The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

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СКАЧАТЬ something for you.’

      Tai looked up, wary. ‘For me?’

      ‘So she said.’ Rimshi raised her hand to cover her smile. ‘I have brought it to you, here. She said, “Tell your daughter that this is for the butterflies and for the golden river.”’

      Tai took the small square package wrapped in an oddment of scarlet silk and unfolded the material to reveal a small book, a journal with a hundred pages gleaming white and blank and waiting to be filled with thoughts and visions, bound in soft, bright red leather with leather ties to hold it closed. Tai’s hands caressed the smooth binding, opened and closed the book several times. Tears which she could not explain stung her eyes. This, after she had told Antian no?

      ‘This is a precious thing,’ Rimshi said, observing her daughter’s reaction. ‘She thinks highly of you, it seems.’

      ‘She likes what I see,’ Tai murmured.

      ‘Ah,’ said Rimshi, still smiling. ‘Use it well, then, to share that vision.’

      ‘Look,’ Tai said suddenly, lifting a piece of very fine paper which had been laid between the last page and the back cover. ‘There is something else here. Look!’

      ‘It looks like a letter,’ Rimshi said.

      Tai looked up in consternation. ‘I cannot read letters!’

      ‘This one you can, I think,’ Rimshi said. ‘She would have written in the women’s tongue.’

      ‘Jin-ashu? The princesses know jin-ashu, too?’

      ‘All women know jin-ashu,’ murmured Rimshi. ‘It is our language, the language of jin-shei – passed from mother to daughter from the dawn of time, letting us speak freely of the thoughts and dreams and desires hidden deep in a woman’s heart. Of things men do not understand and do not need to know.’

      Tai opened the folded piece of paper with reverence. ‘There is only one thing here,’ she said.

      ‘What does it say?’ Rimshi asked, although she knew, and her heart leapt at what her daughter had just been given.

      Tai lifted shining eyes. ‘Jin-shei,’ she whispered.

       So young …;

      Rimshi had been twelve years old when she had exchanged her first jin-shei vow – with Meilin, the daughter and heir of a family which owned a thriving silk business in Linh-an. It was in their workshop that the young Rimshi had first seen silk thread, had first touched silk cloth, had embroidered her first clumsy sampler in silk – all when she was younger still, much younger than twelve years old. And then the friendship with Meilin had deepened into something else, and they had said the words to each other – jin-shei. After that Meilin, the elder by a handful of years and therefore more accomplished, saw to it that Rimshi’s talents were noticed, and she had been given training and instruction in the silk embroidery.

      Jin-shei had shaped Rimshi’s life – it was jin-shei that gave her the gift of her trade, and it was jin-shei, with another jin-shei-bao who had gone on to be an Emperor’s concubine, that had given her the place to practise it. Rimshi had told Tai about the second story and Tai knew all about the romance of it, the glory of the poor but beautiful girl being taken into the Imperial Palace to be a princess. Tai knew only the light of jin-shei, its joys; Rimshi had thought she would still have time to teach her daughter about its duties and its responsibilities. And now it was here, offered by a girl who would be Empress one day.

      It could be refused, simply by making no response to the offer, by not accepting jin-shei by responding with the same words. But Rimshi looked at Tai’s face and the bright wide eyes and could think of no reason for her to refuse this great gift that she had been offered. There would be time still, Cahan willing, to teach Tai about the true meaning of the sisterhood – time enough for everything.

      But right now it was a star, a bright and glorious thing that lit up Tai and made her whole being glow with the joy of it.

      ‘Jin-shei,’ Tai repeated, almost with awe. ‘The Little Empress wants me to be her friend.’

      Rimshi slipped an arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders and hugged her into her side, tightly. ‘The Little Empress,’ she said, ‘wants you to be her sister, my Tai.’

       Three

      Summer wrapped Linh-an, the capital city of Syai, like a shroud. The walls of the city shimmered with it well before the bells of noon from the Great Temple. But summer or winter, the Imperial Guard compound had its routine. The trainees traditionally found something to whine about in every season of the year. Come late autumn they would complain about being expected to do their drills in the cold rain; in winter they would carp about chilblains and frostbite; now, with summer just beginning to settle in, they did their manoeuvres in the cobbled practice yard, the heat reflecting off the grey compound walls, the straw-covered cobbles warm through the thin soles of their practice boots in which their feet slid and sweated. The orderly hierarchies were observed here as everywhere in Linh-an – the élite cohorts practised in the cool of the early morning, or in the early evening when the evening breezes would start to cool their bare arms, sheened with sweat. They made it all look so easy – the choreographed fights with single blade, double blades, iron-tipped staves, unarmed wrestling in the corner of the yard where the ground was left unpaved to lessen risk of injury. They wore black pants, tucked into their boots, and black sleeveless practice singlets, men and women alike; a bandanna tied low on their forehead mopped up the sweat dripping into their eyes. These were the old pros, the survivors, their arms tattooed with the insignia of several Emperors. The oldest of them wore up to three or even four – the tusk for the Ivory Emperor, currently on Syai’s throne, then the sigils that had belonged to the Sapphire Emperor, the Serpent Emperor. Two even wore the sign of the Lapis Emperor, the oldest of the Guard, the best.

      The current cadre, Guardsmen and Guardswomen with a single tattoo or maybe two, trained straight after the élite forces while the mornings were still as cool as they were going to be in that molten summer, or just before them, in the shimmering heat which pooled in the courtyards in the late afternoon. That left the practice yard free for the rest of the day for the young ones, the children raised by the Guard to fill their ranks.

      Often these were the sons and daughters of the Guard, but these children were not forced into their parents’ profession, and there were always gaps to be filled. With the unwanted, the orphaned, the abandoned – the ones adopted, clothed and fed by the Guard, the ones who owed their life to the Guard. It wasn’t indenture, quite, but in some ways it was worse. Although there was always a theoretical way out for a child like this, they were never allowed to forget their debt to the Guard, and by the time they were old enough to choose for themselves they could not choose other than the only life they had ever known. Sometimes barely weaned babies, still in their swaddling clothes, were found abandoned on the doorstep of the Guard compound – orphans or children from families too poor to raise them. That had been Xaforn’s lineage.

      The only thing Xaforn knew about herself was that she belonged to the Guard. There had been nothing left with her when she was found – no amulet, no word, not even a name. All of what she was, all of who she was, she owed to the Guard. She had started watching the élite forces at their daily drills when she was barely five years old, and by the time СКАЧАТЬ