Lady Earthquake

Lady Earthquake Chapter 14

An-Xia noted that the king who had issued this decree was not the current one but his father who had died when she was about five. Grandfather Li had burned much incense in the family Great Hall to commemorate the king's passing. For weeks afterwards, he had been unable to muster a smile. Thinking of that, she vowed that she would find a way to honor her mother and grandfather in their own hall...though she had no doubt Mo would try to find a way to stop her.

"He is going to be difficult," she said aloud.

Placing the scroll back in the sleeve for lack of a better hiding place, An-Xia found the two little fish with pearls in their mouths. There should have been a third one but though she groped in the depths of the silk several times, she found nothing except her mother's jade comb. Somewhere the third fish must have fallen out. Her mother had cherished these, gifts from her husband. When she was young, An-Xia had loved to take them out of her mother's hair and swish them around in a bowl of water, pretending they were swimming for real. She placed the remaining two now in her own hair, leaving the comb on the table.

She admired them in the small mirror on the dressing table. She had a bruise on her chin and her eyes looked swollen from tears. Even as she looked at herself, more gathered. She turned away from her own miserable face. "I will cry until tomorrow. Then I will stop. Tears are indeed a delay I cannot afford."

From the bed, she took up the sword. With a long-practiced skill, she drew it in one swift motion. The blade's edges still shone; the center still gleamed darkly. She had learned a great deal about sword-smithing from various things her Master had said over the years. About the ceaseless folding of molten steel that made a strong blade, of the heating and reheating in the lightning-hot heart of the forge, of tempering, of testing. At any time, a blade might break, shatter into infinitesimal bits. But if it survived, it would be unbreakable.

Yes! At last....

Mo knocked on her door in the morning. An-Xia could not help smiling when she saw him, though he looked woebegone. His flowing grey mustache, pride of a soldier's heart, had gone, leaving behind a pale upper lip with a pronounced indentation. He had trimmed his shrimp-like eyebrows as well.

"You look ten years younger," An-Xia said.

"Ten? He looks like a youth!" Madame Jiu bore in breakfast.

"You should not wait on me so," the younger girl said, going to take the tray before anything spilled on today's exquisite robe of lavender silk worked with silver herons.

"I am afraid I must. I am not letting any of my maids or girls up here for the time being. I am telling them I have a remarkable new dancer that I am slowly nursing back to health. Whether they believe me or not does not matter as long as they do not see you."

"Why cannot they see me?"

"Think, girl," Jiu said, tapping a hard finger on An-Xia's head.

"Because...I am dead?"

"Exactly right. Mo says you do not know who attacked the manor and until you do, it is far healthier to be dead."

"Do not put it so harshly," Mo said.

"Madame Jiu is right. I was thinking I could go to Young Lord Zang Tang-Su for assistance but if his father ordered the assassination, then I do not dare. I think...I think the best thing to do is go to the capital."

"Yes!" Mo said. "That's what you should do. Take the royal decree to the king."

"Oh, but...." Jiu started to say. Then she deferred with a seated bow to An-Xia. "Go on with what you were saying."