The Secrets of Jin-Shei by Alma Alexander Page A

tonight.
    Tai paused, lifting her brush from the page of her journal, listening to the silence.
    This was the first year that she had been in the Summer Palace without her mother—Rimshi had developed a debilitating cough and chest infection over the previous winter, and her physician, the healer Szewan who attended the women of the Imperial Court and who had been sent to take care of Rimshi by the Empress Yehonaia herself, had counseled against travel. But this was the second year of
jin-shei
between Tai and Antian, the Little Empress, and Tai had been invited along in her own right as a guest of the Court. She had not been given the quarters she and her mother usually occupied, out on the fringes of the Palace, in the outer courts. She had a room to herself this summer, close to Antian’s own suite—a room with a window that looked out into the garden, a room full of billowing curtains and soft cushions. There was even a servant who left a beaker of iced tea in the room every morning, when the heat came, as she did in all the women’s chambers.
    Tai felt awkward accepting all this. She also felt isolated. That she was
jin-shei
to Antian was an open secret in the court—but there were times that the hallowed precepts of
jin-shei
did clash with the more traditional strictures of status and class, and many of the inhabitants of the plush women’s wing in the Palace did not much like it that a commoner was invited to live among them. Antian was of age now, however; Tai had been a guest at the Little Empress’s Xat-Wau ceremony only that spring, and was witness to Antian’s grandmother, the old and fragile Dowager Empress, placing the red lacquered hairpin through Antian’s lustrous piled-up black hair. Antian was an adult, according to Syai custom. She was also a senior member of the Imperial household, with her own personal courtwhich was now her responsibility. She had asked Tai to the Summer Palace, and the other women had to at least be polite.
    Or that was the theory of it. Tai had learned to tell the difference between three very specific kinds of women in the Court where she was concerned. There were those who were genuinely pleasant, and offered a smile or a kind word in passing even when Tai was not accompanied by Antian and they felt constrained to be polite in the presence of Tai’s powerful friend and protector.
    There were the ones who would pass Tai in silence if they came upon her alone, but smiled and fawned upon her when she was in Antian’s company; Tai soon learned to recognize a smile that did not reach the eyes and the touch of cold, reluctant fingers.
    And then there was Liudan.
    In the two years of her
jin-shei
tie to Antian, Tai had completely failed to get anything but cold hostility from Antian’s sister Liudan. It had started on the very first day of the
jin-shei,
when she and Antian had been walking in the very gardens that her room now gazed out into, when she had pointed at a flower and seen Liudan’s recoil from her.
    That was my sister. My angry sister.
    Antian had explained about Liudan, later.
    “I was only two when she was born,” Antian had said, “but my mother was the Empress and everyone spoiled me. Every concubine’s child is taken to belong to the Empress, of course, but when Liudan was born, Cai—that’s her mother—did not wish to give her up to be raised by a wet nurse and then the court.”
    “Which one is Cai? Have I met her?” Tai had asked.
    “No,” Antian had said, shaking her head. “Cai is dead. She was at the Court for only a few years, but she lived her life like a comet.”
    “Where did she come from?”
    “She was a daughter of a poor farmer, up in the miserable rocks and stones of the north country. He could not afford to keep her—she was the ninth child in the family, the sixth daughter—and so he took her and two more of his daughters and brought them to Linh-an, and sold them into concubinage. Cai was the only one who made the Imperial