She shakes her head. Beneath her breath she mutters an apology to her father.
One of the newer pages scurries to the threshold. He’s wearing black and silver robes emblazoned with Dao Doan Province’s seal. Is this Jiro-tul’s latest son? He has so many, she can’t keep track anymore. Eventually she’s going to have to make an effort to remember the servants’ names.
The new boy prostrates himself. He offers her a package wrapped in dark cloth and tied together with twine. It’s so bulky the boy’s hands quiver just holding it.
Some idiot suitor’s latest gift. Only one thing makes a person foolhardy enough to contradict the Empress’s will, and that is infatuation. Not love. Love has the decency to send up a note, not whatever this was.
“You may speak,” she says.
“Your Imperial Majesty,” he says, “this package was, we think, addressed to you—”
“You think?” She crooks a brow. “Rise.”
The boy rises to his knees. She beckons him closer, and he scrambles forward, dropping the package in the process. It’s a book. It must be. That sort of heavy thwack can come only from a book.
“Doan-tun,” she says, “you are not in trouble, but tell me: Why are you bringing me something you can’t be certain is mine?”
He’s close enough now that she can see the wisps of black hair clinging to his upper lip. Good. From a distance, it looked like he’d taken a punch to the face.
“Your Imperial Majesty, Most Serene Empress Phoenix—”
“‘Your Imperial Majesty’ suffices in private conversation.”
He swallows. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he says, “the handwriting is, if you will forgive my bluntness, atrocious. When I received it, I had a great deal of difficulty deciphering it.”
O-Shizuka turns toward the zither as the boy speaks. For not the first time in recent years, she considers trimming her nails. But she likes the look of them, likes the glittering dust left behind by the crushed gems she dipped them in each morning. “Continue.”
As he speaks she runs her fingertips along the strings of her zither. If she closes her eyes she can still hear View from Rolling Hills.
“I sought out the aid of the elder servants,” he says. “One of them pointed out that this is in the horse script.”
O-Shizuka stops mid-motion.
No one writes to her in Qorin. No Hokkaran courtiers bother learning it. Horselords are beneath them, and thus there is no reason to learn their tongue. It’s the same reason only Xianese lords learn to read and write that language, the same reason Jeon is a cipher more than a tongue, the same reason one only ever reads of Doanese Kings in faded, musty scrolls.
The saying goes that to survive is Qorin—but the same can be said of the Hokkaran Empire, scavenging parts from the nations it swallows up, swearing that these borrowed clothes have been Imperial Finery all along. How did that drivel go? Hokkaro is a mother to unruly young nations, ever watchful, ever present. Shizuka always hated it.
So the letter cannot be from a Hokkaran, for what Hokkaran would deign to debase themselves in such a way? Burqila’s calligraphy is serviceable, if not perfect; the servants would have no trouble with anything she sent. Which leaves only one Qorin who might write to her in the rough horse-tongue.
It’s been eight years, she thinks, eight years since …
“I asked one of your older handmaidens, Keiko-lao, and she said your old friend Oshiro-sun couldn’t write Hokkaran at all, so I thought—”
Sun. There are thirty-two different honorifics in Hokkaran—eight sets of four. Each set is used only in specific circumstances. Using the wrong one is akin to walking up to someone and spitting into their mouth.
So why was it that, to this day, Shefali remained Oshiro-sun? The boy should know better. Sun is for outsiders, and Shefali was …
“Give it to me,” O-Shizuka snaps.
He offers it to her again, and when she takes it, her hands brush against his. That fleeting contact with the Empress is more than any other boy his age could dream of.
Naturally, he will tell all the others about it the moment he has a chance. His stories will be a bit more salacious, as he is a young man, and she is the Virgin Empress, and they are alone together save the guards standing outside.
O-Shizuka’s hands tremble as she reaches for the paper attached to the package. Yes, she who is known as the Lady of Ink, the finest calligrapher in the Empire: her hands tremble like an old woman’s.
The Hokkaran calligraphy is closer to a pig’s muddy footprints than to anything legible, but the bold Qorin characters are unmistakable.
For O-Shizuka of Hokkaro, from Barsalyya Shefali Alshar.
That name!
Nothing could make her smile like this, not even hearing the Sister’s secret song itself.
“Doan-tun,” she says, her voice little more than a whisper. “Cancel all my appointments for the next two days.”
“What?” he says. “Your Imperial Majesty, the Merchant Prince of Sur-Shar arrives tomorrow!”
“And he can make himself quite comfortable in whichever brothel he chooses until I am prepared to speak to him,” O-Shizuka says. “Unless my uncle has finally done me the favor of dying, I am not to be bothered. You are dismissed.”
“But, Your Imperial Majesty—”
“Dismissed,” repeats Shizuka, this time sharp as the nails of her right hand. The boy leaves.
And she is alone.
Alone as she has been for eight years. Alone with her crown, her zither, her paper, her ink, her Imperial bed.
Alone.
But as she unwraps the package and uncovers the book underneath, she can hear Shefali’s voice in her mind. She can smell her: horses and sweat, milk and leather. And there, pressed between the first two pages—
Two pine needles.
When her eyes first land on the Qorin characters in the book, O-Shizuka’s heart begins to sing.
THE COLORS OF THE FLOWERS
Shizuka, my Shizuka. If Grandmother Sky is good, then this finds you sitting on your throne, eating far too many sweets, and complaining about all the meetings you must attend.
My apologies for the awful calligraphy. I know you are shaking your head even as you read this, saying something about my brushstrokes not being decisive enough.
I have so many questions for you, and I’m certain you have just as many for me. Here in the East, I hear rumors of what you’ve been up to. Is it true you returned to Shiseiki Province and slew a Demon General? You must tell me the story. And do not brush off the details, Shizuka. I can almost hear your voice.
“It really was nothing.…”
The day will come when we share stories over kumaq and rice wine. I know it will. But until then, paper and ink are all we have. They are old friends of yours, and have kindly agreed to keep you company in my absence.