We spent the night in Dadu South at an inn. The Emperor, still disguised as a common man, stayed in my room. We decided that Saran should sleep in the small adjoining room.
I was awakened twice during the night.
The first time, there was a cat sitting outside our window. The Emperor told me it had been watching us for quite some time.
I know Animaji well. The father of my older children is Animaji, as are those children themselves. Animaji possess a strange kind of magic that allows them to exist as both fully human and fully animal. This is not the same as a magician casting a spell to change form, nor is it a disguise. An Animaji in animal form moves, reacts, communicates, and inhabits that body naturally. There is a great difference between an Animaji who truly is a cat or an eagle and a magician who has transformed into one for the first—or even the fifth—time.
The Emperor and I both sensed that this cat was more than an ordinary animal. It seemed intelligent, and the fact that it had remained at our window watching us for so long made me deeply suspicious. We tried to speak to it and summon it closer, but it eventually disappeared into the night.
We returned to bed.
Later, loud knocking woke us again. Local guards were at the door. They demanded to see our hands.
The Dragon Claw have been outlawed in Dadu South, and those deeply involved with the cult are cursed. Their fingers can be lost or transformed until their hands resemble claws. The guards were checking travelers for signs of membership.
The Emperor’s hands and mine were perfectly human.
Then they asked for Saran.
I became concerned. Saran’s hands are still human, but he bears distinctive scars from his time with the Dragon Claw. I did not believe turning him over to these guards would help us find Nambui. Whatever else has happened, the Emperor, Saran, and I all want the same thing: to find her and her son and help them escape whatever terrible situation they have become involved in.
So I told the guards that Saran had already left.
After they were gone, we went to check on him.
He really had left.
There was no note. He had abandoned his heavy armor, sword, bow, and much of his baggage. He left money behind, although he appeared to have taken whatever purse or wallet he normally carried. His horse was gone.
Among Saran’s belongings was a silk handkerchief that had belonged to Nambui. I took it with the rest. At the time, I was more concerned with what its presence might reveal about Saran than with whether the object itself might help us find her.
I was immediately worried.
We gathered what Saran had left and went down to the stable. The stable boys were making jokes about him, although I could not understand what they meant. I did not know whether they had seen something important or were simply amused by a strange traveler.
I could not know why Saran had left. Perhaps he had gone after Nambui on his own. Perhaps he had been frightened. Perhaps he had returned to the Dragon Claw.
But if he had betrayed us, then the danger was considerable.
Saran knew that the Emperor was traveling disguised and without anything close to the protection normally surrounding him. If he returned to the cult and told them what he knew, they would know exactly how vulnerable the Emperor was.
He also knew the location and defenses of the Happy Valley. He had already entered my fortress once, using Hei-Yao’s map and following a Dragon Claw plan. If he had returned to them, he might help organize another attack—this time against my home, my children, and the Emperor.
I decided we should not retrace the route we had taken before. If Saran had betrayed us, I did not intend to make it easy for him—or the Dragon Claw—to find us.
Instead, we left Dadu South by a more southerly route through Jingzhou, heading back toward the Happy Valley and my fortress.
My hope was to speak with Jumei. He is an old friend of mine and a cleric who has traveled with me for years. Every party needs a cleric. I wanted to know whether he possessed magic that might help us locate Nambui and her son.
I wondered particularly about magic that could seek a familiar object.
It was then that the Emperor told me something I had not known.
The light-green hairpin I wear was a gift from him, and he explained that he gives such hairpins to the women who have been most important to him as lovers.
Nambui has one like mine, but dark green.
I did not find this upsetting. I have never wanted to own him. He has a wife, and I have always understood that. What exists between the Emperor and me is unusual, but I accept it for what it is. He saved my life long ago, and over time we developed a deep understanding, affection, and respect for one another. I do not need what we have to resemble anyone else’s idea of love in order for it to matter.
For half a day we rode together.
During that journey, we spoke more openly about our lives than we had before.
Our conversations continued at the inns where we stopped, lying together in rooms where no one knew him as Emperor and no one required anything from either of us.
I told him something of my past, including the time I nearly died while pregnant with my older children. He knows the broad shape of my life and sees something heroic in it. But living through those events never felt heroic to me.
“You think more highly of me than I think of myself,” I told him.
“You can tell a story about that that sounds like the story of a heroine, but living it, reflecting upon it, it doesn’t feel like a hero’s journey.”
He spoke about the pressure of being Emperor—the constant responsibility, danger, and weight of other people’s expectations. I began to understand more clearly why he so often keeps things light, even when circumstances are grave.
Earlier in our journey I had told him, “This is not going to be a romantic holiday,” because I did not think he was taking the danger seriously enough.
Now I understood him better.
His lightness is not necessarily a failure to understand what is happening. Sometimes it is how he survives the enormous pressure of his position.
We also spoke about the woman I had been when we first knew each other. He once offered me an imperial position, expecting me to understand it as a great honor. I refused it as though he had offered me an unpleasant job.
“It’s one thing to refuse the Emperor,” he said, “but never before had someone refused an imperial post as if she thought she was too good for it.”
He had been furious.
“And I thought, what arrogance, I’m going to make her pay. But that was a different man then.”
The man lying beside me could see the past differently.
“Perhaps that man never did forgive her, but this man knows there was nothing to forgive.”
Our agreement had required me to remain for a time in the Women’s Palace. Eventually, after our son had been born and weaned, I left. Yet he told me that while we were together, he never felt that I was merely waiting for the day when I would be free of him.
“During that time, I never had the idea that she was counting the days, or if she was, she was counting them the same way that I was, each one a treasure.”
I had seen the man behind the Emperor. He understood that allowing that man to be seen was both liberating and dangerous.
He also acknowledged the way I had disturbed the comfortable story he had been telling himself about Nambui.
“It was her idea that I should look for my missing Empress, and it took me by surprise.”
His first thought upon learning that Nambui had gone had not been fear for her. He admitted, “I thought only, this is a great opportunity finally for me to visit Beatrice.”
“As always,” he said, “the way she hurts me is by telling the truth and making me aware of my own lies.”
I do not think Nambui has ever liked me. We have, in some sense, been competitors. But whatever feelings exist between us, she and her son may be in danger. I could not permit the Emperor to treat her disappearance merely as an opportunity to spend time with me.
There were gentler admissions as well.
“You light a fire in me,” I told him. “I’m somewhat ashamed to say that you’re the only man I’ve ever loved in this way.”
He has long known that other people consider him ugly. When he was asked how I make him doubt their judgment, his answer was simple:
“The way she kisses me.”
By the end of that ride, I think we both understood our love—and the separate lives we had built around it—in a new way.
Then the practical world interrupted us.
We encountered imperial soldiers who informed us that we were required to sell them our horses. The army needed mounts for the southern campaign, and drought in the west had made suitable horses increasingly difficult to obtain.
I looked to the Emperor. He quietly confirmed that this was, in fact, the law and policy followed by his soldiers—and that it existed under his own authority.
Naturally, the soldiers had no idea that the traveler whose horse they were requisitioning was the Emperor himself.
They paid us twenty-five tael for each horse.
We accepted the money and continued on foot.
Travel became much slower. Ground we might have covered in half a day on horseback now required more than a day of walking. We found inns where we could and continued toward Jingzhou.
Despite the delay, there was comfort in traveling together. We have been on other journeys, even if they were not journeys across land: the journey to have a son together, and the journey to heal me when I was frozen.
“So it’s not our first journey or our first puzzle that we’ve solved.”
In Jingzhou, we went to a monastery. One of the monks recognized me because we had met before.
I am not particularly difficult to recognize in this part of the world.
I come from Cynidicea, where my people lived underground for generations without natural sunlight. We adapted to that environment. My hair is white, my skin is extraordinarily pale, and my eyes are the palest blue. Even the shape of my eyes is different from most of the people here. In this region, I stand out immediately.
The Emperor, fortunately, was not recognized.
I asked the monk about the Dragon Claw.
He told me that they had humiliated several martial monasteries in the region some months earlier. Their contests had since been prohibited in Jingzhou, but he had heard more recent reports of Dragon Claw activity in the wretched taverns and villages outside Xi’an.
At least we now had a western lead from someone other than Saran.
I also asked about using magic to find Nambui through her dark-green hairpin. The monk told me that such magic could sense an object only if we had already come very near it—close enough that we would almost have found Nambui by ordinary searching. It could help within a fortress, a monastery, or a small cluster of buildings. It could not reach across the hundreds of miles that might lie between us.
That was not nearly enough.
So we continued toward my fortress in the Happy Valley.
We had lost Saran.
We may have been watched by an Animaji whose identity and purpose we did not know.
The Dragon Claw might now know that the Emperor was traveling with very little protection. Saran might have given them that knowledge, along with a path back to my home.
But we also had a new lead. The Dragon Claw had been active in the wretched taverns outside Xi’an, and I intended to ask Jumei whether his magic could discover anything more.
After several days, the Emperor and I reached the Happy Valley. I returned to my children and my fortress carrying Saran’s abandoned weapons, Nambui’s silk handkerchief, and more questions than answers.
