Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1) Read online

  However, when the old woman would have undressed her, Silver Snow forestalled that. “Old mother, this service”—and this speed, she thought—“is too much for you. Where is my maid Willow?”

  “She is out there.” The woman pointed toward the courtyard. Despite a careful arrangement of faded screens, the opened door admitted a chilling draft and a glimpse of an evening sky that had turned as violet as a first concubine’s spring robes.

  The nurse made a sign against ill-luck. Had the old woman not been ancient, almost a grandmother to Silver Snow, she might have slapped her.

  “Your mistrust is foolishness,” she did contrive a faint reproof. “For ten years, ever since my father bought her, Willow has given me devoted loyalty and perfect service.”

  The old woman bowed—her hands laden with Silver Snow’s heavy, padded, and befurred coat—and muttered something, undoubtedly the usual rumor, about Willow.

  “More foolishness,” said Silver Snow. “Old women’s tales. Why should the girl turn against the house that saved her life?” She tested the bath with a finger. “That water looks too cold. Fetch a kettle more of hot, then leave me alone.”

  Unused to her nurseling’s recent adoption of the manners of a grand lady, the woman bowed and fled. Her numbed fingers prickling as blood and warmth returned to them, Silver Snow fumbled with the fastenings of her robes as she padded toward her maidservant. Just outside the screen, Willow knelt, oblivious, as it seemed, to the cold. Even the meager light from the fire and the one or two lamps that burned, thriftily distant from the windy courtyard, struck ruddy splendor from Willow’s long hair, the same color as the vixen with which she now seemed to chatter at in little whines and sharp barks, much as stablemen communicated with horses and children with pets of all types. A scrap of meat saved from Willow’s dinner lay on the ground.

  Trained as a huntress, Silver Snow knew how to stalk silently in her heavy felt boots. Fox and maidservant alike heard her though, and froze as might hunted beasts. Willow turned to face her, and fear flashed across her face, gleamed in the eerie green eyes that, as much as her reddish hair, caused the dark-haired, dark-eyed Han to condemn her as supernaturally ugly, the very semblance of one of the dreaded fox-spirits—a prejudice that Silver Snow, usually the most indulgent of mistresses, had always condemned severely.

  “Younger sister, gain what news you may, but finish quickly. I have need of you.” Silver Snow spoke softly and with a smile, but her voice was firm.

  As if they actually could understand one another, Willow and the fox traded whines. Then the vixen barked once, sniffed the air, snapped up the meat, and ran off. Slowly, clumsily, Willow rose, her green eyes never leaving the spot where the fox vanished into the darkness. Then she limped over to attend her mistress.

  “Had you not been born with a clubbed foot,” Silver Snow murmured more to herself than to the girl, “would you have stayed with me, or would you have wished, just as the rumors whisper, to change your own skin and run away with your sister-in-fur?”

  She thought that she had spoken too softly for anyone to hear her, but she had not reckoned on the night wind’s betrayal or the preternatural keenness of Willow’s hearing. The maid gently loosened Silver Snow’s fingers from the fastenings of her robes. Her own hands were warm, hot even; another fault that the other servants held against her, for all knew that the blood of foxes—and of fox-spirits—is kindled to a higher degree than that of ordinary women. Such nonsense, coupled with Willow’s red hair and her skill with small, wild creatures, had almost gotten her killed before Silver Snow’s father purchased her. Since then, she had served the house devotedly; and, as always, Silver Snow relaxed beneath the deft, warm touch of her maid’s hands.

  Tears spotted the fur of Silver Snow’s outer robe.

  “When your father bought me to be your maid, he saved me from being killed out of hand as a fox or, later, as a slaver’s cull. How shall I ever leave you—even were I unblemished and able to run with the sisters-in-fur—when I owe you my very life?” Willow asked. “Though,” she added, her eyes glinting with some unspoken emotion, “it may be you who leaves me.”

  As quickly as her tears had flowed, they dried. Limping, Willow urged her mistress across the room. They might well have been heartbound sisters rather than mistress and maid. Willow, Silver Snow thought as she always did, simply could not be a fox-spirit, since, as all knew, fox-spirits could not love, teasing spitefully behind pretenses of caring.

  “I leave you?” Silver Snow asked. She breathed deeply to subdue an awakening excitement. One must, she knew, summon li and chih—the attributes of propriety and wisdom that Master Confucius decreed were necessary if one were to attain chung yung, the serene and undeviating behavior that every decent person surely must wish for her own—though those proper thoughts were now difficult to heed. She must hasten to obey her father’s summons, that was true; yet she could not hurry into his presence as if one were improperly lessoned in the august way of li.

  “You might,” Willow said, long lashes veiling those green eyes that seemed ever to be alive with a shadow of mischief. Were she indeed a usual inhabitant of inner courts, she should be uncomfortable at Willow’s presence. Yet, from the instant that they had seen one another, they had been as sisters.

  “Your most honorable father received messengers from Ch’ang-an today.” Willow unfastened the heavy, divided riding skirt from around her mistress’ thin body.

  Silver Snow nodded, then stepped into the herb-strewn water of the bath. At least, their hunt had provided the best part of a proper feast. She must bathe and dress quickly, quickly, then hasten to the kitchens and the banqueting room to see that all was prepared with the propriety worthy of a marquis—even a degraded one.

  “They brought a proclamation,” Willow was continuing.

  “That much I guessed,” said Silver Snow. She patted the hot water on her wind-dried face as Willow proffered fragrant oils. This must indeed be a most special occasion if Willow and her old nurse had agreed to use some of the carefully hoarded perfumes from her mother’s day. Refreshed and relaxed, she asked, “How do you know more?”

  “From my sister,” whispered Willow. Her smile betrayed white teeth, and she gave a quick motion of head and neck. For an instant, she looked very much like the beast with whom, earlier, she had entertained herself outside the chamber door. Silver Snow stood, and Willow wrapped her in a warm robe. There was no need to fear Willow, not ever. If the girl could turn rumor into a pleasantry to make her mistress smile, that but increased her merit. If she were unusually clever at making friends with animals, what of it? Such a talent was a gift.

  Silver Snow herself, when riding out, was aware of small creatures that appeared to watch her curiously. In return, she was careful about what—or whom—she hunted.

  “What did your sister tell you?” Silver Snow turned again, humoring Willow, as the maid combed out her long, black hair, as straight and fine in the lamplight as Willow’s was red and waving. She gazed into the mirror that Willow held for her, a highly polished disk of silver, incised along the edge with wishes for good luck. This burnished moon disk was the one thing from Willow’s previous life that she had brought to Silver Snow’s home; rightly, she treasured it.

  For a moment, the room behind her—small, shabby, but familiar and much-loved—wavered, engulfed in a brief vision of vast spaces and felt tents; there followed a rush of wind that drowned out the small, daily sounds of women working among women. Then she blinked and saw, once again, a lady of the Han with creamy skin, large, deep-set eyes the shape of almonds, brows that needed no plucking to shape them into moth wings, a tiny mouth. She shook her head, unpleasantly surprised at what she brusquely dismissed as unfitting vanity.

  “We have heard”—Willow slipped the mirror once more into its protective silken bag—“that the Son of Heaven’s beloved First Concubine died in childbed.”

  Silver Snow nodded as she dressed cautiously, fearing each time she wore the t
hin, ancient silk garments that she would tear them beyond any mending. Even this far to the north, the nobles had mourned that much-honored lady, who had been so brave that once, when a tiger had gotten loose, she had stepped before the Emperor until the beast could be lured again into its cage, saying to all that his life was more precious than hers, which was at his service.

  “Did not the fur merchant who came last moon,” Willow continued, “say that during the Son of Heaven’s mourning, he returned all of his other ladies to their homes? Though all of the ministers and poets praised the depth of his mourning thus, it was a hardship for the tradespeople when the silks and furs could no longer be offered to those behind the Phoenix screens.”

  It is a truth, thought Silver Snow, that with no ladies to buy silk, to demand gems and embroideries and delicate foods, those supplying such would suffer. How not? But I myself am poor, she thought. What is strange about poverty? Surely a right-acting man need not suffer at heart, even though his rice bowl is near empty. Confucius had much to say about that, she knew. Did not her father’s serenity, despite wounds and captivity, even in poverty and disgrace, prove the rightness of such acceptance?

  “Did you know,” Willow breathed slyly into an ear that Silver Snow’s mirror assured her was as rosy and delicate as the rare shells from the far-off sea, “that the Son of Heaven wrote a poem about his lady before he summoned his wizards?”

  A single bracelet of old white jade clicked against the lacquer chest before which Silver Snow sat. That thought brought more shivers than a winter wind. “The Emperor summoned wizards?” she breathed. “More quickly! Already I have tarried too long in obeying my father.”

  “Your pardon, Elder Sister,” said Willow, “but I would rather err by tarrying than have you sicken in your lungs. My sister-in-fur’s fifth cousin”—again, Willow smiled and flashed that uncanny impression of a beast at her mistress—“sat outside the Emperor’s court in Ch’ang-an, and thus she heard him speak:

  ‘The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.

  On the marble pavement, dust grows.

  Her empty room is cold and still.

  Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.

  Longing for that lovely lady,

  How can I bring my aching heart to rest?’ ”

  Silver Snow joined Willow in a heart-felt sigh. “Most beautiful,” she breathed, “and so melancholy. But why did he then summon wizards?”

  “To call her back.” One of Willow’s russet, level brows—an imperfection that no Emperor would have permitted among his ladies, but one that gave Willow a curiously trustworthy appearance—quirked, as if she had her own opinion of such wizards and such doings. “What they mumble is mostly foolishness. The Tao goes as it goes; and we, man and beast, are born and we die. Yet, the Son of Heaven is all-wise; so he summoned his wizards, who strove mightily—for men who dabble in such things. Finally, just one wizard produced a shadow . . . the merest flicker . . . against a silken hanging.

  “Then the Son of Heaven wept and cried out:

  ‘Is it or isn’t it?

  I stand and look.

  The swish, swish of a silk skirt.

  How slowly she comes!’ ”

  “My honored father will say worse than that of me, should I delay longer,” cried Silver Snow. “Are you finished with my hair, or are you not? And will you hold me here longer, you slothful girl, listening to silly news you claim to snatch from the mouths of foxes?”

  Willow laughed, exposing white teeth as she threw back her head, showing her strong throat, as white as a fur blaze on a fox’s chest. “Here, Elder Sister, is my most important news. After numerous tears, even more numerous verses, and more memorials than anyone would care to reckon, the Son of Heaven has agreed to choose another Illustrious Concubine, and perhaps even more than one.”

  Silver Snow’s hand went to her throat. “But I am the child of a disgraced . . .” Then she drew a deep, shaky breath. “Oh, but what could I not do were I to become a favorite! What could I not do for my father? A grant of favor, his titles and honor restored, perhaps . . .” Her thoughts took wings and flew as high as the moon overhead where, surely, the lady who lived in that orb saw them and smiled. “Do you think . . .”

  “I think,” Willow interrupted, “that many other ladies dream such dreams tonight. However, what a mirror, mine especially, has shown you is truth. You are very fair, Elder Sister. However, the Hall of Brilliance will be filled with the fairest ladies of the Middle Kingdom. And many of them will have gems and garments that outshine you as much as your eyes outshine mine own.

  “Lady,” Willow continued more gravely, “the messenger arrived, the messenger spoke with your father, and you have been summoned. That is all, I tell you with all my heart, that I know to be so. Go you, to find out the rest.”

  Abruptly Silver Snow’s eyes flashed, and though fear gripped her, she forced a laugh. “I hear and obey, at once, Elder Sister,” she told Willow as she made for her father’s study.

  CHAPTER 2

  As Silver Snow sped across the frosty courtyard she was grateful for the weight of her robes: the silk underrobe with its high, modest satin collar, falling to a hem that covered even the tips of her slippers; and the overrobe with the long sleeves that tumbled over her hands, trapping some warmth within—along with the fingers that such robes were devised to render useless. The ritualized clamor of hospitality rang in the night air. Though she herself might never see the official who had brought the Emperor’s edicts to her father, she must later supervise from behind the screens the banquet her father would give later that night for their entertainment.

  The stream designed to flow into a pool within her father’s courtyard was stilled and frozen. Gnarled pines leaned over it to shed their dark, fragrant needles onto snow shining silver in the lamplight from her father’s room. As much to guard herself from tripping over her flowing robes as to achieve the demure shuffling gait that the Book of Rites prescribed for maidens, she slowed as she climbed the slippery wooden steps. By the carved doorposts of her father’s study, she paused, astonished.

  The familiar and much-loved scents of pine and incense wafted out from the splendid brazier, which had been newly polished so that its silver and gold ridges and the gem inlays gleamed. Usually so thrifty, her father must have ordered all twelve of the lights in the curving arms of the largest ceramic lampstand in the house to be kindled. Seated in a haze of incense and a halo of light was Chao Kuang himself. Silver Snow bowed deeply, as much out of love as from proper manners, before she glanced up.

  Chao Kuang wore his finest tunic, woven and embroidered with red and blue with characters of good fortune, fastened on the right with five gold buttons. A wide vermilion belt (a privilege once granted and, unaccountably, never revoked by the Son of Heaven) was drawn atop it. His robe’s long sleeves fell over her father’s hands, hiding his scars and the missing finger. Though the room was warmly heated, a wide strip of sable encircled his throat, while ancient skins of the same precious fur lined his coat. There was no doubt that this splendor had been donned with care to receive an official to whom Chao Kuang would never reveal his house’s poverty.

  He leaned against padded cushions, holding a two-foot-long bundle of thin wooden strips on which delicate characters had been inked. That must be the Emperor’s edict! Broken seals hung from it, chief of them, the signet of the Emperor himself.

  Silver Snow drew a deep, shuddering breath and waited anxiously for her father to speak.

  “Sit, daughter.” Chao Kuang gestured toward a pillow.

  Silver Snow lowered herself, settling her robes in decorous folds. Once again, she ventured to look up.

  “Doubtless, you have been listening to the gossip in the women’s quarters,” he observed, but he was not frowning with displeasure. “Vixens’ chatter, most of it; but even a fox, should it bark long enough, may once in its life utter the truth.”

  Had Chao Kuang heard the women’s rumors about Willow? Silver Snow h
ad asked herself so often if he had harkened to such spiteful tales that the arrow of fear once accompanying such a thought had long since lost its barbs. Was he about to examine her about that? But why would he do so at a time as important as this one? When he had purchased the maid, he had remarked only that the right-minded man tried to aid those in need, and that he had heard of a faraway province in which red hair—hard as it was to believe—was esteemed as a mark of beauty. Still, since Willow had come to live in their courtyards, Silver Snow noted, he had forbidden the hunting of foxes on their lands; he himself wore only sable or the fleece of sheep.

  Chao Kuang raised the wooden strips of the Emperor’s edict and, seated as she was, Silver Snow bowed before the august words until her brow touched the felted mats covering the floor.

  “As you have heard, because the Emperor’s Inner Courts have long been empty, the Censors have now reported to him the outcry of the people who rely upon those courts for their livelihood.”

  Silver Snow nodded once, and kept her head down. Her eyes, however, darted about the familiar, cozy room, and noted an unfamiliar, ancient-looking chest in one corner. An odd surge of excitement made it difficult for her to sit and listen as, in strict propriety, she should. But it had never been just strict propriety for her and her father: beyond proper behavior lay hsin, or sincerity, and jen, good will; and beyond those virtues, she knew, lay love—though, of course, a decent reserve would forever prevent either of them from giving voice to such emotion.

  “Moreover—and this too is the chatter of foxes—it is said that one night the Emperor dreamed of a woman as lovely as the lady who died, and vowed that he would discover whether such beauty existed anywhere within the Middle Kingdom. Consequently, he has decreed that five hundred concubines should be chosen, and he entrusted the task to Mao Yen-shou, the Administrator of the Inner Courts.” Her father paused, and Silver Snow dared to look directly at his face. His eyes were deep and shadowed with memory, the crease between them seeming to be all the deeper.