Only after buckling on my sword, did I cross the room to open the door.

  I had expected another voiceless attendant, come to force me to trim my nose hairs or something else offensive to Imperial eyes. There was, of course, always an outside chance this would be a very bold assassin with a very low-priority hit-list. But what I actually found when I opened the door was…

  “What are you?”

  She faltered for only a moment. “I… am Lady Ding. I am pleased to meet you, my lord.”

  “I mean what are you doing here?”

  She smiled like I was a simpleton. “In your experience, why does a lady normally visit a lord in his chambers?”

  She entered without being invited to do so, and slid easily onto a couch.

  My father and Uncle had sent me concubines before. They had joked about it afterwards, as if I had passed some sort of test and had been invited into some secret sect of manhood.

  Of course, I hadn’t really been invited in. Not without a Mandate.

  A part of me now assumed that this was some far-flung attempt to trigger my Mandate from Heaven with the romantic arts. But no, I had already tried that.

  In any case, I knew enough about concubines to recognize one when I saw one. And I wasn’t enamored with the concept of a harem, or fathering a few bastards, especially when I was still just trying to figure out how to keep myself alive.

  “Lady Ding, was it? Listen, I…”

  “Will my lord not join me on the couch?” I also knew enough about concubines to know that they always played some sort of game, intended to interest and seduce. Lady Ding’s game appeared to be playing to my ego, giving me respect beyond my station and letting it intoxicate me.

  “I don’t…”

  She shifted in such a way that her lavender robe seemed to slide itself to her shoulder of its own volition. Ah. Then of course there was the standard game of concubines. I blushed and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to look at her bare neck or anywhere but her bare neck.

  “Oh, dear. My lord is quite young, isn’t he?”

  I knew to refute it would only make me seem younger, more desperate and more inexperienced in such matters of manliness, so I did what I pictured any other lord might do when a concubine came to visit him… I poured myself a cup of wine. Lady Ding’s eyes tracked me all the way. The first sip did wonders for my nerves and I took another before responding.

  “I’m familiar with such games as these,” I said. I wasn’t, so I just started talking the way an older, more sagacious lord might. “Someone within the palace would have the warlords… distracted. I thought perhaps the Gray Dowager at first but… no, she’ll be quite preoccupied with the Empress. And vice versa. The Marshal perhaps? Or maybe these eunuchs I’ve heard so much about?”

  I had no idea what I was actually talking about. The first I had heard of any of these people was this morning, but as long as I was overstating my knowledge…

  A tremor at the corner of her mouth was the only sign of what might have been a war within. Clearly I had broken some rule of the game. Perhaps I had even struck close to the mark. But, then again, I had just named everyone Uncle had.

  “Such things are not for me to say, my lord,” she said smoothly. It was an obviously trained response and I decided on a frontal assault to test the depth of that training.

  “Who sent you?”

  She gave a sweet smile that was almost convincing as she rose and placed her hands on my chest. “Does it matter so long as I am here now?”

  Despite her hands running across my shoulders, all I could think was that this was yet another move in the larger war between the lords of the land – one in which I had much less experience than in actual war. Of course, whoever had initiated this… um, battle would have been sure that Lady Ding would only absorb information, not spill it.

  When I hadn’t responded with a retort, she had begun undoing my sash and outer robe. “Think of me as a message for you to unravel. Does the messenger really matter so long as the contents are… rewarding.”

  I tracked her hands for a moment then looked up. “Do you have a courtesy name, Lady Ding?”

  Her hands froze in place. “A courtesy name?”

  I nodded without elaborating.

  The question seemed to have caught her off guard, and for a moment her act had cracked again, giving me a glimpse at… well, at something else. I wasn’t sure.

  In a flash, the facade was back up. She spoke slowly and sweetly, as if I were a horse in need of calming, or a foreigner who didn’t quite know the language and the ways of our world. “We are meant to be intimate, my lord. Those who are intimate have no need for courtesy names.”

  “Yet you insist on calling me ‘your lord.’”

  “Are you not?” My outer garments were gone before I realized it, and she had started on hers.

  I’m not even my father’s heir. The response came immediately to mind, but I clamped down on it. That would have been just the type of slip Lady Ding’s masters – whoever they might be – were hoping for.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  It would be just the type of information that could get me cast out of the palace or killed.

  “My father is a lord. I am his loyal subject.” It was the polite response, the one that could have come from either a dutiful heir or a peripheral, yet pragmatic son. In other words, it told Lady Ding and her masters nothing.

  “What shall I call you then? ‘Loyal subject’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.” There! Another flash of that deeper layer, then it was gone. I got the sense that the ‘helpless subject’ act didn’t come naturally to her; it didn’t incorporate her wit.

  “Sparrow will suffice,” I said.

  “Well, my lord Sparrow,” the genuine reaction to my obstinance might have been exasperation, but Lady Ding simply moved closer to me in nothing but her supple, silken under-robes, and lowered her voice as if telling me a secret, “Are you familiar with the concept of a… concubine?” This last word was barely a breath in my ear.

  “I’m familiar with the function they serve in seeing that noble bloodlines are not only secure but prolific, yes.”

  The temperature of the room might have dropped from high summer to mid-winter in the space of a heartbeat. Lady Ding straightened up, took a half-step back, and her eyes went flat.

  “They always send me the strange ones,” she mumbled. That voice could have come from a different woman’s lips, it was so changed from that of the character she had played a moment ago.

  I laughed. “Maybe so, but-”

  Lady Ding’s foot lashed out and struck me in the chest, catapulting me onto the nearby couch. In a moment she was on me, pinning me even as my sword was out of its scabbard and spinning across the room.

  I surged up, but her attack had been so sudden, so complete, she was able to force me back down. For the moment, I was helpless.

  “Relax,” hissed Lady Ding, so low I could barely hear her. “I’m not here to kill you.”

  The coldness was still there in her voice – not the sickly sweet tone she had used at first, but the menacing, flat one I had begun to recognize as the true voice of Lady Ding.

  “If this is some new game the concubines are using, I have to admit, it is not my favorite.”

  She leaned closer, pinning me to the couch with her eyes as much as her body now. “This is no game for me.” It was again a whisper, but there was no allure to it. This was Lady Ding, the true lady: as cold and dark as the abyss. “Be still.”

  Her true voice was oddly… comforting to me. The barely restrained snarl mellowed within my chest.

  Suddenly she withdrew, and in a moment she was standing again, frozen against the wall as if waiting for something, as if she hadn’t just attacked me and pinned me to the sofa.

  She was staring at a blank wooden panel like it was a deer about to bolt.

  “What are-”

  A motion from her cut me off.

  “Oh, yes, my lord,” she said in a stage whisper, and then panted as if in the throes of lovemaking. “My lord! How improper of you!”

  The puzzlement must have been so clear on my face that when she looked over again, she rolled her eyes and beckoned. I began to rise from the couch and she quickly held out a hand, then motioned for me to come more slowly this time. I got to my feet as stealthily as I could. My boot creaked on the floorboard, but another bout of acting from the lady covered it up.

  “I am yours to command, my lord! Ungh. Use me as you will! Ungh! Ahhh!””

  Once I stood beside her, the two of us nearly flat to the wall, she pointed at a seam in the panel. I scowled. There was nothing there.

  She turned to throw her voice back toward the couch and produced a very convincing set of sounds that left me both scandalized and confused, my mind and body going in so many different directions at once.

  “Ahhh. Oh, my lord.” She sighed as if satisfied. If that was supposed to simulate our entire bout of lovemaking, I was a bit insulted.

  There was a seemingly innocuous and barely perceptible creak from just beyond the wall. The seam that had been dark a moment ago, grew suddenly bright, as if light were shining through from the far side, then filled in with a barely audible click. The paneling was once again whole and without any visible joins.

  I turned to Lady Ding with a question. She held up a hand, looking as if she were counting.

  “Ugh, there. You can move freely, now.” She threw herself down on the nearest sofa and picked up the scroll I had been reading when she had walked in. Her eyes scanned it for a moment as if finding her place… like she had been the one reading it, and I had been the one to distract her. Within moments she seemed absorbed.

  “Um, what just happened?” I asked.

  Without looking up she said, “I seduced you. We made love. It was Heavenly.”

  “Um, no you didn’t… No we didn’t. No it wasn’t.” I rubbed my chest.

  Still reading, she said, “It's fine if you’re not interested. Boys, grandmas, goats.” She made a flippant gesture. “If they put you in a better room I might have to actually find out what stimulates you.”

  “What?” My eyes narrowed. “Goats?!”

  “It's not really my problem. They’ll probably send someone else tomorrow night.”

  “Look I didn’t say I wasn’t interested-”

  “Like I said. Not my problem anymore.”

  “But what’s wrong with my room?”

  She slapped the scroll down onto the couch, as I often did when I had read the same passage a dozen times. “If they thought you were important, they would have put you in a room where they could see your every move. In this room, there’s only the one wall.”

  She pointed to where the spy-hole had been and then made to start reading again.

  “Ah,” I said, feeling a fool. I should have suspected as much when I had first arrived. “So… is there always someone watching when…”

  She lowered her scroll – my scroll – just enough to fix me with a flat stare above it. “‘It's not for me to say, my lord,”” she said, mocking her own words from earlier.

  I probably should have taken the hint and just picked something else to read until the lady left, but, honestly, the palace, the wine – and I had to admit – Lady Ding herself had gone to my head. For whatever reason, I wasn’t quite ready to disengage.

  I said the first thing that came to my mind. “You never wondered who decides who you sleep with?”

  “Wondering gets women like me killed.” She sounded as if she were reciting a mantra.

  “And… what gets someone to become a concubine?”

  She responded as if far away, deep within the Record of the Warring States. “Sparrow, we’re not friends. I have no reason to tell you my life’s tale.”

  “Fair enough.”

  A moment ago I was ‘her lord,’ and now it felt like I was the intruder here. Looking back, the whole act was probably carefully chosen for me specifically – to disarm the type of eager young soldier who would try to face down the General of Heaven alone. It was all meant to lure me into slipping up and saying something important that could be used against my clan. Looking back, it had almost worked.

  It probably wouldn’t be the last time that my lack of a Mandate came close to leaking out.

  I let out a sigh. “Can I at least have my book back?”

  “There are others.”

  I scowled and moved to the bookshelf.

  “Oh, and you’re sleeping on that couch tonight.”

  “If you say so, my lady,” I said scanning.

  Her eyes flashed dangerously at me over her scroll, and for a moment, I wondered if there might still be an assassination attempt in store for me this evening.