Alma Alexander - The Secrets of Jin-Shei

‘Yes, sai’an. ’ He grasped her wrists firmly and the corded muscles in his arms knotted as he lowered her slowly, gently, down to where Antian lay. Yuet felt her feet touch something solid, then it lurched beneath her heel. She gasped.

‘Wait!’

‘I won’t let go, sai’an ,’ the servant said, his voice tight with the effort of holding her suspended above the tumbled chaos at her feet. ‘Not until you tell me.’

Yuet felt with her foot, found a foothold that felt solid, tested it. It held. She brought the other foot closer, fitted her heel into the arch of the grounded foot like a ballerina, found her balance, stood. The manservant felt one of her long fingers tapping at his wrist.

‘You can let go now. Go, get a rope. Get help. For the love of Cahan, run!’

‘Yes, sai’an , I go!’ He released her arms, turned, and ran back the way they had come. Tai could hear him calling out urgently as he ran, but then he was dismissed from her mind and she knelt on the edge of the ruined balcony and craned her neck down to see what Yuet was doing.

The healer shifted her weight very gradually, very carefully, aware that a single false move she made could send both her and the Little Empress tumbling all the way down to the bottom of the chasm below.

‘I come, Princess. I am coming.’

‘It’s too late,’ Antian whispered, her voice a breath.

Yuet bit her lip, looking at the broken body at her feet. The fingers of Antian’s hand, lying over the spreading black stain on her robe, were slick with the blood that had seeped through. The cut on her forehead was starting to clot but was still seeping, and a thin stream of it had flowed past the corner of her eye and down her temple, soaking the glossy black hair. Yuet could read the signs, and the signs were all over the Little Empress – the pallor of her skin, the white shadow around her lips, the shallow breath that moved the thin ribcage beneath the blood-soaked robe. This was just one more face of the death that Yuet had found at every turn in the Palace that grim morning.

‘Oh, no,’ Yuet found herself whispering. ‘No, no, no, no. ’

‘Do something,’ Tai said desperately from the edge of the balcony, just above them.

Yuet took another careful step, which brought her right up to Antian’s body, and went down gingerly on one knee. ‘Let me see, Your Highness.’

Antian allowed her hand to be removed from her bloodied side, her eyes closing. Her lips were parted, and she breathed so shallowly that Tai, staring at her from her perch on the edge, could not swear that she breathed at all. The breath came a little more sharply as Yuet’s gentle fingers probed the wound in Antian’s side and came away bloody. Yuet kept her eyes lowered, looked down the line of Antian’s hip and onto the unnaturally bent leg, allowed her fingers to linger there as well, drawing another sharp gasp of pain.

‘That’s just a broken leg, we can mend that,’ Yuet said soothingly. ‘I will make a splint, just as soon as we get you up.’

Antian’s eyes opened, cloudy but alert. ‘What …; happened to …;’

Yuet tried to look away but a sudden rush of tears she could not hold back betrayed everything, and Antian bit her lip.

‘They are dead, aren’t …; they? All of them?’

‘I …; I don’t know, Your Highness, but …; we have not found Second Princess Oylian yet.’

‘So she won’t …; be Empress,’ Antian said, and glanced up to catch Tai’s eye. It cost her something, because she could not help a soft moan as she tried to turn her head. ‘And neither …; will I.’

‘It’s just a broken leg,’ said Yuet stubbornly.

‘And this?’ Antian whispered, only her eyes flickering down to her side. It seemed that her eyes were all that she had the strength to move.

‘Where is that man with the rope?’ Yuet snapped, fretting.

‘I can help you,’ Tai said suddenly. ‘I can help you bring her up here.’

‘You can’t hold her weight,’ said Yuet sceptically, glancing up at the slightly built eleven-year-old on the ledge above her.

‘She is not heavy. And if you will hold her from below, I can catch her up here.’

‘We should not move her at all!’ Yuet said with an edge of despair in her voice. ‘Let alone a push-me-pull-you method like that! Her ribs …;’

Tai’s breath caught on a sob as she turned around and scanned the gardens behind her for any sign of the returning manservant with the rope and the reinforcements. ‘She’ll die.’

She is dying anyway. She will be dead by the time the man gets back here. The thought was as clear in Yuet’s mind as though Szewan, her mentor and the master-healer woman to whom she was apprenticed, had spoken them while standing right beside her.

She glanced up again, to where Tai had risen into a crouch, tense, weeping. Then down, at the fragile broken body at her feet. Then at the ledge where she stood, precarious, unstable. If she moved too fast, too carelessly, if she turned an ankle on a loose piece of rubble …;

‘All right,’ she said abruptly. ‘Wait there until I say.’

There was a long tear in Antian’s robe; she must have caught it on something as she was pitched over the edge and fell. Yuet took hold of the fabric and ripped it all the way, leaving herself with a ragged strip of silk in her hands. She folded this up into a thick wad, tucked it underneath the robe over the wound in Antian’s side, took off her own belt and tied the pad into place.

‘Can you hold on to that, Princess? Just so that it doesn’t move?’ She lifted Antian’s almost lifeless hand and placed it over the makeshift pressure pad. It was not going to help. Nothing was going to help, but she might as well try.

Antian’s hand landed with her usual grace. ‘I’ll try,’ she said weakly.

Yuet looked up.

Tai straightened. ‘I’m here. What do I have to do?’

‘I will try and lift her. Can you reach down for her shoulders? Oh, what are we doing?’ Yuet said, aghast. ‘We’ll all be down there in pieces in a minute!’

‘I can do it,’ Tai said. ‘I can do it!’

‘We’ll kill her,’ Yuet whispered despairingly, looking down at the girl at her feet.

Antian’s eyes opened again, and there was a shadow of a smile in them. ‘You cannot do that,’ she whispered. ‘It is out of your hands.’

Yuet was seventeen years old. She had had her Xat-Wau ceremony nearly three years before; she had been first apprentice and now assistant to Court Healer Szewan since she was seven years old. She was good. She saved lives. And right now all she wanted to do was bury her face in her hands and weep for the pity of it.

All her choices were doomed here. Antian was right. Yuet could not kill her – because, except for these last few breaths of pain, she was already dead.

‘Help me,’ Yuet said to Tai, waiting on the ledge. She checked the tie on the pad, made sure it was as secure as it could be, lifted Antian’s slender body as gently as she could. Antian let out a soft sob of pain and Yuet winced; she could feel the blood from Antian’s side seep warm and wet into her own robe as she held Antian against her body; she cradled the Princess for a moment, shifting her grip, and then slid an arm along her back, laying Antian’s spine against the long bones of her own forearm, straightening the Princess’s body as much as she was able. ‘Just keep your hand there, Princess,’ she said, anything, just to keep talking, for Antian to hear voices. ‘Stay with us. You …; what is your name?’

‘Tai. I’m Tai.’

‘Tai – catch her under the shoulders – gently, gently – slowly. Have you got her?’

Antian’s shoulders were on the edge of the broken balcony, her head lolling sideways. Tai had both hands under her shoulders, trying not to pull on the wounded side, using her arm and shoulder to keep Antian’s head from lolling down onto the stone. ‘I have her,’ she gasped, straining. Antian was a small-boned girl with a fragile build, but she was a dead weight in their arms right now, her eyes tightly squeezed, her face a mask of pain, her breath coming in short sharp gasps.