Hidden Cities (12 page)

“Majesty?”

“Mei Feng,” he said, with an anxious glance forward to where his woman sat in the bows. “Can she really carry this baby safely? She’s so small …”

That wasn’t quite what she thought he’d say, and she liked him better for it. “Majesty. Mei Feng isn’t one of your pampered delicate beauties,” the kind of court women that he didn’t actually seem to have or want, “she’s peasant stock, tough as a root.”

“She said that. Even so, she should have her doctor with her. She should have you.”

“Women have been bearing babies for a long time now, and most of them without sight of a doctor from beginning to end. You will find Taishu full of women much wiser than I am, who have helped one another give birth to half the island.”

“She wants you,” he said stubbornly, meaning
I want you, I want her to have you
, and he was a little baffled by the fact that she was not in fact coming with them.

Tien said, “That is flattering, majesty, but ill-advised. You have your own doctors, if a doctor be needed. Truly, I have small experience in this.”

“You think my doctors have more?”

“I think they know more about the difficulties that surround an emperor, yes. Trust them, before you trust me. And your own mother, of course,” the only woman living who had borne a child to an emperor.

This time he let her go. She bowed and turned and balanced down the gangplank, reached the wharf and walked away: feeling eyes, perhaps more than one pair of eyes burning into the back of her neck.

Still not looking around.

Not looking up, either. Not looking for the dragon, no.

R
ETRACING NOT
her own steps of this morning but the emperor’s: going not to her hospital but farther, up to the governor’s palace.

Tien wanted her library back.

She was anxious, but only a little, that Tunghai Wang might have taken it. If he had actually valued it, if he had understood it, he wouldn’t have given her such free rein. It should have been full of scholars and the wise; Tunghai Wang should have wanted it extremely, but she didn’t believe that he knew what it was.

She was anxious again, but again only a little, that it might have been pillaged for the simple convenience of paper. Or for no reason at all, only because these things happen in times of war. If it had survived Tunghai Wang’s occupation, though, it should have survived the emperor’s. Especially with the emperor himself actually camped out in the palace, unconsciously protecting what was as valuable to him as to his enemy. If he had only known.

She should, perhaps, have told him what he had. How she had used it, how she thought it could still be used. Military men might see the dragon as a weapon, though, they might be that bold. Someone was sure to see Han only as an instrument. She had been ruthless herself, she knew, but only in conscience. She was kinder, she would be stronger and more careful. She and the dragon
would fight over him, and she intended to win. She thought she could, if only she still had the library.

Through the gate, then, and across the public courtyard, in at her familiar doorway. No lamp left burning for her today; she made her own light and carried it down to the library.

Here were all the books and scrolls,
her
books and scrolls, untouched. Here was the niche of polished stone where she could safely set her lamp. Because one worry would always rush in to replace another, she was already wondering how she could keep both access and privacy when the emperor appointed a new governor. With that filling her head, she needed a moment to register a movement in the gleaming mirror of the stone. That was not the lamp’s flame, neither her own self reflected. She stood still and saw it more clearly, saw him rise behind her shoulder where he must have been crouched patiently in the dark of the room, waiting. Waiting for her.

Here now, she turned; and here was Han.

Still shirtless, as she had seen him last. The better perhaps to flaunt what she had done to him, to cry it like a betrayal to the world. Or else to flaunt it at the dragon, to hurl it like a banner in her eyes,
see me, I have the measure of you. I am the measure of you
.

That was not true, but some control he did have, and Tien could give him more. He could be fearsome, he could matter more than emperors.

If he would allow it. He had a feral, half-mad look in his eyes, unless that was the dragon looking out of them. She was feral and half mad, and with reason.

He had a blade in his hand. Not a tao, just a knife: a short knife, long enough.

Tien said, “Doesn’t the dragon feed you?” He had always been bone-bare; now he looked starved, all gaunt ribs and glare. There was something else about him, something more startlingly new, but what she saw first was the hunger.

He was confused, momentarily. He blinked and said, “She … doesn’t think. To do that.”

“And neither do you, I suppose. Here, I have food,” cold rice and bean paste, good enough for a hollow belly. “Sit and eat, before you fall over.”

He shook his head, quite slowly. He hadn’t come for food. Nor for her, or not in the way he used to. Quickly, then, she came up with other questions. “Who let you run around loose? And how did you know where to come?” Both elements in that seemed monumentally unlikely, but Han’s life always seemed to shade from the unlikely to the impossible. With the dragon at one end of the chain, anything might happen at the other.

He shrugged. “There were soldiers watching me, but they got caught up at the harbor,” which meant he’d given them the slip in all the fuss, while his escort was entangled with military protocols: explaining themselves to an officer, perhaps, turning to produce their prisoner as justification, finding him suddenly not there. It sounded very Han. “After that, I just asked people where I could find you. Everybody knows Tien the doctor.”

And apparently everyone knew that if she wasn’t at her hospital, she’d be here; and demonstrably Han had no trouble inveigling himself into the palace, with the emperor leaving and everyone down at the dockside to see him away. She was willing to bet that he’d had a shirt, though, not to scare the servants with his dreadful written skin.

He was trying to scare her, or else accuse her. Maybe both. He said, “She wants to kill you, Tien. For what you did,” a flex of his shoulders to speak of it, and of course that was the new thing, the strangeness: she had never seen him before without his chains. Here he was free, body-free, and more tied to the dragon than ever, or she to him.

“I’m sure she does,” Tien said. It was almost not frightening now. The dragon wanted to kill everyone, more or less.

“I won’t let her, though. She knows that.”

Of course she did; she must know everything that was in his head. Tien had made her a gift of it. The girl almost thought the dragon should be grateful.

“And you?” she said.

“Oh, I could kill you. I could let myself do that.”

Tien had nothing to offer him but the truth. She said, “I am sorry, Han, but I did have to do it. For everyone’s sake.”

“Everyone’s sake but mine,” he said, that much self-aware at least; he did still remember why he might want to kill her.

“Yes. Of course.” That was what betrayal meant, that you hurt the one you loved. Not him alone, perhaps—him and herself and the dragon too—but him most of all. It was the right thing to do, and she had done it. He might even agree with her if he was sane, if he didn’t have that cold weight of dragon in his head. It was still betrayal. Her hand it was that tattooed him, that bonded him and dragon lifelong; there was sense, perhaps, in letting it be his hand that slew her for it. Sooner him than the dragon.

He might not forgive himself after, when he remembered that he loved her. There was nothing she could do about that.

She said, “I couldn’t let you free the dragon, whatever you promised her. I still can’t. But what I can do,”
I think I can
, “I can find a way to put her back where she was, beneath the strait. I can make her sleep again. That’ll be easier for you, Han. She’ll be quiet in your head. You help me here, help me find what I need, we can work together …”

We can be together
. That used to be enough, but he was mad now. He shook his head, almost frantic. “That’s not, she couldn’t bear it, don’t you even
threaten
that …”

And the knife was lifting his hand again, that was how it looked, that the intent was in the blade and not in him.

Perhaps the intent was in the dragon, and he was just a puppet.

Perhaps they both were, puppets to the moment. Apparently she was going to stand here and let his knife kill her, whether or
not he had any will in the matter. Not going to move, not going to resist or cower or try to run away.

Not going to call out, even, to whoever they were whose voices she could hear in the hall, whose slow shuffling footsteps rang so loud.

Figures shadowed the doorway, two old hurt men who couldn’t conceivably stop Han if he really meant to do this. One was bent and leaning on a crutch, while the other stood too carefully erect. She knew severe pain when she saw it, and she was seeing it twice here, two contrasting patterns of pain.

The straight man said, “You again, is it, lad? Has nobody killed you yet?” Meaning
even yet
, measuring just how astonishing this was.

And that man, his voice was all it took, apparently, to stop Han.

To have him turn away from Tien, suddenly purposeless, hanging like weed in water, mindless drift.

To have him stare at the man in a blanching terror, as though all the ghosts of his past had risen up at once.

Tien wanted to go to him, when she saw him so suddenly scared. And was too slow, because the man with the crutch moved first. Haltingly, effortfully, he dragged and swung his twisted body across the floor. Han just stood and watched him come. So did Tien, so did his companion in the doorway.

Finally close enough to touch, the crippled man reached out with his free arm and seemed to do no more than that, a touch on Han’s elbow, barely so strong as a grip.

Han gasped, and the knife fell from the fingers of his one good hand as though all the strings of his arm had been cut.

The bent man balanced awkwardly on unsupported legs for a moment, to flick at the knife with his crutch. Sent it skittering across the floor, almost to the straight man’s feet.

Who bent over—very straightly, very slowly—to retrieve it, and came up smiling, sure that all the power in the room now was
where it ought to be, where it belonged, in his hands and his friend’s.

Nobody seemed to be saying anything. Nobody felt the need. Tien was negligible for now, she felt that herself. What she had to offer here was slow and long-term and dependent. Dependent on this room, more than anything.

Han had lost most, here and beforehand. Even before he had been reduced by madness and reduced again by fear and now again by losing the little other thing he had, the little knife. Still, he looked from one old man to the other—and not at Tien at all, because she was negligible, or for whatever other reason he might hold closer to his heart—and didn’t speak, didn’t need to.

In response apparently to his silence, the palace seemed to grow abruptly darker, abruptly colder, cast into deep shadow, as though a cloud hung directly overhead to obscure the sun.

If so, it was a cloud with purpose. She couldn’t quite tell if it was actually Han’s purpose, or if he had just called into a void,
do what you will
—but there came a terrible clatter of falling tiles and breaking masonry, the snapping of ancient beams, a distant scream shrill enough to cut through steel, a groaning sound that welled up beneath their feet and might well be the complaint of the earth itself at too great a weight descending.

The library had no windows, which was probably just as well. Nobody wanted to look out to see the dragon looking back at them.

Han looked back at the old men, which might almost be the same thing: not frightened now, not cowed, not possible to bully. No one spoke, no one had any suggestions. It wasn’t quite an impasse, only that not one of them quite knew where this would lead, where they could possibly go from here.

ing Wen would often go walking in the rain.

Sometimes he said that he liked to do this because it reminded him of other days, harder, better, when he was young and on campaign, a simple soldier for his emperor.

Sometimes he said that the rain made a cloak, to isolate him from the intrusions of the world. A palace wall might do that but not well, not well enough. A palace was a world to itself, and full of intrusion. A garden within a palace wall was better; rain in a garden within a palace wall was better yet, worth waiting for. It gave him space and time, quite undisturbed.

He had other reasons too. One of those—never confessed—was the pleasure he took from stepping indoors again, having his women strip away sodden clothing and rub him dry, fetch him tea and whatever other comforts he might demand, the intimate services due to his rank and power.