Alma Alexander - The Secrets of Jin-Shei

‘Which one is Cai? Have I met her?’ Tai had asked.

‘No,’ Antian had said, shaking her head. ‘Cai is dead. She was at the Court for only a few years, but she lived her life like a comet.’

‘Where did she come from?’

‘She was a daughter of a poor farmer, up in the miserable rocks and stones of the north country. He could not afford to keep her – she was the ninth child in the family, the sixth daughter – and so he took her and two more of his daughters and brought them to Linh-an, and sold them into concubinage. Cai was the only one who made the Imperial Court.’

‘What of her sisters?’ Tai had asked, her eyes wide.

‘Who knows? Cai never did, or at least never spoke of them after to anyone here in the Court.’

‘So what happened?’ Tai had asked, held rapt by the sorrow she could sense between the lines of this tale, by the tendrils with which this sorrow had snared Liudan herself.

‘She might have been happy,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t know, I was only a child. Cai caught the Emperor’s eye quickly enough, but rumour had it not for long. She did bear him a daughter, though. One of only three daughters, including me, that he sired on his women. And we were all more or less born at the same time, too – there is just over a year between me and the next daughter, and then another year between her and Liudan. She’s the youngest of the female line. The rest, well, his line runs to boys. His sons, now, range from their twenties to babes in arms.’

Tai was old enough to do the numbers on this. Inheritance went through the female line in Syai; the Emperor might rule the land, being male and having that power vested in him, but he came into his power through the woman he had married and who had been his path to the throne, and his legacy rested in the daughters he had sired. So the Emperor had secured his succession, and then provided a couple of spare heirs to the Empire, two other daughters, in case anything happened to the Little Empress. The boys would be married off well, and were of no further importance.

But Liudan was the Second Spare, born of a mother who, once her duty was done, became a shadow in the Court, no longer noticed, no longer needed, supplanted by other women in the Emperor’s retinue of concubines. The only thing of value Cai would have had would have been her child …; but Tai had extrapolated from Antian’s earlier words. Cai had not wished to let others raise her daughter – and perhaps, if she had borne a son, she would have been allowed to keep the child and rear him. But she had borne a potential heir – one twice removed from the throne, to be sure, but a potential heir nonetheless – and the child was taken away from her not long after it was born.

‘She must have been very lonely,’ Tai had said.

‘She had two of us she grew up with,’ Antian had said, misunderstanding and applying Tai’s words to Liudan, of whom she had just been speaking.

‘I meant Cai,’ Tai had said. ‘What happened to her after Liudan was born? When did she die?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Antian had said thoughtfully. ‘I do know they said that she was pregnant again less than a year after Liudan was born – but after that, I don’t know. It may be that it was thus she died – in childbirth – her and the babe both because when she disappeared from the Court there was no child left in her wake that I know of, male or female. But then there were the rumours.’

‘Of what?’

‘She was in some sort of disgrace,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t recall what, but she had done something that reflected badly on her. And that meant on Liudan, too, on her child.’

And Tai had suddenly understood Liudan’s recoil in the garden. ‘She was the one left behind, wasn’t she?’ Tai had whispered. ‘The child of the erring one. Without friends. Except you, Antian. Except you.’

Antian had looked at her with lustrous dark eyes. ‘You see? You always understand. Yes, she grew up as the Third Princess, the youngest in protocol, the last in line, the not-quite-needed. And her mother had fallen from grace, and nobody wanted any part of her other than her continued existence.’

‘And she was afraid, wasn’t she? That morning in the garden, she was afraid that she would be the price of my coming into your life. She’d be abandoned if you chose another companion.’

‘Oh, she was never a companion – not like that – she is my sister.’

‘Is she mine, now, too?’

‘No, the jin-shei bond doesn’t mean you have to take Liudan on,’ Antian had said with a smile. ‘Not like that. She is my blood-sister, and that makes it different from the jin-shei bond. And she is wrong, in that I am not going to abandon her just because I have found a jin-shei-bao to share my heart with. But she has always felt the edge of the Court turned at her, and she has always been angry at the world. And she has grown up alone, for all that these halls are teeming with brothers, sisters, and women who had been her mother’s companions.’

‘She is very pretty,’ Tai had said.

‘So was Cai,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t remember her, not really – but there is a portrait that the Emperor had done, on ivory – the miniature stands in the Palace back in Linh-an. I’ll show you some time. She was very beautiful.’

‘It was a pity she was not loved,’ Tai had said.

Antian had given her a strange look. ‘Yes,’ she had said slowly. ‘It was a pity.’

It was the custom of the Court that one of the heirs always had to stay behind in Linh-an when the rest of the Court came away to the Summer Palace – just in case of some calamity. In the year that Tai and Antian entered into jin-shei , the third sister, Second Princess Oylian, had been the one to have remained in the sweltering capital city over that long hot summer. The year after that it had been Antian herself. This third summer it was Liudan’s turn – and Tai, despite a guilty cast to her sense of relief, was not entirely unhappy that she did not have the angry Third Princess watching her and Antian together with smouldering, jealous eyes. Her feelings for Liudan ran the gamut from pity to deep resentment that she should be the focus of so much undeserved hatred for no better reason than that she was Antian’s chosen companion.

Second Princess Oylian was a gentle, pliant, pleasant girl who drifted through life – she was a stream of water which flowed around obstacles rather than try and shift them.

‘The worst thing that could ever happen to Oylian and to Syai,’ Antian had said to Tai once in a low whisper one early morning out on their balcony on the side of the mountain, ‘would be for her to ever become Empress. Whoever her Emperor proved to be, he could make her do whatever he said and she would do it to keep the peace. She was born to a family, not an Empire.’

But the Second Princess would smile at Tai, even if she didn’t have much to say to her. Liudan would simply sweep past and ignore her whenever she could. Tai was the danger – Tai was, like Liudan’s own mother had been, of common stock, only one step removed from Liudan’s own now-high station, a reminder of what she could easily have been if she had not been born royal. The Third Princess was a complex mixture of insecurities – left adrift because she was the second spare heiress and therefore less urgently needed than Oylian, left alone because of her mother’s fall from grace for reasons that even Liudan herself did not really understand, afraid of the thin veneer that separated her royalty from the land-grubbing poverty from which her mother’s family had come. Liudan wanted the royalty, needed it as a shield against all kinds of terrors – and it was a thin shield, barely there. She was only Third Princess, after all.