“One hundred paces away, Windstopper.” I had explained to my overzealous, oversized nanny.

  “But You Will Be Moving?”

  “Fair point. Well… walk one hundred paces down that hallway and then only take a step when I do.”

  As Lady Ding led me from my rooms to the palace gardens, Windstopper followed us with such concentration that I couldn’t help but smile.

  Or perhaps I was smiling for another reason.

  The lady hadn’t felt the need to lay on the ‘my lords’ so thick as we strolled through combed pebbles, manicured flowers, and fish-filled ponds, nor did she drop the act entirely. It was a civilized middle ground where I could just barely get a sense of what might interest her and when I began to get boring.

  She was everything that my life wasn’t. There was no hunting or training. There were no swords or conquests or military formations. She didn’t care a whit which lands could support what armies, or where the bulk of the Tiger’s forces were going to be stationed.

  But beneath all that, our worlds were very much the same. Every public misstep could spell our doom, our rivals’ knives were always at our backs, and both of us lived and died by the grace of the men we were sworn to. And, to my great delight, we dealt with it in the exact same way; we escaped into literature. Oh, I know she was trained to navigate a man in order to find and exploit his interests, much as I was training to navigate a battlefield in order to find and exploit its strengths and weaknesses, but there was a way she was ‘interested’ in some things – about the Tiger’s forces, for instance – that differed from how she was interested in the Art of War.

  If anything, it appeared she was more engrossed in the topics that she cared less about, saying things like, “Oh, tell me more,” or “That is so interesting,” when I knew it wasn’t.

  But when I would quote Sun Tzu or Kong Qui, she would attack my positions, tell me I had misread it, and force me to defend my interpretation or application of the concepts.

  In this way, Lady Ding was like any battlefield commander I had ever seen or studied: there were goads and feints, enticements and distractions, but she only really fought for the objectives that mattered to her.

  I didn’t realize it until later, but at some point, we stopped looping around the palace gardens and turned out of the palace gates, into the City of Lanterns itself.

  We were hardly in the heart of the city, as the city blocks around the palace were largely comprised of walled manors and sprawling city mansions. Night had fallen, but paper lanterns hung on strings over the streets.

  For whatever reason, Lady Ding had decided on a change in locales, and she danced around her reasons for why.

  As the first stranger shuffled by, cloaked and hooded, I inadvertently went to rest my hand on my sword pommel only to remember that I had left it back in my quarters.

  At some point, she placed her hand on my arm and brought me to a stop.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but she held up a hand, head cocked as if listening.

  I listened as well. At first it was subtle. With the setting of the sun, the city had begun wailing. An Emperor had died and the people, high and low, would lament. Even if they had no love for the late Son of Heaven, even if they had no love for the Land Under Heaven, anything less than vigorous nightly wailing for a hundred days would be considered an act of disloyalty, possibly even treason.

  Wails rose up from inside the mansion we had stopped beside, same as the others, but there seemed a different pitch to it. I checked the alleymouth and saw that Windstopper was still there, peering around the corner to check if I had taken any more steps, and then disappearing again to observe my ‘hundred-paces-away’ rule.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  The moon was thin, barely more than a curved saber blade, but the lanterns lit Lady Ding’s face on one side. The look she gave me was unreadable and weighing, one I had not yet seen from her.

  She gestured to the spikes atop the wall. They were styled to look like wrought-iron Moon-Moths. “Are you familiar with this clan motif?”

  I had read something that mentioned the moth but… “Not intimately, no.”

  “You wouldn’t be. They’re relatively new as far as clans go, and not very powerful outside of their matriarch. Care to guess who she might be?”

  “Matriarch?” The clans run by women were few and far between.

  “A hint. The clan is called the Gray Moon-Moth.”

  “Hmm, the Gray Dowager? The late Emperor’s mother? Ah, the Empress who stood beside the other prince, the one not coronated.”

  The lady made to reply and then halted as she noticed a drunken lord stumbling down the alleyway. I’m not sure why, but as he passed, I positioned myself between him and Lady Ding.

  When he disappeared down the far end of the alley, I turned back to the lady to find her looking up at me, something strange and dark in her eyes. “Do you know how a lady in the palace lives long enough to become gray?”

  I shook my head at that.

  The lady nodded and seemed to be looking over at the rising cries from behind the wall. “The Gray Dowager came from nothing, the prettiest farmgirl in a little village with an old, unmarried minister.”

  A patrol moved past the far end of the alleymouth, and the lady took me by the arm and led me a few steps in the opposite direction so that our backs were toward the more busy street.

  “The unmarried minister had little talent. He had even fewer aspirations beyond a full belly and… well, the prettiest farmgirl warming his bed. He married that farmgirl at least, before she ‘warmed his bed,’ and when she gave him a son, they were both happy.”

  I realized I did know this story — everyone in the Empire knew at least some of it — but the way Lady Ding spoke of it, she seemed to know its characters more intimately, and she spoke as if she had told this story many times. Eyes still flicking to the alley-mouths, she continued.

  “The life of a wife in a small village. Her husband’s rank couldn’t have been more than 103 or 102. The lowliest of government officials. But for her, it was enough. Until one day, an army showed up at the minister’s house, and told them they were to come away to the capital. The unambitious minister had royal blood in his veins, you see. He had a Mandate, but nothing worth mentioning. And now, for some reason, his son would be the new Emperor.”

  I had grown antsy at the wailing over the mansion wall, and the increased activity in the street behind me, but when I turned away, the lady placed a gentle hand upon my chin and turned me back toward her.

  “‘Surely there’s been a mistake’ said the farmgirl, now a woman with just a touch of gray in her hair. But the Emperor before had been sterile, either from bad luck or…” her eyes darted over my shoulder, “Or through the careful attentions of his Ten Imperial Attendants.”

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  Her hands pulled me closer.

  “The empress-mother at the time, called the Koi Dowager, had decided, after very careful study and deliberation with her Minister of Imperial History, that a farmboy, son of a farmgirl, would be the next Emperor. The boy-Emperor’s parents and relatives were given an estate, but no titles, in exchange for their son, and so it was for years.”

  I could smell the exotic perfumes in her hair as Lady Ding nuzzled her head against my chest, as a man stepped into the alley, and then nervously disappeared through a doorway opposite the wailing.

  She waited another few heartbeats before continuing, looking up at me from not half a span away. “For years the farmgirl railed against her lavish prison and the isolation from her child, while courtiers and eunuchs and the Koi Dowager raised him. They chose his name. They chose his wife. They chose his every decree. Years later, it wasn’t until the struggle between the Koi Dowager and the Ten Imperial Attendants came to a head and the Koi Dowager was killed, along with her entire household, did the farmgirl become the new Empress Dowager.”

  She stepped away a more appropriate distance and I can’t say that I wasn’t a bit disappointed that the embrace hadn’t lasted longer. My eyes still lingered on her painted lips as she spoke.

  “The farmgirl called herself the Gray Dowager, and her new house the Gray Moon-Moths, for the years she had spent without her son left her old and delicate like the wings of a moth. But now, with an an official rank second only to the Emperor in the Land Under Heaven, and a newly constructed clan willing to support her, she could finally put all her years of planning into motion. She tried to guide her son, directly, at first, but by this point he was corrupted. He was only interested in wine and women, and the Emperor’s disinterest in ruling left all the power in the hands of the Ten.”

  She laced her fingers through mine and brought our hands up between us.

  “So, slowly, the Gray Dowager replaced the Emperor’s women with ones that might guide him to the right path. He was still spending all his time with the beautiful creatures, but suddenly their attentions did not come so cheaply. They were asking favors of him, talking him on walks through the city or rides through the countryside where he could see his people. His concubines were even so bold as to express opinions on matters of Empire.”

  She lifted her chin and I realized that she not only knew this story. She might have had a personal tie to it.

  “Suddenly the Emperor noticed that his wine was not so strong as it had once been, and his chefs and cupbearers claimed hardship in the paddies and breweries, which was not untrue. Slowly, the ministers around him began to change, too.

  “There were new faces, or rather, ones so old as to seem new, ones he had once recognized as his friends and family from a farm village far away from the capital. They seemed less certain about the world. They argued, even fought, but they weighed decisions carefully, and the Emperor – head finally clear and eyes finally open – was delighted to see that they often came to better decisions than the other ministers that had once run the Empire.”

  Someone screamed from beyond the spiked wall and my head snapped around, but Lady Ding took my face in her hands and brought her lips so close to mine I could feel her breath as she spoke.

  When the lady continued, her voice was hoarse

  “The Emperor already had an Empress and he already had an heir by her. But now, among his concubines he found his true match. The Emperor fell in love, he had another son, one that showed promise and power, and there was hope for the court and the land once more.”

  She stepped back, her spell on me broken.

  “So, tell me little sparrow, do you know how this story ends?”

  I nodded, mouth dry. I had seen the ending myself, not a day ago, but my mind was still on the lady’s lips.

  “Go on then. Tell me. How does it end?”

  I cleared my throat, my blood cooling as I remembered a note that had called me a ‘Red-Handed Usurper.’ “With yet another new Empress Dowager. A new boy on the throne. And that promising young boy that should have sat the throne, crying beside it with his grandmother.”

  “Perhaps for you, that is where it ends, Sparrow. But not the farmgirl. What of her?”

  “The Gray Dowager? The grandmother of the princes?”

  Lady Ding nodded, and looked up over the walls, her face catching the lantern-light. I saw that she had tears in her eyes.

  The wailing from the high walls beside us reached its crescendo, screaming in grief and fury. This was no mere state-mandated observance. This was mourning in truth. “This… this is her estate? The Gray Dowager’s!”

  The mourning cries changed pitch, became screams of fear and… something else. I reached for a sword again but there was still none there. I was suddenly glad that I hadn’t left Windstopper behind in the palace.

  Lady Ding flinched at the horrible sound, appearing more vulnerable than I had ever seen her. “Not just the Gray Dowager’s home. Her entire clan’s.”

  There were now the unmistakable sounds of slaughter coming from within the manor’s walls. And my years of combat could not prepare me to hear those same sounds of butchery coming from the throats of women and children.

  “We have to do something!” I started for the other alleymouth where I had seen the patrol pass.

  “Summon the city guard?” said Lady Ding, stopping me with the gentlest of touches. “You might find them strangely absent tonight.”

  “Windstopper and I are soldiers, Lady Ding.” Windstopper was suddenly by my side, a dagger-axe in his hand that might have weighed as much as an anvil.

  “Soldiers without an army,” she said.

  My bravado leaked out at that. Lady Ding was right. Even with Windstopper by my side, we were only two men, and I was unarmed. All I could do was add my body to the total, and put the lady in danger as well. I got the sense that she had already risked her own life by bringing me here, and again when she had told me the story behind the late Emperor and the Ten Imperial Attendants. I also got the sense that she had deliberately disarmed so that I wouldn’t do anything stupid in front of her – like charging into a scene of slaughter.

  She knew this would happen. My thoughts whirled. She knew this was happening tonight! No, it was more than that.

  “You know her don’t you?” I asked. “You know the Gray Dowager personally.”

  Tears now poured freely down her cheeks, and she nodded again. “She chose me. To help save the Emperor. She chose all of us so carefully. And she became like a mother to us.”

  “You’re no mere palace pleasure girl.” I put a hand to my brow. “Of course! You’re one of the late Emperor’s own concubines.”

  “Tell me, Sparrow. What happens to a concubine when her Emperor dies?”

  I thought about it a moment, and then I ground my teeth. She was the late Emperor’s property. Long ago she might have been buried with him. Now…

  “Same thing as his horses,” I growled.

  The lady laughed bitterly. “The Emperor that inherited me is eleven years old. He’s got more use for horses than for concubines. No. We’re the property of the Ten Imperial Attendants now, to be moved around the game board at their will and doled out as rewards for loyal service.”

  “And what have I done to deserve…” I was going to say ‘this reward,’ sardonically of course, but I decided on simply, “What have I done to deserve you?”

  “Your words when we met may have been launched carelessly but they found their mark nonetheless. The Ten want you distracted. They want the Gray Moon-Moth clan to slip away unnoticed. They want the running of the Empire to go unnoticed. They want to go unnoticed. I was meant to be a test, only one time on your first night, to measure your virtue and to find your vices. But now, something you’ve done, or perhaps many things you've done has them very, very interested.”

  “They’re the ones watching from inside the walls?”

  “Or one of the many who serve them.”

  The screams and desperate cries from the mansion behind us began to die down, with long pauses between them now, but they still set my teeth on edge, perhaps more so for what their slowing implied. I had heard stories of vendettas before. Elders dragged from their beds in their underclothes. Children hiding in closets. Unarmed and unarmored fathers flinging their bodies before blades, the only way left to them to protect their families. Young mothers whose best hope was a quick death.

  I couldn’t do nothing. I pushed the lady away. “You should run. Leave the city tonight,” I said.

  Lady Ding snorted. “And go where? Do what?”

  “Anywhere. Anything but serve their callow needs.”

  The lady shook her head. “I would be rankless. An outlaw. If I didn’t find myself in the harem of some brigand, I’d have to marry some fat, old merchant just to live within his walls. No. Whether here or out there, I have one thing to trade for my survival.”

  Mind racing, I knew she was right, but that didn’t stop me from being angry about it. I grabbed Lady Ding by the arm. “Then come on!”

  I ran across the dew-slick cobbles, Windstopper in tow. It was late now, and no one was in the streets. If there had been any common-folk, surely they would have made themselves scarce when they heard the first sounds of struggle within the Gray Dowager’s estate.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To find out who did this.”

  “Does it matter who swings the sword?”

  I growled. “It should.”