Fortunately, she had an easy topic at hand. “The news of the Taiping defeat is most excellent! I am breathless to see your plans for the northern lands such that no upstart can rise again.”
It worked! The emperor’s attention had been wandering to Li Fei, but at her words, he focused back on her. “Whatever do you mean?”
Ji Yue straightened, uncomfortable at his curt tone. “Only that when servants—or peasants—act badly, there is usually an underlying cause. Address that cause, and the meals once again appear hot and on time.”
The emperor frowned at her. His face darkened, and his eyes grew cold. “Do you hear that, Bo Tao? Comparing our glorious empire to servants and meals!” He raised his voice so that all would hear. “Bad servants will be whipped. Upstart peasants who dare challenge the Dragon Throne will be killed. And that is the end of it!”
Cheers and claps greeted his rousing statement. Then he turned back to her, his humor restored. “But I like your butterfly pin,” he added.
She could barely murmur a thank-you before he laughed again and strode back to his table at the front of the room. Sun Bo Tao lingered a moment longer, his gaze dark and uncertain on her. She met his look—she couldn’t help herself—but she couldn’t read his meaning. She merely felt that tension again, that low lute string that seemed to tighten between them whenever they saw each other. And then he was gone, his long strides easily catching up to the emperor.
“You have disgraced us!” someone hissed.
Ji Yue turned and was startled to see her fellow virgins glaring at her. “What?”
“He came to our table to talk with us, and you coughed all over him. It is no wonder that he rushed away. He must fear a plague from you!”
Ji Yue blinked. “What?”
“He will think we are like you! He will think we keep company with upstart women who challenge his authority!”
“I did no such thing!” she cried.
“You do it even now! Oh, we are ruined because of you!”
Ji Yue looked from face to face. She had just spent a delightful two hours at the banquet with these girls. They had laughed together and shared stories of their homes. And now each one spit into their napkins at her and turned their faces away. Even Li Fei would not look at her.
“My chances are my own,” she finally said. “They will not affect yours.”
“Ugly and stupid,” Fan Mei Lin said. “She will bring us all down with her.”
Ji Yue said nothing. Their minds could not be swayed, and worse, she feared they were right. Men’s minds did not always remember details. The emperor might very well attribute her actions to one of them, but she doubted it. Especially since each girl would take pains to remind the emperor that it was Ji Yue who had insulted him so.
No one would remember that she had tried to compliment his statecraft, not insult it. He would only know that she had created discord in his home, and that was a sin that could never be forgiven, especially in the Forbidden City. In short, she had not only failed to impress the emperor but had turned every virgin against her.
Nothing about her was sacred. Her body, her hair, her smell were all fodder for insult. For one insane moment she thought the eunuchs might help keep the rancor under control, but to her dismay, they merely egged the virgins on. This was their entertainment. Plus, they had no wish for the bitterness to be turned back on them.
In the end, Ji Yue stopped defending herself. No one wished to hear her side, anyway, and she was too miserable to try to speak reasonably to anyone, much less the shrews that surrounded her. She simply wanted to go to her bed and cry herself to sleep. But she was blocked on all sides. No one would let her pass out of the main room. She had to wait it out, doing her best to ignore every hateful word.
But then someone recalled that the emperor liked her hairpin. Another screeched that the pin was hers and she ran at Ji Yue, her claws extended to regain her property. She succeeded. She ripped out the butterfly pin and took a handful of cemented hair as well.
The pain shredded the last of Ji Yue’s patience. She had two brothers, she knew how to fight. So she grabbed the girl’s arm with one hand and balled the other into a fist, slamming it into the girl’s stomach. Her attacker crumpled to her knees, but the hairpin was still gripped tight in her fist. “That was my great-grandmother’s!” Ji Yue said, and she went to pry it out of the shrew’s fingers. She’d just managed to grab hold of one tiny wing when the first blow fell.
Clearly, someone else had brothers. A hard, compact fist slammed into her side. As Ji Yue began to drop, she saw a small foot in a bright red shoe fly toward her face. She twisted, taking the impact on her shoulders, but that only exposed her face on the other side. Blows began to rain down. She had no idea who attacked her, only why. Tonight she was the scapegoat for everyone’s frustrations. As blow after blow fell, each more vicious than the last, Ji Yue could only curl into herself and pray. Surely it would end soon.
He saved her. Somehow she knew it would be him. Not the emperor, as she might dream, but the man who plagued her awake and asleep: Sun Bo Tao, Master of the Festival. She heard his voice, a deep, angry bellow that cut through all the high screeches.
She felt no more blows, only a dull ache from head to toe. The pain would grow worse later, but she already knew that nothing had been broken. The girls had been intent on a beating, not murder. The master was still bellowing, and she heard the noise of people withdrawing. Then she felt his hands, large but oh so gentle, on her back.
“Where are you hurt, Ji Yue? You must tell me. I cannot help otherwise.”
Deep in her spirit, she wanted to answer. She’d never had a sister, and she had naively believed that some of her fellow virgins would be her friends. She was a foolish, foolish woman to have thought such a thing. She knew that now.
“Chen Ji Yue, you must answer me!” His voice held a tinge of panic, so she opened her eyes to look at him.
“Once many years ago,” she said, “I was climbing to reach something I was not supposed to have.” She blinked away her tears. With his help, she began to uncurl, wincing as she moved. “I don’t remember what it was. A sweet perhaps or, more likely, my father’s brushes. But it was too high and I was too small, so I fell and broke my arm.”
“Ji Yue, where are you hurt?” He brushed his thumb across her cheek and it came away smeared with white paint and black charcoal.
“The pain was unbearable,” she said, retreating to the memory of her mother’s arms wrapped about her, and her father’s voice, high and threaded with panic. “I screamed until my throat hurt as much as my arm, and still I did not stop.”
“Ji Yue…” he murmured, clearly frustrated. He was running his hands down her body—her arms and her ribs, then her legs. There was nothing familiar in his touch, simply a quick pat everywhere to check for breaks.
She leaned forward and touched his arm before he reached her big feet. “This was a beating,” she said. “Nothing more.”
He froze. “I have already summoned the women’s doctor.”
She shook her head. She did not want to see that woman again or go into her examination room. “Send her away. I would know if something inside were broken.”
He shook his head. “Not always,” he said grimly as he handed her a cloth for her face. “Have you been beaten before?”
She wiped the worst of the paint from her face then pulled the now broken board from her hair. “Once by my father for practicing my brush strokes upon his fine paper. And once by my brother’s tutor for doing his homework for him.”
He frowned. “You did your brother’s homework?”
She shrugged, then immediately stopped. Already her back was beginning to swell. “I was bored. And I didn’t think the runt would claim my work as his own.”
He smiled. This close, she could see the way his brow puckered when he was worried, and how his smile smoothed the furrows away. “Can you stand?”
She nodded. He gripped her hand, but there was something between their palms. He pulled back and turned her hand over. The mangled butterfly hairpin lay in her palm. She had ripped it back from the lying bitch who’d stolen it.
“I am sorry,” he said. “It was a pretty piece.”
It was mutilated beyond repair. The jade stones were broken or missing and the gold wire was twisted. She looked at the misshapen thing in her palm and something inside her broke. She began to cry, and once the tears began, they would not stop.
He tried to speak to her. She couldn’t understand the words, but she heard his tone. He sounded much like her father had that day long ago when she’d broken her arm: alarmed, anxious and completely uncertain what to do. In the end, Bo Tao simply swept her legs out from under her and carried her from the virgins’ palace. She didn’t know where he was taking her, and frankly she didn’t care. His arms were larger than her father’s, his voice was deeper than her father’s, but the comfort was the same. His touch was just as tender, and she wanted nothing more than to be held by him forever.
Then he stopped walking. He stood still for a moment while she listened to the steady beat of his heart. She liked the regular rise and fall of his broad chest. Then he eased down on a bench, gently resting her on his lap.
“We are alone now,” he said. “You can cry as much as you like.”
She smiled and wished she could rub her face against the skin on his neck, but his collar prevented it. “I am done crying,” she said, her voice raw. Instead, her mind was consumed by the feel of his arms, the warmth of his body and the strength that surrounded her so completely that she thought she could never be harmed again. “Don’t leave me yet.”
He tightened his grip around her. “Are you sure you don’t need to see the physician?” he asked. With her ear pressed to his chest, his voice was a deep, echoing rumble like the sound of thunder in the distance.
“I am fine so long as you hold me.”
He didn’t answer, except to lean back enough to settle her even more deeply into his arms. She smiled, happy to think of nothing beyond him. But that thought led to others. Her heart beat harder, and she remembered another time when his hands had been on her body, when his chest had been pressed tight to her back, and his hands…
“Where are we?” she asked by way of distraction. She knew they were in a bower of sorts. She could feel the breeze, but in the darkness, she could see little more than the stone bench upon which they sat.
“It is a garden near the emperor’s palace.”
She jerked in alarm. “But he cannot see me like this!”
His grip tightened on her, keeping her in place. “No one comes here at night but me. Certainly not Yi Zhen. And even if he did, we would hear him long before he could see us.”
Reassured, she relaxed back against him, acutely aware of the way his thighs rippled as he adjusted to her. And of the burning heat pressed intimately against her. “But where is this place?”
“It is my aunt’s garden. Well, not specifically hers, but she was the only one who tended it.”
She frowned. “You have an aunt in the Forbidden City?”
He nodded. “She was part of Emperor Dao Guang’s lowest harem. That is how I came to be friends with Yi Zhen. My mother was visiting her sister. One day I escaped them and found him.”
Ji Yue smiled. “My brothers often ran away from me, as well.” She straightened, intrigued by the idea of meeting one of Bo Tao’s relatives. “May I meet your aunt tomorrow? I would love to talk with her. I like gardening, too, and would often help the workers when I was little.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. My aunt was selected to be buried with the emperor.”
She swallowed, understanding the harsh fate that sometimes awaited members of an imperial harem. Being buried alive with the emperor was one of the worst. Still, she spoke the words that were expected of her. “She was greatly honored.”
Bo Tao grimaced. “I have never thought it much of an honor, but I know she believed it.”
Ji Yue sighed, uneasy with the idea of what could very well be her own fate someday. “Did she…Was she awake in the tomb?”
“I hope not. I brought her poison sealed in a perfume bottle. She should have fallen asleep, then died quickly while at rest.” He took a deep breath, and Ji Yue felt it shudder inside him. “I hope it went like that. We will never know if it did not.”
“I’m sure it did. I’m sure she was very grateful.”
His hands tightened on her, and she went where he silently urged her: back into his arms. She listened to the night birds and the whisper of the wind through the leaves. But mostly she felt the wildness building inside her again. Would he touch her like he had before? She shouldn’t want him to, but she did. She should be aching for the emperor’s caress, the emperor’s hot press of body and groin, the emperor’s…
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied. In truth, she was beginning to feel an ache deep in her womb. It was shame. She was ashamed that her thoughts lingered on a very unvirginlike desire for the absolutely wrong man.
“Do you think you could walk? I have something I want to show you.”
“Yes, of course.” She reluctantly shifted out of his arms, standing carefully. Her clothing was torn in a dozen places and her hair constantly strayed into her eyes, but she didn’t care. Despite the conflicting emotions inside her, this night had taken on a magical quality, and she did not want it to end even if she walked around in rags.
“It is not far, but it requires a little bit of climbing. I would not be able to carry you.”
“I am fine,” she repeated, her curiosity piqued.
With a nod, he gestured her out of the bower. They walked together in silence. He kept a hand on her back and another on her arm, leading her through the dark maze that was the Forbidden City. They ended at a ladder that led up a massive tree.
“It is up there,” he whispered into her ear, “but I must empty it out first. Wait here in the shadows and don’t make a sound.”
She nodded her agreement. Within moments he disappeared up the ladder. Then to her shock, four eunuchs descended in rapid order. They went in the other direction, grumbling and laughing among themselves. Bo Tao descended a moment later.
“They are gone now,” he said.
“What did you do?”
“I bribed them to leave. Now no one will know that you are here.”
She stepped forward, looking up into the blackness above. “What if someone else comes?”
“They won’t,” he said as he placed her hands on the ladder. “There is a way to bar entrance to anyone else. Besides, the show is not that interesting tonight.”
“Show?” she asked.
“Hush. Climb.”
She did as he bid, though it was hard going. Her skirt was already ripped, so there was no difficulty there. But he placed his hands on either side of hers, and he mounted each rung directly behind her. When he bumped against her bottom or leaned close enough to heat her shoulders with his chest, she gasped at the contact and thought inappropriate things. What if she had not hit him in the examination room? What would have happened? With his body around hers and his hand exploring her, what would have happened? What would she have felt?
By the time she made it up to a platform at the very top, her mouth was dry and her breasts heavy. “What is it that you want me to see?” she asked, her voice thready in the darkness.
He didn’t answer in words. Instead, he crawled beside her and gently twisted her shoulders around until she looked through an opening in the branches. From there she saw into a room in a palace. There were people inside—women—but what were they doing?
Bo Tao was still holding her to direct her attention. Now he leaned closer to whisper into her ear. “We are looking at the surviving harem of Dao Guang. This is a room in their palace.”
“But what are they doing?”
“Can you not guess? Do you not understand?”
She did understand, but she had never thought to see three women in the throes of sexual congress.
“Do you know that women establish a hierarchy in a harem? That one is the head female and the others must follow her rules?”