Tai doubted he'd forgotten it at all. Liu did not answer him. That could come later.
He turned back to Zhou. "You haven't responded, first minister." He could only be direct here. Or accept being a wood chip in rapids.
"I am unaware," said Wen Zhou coldly, "of any protocol in any dynasty that would require a prime minister to respond to a question phrased that way. A beating with the rod is possibly in order."
Tai saw Zian signalling with his eyes, urging caution. He declined. He was here. Li-Mei was gone. Yan was dead by a cold lake. And his father was dead, lying under a stone Tai hadn't even seen.
He said, "I see. Roshan suggested you might avoid the question."
Zhou blinked. "You spoke with him?"
Tai's turn to ignore a question. "A beating with the rod, you said? How many? People die under the rod, first minister. That could cost the empire two hundred and fifty Sardian horses."
If he was doing this, Tai thought, he was going to
do
it. There was exhilaration in having the chance, to be out from concealment, standing before this man and saying this. "Protocol might be amended, don't you think, when murder is involved? I ask again, how did you know I was at Kuala Nor?"
"Murder? You seem healthy enough. Are you a ghost yourself, then, Shen Tai?"
It was upon them, Tai thought. The poet had stopped trying to get his attention. The prince moved forward from the wall again. Only Jian seemed composed, sitting (the only person sitting) on her platform in the midst of all of them.
Tai said, "No, first minister. I am not dead yet. But the scholar Chou Yan is, at the hands of the assassin sent after me. Admissions have been made. By that false Kanlin who killed my friend. By two other assassins who confessed their purpose to Governor Xu in Chenyao." He paused, to let that name register. "Those two were also seen by my friend Sima Zian, and the governor's own daughter brought us the name the killers offered up. So there are others who can speak to this. And then, first minister, Roshan presented me with a copy of the letter sent him by Xin Lun, saying he feared he would be killed, since he knew too much."
"A copy of a letter? From
Roshan
? He cannot even read!" Zhou actually managed a laugh. "After all we've heard this afternoon--some of us skulking behind a screen--about his designs? You don't think that would be an obvious forgery meant to damage me? The only one openly resisting him? Surely you are not so entirely--"
"It is not a forgery," Tai said. "Lun died that night. Exactly as he feared he would. And the Gold Bird Guards saw who did it."
He turned to his brother, as if ignoring Zhou. As if there was nothing left to say to him at all. He looked at Liu. His heart was pounding.
"Someone tried to kill you at Kuala Nor?" Liu asked. He said it quietly. Assembling information--or that was how it sounded.
"And at Chenyao."
"I see. Well. I did know where you were," said Liu.
"You did."
It was strange, speaking to his brother again, looking at him, trying to read his thoughts. Tai reminded himself that Liu was easily skilled enough to dissemble here.
"I tried to persuade you not to go, remember?"
"You did," said Tai again. "Did you tell the first minister where I was?"
The question he'd been waiting to ask since leaving the lake and the mountains.
Liu nodded his head. "I think I did, in conversation." As simple as that, no hesitation. Someone else could be direct, or appear to be. "I would have to check my records. I have records of everything."
"Everything?" Tai asked.
"Yes," his brother said.
It was probably true.
Liu's face, carefully schooled from childhood, gave nothing away, and the room was much too public for what Tai really wanted to say again, face to face this time, a hand bunching Liu's robe tightly at the collar: that his brother had shamed their father's memory with what he'd done to Li-Mei.
This wasn't the time or place. He wondered if there would ever be a time or place. And he also realized that, for reasons that went far beyond his own story, this encounter could not turn into anything decisive about murder attempts. There were issues too much larger.
His thought was mirrored, anticipated. There was a dancer here. "Perhaps we should wait for my cousin's guardsman to answer some questions," said Jian. "Perhaps we can talk of other matters? I don't find this as amusing as I thought I might."
An order to desist, if ever there was one.
Tai looked at her. She was icily imperious. He drew a breath. "Forgive me, illustrious lady. A dear friend was killed in a place beyond borders. He died trying to tell me about my sister. My sorrow has made me behave unpardonably. Your servant begs indulgence."
"And you have it!" she said promptly. "You must know you will have it--from everyone in the Ta-Ming--for the honour you have done us."
"And for the horses!" said Shinzu cheerfully. He lifted a cup towards Tai. "Whatever questions or troubles any of us might have, surely our task now is to amuse our hostess. What sort of civilized men could we call ourselves, otherwise?"
A servant appeared at Tai's elbow, with wine. He took the cup. He drank. It was pepper wine, exquisite. Of course it was.
"I
asked
for a poem," Jian said plaintively. "Half a lifetime ago! My cousin declined, our wandering poet declined. Is there no man who can please a woman here?"
Sima Zian stepped forward. "Gracious and exalted lady," he murmured, "beauty of our bright age, might your servant make a suggestion?"
"Of course," said Jian. "It might even earn you forgiveness, if it is a good one."
"I live only in that hope," said Zian. "I propose that someone present a twinned pair of subjects and our two brothers, the sons of Shen Gao, each offer you a poem."
Tai winced. Jian clapped her hands in delight. "How
very
clever of you! Of course that is what we will do! And who better to offer the subjects than our Banished Immortal? I insist upon it! You choose, General Shen's sons improvise for us. I am happy again! Does everyone have wine?"
His brother, Tai knew, had passed the imperial examinations in the top three of his year. He had been preparing for them all his life. His poetry was immaculate, precise, accomplished. It always had been.
Tai had spent two years at Kuala Nor trying to make himself a poet in a solitary cabin at night, with little success, in his own estimation.
He told himself that this was just an entertainment, an afternoon's diversion at Ma-wai where they liked to play, not a competition that signified anything. He felt like cursing the poet. What was Zian doing to him?
He saw Liu bow to Jian, grave, unsmiling.
He never smiles,
she'd said in the sedan chair. Tai also bowed, and managed a wry smile. It probably looked apprehensive, he thought.
Sima Zian said, "Xinan, and this night's moon. Any verse format you choose."
The prince chuckled. "Master Sima, did we even have to wonder? Do you always choose the moon?"
Zian grinned, in great good humour. "Often enough, my lord. I have followed it all my days. I expect to die by moonlight."
"Many years from now, we hope," said the prince, graciously.
Tai was wondering, amid all else, how everyone had been so wrong about this man. He did have an answer, or part of one: it had been fatally dangerous through the years for an imperial heir to show signs of ambition, and those signs might all too easily be thought to include competence, intelligence, perception. It was safer to drink a great deal, and enjoy the company of women.
Which did raise a different question: what was Shinzu doing now?
Zian murmured, "Do you know ... well, no, you can't possibly know, since I have never
told
anyone ... but I have sometimes dreamed of a second moon to write about. Wouldn't that be a gift?"
"I'd like a gift like that," said the Beloved Companion, quietly. She was, Tai remembered (it needed remembering sometimes), very young. She was younger than his sister.
Jian turned to look at him, and then at Liu. "The First Son must surely go first, whatever other protocols we are abandoning."
Wen Zhou had stepped back as this new game began. He smiled thinly at this, however. Tai felt as if his senses had become unnaturally sharp, as if he was seeing and hearing more than he ever had. Was this what life at court was like? What the dance involved?
Liu folded his hands carefully in his full black sleeves. He had been doing this all his life, Tai knew, preparing for such moments as this. Xinan, and tonight's moon, he reminded himself. It was customary in such contests to pair two images.
Liu said, looking at no one, measuring stresses:
No one ever rests in Xinan.
Under a full moon, or the hook moon of tonight
As springtime turns a pale face to summer.
A place for winning renown, if deserved,
And gems and trappings of great worth.
The city is alive all night and even more
From the drumming-open of the great gates
As the white sun rises dispelling mist.
Here the Son of Heaven
Shines forth his Jade Countenance
Upon his beloved people, and so
Here the world is all the world may be.
There was a kind of pain in Tai's chest, shaped by and entangled with memory. This was his brother, they were at the heart of the court, the heart of empire, and Liu could do this, effortlessly.
All the world may be
.
But what else had he done, what else could he do, as easily?
Everyone in the room seemed to be looking at Tai. There had been no response at all to Liu's exquisite offering: that, too, was proper. When two or more people had been set a verse challenge you waited until the last one was done. They did these in the North District, often very drunk, often very late.
Tai sipped his wine. He was impossibly sober. He thought of Yan, of his sister. He looked across at Liu.
"If deserved
,
"
he murmured. "I like that."
His brother's mouth tightened. Tai hadn't expected a reaction. Nor had he expected to have to compose a poem in this setting. This was the court, not a pleasure house among fellow students. He took another drink. He had only one thing to bring to this room, he realized, that these elegant dancers would not have.
He looked at Zian. The poet's face was attentive. It would be, Tai thought, when poetry was concerned. This was his life, air and water.
Tai thought of a first phrase, and then--quite suddenly--of a conclusion, a contrast to his brother's, and he began, speaking slowly, picking his way, as through a moonlit wood. And as the words came, so, too, did images he'd lived with:
South of us Xinan lies under a sickle moon.
Lanterns will soon be bright in the spring night.
Laughter and music and rich wine poured.
Far to the west where all roads end
Cold stars shine on white bones
Beside the stone shores of a lake.
Thousands of
li
stretch empty from there
To east and west and mountains rise.
Birds wheel when the sun goes down
And grieving ghosts are heard in the dark.
How may we live a proper life?
Where is the balance the soul must find?
He looked at Liu first, in the silence that came when he was done, a stillness coming into the room like the breeze from outside. He'd spent so much of his childhood looking to his brother for approval. Liu turned away, reflexively, and then--it must have been difficult, Tai thought--back to his younger brother.
"A bright loom," he said. Old phrase. Poetry and silk.
"It is more than that," said Sima Zian, softly.
Laughter was heard. "Well. That didn't take long, did it?" said Wen Zhou, caustically. "Only a few moments out from hiding, and Shen Tai hastens to remind us of his so-heroic time in the west."
Tai looked across at him. And he realized two things in that moment. That he
could
do this, could dance to at least some of the music here if he chose--and that someone else in the room had even more anger than he did.
He stared at the handsome figure of the prime minister. This was the man who had taken Rain. Had killed Yan.
Tai took his time. They would wait for him, he realized. He said, "There were past a hundred thousand unburied there. Half of them were ours. I wouldn't have thought you'd need reminding, first minister of Kitai."
He saw his brother wince, which meant he knew how deeply Tai had thrust--and couldn't hide it.
"You will spoil my pleasure if you quarrel," said Jian. She let her voice sound petulant. Tai looked at her: the exaggerated downward curve of that lovely, painted mouth. She was toying with them again, he thought--but with a purpose.
He bowed. "My apologies again, illustrious lady. If I am to spend time at this court, I shall need to show restraint, even when others do not."
He saw her suppress a smile. "We have little intention of letting you leave us, Shen Tai. I imagine the emperor will wish to receive you formally very soon. Where are you staying in Xinan?"
He hadn't given it a thought. You could find that amusing. "I have no residence there any more, gracious lady. I will take rooms somewhere and I will--"
She seemed genuinely astonished.
"Take rooms?"
Prince Shinzu stepped forward. "The Precious Consort is right, as ever. It would be a shocking lapse on the part of the court if you were allowed to do that. Will you accept one of my homes in Xinan for the present? Until my father and his advisers have had time to consider the proper ways to honour you."
"I have ... I have no need for honours, my lord prince. I did what I did at Kuala Nor only--"
"--only out of respect for your father. I understand. The world is permitted to honour this, is it not?" The prince grinned. He drained his cup. "And there
are
those horses. One of my men will call upon you this evening, to make arrangements."
There were, indeed, those horses, Tai thought. He wondered--yet again--if Princess Cheng-wan in Rygyal on its far plateau had had any idea what she was doing to him when she decreed that gift.
The other woman who seemed to be entering and shaping his life now, the one who seemed to know precisely what she was doing, declared an end to her gathering.
Guests bowed to her and began filing out the doors. Shinzu remained in the room. Tai looked at the screen he'd hidden behind. The viewing holes were invisible.
He looked at the other screen.
He went out, last to leave. The steward closed the door. Tai's exquisitely delicate escorts were there, hands demurely in sleeves. He saw Zhou and Liu striding away together. He'd wondered if his brother would linger to speak. He wasn't certain if he was ready for that.