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The Wei Kingdom lies. The grass plains weren’t that cold.
Not in her memories, at least. If she closed her eyes for long enough, she could see the snow loaded high on the bowing grass, all pointed true north. Look up. Her father draws a line in the air from the west – the sun bows too – and points up to the weightless stars they follow home. Horses know because they know. We have to learn.
Those clear nights were the ones she remembered easily between the pavilions of the palace, stealing glances at the blue sky between smiling rooftops. The rest… it was hard to say. Time runs swift, even more so when it’s beaten out of you. Perhaps, if she was taking a silver lining inventory, that could be her first: bruises swelled, from red to purple before echoing out into blue. No storm lasts forever. Not even hers.
The wedding between Nangong Jingnu and Qi Yan was scheduled for one of those clear winter days. Nangong Jingnu’s phoenix-patterned robes stood boldly in Qi Yan’s line of vision, or, no-- Nangong Jingnu’s robes were perfectly suited for the occasion, and stood profoundly amongst the other parts and pieces that make up an imperial wedding. Qi Yan folded neatly into the picture as well. It was Qiyan Agula, a prince turned inside out to take the shape of a common-born scholar, who stuck out.
(
The night of the announcement, lying in the dark, she cast her mind back to Shifu’s classroom. The fog had settled in the nameless valley, and the walls surrounding her appeared to curve inwards. Little light broke into their make-shift classrooms. Reviewing her notes from that day, she remembered the story of Qin Er Shi, imagining what it would be like to watch his own men openly cast allegiance to the enemy.
During class, she had wondered which end she might be on: the side that knew the truth – that pointed deer from horse – or the side that knew the future? Her purpose was just, her revenge meaningful, reality could shift any way she needed as long as her parents were dead, and Nangong Rang lived. If that was true, then all else could be stretched to fit a suitable narrative; a sculpting, not a negating, of truth.
To point at a deer and call it a horse, then... To laugh and cast allegiance to treason benefits the emperor, if only to give him a glimpse into the future. This functions best if one is surrounded by intelligent, forward-thinking officials. The deer, too, must clearly be a deer, as your own men mustn’t be tricked by illusion. Everyone needs to see who is placing his allegiance where.
What was the inverse? To point at the prince of the grass plains and call her a Fuma? Nothing clear about that, but true revenge so rarely considered the morals of deceit. Illusion is simply another necessity.
Ha, she’d thought in her salad days. Qiyan Agula, son of Qiyan Sukhbaru, Khagan of the Chengli tribe, wouldn’t be so easily fooled. A deer was a deer. A horse was a horse. A prince was a prince.
But then she imagined Flowing Fire’s ferocious corpse on the other side of the Luo, her black coat pelted by the rain next to Qi Yan’s unconscious body. Back then, she’d shudder at the memory, curling up on herself and crying quietly enough so that shifu wouldn’t hear through the walls.
She was older now; she knew shifu could hear the whole time. Back then, Flowing Fire was her personal memory. If she could cry over her horse, it was a salvation from crying over her family. It was probably all the same to the masked person.
Like salt in the wound, she closed her eyes. Princess. Marriage. Fuma. Prince. Ha.
No storm lasts forever. Kill the emperor, and the rain might let up tomorrow.
)
The day of their wedding was dry and cold. Ten yéars ago, Qi Yan could’ve been anywhere, but the Nangong family would always be here.
-
Her arm throbbed.
Funny that the first injury she’d get on this path was self-inflicted, the guise of Nangong Jingnu’s protection worked just as well. Marriage was not a part of the plan, and consummation definitely wasn’t.
The wound wasn’t deep, but living as a scholar for four years hadn’t done her any favours. Walking behind the royal sisters, and the other newly-wedded Fuma, she schooled herself to bite the inside of her cheek each time her robes brushed against the healing skin.
Lu Zhongxing ran off after coughing up some dull excuse and Nangong Jingnu followed, for whatever reason. Qi Yan was certain that her happenstance in the palace had slaughtered some fantastic love story right before its final flourish, now left to watch its meagre swan song flood the air. She, the enemy on all accounts, had stepped on another deer’s neck on the path to revenge. Well, she supposed, it doesn’t mean much to kill a story.
Her lawfully wedded wife’s older sister stood five paces before her.
Nangong Shunu’s back was turned to Qi Yan. Like this, Qi Yan was no different to one of the palace maids or eunuchs following their masters. She was even playing the part. Nangong Shunu might be an unflavoured princess, but she wasn’t a servant.
She held herself upright and proud, and did not turn to meet eyes with Qi Yan. Rather, she seemed trapped in the place where she always seemed to be, bound by invisible threads of ice and etiquette that puppeted her body along.
At the same time, there’s a certain freedom to facing nothing. Nangong Shunu watched the palace walls as though something were to start oozing out of them. Qi Yan watched her back, careful not to breathe too loudly in the cold air.
Nangong Shunu remembered two things. Qi Yan’s shoulder smashing into her own in some anonymous alleyway, hardly making eye-contact before Nangong Jingnu stepped in to protect her sister’s valour. Then, the palace exam’s parade, where Qi Yan reminded everyone that one doesn’t need to be a good rider to be a celebrated scholar. She felt a prick of jealousy nudge at something inside her. She could never be the fool. Not like that, at least. Bound in the palace as an unfavoured daughter brought with it its own restrictions and shame. To be a common-born man, free to be clumsy and shameless, must be better than this.
Only a fool longs to be a fool.
Qi Yan knew his place, she found, having offered him some friendly sister-in-law advice. Qi Yan’s stilted replies were all she wanted to hear. Understood. Understood. It was the hallmark of passing the baton, to pass off one’s younger sister to… someone. Not ‘someone’, but simply whomever her father waved into the palace. Someone so politically inconsequential, they might as well be the grassy overgrowth on an otherwise scenic waterfall, lodged between bone and fleshy interior.
Nothing. Décor. She wasn’t far from that herself.
Nangong Shunu had half a mind to predict that her father would switch Qi Yan out with a more suitable match later on. He had to maintain relations with the Lu clan somehow, but the court wouldn’t collapse if they weren’t joint at the hip. Her father pocketed his queen and shifted a pawn. For her young sister, Nangong Shunu resolved, she could take every fall.
But here… Qi Yan barely moved the air. Nangong Shunu looked away to save them both the displeasure of seeing her jealousy. The breath that made up her voice dissipated into a thousand tiny crystals of ice, and her words disappeared into the soft breeze. She might have laughed.
Nangong Jingnu ran back up to where they were standing, and Nangong Shunu wiped away the tears at the corners of her eyes frantically. “You’re back?”
“Er-jie? You’re crying?!”
Well, how was Qi Yan supposed to know that?!
She watched Nangong Jingnu coax her sister away, and very pointedly did not think of her own. She followed the warning of her glare and stood still, to wait exactly where they left her, taking a slow breath.
This was the second test. Her arm throbbed again. As the two sisters fluttered away, Qi Yan figured it was time to up the ante. She could cut skin for Nangong Jingnu’s sake, proving her loyalty in blood. Nangong Jingnu was, perhaps, a little too young to understand any other loyalty, but Qi Yan was well acclimatised.
To prove a loyalty in soul, she decided to wait where she was left for Nangong Jingnu’s return. Five minutes, five hours, five days; what difference would it make?
The garden around her was quiet. No different than it was when Nangong Shunu was there, really.
Her estimate of five hours wasn’t too far off. Nangong Jingnu came to find her after dusk, and led her into the dining hall, hiding her guilt through the novelty of treating her newlywed commoner to a royal banquet. The palace was lit-up, and the air thick and festive. Nangong Rang sat in his grand throne, beckoning his serving maid to pour another glass.
“This dish of lamb chops can’t be eaten in the common streets,” Nangong Jingnu explained, gesturing for one of the maids to cut a rib off for Qi Yan. “Have a taste!”
Qi Yan swallowed her pride, pretending to try mutton for the first time.
Nangong Jingnu, who didn’t know any better, pushed the saucer of green chive flower paste towards her. Years ago, she dreamt up a promise to never eat the food of home before she was certain their spirits could rest. The Wei kingdom, for all its luxuries, didn’t know they wanted something until it was covered in blood and begging for mercy. The promise didn’t keep, anyway; shifu was a master at torture. She chewed her food in front of Nangong Jingnu, pretending to savour each bite.
Back home, you ate what you, or someone else, hunted. The process of food to plate was transparent, and everyone had some grasp on the weight of a life. Here, palace maids sliced the meat, and royal wrists were never strained. What joy was there in a big meal if one hadn’t worked up the appetite for it? Qi Yan could barely understand it. The cold had seeped into her bones already, and there was little good these dishes could do now.
-
The next morning, when she woke up sick, it wasn’t so much a shame as it was an annoyance. As Jingnu laid a wet down over Qi Yan’s forehead, and Qi Yan fumbled around to hold her new wife’s hand – oldest trick in the book – she caught Shunu smiling to herself.
God, if she could just kill them all right now.
She gave herself a few hours just to harvest her thoughts, swept up in the brocade blankets that did more to hold her still than to keep out the cold. At dusk, when Chuntao asked if she intended to attend dinner, she figured it was time to play the role of docile husband like she meant it.
Dinner as a fuma was certainly different to dinner as a commoner, banquets aside. The table was peppered with an array of dishes; always an occasion, she supposed. These meals rivalled even the most flamboyant festival of the grass plains, yet all confined to their tiny serving dishes. No warrior would be happy with a few squares of meat— but these weren’t warriors. These were princesses.
How many starving refugees had Qi Yan walked past on her way to the examination halls? How many had she helped? How many were Chengli? Nangong Jingnu’s chopsticks poked uneasily into some of the cabbage she so clearly didn’t want to eat (a small reminder of Chuntao’s influence), while her sister sat far more poised, like dust flitting over the table.
If Qi Yan wasn’t watching, she might have thought that Nangong Shunu hadn’t eaten a single bite. Instead, she schooled Nangong Jingnu on the ‘proper’ way to eat at the dining table, and Qi Yan could etch out the curve of her nose against the paper windows behind her. What childlike innocence beamed out of Nangong Jingnu’s face could only be traced subtly in her older sister’s, shadowing across her features like dim reminders of her own childhood, or whatever ghost of it could still escape. She couldn’t be much younger than Qi Yan, no?
(If the grass plains were still what they were, it hardly meant that Qiyan Agula would be more like Nangong Shunu than she would Qi Yan. Nangong Shunu was still Nangong before anything else; well-educated, well-fed, and more than happy to push polite commands into the laps of others.)
-
Qi Yan writhed in bed for ten days. The masked person had taught her about everything under the sun, of emperors young and old, legendary and forgotten, in sickness and in health. Whenever they came up, Qi Yan kept one private thought; is an emperor so different to a Khagan? Is an emperor so different to her? Could an emperor lead a kingdom from his sickbed? Could a prince take revenge from hers?
… There’s nothing quite like stewing in your own sick misery.
On the tenth day, when the clouds parted from her bedchamber and slipped out of the open door, they seemed to flock around Nangong Shunu’s head instead.
-
Nangong Jingnu couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand what? Her sister’s misery? Her husband’s lack of soothsaying hands? The cold? Qi Yan’s cold? Eventually, it spills out.
“… Er-jie’s been gloomy ever since she came back from visiting her Lady Zhaorong.”
Qi Yan wanted to give her a look, but held it in. At times like these, Nangong Jingnu really did remind her of her own younger sister… but what does Nangong Shunu’s happiness have to do with her? No one would be happy when she was through with this family. Nangong Jingnu was simply asking for a temporary solution to salve a wound, but the real knife wasn’t even in—wasn’t even visible!
Of course, Qi Yan had no way of knowing that Nangong Jingnu’s version of reality was bent around the belief that Qi Yan and Nangong Shunu were deeply in love with each other… but would it really make a difference if she did?
“Is your Highness asking me for ideas?”
After prying some information out of Nangong Jingnu, they conjured up a simple plan to raise her sister’s spirits. Calligraphy and painting were off the table, and at a time of year so neatly packed with imperial events, there was no chance to get out of the palace either. Playing the qin was the only realistic option.
In a way, it was also Qi Yan’s least favourite option. Calligraphy, she liked. Painting, she had no skill in, nor any stake. Walking was as inoffensive as anything else.
But qin… The qin was the masked person’s instrument of choice. If she wasn’t terrorising an adolescent Qi Yan with her vigorous training, she was somewhere deep in her study, playing to herself. But the sound of thunder can’t hurt at all, she told herself. It’s only the lightning.
… And it gave her a good excuse to leave. If she could get back to the private estate, she could at least enjoy the chance to drop her shoulders for just a moment. Upon arrival, she went straight to the chest the white jade xiao was bound in and unearthed it, testing its weight in her hand. White jade was said to be healing, a symbol of heaven that cut through the grey monotony of mortal life, the final peak of purity before the body was lowered into the ground. Good thing Qiyan Agula was already dead, she mused.
When she returned, Nangong Jingnu’s head poked up from the side of the door to greet her, brimming with anticipatory excitement. In Nangong Jingnu’s eyes, this was the closest these two forbidden lovers could come without breaking their separate oaths in marriage. She knew her older sister would never break away from tradition… and… she didn’t know much at all about Qi Yan. Perhaps, if she found him crying, she could get her sister to come play the qin at his bedside?
Or… Nangong Jingnu could do it herself? The thought was almost too illicit for her to commit to—this was her sister’s beloved she had married in her stead! Now she was childish dreaming of some cruel stolen valour. She gave a silent sigh before pulling the strings of her body into the closest thing that remembered what a qin player might look like.
Yeah, she really couldn’t play this thing. After just a few moments of off-tune, off-tempo plucks, Nangong Shunu had appeared before her, already straightening out her hands to fix her younger sister’s approach. After a little back and forth, Nangong Jingnu decided she didn’t even want to pretend to learn.
“Can er-jie play a song? I’ll learn by watching by the side.”
Not the most eloquent lie, but Nangong Jingnu could get anyone to spoil her if she really tried. Nangong Shunu’s face blossomed with a rare smile, and her sister shuffled out of the way.
Standing outside the hall, Qi Yan listened closely. Nangong Shunu played slowly, as though she were rectifying the mistakes of her younger sister’s clumsy fingers by pulling out the weight of each note, excavating them from the dust and holding them up to the winter sun.
Out here, Qi Yan could be anyone. This plan of hers required a little mystique, and Qi Yan was thankful for that much. Nangong Shunu was no different to the rest of her family, and Qi Yan did well to remember that. No muscle of hers was flexed to move the qin into the hall, no door opened by royal flesh, no string tuned. They stepped into perfect worlds like the heavens parted at their arrival.
Only Qi Yan bore the weight of the xiao. Suddenly, it felt a thousand times heavier. If she closed her eyes, she was thrown back to those dark rooms in the small hours of the morning, wishing her family were alive again, or that she were dead with them.
Halfway through Nangong Shunu’s performance felt like the best place to join. Even a commoner-turned-scholar-turned-royal could make peace with interrupting the royal air.
As predicted, Nangong Shunu abruptly stopped, but Qi Yan played on.
The goal was for Nangong Shunu to play freely with her, taking the xiao as scaffolding for her to construct her own misery within. Of course, to interrupt a royal doing anything could be a crime punishable by beheading, but what wasn’t? And could they really own the air around them? Nangong Jingnu’s palace was special anyway, exempt from a number of rules set down in the royal estate: no music in the imperial palace; no stage plays; no ostentatious performances; no extravagant dances. Qi Yan asked Nangong Jingnu with all the grace of a wide-eyed commoner if this was allowed. Nangong Jingnu answered with her face turning a shade of red, as though this were the first time she was learning of her own exceptionalism.
Being the favoured daughter must really mean something. Having a living father must mean something else.
Qi Yan played on. To comfort Nangong Shunu, she had to grant her space to express her own heart through this invisible language. In words that moved, fingers that strummed. Breath was always doomed to become air, but music was exempt from such eerie fate, dripping into memory instead.
She switched her tune, bowing into a melancholy stretch that felt its way through a minor scale to trace out a new picture. The xiao was different from the qin; it was all breath. Like this, maybe Qi Yan was free to let her own inhibitions fly with it, like they, too, weren’t going to be traced through the annals of history.
Unable to watch Nangong Shunu’s face, Qi Yan led her through new sadness. Deep and restrained, it was a loss that bypassed her own shambled life and carved out new agony. What do you know about suffering, Nangong Shunu?
-
Qi Yan wanted to kill everyone. Nangong Shunu’s playing decorated her own, the qin plucking out sorrow at each mountain top and valley basin, where thumbs jabbed into eyes, or hands against wrists, or breeze against branch. She wanted them all dead. She didn’t even know it until her sorrow burst, and she blew too violently into the lip plate, circumcising the whole thing. She could imagine this was something her shifu had beaten into her. To stop a heart from revealing a truth, stab another organ. Obviously.
She thought briefly: if the wind had blown any other way, the arms of the grass would lay south. If the Wei kingdom brought in, rather than push out, the wind might not run from their palace. Or, she was wrong on all counts.
The capital of the Wei kingdom was much further south, but the snow still fell. It was only inside the palace greens where it never built up, or perhaps the eunuchs were tasked to clean it up each morning, to craft some illusion of the palace’s immeasurable heat, or the endless sun of heaven, or the endless grace of the emperor. Maybe it was just that warm. She glanced down at the green while her hands steadied themselves on the xiao. The grass watched. She couldn’t bear the weight.