She erupts into giggles. “Oh, please don’t! Madam Himura will have a heart attack if she sees!”
I look up with a smirk. “All the more reason to do it.”
As Lill gets me ready for bed, the fear and unease start to shift, the pressure on my ribs unknotting just a little. I didn’t imagine making friends here, but Lill and Aoki and Mistress Eira have given me hope that things might be different.
On the way to the palace, I was prepared for sadness. For tears. For having to do things I don’t want to, and many more I am terrified of. For pain. For homesickness. As the hours went by in the carriage and then during that seemingly endless boat journey, I prepared myself for all the things that I could possibly find within the palace walls.
The one thing I didn’t prepare for was kindness.
And yet somehow, kindness, these light exchanges with Aoki and Lill… it still feels wrong, like the worst kind of betrayal. My father and Tien must be heartbroken that I’m gone. And here I am, able to smile. To laugh, even.
That night, lying under the unfamiliar coolness of silk sheets, I cup my Birth-blessing pendant to my chest. It’s the only thing I have with me from home. Squeezing my eyes shut against the sting of the tears, I picture Baba and Tien in the house, how they might be coping, and it breaks something deep within me. The word itself—home—is a blade in my gut.
It’s a call, a song. One I can’t answer anymore.
On nights when I couldn’t sleep back in Xienzo, I used to lie exactly the same way I’m lying now, hands over my heart, my pendant safely nestled in the curve of my palms. I would pass the time by imagining what word could be hidden inside, and there was something comforting in it. The idea of being looked after, almost. A promise of a future so beautiful I couldn’t even dream it yet.
But on the occasional night, my mind would fill the darkness with words just as black. Because whatever I want to believe, it is possible that my pendant holds a future I will not be grateful to receive.
And tonight that’s never felt more likely.
SEVEN
WHEN THE GONG SOUNDS THE NEXT morning, I’ve already been up for hours.
It was the nightmare again. The kind you can’t banish with assurances that it’s all make-believe. That you can’t wake from and let the bright sureness of your life slowly melt the darkness away. This was the kind of nightmare whose monsters you can never outrun, that are still there when you open your eyes.
The worst kind of nightmare, because its monsters are real.
It hit me hard and fast, almost as soon as I’d closed my eyes, thrusting me straight into the fire and screaming. The roar of demon soldiers. Fragments of memory, barely smudged by age: the way Mama cried my name; splashes of blood on the floor, as vivid as paint; the bodies I tripped over trying to get back to my parents.
Afterward—only returning home with one.
I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep after the nightmare, so I spent the rest of the night pacing the small rectangular patch of my room, feet almost silent on the soft bamboo mat floor, until my pulse returned to normal and my breathing slowed. And as I paced, a new idea started to emerge: that maybe it’s a sign that on my first night in the palace I dreamed of Mama. Here I am, so far from home, in a place where she could have also been.
Instead of sleeping, I take one slow lap of my room after another. Did the soles of her feet kiss the ground here, too, once? There’s got to be some way I can find out more about her while I’m in the palace. Someone who might know what happened to her. If nothing else good can come from being here, at least I might be able to get some closure about that.
How incredible would it be to be taken from one half of my family only to find the other half here on the opposite side of the kingdom?
As the morning starts to fill with the sounds of daily life, I move to the window. Outside, the sun is rising, burning away the last scatters of raindrops from the night’s storm. My room looks out over the northeast side of Women’s Court. I’d been imagining small gardens from what Mistress Eira told us last night, but the daylight reveals them to be vast, an undulating landscape filled with trees and ponds and lush wildflower meadows. Winged roofs of pagodas poke through the treetops. The grounds stretch so far into the distance that the palace walls are barely visible, but my gaze is still drawn to them: a severe line of black, like an angry brushstroke blotting the horizon.
A flock of birds scatter into the air. I follow their wheeling formation over the trees before they fly beyond the wall.
I turn from the window, a sour taste in my mouth. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the cage is. It’s still a prison.
There’s a tap on the doorframe. Lill bounds in a second later, far more excitable than is decent for this time of day. “Good morning, Mistress! Did you sleep well?”
“Pretty well,” I lie.
She beams. “Great! Because you’ve got a busy day ahead. We need to start getting ready.” She clasps my hand and pulls me out of the room, leading me down the corridor. “First stop—the bathing courtyard.”
“Um… I usually bathe at the end of the day. You know, after I’ve had time to get dirty?”
She sighs and says as if it were obvious, “Paper Girls wash in the mornings. It’s one of the rules. Mistress Eira says it’s symbolic. Something about purifying yourself for the day ahead. Getting rid of negative qi from bad dreams.”
Thinking of last night, I repress a grim laugh. I’d need a whole lake for that.
We turn the corner to the bathing courtyard, a rush of hot air instantly moistening my skin. I raise my hand against the sun as we step down into a sunken courtyard dotted with big wooden barrels. Fronds of swaying bamboo line the walls. I pick up the scents of sweet rosewater and ylang-ylang, the ocean tang of seaweed, and homesickness darts through me as the fragrances take me back to my herb shop.
Through the steam, I notice that some of the tubs are already occupied. Most of the girls are submerged up to the neck, but when they move, they reveal flashes of skin that draw my eyes—the naked curve of a breast, the slope of a thigh.
I drop my eyes quickly to the floor and keep them trained on my feet as we cross the courtyard. Nakedness must be something everyone from affluent families is used to. Most of these girls probably had maids since they were young. Maybe they had places like this in their own houses, instead of a tiny room downstairs at the back of a shop-house where you had to use a sponge and water heated from a kettle to clean yourself, crouched in a corner so water wouldn’t spill under the door.
Thankfully, Lill brings me to a barrel tucked into a corner that’s well hidden by the clouds of steam. I shrug off my night robe before she can help, then practically dive into the tub.
“Don’t worry, Mistress,” she giggles when I emerge, peeking my head up above the water. “You’ll get used to it.”
Once we’re back in my room, she dries my hair with a towel before dressing me in simple midnight-blue robes. Lill is just crouching at my feet, helping me into the socklike indoor slippers the women here wear to keep their soles smooth, when the clicks of talons sound in the hallway.
“Hurry up!” Madam Himura calls. “The others are waiting.”
With one last encouraging look from Lill, I lift my chin and step out into the hall—and immediately trip.