Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

by Julie C. Dao

  Not a shade of suspicion touched her. No one truly knew what had happened aside from herself, the Serpent God, and his servant, who seemed unlikely to talk. She wondered who he was, this slave of the dark god. From his build, he could have been a soldier or a guard. A man sworn to protect the Emperor by day . . . and do the god’s bidding by night.

  “Everyone is saying His Majesty questioned all the guards and eunuchs in the city of women, and dismissed many of them,” Xifeng said.

  “He got angry because they all gave conflicting accounts of whether they’d seen Lady Sun in the tunnels, or outside her apartments at all. I was questioned, but even Master Yu vouched for me,” Kang added cheerfully. “I’m famous for my snoring, you know, and I’m told I provided remarkable music the night Lady Sun left.”

  From then on, Xifeng felt different. She felt the concubine’s essence in the way she greeted each day, her feet like bronze claws ready to seize the world. Her skin glowed and her hair hung blacker than ever, and neither the ladies nor the eunuchs could take their eyes from her. The wounds returned every so often and her cheeks burned as though they’d been scraped raw. But she reminded herself that the injuries weren’t real, and then the blood would vanish and her face would return to its usual perfection.

  Now, when she spoke, even the highest-ranking women stopped to listen, drawn in by her voice, beauty, and newfound power. She pitied their ignorance. They were so jealous, so eager to explain away her sudden popularity. She was something fresh for His Majesty, they whispered, and she would be nothing again once he got tired of her.

  They didn’t know her secret lay within each and every one of their hearts; they didn’t know the magic of Lady Sun’s heart now coursed through her veins, placing each and every one of them under her spell.

  And they could never imagine Xifeng was here to stay, or that she had just cleared away the last remaining obstacle in her path.

  Well . . . not quite the last.

  • • •

  Autumn came, bringing fiery touches of red and gold to the gardens, and Xifeng sensed that she had completely slipped out of the Empress’s favor. Her Majesty no longer sought her out, and chose other ladies to accompany her to the Boat Festival. Xifeng sorely felt the absence of her motherly care, and resented it, too. She had, after all, done the Empress a great favor by destroying Lady Sun.

  “Her Majesty knows the Emperor’s affections for Lady Sun were souring,” Kang told her. “Still, she must be thoroughly pleased to be without a rival for the first time.”

  “And everyone knows Lady Meng’s days at court are numbered,” Xifeng added. The eunuchs were placing bets on whether His Majesty would send her back to her village or to a monastery to live out the rest of her days.

  “It seems, my dear, it is you to whom Their Majesties’ eyes have turned.”

  “I doubt that. The Emperor hasn’t sent a single message or come to the city of women for weeks.” It stung to say it, no matter how true. Yet if he wanted to see Xifeng, wouldn’t he have sent word? Or come on the pretext of visiting his wife? “The Empress can’t possibly view me as a rival. And even if she does, she thought of me as a daughter once. She should give me a chance to explain, instead of jumping to conclusions.”

  “Queens may jump to conclusions as much as they like. Heads have rolled because of it.”

  “Would she do that?” Xifeng asked.

  “What, behead you?” He shrugged. “She let Lady Sun live, didn’t she?”

  • • •

  But as the days grew shorter, Xifeng began to doubt. She woke most nights with a sweat-soaked pillow, drenched in fearful visions of Lady Sun returning from her watery grave. Sometimes, her ghost whispered gleefully in the Empress’s ear, as though they were conspiring, and the Empress would give Xifeng the concubine’s feline smile. Lady Sun had died . . . but had the Fool? Perhaps Xifeng had guessed wrong. Perhaps she had allowed the true Fool to persist. She had defeated Lady Sun, but was she truly any closer to sitting on the throne?

  She spent her nights in painful uncertainty and her days in loneliness, sewing in solitude, as the Empress called every other lady-in-waiting except Xifeng to attend her.

  So when Xifeng was at last summoned to the royal bedchamber one morning, she obeyed in surprise. Her Majesty was sitting up in bed with an older woman beside her on a stool, bent and gray in the simple cotton clothes of a servant.

  “Xifeng, come in,” Empress Lihua said warmly, as though nothing could or had ever soured between them. She seemed in high spirits, but her pale, wan face—already drawn with ill health—was beginning to show the weariness of pregnancy. “You’re in time to hear the story. I tell it to the baby every day, and when she is born, her nursemaid Ama here can help tell it.”

  “She, Your Majesty?”

  The Empress tapped her rounded stomach. “It will be a girl. I hear her speaking to me. She says she is what I have waited for . . . what we all have waited for. And I, in turn, tell her who she is. I tell her of the Dragon Lords who created our world, and of the Dragon King whose blood runs through her veins.”

  Xifeng imagined the child curled inside the Empress’s belly, tiny heart pumping the most precious lifeblood on Feng Lu. But lifeblood was easily taken.

  “And I tell her the story of the two lovers in the Great Forest. Do you know it?”

  “My . . . aunt rarely told me stories.” Xifeng’s voice shook, unable to say the word mother. Weeks ago, Empress Lihua might have responded to the longing in her voice. But now her eyes and her heart were wholly fixed on the unborn child in her belly.

  “A long time ago,” Her Majesty said in a dreamy voice, “when dragons walked the earth, there lived a queen who loved her daughter more than all the jewels of her court. She gave her everything her heart desired and asked for one thing in return: that the princess marry the man chosen for her. But the princess had already given her heart to a poor musician. He had a voice like a bird and taught her to love the song of the trees sheltering the palace. Though he begged the princess to reconsider, for his was a life of hardship, she vowed to be his wife.

  “They made a plan: he would hide in the forest and leave behind a trail of lanterns. Some of them would be draped with red cloth, and it was these she should follow to join him. But before she could do so, her intended discovered their romance and followed his rival into the trees. He killed him with a single stroke of his sword, before the musician could drape any of the lanterns, and the blood splattered one.”

  Xifeng hadn’t realized she had leaned forward to better hear until she saw Ama, the old nursemaid, watching her. The woman’s face broke into a smile Xifeng did not return.

  “The princess was led to believe her lover had abandoned her,” Empress Lihua continued, “and that his neglecting to leave behind any red lanterns was his way of telling her not to run away with him. So she married her intended as the queen wished, but grew sad and silent. She ordered all of the lanterns in the forest to be lit and spent her days walking among them.

  “One day, she came upon a single red lantern she hadn’t seen before. Her heart rejoiced, knowing her lover had wanted her with him after all. On a nearby branch sat a drab brown bird chirping the song the musician had written for her. The bird shed tears of blood and indicated that the princess should drink them, but she refused.

  “Three times she came to hear it sing, and the familiar tune it trilled made her grow more certain that the bird was her lover returned. She told the queen, who urged her to drink the tears, knowing how unhappy she was. The princess understood then that her mother had relented at last, and bid her farewell. She returned to the forest and drank the bird’s blood tears, and in doing so, turned her arms into wings and her hair into feathers. She flew to her lover on the branch by the red lantern, and it is said they still live there today, joined in eternal love.”

  Every nerve in Xifeng’s body felt charge
d and on edge. It was only a silly tale, but something about the lanterns in the forest resonated—warned her to be aware.

  She closed her eyes and saw vivid images behind her lids: scented spirals of incense; a pool of silent, heartless women; a card depicting a girl in disguise, her foot hovering over the edge of a cliff. And lanterns, one thousand lanterns blazing in the forest, just out of reach. But what they meant and had to do with her, she couldn’t guess. It was a secret she felt she ought to know.

  Empress Lihua dismissed the nursemaid. “I’d like you to stay and talk awhile with me, Xifeng, as you used to.”

  “I would be honored, Your Majesty.”

  “Bohai says I will deliver a strong child. A true miracle. He is as surprised as I am,” the woman said. A gentle, satisfied smile softened her features, as though she had proven the physician wrong. “The baby will come in the early days of winter, when the envoy leaves for the mountains. Perhaps I’ll be able to see them off and ask them to pray for the princess’s health.”

  “I will do the same.” But Xifeng heard the hollowness in her own promise. She had no more use for gods who ignored and neglected her. Only one had answered her prayers, and it was she he cared for—not some spoiled sapling of a brat who hadn’t even been born.

  The Empress gave a slow nod, looking at Xifeng as though she saw a stranger. She picked up an ornate cup, holding it with both hands as she sipped. “I loathe the taste of Bohai’s new medicine, but he’ll never know. It would be like insulting a meal in front of the cook.”

  Xifeng felt a gnawing emptiness as she watched the Empress take another sip. It was as though Her Majesty had vacated a hole in her heart and nothing could fill it again.

  There are consequences for everything we do, Guma had said. Even—and maybe especially—for the way the Emperor had looked at Xifeng on the night of his wife’s birthday.

  The Empress’s thoughts seemed to run the same course, as she lowered her cup with shaking hands. “His Majesty is taken with you,” she said directly. “Lady Sun’s departure hasn’t upset him as much as I assumed it would, and he has praised you in my hearing more than once.”

  “He is kind and gracious to remember me.”

  “You’re a memorable woman. Worthy of any man’s notice, even that of the Emperor. And you are nineteen, quite old enough. Do you wish to marry?”

  In her eyes, Xifeng saw she knew, or at least suspected, that Xifeng had something to do with Lady Sun. She clearly believed Xifeng would take the woman’s place; maybe she even hoped for it, so she could keep her close as she had Lady Sun for years.

  “I’d like to marry, if the right man wanted me. But I want to be a wife, as you are. Lady Sun had wealth and comfort, but not a marriage—a partnership, a joining of equals.” Xifeng thought of Lady Meng, too, trapped in a promise to one man while longing for another.

  “And this is what you believe you deserve?”

  “I do.”

  For the first time since Xifeng had entered the room, the Empress truly looked at her, without fixing her mind on herself or her baby. “A queen’s marriage is not as secure as you think. Her husband can put her aside at any time if he is displeased in the slightest. And there is always someone waiting at the door, ready to pounce when that should happen.” The Empress lowered her eyes to her belly. “The tengaru have told me for years of an enemy on my doorstep. A masked usurper. This person, they told me, would seek to end my line in fire and darkness. To work on behalf of an ancient feud.”

  Xifeng’s hands were clasped so tightly, the knuckles turned white. Guma’s cards had warned her about the Fool, and it seemed the tengaru had warned the Empress about Xifeng. This would seem to make Empress Lihua the Fool beyond the shadow of doubt.

  The Fool. She recalled a high-pitched whistling, a wicked scythe splitting a man in half, Shiro stabbing an attacker to save Wei’s life—and presumably hers as well. Perhaps Her Majesty had taken the tengaru’s threat seriously. Perhaps she had sought to nip her enemy in the bud with a band of masked killers. Xifeng’s breath came in short, painful bursts, remembering how she had once longed for this woman to be her mother. This woman who may have tried to end her before they’d ever met.

  “You’re pale,” Empress Lihua said flatly.

  “I’m fine, Your Majesty.” Xifeng forced herself to remain calm as the Empress studied her, as though searching for something objectionable in her manner or dress. It seemed not even Her Majesty was above the jealousy and desperation that had plagued Lady Sun. She, too, was part of this game in which women could only hope to survive by keeping each other down.

  “Let us return to our previous subject. You would be welcome to remain in my service, if you chose not to wed.” The Empress paused. “For me, it was inevitable. I was my parents’ only child. Daughters can rule in their own right if their parents deem them worthy, but mine thought me too gentle to be anything more than a consort. Perhaps they were right.”

  Weak, in other words. Xifeng relished the scorn she felt. It made it easier to accept that she had lost all hope of ever winning this woman’s love.

  “But even if I’d had the choice, I would have chosen to marry anyway. There is something sacred in the binding of two lives, in the love a couple joined in such a manner may bring to this world.”

  Xifeng pushed away the image of Wei’s face. “Love does not always come with marriage, Your Majesty. Marriage may strengthen a woman, but love weakens her. She has more to lose.”

  “But in weakness, you find your strength. It takes no small amount of courage to open yourself up,” the Empress said gently. “You leave pieces of yourself in the ones you love. Is that not the greatest power, to endure in that way?”

  “I don’t know,” Xifeng said in a low voice. “I may never know.”

  Something of the mother returned to Empress Lihua’s face, though she did not take Xifeng’s hand as she would have before. “I’ve been drawn to you since you came because I felt you truly cared about me. You needed me like I needed you, and no one at court has ever made me feel that way. They all want something from me—not me, myself. We two have been honest with each other as best we could.”

  And in her voice was a farewell that confirmed where Xifeng stood. There was now a distance between them that could never be bridged.

  The Empress pointed to a beautiful bronze chest in the corner of the room. “There is something in there that belongs to you. Open it.”

  Xifeng obeyed, curious when she found a pouch tied shut with gold cord. She gasped at the riches inside: a gold-and-ivory hairpin shaped like a flowering tree, a necklace of interlocking jewels that shone like drops of blood, brooches inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a scroll in the Imperial colors with Emperor Jun’s crimson seal, unbroken.

  “Those are gifts from His Majesty. To you.” The Empress fixed her eyes on the wall. “They’ve arrived regularly for months, but I asked the eunuchs to bring them to me. I hope you’ll forgive me, and I hope you understand why. But my conscience can no longer bear it.”

  In spite of herself, Xifeng’s eyes stung at the pain in the woman’s voice. She blinked as she replaced the items in the pouch, fingers lingering on the Emperor’s seal. The girl she used to be, the one who might have understood that slipping, jealous fear, seemed a distant memory. That girl was gone, and the Empress knew it, too.

  It was why she was saying goodbye.

  Empress Lihua turned her attention back to her belly as though it were the only thing that could comfort her.

  The scroll asked for the honor of a private audience with her. Asked, and not commanded. Xifeng accepted, pleased the Emperor would approach her from a position of respect. She pulled her hair into a plain knot, adorned with only the ivory-and-gold pin he had given her, and wore the simple gold silk under a fur-lined tunic, as the winter days had grown colder.

  “Did you see how the other ladies stared at us?
” she asked Kang, who escorted her across the Empress’s walkway into the main palace.

  “Can you blame them? You are the vision of a queen.” The eunuch gave a sarcastic bow to the women peering at them from the Empress’s windows. The ladies scowled and retreated behind the opaque screens.

  It felt strange and natural all at once to use Empress Lihua’s entrance, to see eunuchs greeting her courteously where they had once ignored her. Strange and natural to walk down gilded halls in silk and ivory with a loyal servant by her side, to have whispers and admiration follow in her wake.

  “The noble families already know you,” Kang murmured. “They’re wondering whether they ought to spurn you or court your favor.”

  “If they’re clever, they will choose well,” Xifeng said haughtily, and he grinned at her. “I’m going to ask the Emperor for something. Master Yu has fallen from favor since Lady Sun left court. He won’t be leader of the Five Tigers for long. I will ask that you take his place.”

  Kang looked at her with fierce pride and bent low from the waist as if she were already Empress. He was still bowing when she swept through the doors of the Emperor’s apartments.

  A pair of heavy brocade curtains sheltered the main room. The guards hurried to part them for her, wiping away smirks. No doubt they expected to hear interesting noises from behind the drapes in a moment, assuming she was like all the others. Easily used, easily discarded. That was their mistake, and if Emperor Jun thought the same, that was his mistake as well.

  She made that clear with her modest clothing, the brisk manner in which she strode into the room, and the restrained bow she gave. There would be no fluttering of her eyelashes, no coquettish tilt of the neck. She looked the Emperor of Feng Lu in the eye like an equal.

  His Majesty swept a hand toward one of the ornate chairs. “Thank you for joining me, Madam Xifeng. Please sit.” His formal tone perfectly matched her manner. Perceptive man, she thought as she sat down. And then a gleam came into his eyes, and she knew he had seen his gold-and-ivory pin in her hair. “I’ve ordered tea for us,” he added.