not shackled to a dragon.
It didn’t seem so much.
Tien might be a little angry with him, for setting the dragon free. She had strong notions of duty and what was proper, what was owed. His own mind turned more toward survival, for himself and those he loved. He had gotten by, as a river rat and as an inkboy; he had—just barely—gotten by as a pirate brat.
If he could get to the mainland somehow—if the dragon managed to fetch him a boat, preferably with sailors aboard, because Han didn’t know how to work a vessel by wind and water, he hadn’t been that much of a pirate brat for long enough to learn—he would have more reasons than the dragon’s impatience to see the cuffs and collar struck off. Once it was done, it was done. Tien would forgive him, and they would travel inland. Far inland, very far from the dragon and all her harm.
Yes.
Day by day he was getting by as a dragon’s brat, but only day by day. It couldn’t last. He would go mad, or she would eat him, or find some other way to bring him to ruin. He held the typhoon in a noose of rotted rope, and the bitter end was around his neck. It would break, or it would strangle him, or else it would carry him away. There were no other choices, except that he let go.
two
If Mei Feng sat down to make a list, all those many ways she felt betrayed—well. It would be a long list, and most of her friends would feature.
At heart, of course—at the head of the list, and running all the way down the margins, and neatly closing it out at the tail too—would be the emperor, the fountainhead, the source of all betrayal. Who apparently still expected her to lie in his bed and listen to his snoring, even when they were not at all speaking to each other.
Then there was Jung the eunuch, who had so cruelly misused her foolish kindness by offering the child he carried—a child!—as safeguard against the dragon’s fury. Which was an offering the wicked emperor was ready to accept, for the sake of his stupid war.
Jiao and Yu Shan and Guangli the jade carver, those she could almost ignore; their failure to produce the simple commission she’d asked for, an armor for her lord the emperor to protect him in his folly, was almost negligible in such a list of blame. If they had been here, she suspected that Jiao and Yu Shan too would be demanding a place in the boats; it was odd to find herself reluctantly grateful for their absence, not to be yet worse betrayed.
The head and the heart of all betrayal might be the emperor, but there was a grand passion in that. She could almost enjoy being furious with the Son of Heaven, being appalled by him. It was the proper way of things, perhaps, that a god-on-earth should be heedless of his mortal possessions, leaving them outraged and desolate.
It was her grandfather who spoiled that high-minded suffering. He made it stink, the whole rank idiocy of it.
He was her grandfather, and if he knew nothing else, he knew her intimately; he must know how she would feel about this madness, especially the cruelty of using a child to make it happen. He must know how she would hate that. And yet, and yet …
Oh, he probably hadn’t volunteered. Likely he had simply been told, you will lead the fleet, and what could he do about that?
Not refuse, of course; she knew it. But he had a boat, he had all the sea to hide in; and his Li-goddess held him in good favor, he didn’t truly need a child on the deck to ward away the dragon. She didn’t think he did. She thought he could simply have sailed away.
But no, there he was in the harbor with a squadron of other vessels grouped around him, too late to make a dash for it now. He hadn’t come to see her since it was decided; she’d had to learn from others that his would be the pilot-vessel, he the guide.
Jung the eunuch, of course, would carry the child. He had outfaced the dragon once; it only made sense that he should do it again.
Mei Feng of course had gone to shout at Jung, but couldn’t find him. He had already insinuated himself into the palace staff. It was as though there was another secret palace within the one she knew, one that was private to servants and eunuchs and clerks. She couldn’t find her way in; she met locked doors, locked faces at every turn.
When she sent for him, still he didn’t come. Her messengers said they couldn’t find him either, but she wasn’t sure. They stood within his world, on his side of the wall.
She could hate Jung, she thought, if only he was visible, physical, available to her fury. It was harder to hate a ghost. She knew nothing of him but his name and his face, the soft shadow of his voice and his betrayal.
The emperor was almost his reverse: impossibly visible and physical, eternally there in her eye, inescapable. And implacable. It might have been Ping Wen’s war once, but he had seized it and claimed it, as swiftly and irrevocably as he had her; it was his new delight, the rival she had feared and anticipated and never somehow imagined like this. It was the stranger in their bed, and she could find no way around it. He wasn’t even trying to find any way back to her. That was his great betrayal, she thought: not that he would not listen, but that he would not try.
And still it was her grandfather’s that sat in her mind like a foul taste in her mouth, like something rotten in her belly: his acceptance of what was unacceptable, unbearable, just wrong. So many ways of wrong …
IT WAS her grandfather, then, his utter wrongheadedness, that drove her out of the emperor’s bed while he was still snoring. It wasn’t so very early, but he slept late always, later if she let him; today, she thought, if he slept till she woke him he might never wake at all.
She slipped out of the bed and out of the chamber, more cautiously than she needed to. If the moment of her leaving didn�
�t wake him, nothing would.
In the room beyond, her women intercepted her. A little astonished at seeing her like this, alone and independent; a little shocked that she dared to sneak away. Even after months she could still surprise them, it seemed. Something to be glad of, on a miserable morning.
She couldn’t evade their determined attentions. She was washed and powdered, oiled and perfumed and dressed, and then only let go on alone when she threatened to make noise enough to wake the emperor after all, and blame the noise on them.
As threats went, it was empty, but they pretended to be as cowed as she was pretending to be fierce. Once they knew where she was going, none of them would willingly go with her anyway.
On her own, then, and head high with the bitterness of that—of being so betrayed that there was no one to walk with her, out of all the people who mattered to her, to whom she’d thought she mattered—she walked across the formal garden that separated the emperor’s wing from his mother’s.
THE DOWAGER empress was not expecting her. Nevertheless, Mei Feng found her exactly where and how she always had: even more formal than the clipped and cosseted garden; sitting erect in her private chamber, exactly as much softened by age as she was by kindness, which meant not at all; a rock that would not weather.
She said, “Well, child? How does the Son of Heaven?”
“He is sleeping, great lady.”
“Of course,” she snorted, glancing out of a high narrow window at the sun. “And so you have come to seek me out …”
“Of course,” though it had never happened before. “Great lady, please—can’t you stop him?”
“You have heard me try,” the old woman said drily. “And these days I thought he was more inclined to pay attention to his new … possession, shall we say?”
Black inkstone eyes, the glitter all surface, like a wash of water over the truth beneath.