The Dragons of Heaven (28 page)

“Biddable? He actually called me biddable!” I made a mock move to rise and hunt down the offender, but Jian Huo pulled me back.

“No you don't. You've done enough, encouraging them as you have. I won't have you adding to his misery.”

I pouted at being foiled, but he kissed it away and settled me more firmly on top of him. I propped myself up on my elbows so I could continue babbling at him. Resigned to this from long experience, Jian Huo ignored me in favor of undoing my robes.

“He really does seem bothered by it, doesn't he? I wouldn't have expected it.” I paused and Jian Huo hmphed, freeing me to continue. “I mean, sure, they've been together for over a decade, but they always seemed so casual.” I knew from long conversations over tea and plum wine that the fox-girl's feelings were anything but casual, but I also knew from observation that they had never seemed to be fully reciprocated.

Jian Huo's response echoed those observations. “She is his concubine.”

“I hate that word.” I growled, no longer distracted by his hands. He stopped to brush my wispies back from my cheeks.

“I know. But until now he – they both – have let that term define how they behave with one another. But you are right. Shui Yin is much more disturbed than he should be. I think after tonight that Wu Wei will no longer be his concubine.”

“Wife?” I asked. A lifted brow communicated the unlikelihood of that. “Some indeterminate in-between state, then.” My words skirted the unresolved issue of our own relationship; he tensed beneath me. I smiled and copied his gesture, sliding my fingers through the hair at his temples. “I can live with that.” Jian Huo relaxed and resumed fiddling with my robes. I looped back to his original question.

“As for the children, I've met political prisoners who've behaved more compliantly.” My voice took on a mocking, sing-song quality: “It's too loud; it's too quiet; we're thirsty; we're hungry; tell us a story; sing us a song; it's too hot; now it's too cold; our nurse is an evil, ill-omened hag who is plotting our deaths.”

“That is a new one,” he chuckled, but by the way he was nuzzling my throat, I was pretty sure he was only half paying attention. I started to stop paying attention myself.

“Mei Shen's invention. Still not the winner of the day, what with Mian Zi's anthropological knowledge of all-night lesbian fox orgies.” I felt more than heard the thrum of laughter in his chest. My last question emerged breathy and distracted. “How exactly did you know about that?”

His lips smiled against mine. “Didn't you hear Mian Zi? Everyone knows that.”

Whatever response I might have made was lost in his kiss.

T
he moment I woke up
, I knew something was wrong.

I'd like to claim a mother's instinct or something equally arcane, but the truth of the matter was that I hadn't slept late for over ten years, ever since the twins had mastered walking. My mornings started early with two imps bounding onto the bed, tangling themselves in the covers, and getting tickled near-to-gasping by their father and myself for their pains.

Diffused sunlight greeted my eyes as I cracked them open. I stretched against Jian Huo's warm length, the silk of his hair sliding along my skin as he shifted with my movement. Magic hair. It never tangled or got caught underneath your arms or in your mouth. It entranced me. I reached down to grasp two long coils of it, intending to wrap myself in the silken warmth, when the wrongness of the morning hit me.

The children.

I sat up, rubbing away sleep, and looked around the room. Maybe it was some new, inventive game designed to send me into a panic. Jian Huo sat up as well, sensing my growing distress.

“What is it?” His hand rubbed up my arm, a futile attempt to soothe. I shrugged him away.

“The children. They're not here. It's late, and they didn't wake us up.”

It was a testament to how regular our idyllic days were that he also recognized the wrongness of this. I scrambled from the bed, reaching for my robe. He rose more fluidly, eyes serious and pensive, seeking a rational explanation as he donned his own robe.

“The nurse?” he offered. “She doesn't know them, or us. In all likelihood she wouldn't let them leave the nursery. I have sometimes wished that our own nurse was half so diligent.”

I started to agree with this. We were in a strange place. The nurse wouldn't know how much we indulged our children. It must have been a mighty struggle for her to keep them in the nursery. Even so…

“Since when would they let a little thing like that get in their way?” I asked.

He held my gaze for a beat. We broke, scrambling for the door and rushing down the hallway.

The strangest tableau greeted us when we burst into the nursery. The nurse was nowhere to be seen, but Mian Zi and Mei Shen sat in the middle of the chamber, playing a game. He laid down a set of colored sticks, which she studied intently before picking them up in reverse order. Then she laid them down, and he picked them up. They played with a level of concentration usually reserved for
wei-qi
, humming a tuneless drone. I'd seen Cronenberg films that creeped me out less.

They didn't notice our entry. I don't know how long we stood there watching them with growing horror.

Jian Huo interrupted the game. “Mian Zi. Mei Shen. What are you doing?” His words were quiet, his normally rich baritone strangled. I couldn't even bring myself to speak. The children finished the round, stopped humming, and stood.

“Hello, Father; hello, Mother. Are we ready to go home now?” Normally the more reticent of the two, Mian Zi stepped forward. Mei Shen cast her eyes to the floor in proper feminine deference. There was no sign of the jade combs I'd given her the night before. Their skin was swarthier than it should have been and oddly grainy, their movements jerky and wooden, and when they looked at us, there was something wrong behind their eyes. I let out a choked gurgle. Pod people. My children had been replaced with pod people.

Tears welling, I wrenched my gaze away from these imposters. My eyes fell on the chair near the brazier, the one that the nurse had sat in the night before. Wood-shavings from whatever she'd been carving lay in a scatter; the dull knife sat abandoned amidst them. I stared blindly at the knife for a moment, then back up at the things pretending to be my children. Years of bedtime stories and folk lullabies had supplied a catalogue of dangers to warn them against, but some of those warnings weren't meant for children. They were meant for parents.

Mei Shen and Mian Zi weren't pod people. They were changelings.

Jian Huo started forward in fury. I rushed at him, grabbing his arm before he could strike the imposters and make it that much harder to get our own children back.

“Jian Huo. Wait!”

He turned to me. “Missy, these aren't–”

“I know,” I interrupted. “Bring me eggs.”

What?” His fury had turned to surprise and suspicion. He had to be wondering if he had three pod people on his hands instead of just two.

“Please. I can't explain, but I… I know what to do.” I choked on the words, doubt creeping up in conviction's wake. I glanced at my children. Not my children? They were so wrong, everything was wrong. What if I was wrong, too?

And even if I wasn't, that didn't mean I knew better what to do than Jian Huo, who'd always lived this life. But he'd been about to strike the imposters. His hand opened and closed in impotence. Maybe basing my children's recovery on instructions gleaned from a folk song was madness, but it had to be better than violence.

I shook Jian Huo's arm. “Eggs, some kind of bread, milk – preferably spoiled – and rice with as much chaff as possible.” Thank god we were in Shanghai. Half the ingredients would have been impossible to get in Huanglong. “Oh, and a pot with hot water. I'll need that for the brewing.”

His mouth worked as he struggled through a thousand questions, but then he just clamped his jaw, nodded, and stalked from the room. I walked over to the shavings and ran my hands through them, taking a moment to collect myself. The knife I picked up and slid into my robes. With a deep breath, I rose and turned back to the imposters, smiling brightly through my fear.

“So, my darlings. That is an interesting game you were playing. Why don't you show me how to play it.”

T
he waiting was horrible
, made more so by having to watch the two changelings go through the motions of being my children. Whatever intelligence animated them was rather dim. On the one hand, it made things worse because my own children were so brilliant. To see Mian Zi's copy confounded by the stick game, to see Mei Shen quiet and deferent – I wanted to shake them, strike them as Jian Huo had been about to. Still, it gave me hope that they would be easy to trick. In the tales, changelings were always so cunning, but, if these two were anything to judge by, then just maybe my folk magic had a shot of working.

Before my patience could snap, Jian Huo returned with several servants and the items I'd requested. Jiu Wei, Shui Yin, and Wu Wei were with him, the latter looking as if all she wanted was to be left alone to commit ritual suicide. A small part of me wanted to assuage the tortured guilt in her eyes, but a much larger part of me was furious that she'd been so careless with my children's safety. Part of that fury was misdirected – it was my fault for not taking Mei Shen's worries more seriously – but it was easier to blame Wu Wei.

“The nurse has slipped away. She was brought here in repayment of a debt.” Jian Huo glared at the fox-girl. “She expressed an interest in meeting the dragon-children. Si Wei thought her harmless. Apparently, Si Wei was mistaken.”

Even I shivered at the coldness of Jian Huo's tone, but I'd already figured most of that out while I waited. My attention was caught by the one unexpected element.

“Si Wei?” I asked.

“I have forsaken my claim to my fifth tail. To be so duped, and to such ends, proves that I have not earned it.” The fox-girl managed to look me in the eye. “I am so sorry.”

My anger ebbed, but rather than dissolve into tears and accept the comfort I knew they would all give me, I beamed a big, fake smile at her and thumped her on the shoulder.

“What for? Everything's fine!” I ignored the shocked looks and, quelling my revulsion, I grabbed each pod-child by the hand and led them over to the brazier and the pot of steaming water.

“Now, my darlings, we're going to go home, but first we need to brew the parting glass. We'll drink the beer with our friends, and it will give us all luck until we see each other again.” Which was utter nonsense, but that was the point.

I hummed as I added ingredients to the pot, half to steady myself and half to keep the song's instructions in mind. First I broke the eggs, tossing out the whites and yolks and putting the shells into the simmering pot. Next came the bread – little golden bing that didn't have the crusty bits I needed. I did the best I could, picking out the charred pieces to toss in the pot and discarding the rest. Everyone gathered watched me with rapt fascination, although the adults all shared a similar look of concern over my apparent madness. The children's jaws were slack, though in the Mian Zi imposter I discerned a bit of growing skepticism.

I kept humming. Next came the milk. Holding my breath, I skimmed off the curdled film at the top and dumped it into the pot. I gestured for a servant to take the rest of the milk away; I didn't want to gag from the smell and ruin the entire process. Once the milk was gone, I stirred the unlikely ingredients together. Skepticism now lighted both of the changelings' eyes.

“We're supposed to drink this?” Shui Yin's
sotto
-voiced question held similar skepticism, and a level of disgust. Jian Huo and Si Wei both shushed him. With trembling hands, I reached for the final ingredient. Please, I prayed, please let this work.

I sifted out the chaff from the rice and added it to the pot, throwing aside the whole, unbroken grains. I heard a snort of disbelief behind me and turned to face Pod-Mian.

“That's not the way to make beer.”

“Of course it is!” My smile was at full wattage.

“No,” he countered. “It isn't.”

I floundered. This wasn't how things were supposed to go. So far, his skepticism was similar enough to Mian Zi's that it didn't count as an admission of his charade. My smile dimmed. “Maybe it isn't how you make it here in China, but it's how we make it back home in San Francisco.”

Pod-Mian's eyes narrowed, as if he'd never met a simpler creature than me. “You stupid woman. I've traveled the world and lived over two millennia, and I've never seen anyone make beer that way.”

Not to be outdone, Pod-Mei's voice was similarly dismissive: “I've traveled as far and lived as long, and neither have I.”

This time my smile was real, and full of triumph. I upended the pot, dousing them both with the stinking contents.

“Eggs and crumbs and milk and grain, bring my baby back again!” I shouted the final line of the song in English, the first I'd spoken in years. The Shadow Realms shifted, regurgitating
something
back into this world, but other than that, there was little outward sign that my spell had worked. One moment the two pod- children were washed over by the hot, stinking liquid, and the next moment Mian Zi sat clutching his sister in the middle of the steaming muck. Mian Zi blinked up at me, a look of fastidious disgust on his face at the smell and the mess.

Heedless of the stink, I rushed forward to hug them both, and our little group was soon enveloped in Jian Huo's arms. Our relief was short-lived. Mian Zi struggled against me, and I pulled back, confused.

“Mother!” He loosened his hold on his sister and she thunked to the floor, a lifeless wooden doll dressed in Mei Shen's clothes.