Page 32 of The Cinders
The captain’s hand clenched Xian’s elbow before he relented with a deep bow.‘Of course, your grace.’
Xian stood through it all like a statue in danger of crumbling.Marchioness Shen dug her fingers into his arm.‘Come now, your highness.The excitement seems to be too much for you.’
He stumbled with the quickness of her pace, but each time his knees buckled she had him upright again; her strength unexpected considering her diminutive size.
‘Yu Ming intended this as a jest.That is all.You need not appear as though you are about to return the contents of your guts to the table,’ she hissed as well as any snake, but her words had his hopes struggling to rise.
‘Then it was not Mercy, there on the table?’
‘Of course it was your wretched fish.And good riddance to it, your affection for that cold-blooded creature has always been unseemly.I tolerated it when you were a child, but you are a grown man now.’She pushed him down another corridor.‘Does no hot blood flow in your veins?If I was not assured that your manhood still exists, unscathed by the fire, then I would have said you became a eunuch that day your mother’s sorcery got the better of her.’
Xian was too numb to even grow cold at her words, certainly too numb to protest the mention of his mother.He moved where he was taken, loss eating away at his body.His grief had faded over the years, only rising to plague him on the oddest occasions, but now it thundered in renewed; crippling him as surely as the meanest of diseases.
‘Your Grace?Is something wrong?’
Deep in the suffocating grip of heartbreak, Xian still recognised Daiyu’s voice.His pounding heart stuttered.
‘Daiyu…they killed her…’
‘What?’
‘Never mind that, he is unwell,’ the marchioness snapped.‘I must return to the banquet.Take him to your father, see that he is treated for this unfortunate melancholy.I won’t abide it.He must not drag himself about as he does now, like a ghost, when he travels with the envoy.Tell your father to do what he must.’
‘Your grace, may I ask what has brought this melancholy on?’
As the marchioness drew breath, Xian found his voice.‘Mercy…they killed her, they killed her.’
‘Your carp?’Daiyu’s shock was laid bare.‘Who would do such a thing?’
‘Girl!Do as you are told.’The marchioness pushed Xian towards Daiyu.‘See to it he is ready to travel without protest tomorrow morning, or you and your father will be severely punished.’
A sob choked Xian, and his eyes burned.The marchioness was a blur as she leaned towards him.‘Do not disgrace your father, our beloved Son of Heaven, as you mother did, boy.I will not hesitate to inform my sister the moment that you do, and there shall be no hope of you ever entering the Forbidden City again.’
But what did he care about such things?His friend was gone.Torn apart and delivered to those who cared nothing for her importance to him.Marchioness Shen, lips tight with her displeasure, turned in her gown of crimson; its elaborate gold embroidery depicting a mountain scene, a four-clawed dragon coiling around the highest peak.
‘Take him away.’
She moved back down the corridor in a hush of silken fabric and utter disregard.
Xian ached to join Mercy.He’d go whereverYan Wang, the great god of death, deemed to send her.Surely it could be no more barbarous a place than this?
‘Prince Xian, what has happened?’Daiyu asked urgently.‘Surely they deceived you?They would not harm Mercy, I’m sure.’
Xian said nothing.He did not blink.He barely breathed.How he wished it were deception.But his friend’s flesh had been laid before him as a grotesque feast.His grief festered like a wound at his core, the infection seeping into his blood.He knew what it was to feel low, but this…he could not name this ache.The enormity of the loss loomed like that of the storm his senses told him approached Kunming.If only the lightning would strike him down and take him from this agony.
Daiyu led him with soft encouraging murmurs.‘That’s it, we are almost there.My father will help you with your shock.’
She squeezed his arm, and it was as though his body cracked open.His tears flowed like rivers, soaking into the veil and sticking the fine silk to his face.A flood he wished to drown himself in.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BY THEtime they reached the steps of the herbalist’s room, Xian was ravenous for relief.
‘Your shoes, your highness,’ Daiyu said, reminding him to remove them before he entered her father’s rooms.The scents inside were unpleasant, dark and earthy, rich and bitter, but Xian inhaled a wet breath through streaming nostrils, eager to find comfort in their tang.
Daiyu settled him on a simple wooden stool, under the startled gaze of her father, Master Liang.
‘What has happened?’He was a handsome man, though his cheeks were perpetually red, and his queue shaved too far back on his head; his high forehead accentuated by his bald scalp.‘Is he injured?’