Lust

The city of Yuling had never burned before.

For three hundred years, the capital of Wei had stood untouched behind its walls of grey stone and its moat of dark water. Walls wide enough for four horses to ride abreast, water deep enough to swallow a man in full armor and never give him back. The people of Wei were proud of this. They said the city breathed a different air than the rest of the warring kingdoms. They said their walls had been blessed by the Mountain God, and that no conqueror’s banner would ever fly above the Southern Gate.

They had not accounted for Xiao Che.

He was twenty years old. Those who saw him that morning would spend the rest of their lives arguing about what he looked like. Some said he was frightening. Some said he was beautiful. Most, if pressed, admitted he was both at once. He rode a black horse through the broken southern gate as the autumn dawn was still grey and uncertain, his jade-green battle armour catching the first thin light, his dark hair bound in a general’s topknot with a single pin of white jade. He rode slowly. That was the thing people remembered most. He did not gallop in triumph the way the stories said conquerors should. He walked his horse through the splintered wood and the settling dust, and he looked at the city of Yuling the way a man looks at something he has wanted for a very long time.

Behind him came one hundred thousand soldiers of Qi, their banners snapping in the cold October wind.

Ruo Feng heard them from the inner garden.

She had been awake since since the moment the first distant boom of Qi’s siege engines had rolled across the rooftops and shaken the bronze wind-chimes outside her window. Her ladies had wept and clung to each other. Her chief attendant, old Mama Su, had tried to dress her in servant’s clothing and beg her to flee through the water gate.

Ruo Feng had refused.

She was nineteen, the youngest and last princess of Wei, and she had decided some weeks ago, around the time it became clear that her father’s army would not hold the outer provinces, around the time the court astrologers stopped making predictions and started making excuses, that she would not be found hiding.

So she stood now in the center of the inner garden in her formal princess robes: winter-white silk with deep crimson embroidery at the hem and collar, her hair dressed with pins of silver and pale coral, her hands folded in front of her. The garden’s last chrysanthemums were still blooming around her feet, yellow and white against the dark earth. The smoke from the southern quarter drifted overhead in long grey scarves. The sounds of a city surrendering — doors thrown open, weapons laid on stone, voices calling out in the particular pitch of men choosing survival over pride — filtered over the high garden walls.

She looked at the chrysanthemums. She breathed.

Let him come, she thought. Let him see me standing.

They brought word to Xiao Che before he had reached the palace gates.

“Your Highness.” His general, a blunt-spoken man named Deng Yun, drew up alongside him and lowered his voice. “The Wei court has surrendered in full. The king is— the former king has requested permission to take his own life with honour. His ministers are assembled in the throne hall awaiting your terms.”

“And the palace household?”

A slight pause. Deng Yun was not a man given to hesitation, which made this one noticeable. “Mostly fled or confined to quarters. But” He cleared his throat. “The youngest princess. Ruo Feng. She is in the inner garden. She refused to be moved. She is simply standing there, Highness. My men didn’t know what to do with her.”

Xiao Che was quiet for a moment.

He had read the intelligence reports on Ruo Feng of Wei the way he read all intelligence reports — carefully, completely, and with the part of his mind that was always calculating. Age: nineteen. Unmarried: the betrothal negotiations with Chu had collapsed six months ago when it became clear that Wei was losing the war. Education: unusual for a woman of the court — she had apparently read military texts as well as poetry, had sat behind the screen at enough of her father’s councils to understand strategy, could reportedly shoot a bow with accuracy at thirty paces. Temperament: difficult, one spy had written, which in Xiao Che’s experience meant intelligent and unafraid of men who outranked her.

He had also read, somewhere in the margins of a different report, that she was considered the most beautiful woman in the southern courts.

He had not weighted that information heavily when planning the campaign. He weighted it somewhat more now.

“Show me,” he said.

She heard the footsteps before she saw him.

The garden gate opened. Three soldiers entered first, hands on their swords, eyes moving across the space with professional wariness, and then they stepped to the sides and he walked through.

Ruo Feng had prepared herself for many things. She had prepared herself for a man who was cruel, or old, or ugly in the way power sometimes made men ugly — bloated with it, dulled by it. She had prepared herself for dismissal, for contempt, for the particular coldness of a conqueror who sees his victory already complete and the remaining details beneath his attention.

She had not entirely prepared herself for this.

He was younger than she had expected. She had known his age — everyone knew his age, the terrifying prodigy-prince of Qi who had been leading campaigns since he was seventeen — but knowing a number and standing twelve paces from the reality of it were different things. He was tall, lean in the way of someone who had spent years in armor, with a face that was — she kept her expression carefully neutral and made herself observe him the way she would observe a battlefield — a face of sharp, clean lines, dark eyes that moved across her with an assessment as frank as her own, a mouth that was, in this moment, neither smiling nor hard.

He stopped walking. They regarded each other across the chrysanthemums.

“Princess Ruo Feng.” His voice was calm. Low. The voice of someone accustomed to being listened to without having to raise it.

She inclined her head. Not a bow — an inclination. “Prince Xiao Che.”

Something shifted in his expression. So slight she might have imagined it. “You know who I am.”

“I made it my business to know.” She held his gaze. “Since it seemed likely you would eventually arrive in my garden.”

He looked at her for a long moment — at the white silk and the silver pins and the chrysanthemums around her feet and the steadiness of her hands.

Then something in his expression closed.

It was subtle. A door, not a wall — the almost-smile receding the way light recedes when cloud moves across it, leaving the face beneath it entirely unreadable. He looked away from her, just briefly, toward the smoke rising over the southern rooftops. When he looked back, he was different. Not cruel. Not cold, exactly. But somewhere far from the man who had almost smiled.

“I have orders,” he said.

Ruo Feng said nothing. She waited.

“From my father.” A pause. “The King of Qi.”

She understood, in the space between those words, that whatever she had imagined might happen to her — confinement to the inner palace, marriage to some minor lord of Qi as a political footnote, a quiet life of supervised irrelevance — she had imagined wrong. The King of Qi was not a man known for quiet arrangements.

“You are to be brought to Tiancheng,” Xiao Che said. “To the capital.”

The garden held the words for a moment. A wind moved through it and the chrysanthemums bent.

“As what?” she asked. Her voice came out even. She was proud of that.

His eyes returned to hers. “I was not given a detailed account of his intentions.”

“Then give me your estimate.”

Something shifted behind his expression — brief, unnameable — and then was gone. “You are the last princess of Yuling. You are young, unmarried, and reportedly”— the word arrived without inflection —“accomplished. My father collects things of value.”

Things. The word landed without any particular force, which was almost worse than if he had meant it as a cruelty.

“And if I decline?” she said.

“You cannot decline.” He said it the way a man states the position of the sun. No malice. No apology. Simply the shape of the world as it now stood. “Wei has fallen. You have no army, no court, no father left to negotiate on your behalf. The only question is the manner of your travel.”

She looked at him. He looked back at her with those dark, level eyes and she understood — with a clarity that felt almost like cold water — that he was not threatening her. He was not enjoying this. He was simply telling her the truth, which in some ways was harder to argue with than either of the other things.

“When?” she said.

“Three days. I have the city to process.” He glanced once more around the garden — at the chrysanthemums, at the smoke, at the pale sky beginning to show through the grey — and then back at her, and whatever he saw in her face he kept to himself. “You will be given comfortable quarters within the palace. Your attendants may stay with you.” A brief pause. “You will be treated according to your rank.”

My rank, she thought. The rank of a kingdom that no longer exists.

“I understand,” she said.

He held her gaze for one moment longer than was necessary. Then he inclined his head — not a bow, just as she had offered him — and turned, and walked back through the garden gate, and was gone. The soldiers filed out after him. The gate closed.

Ruo Feng stood very still.

The wind came again and the chrysanthemums moved around her feet and somewhere beyond the garden walls a horse screamed and someone was shouting orders in the clipped, impatient dialect of Qi. The smoke had thickened. It had the smell of wood and something beneath wood — the particular smell of things that had taken years to build burning in an hour.

She stood still for a long time.

My father collects things of value.

She had told herself, in the weeks since it became clear the war was lost, that she was prepared. She had stood in this garden and decided she would face whatever came on her own feet, with her hands folded, without weeping. She had constructed the idea of herself as someone capable of that. She had believed it, more or less, until approximately ten minutes ago.

Her hands, she noticed, had begun to shake.

Not visibly. Not in a way that anyone watching would have seen. But she could feel it — a fine trembling deep in her fingers, in the muscles of her forearms — the body insisting on the truth the mind had been holding at a careful distance. She was nineteen years old. Her father was dead. Her city was burning. And in three days she would be taken a thousand li north to a court she had never seen, to be presented to a king whose reputation for cruelty was not a rumour but a documented fact, for purposes that a twenty-year-old prince had declined to specify.

You will be treated according to your rank.

She unclenched her hands. Clasped them again in front of her. Breathed.

There was a great deal she needed to think about before three days were up.