Those Three Children Are What the King Owes Me

The smell of the queen's medicine had soaked into the walls of the east wing until I could taste it in my sleep. Wormwood and honey and something metallic underneath, the way blood tastes when you bite your cheek. I had carried that smell on my clothes for eighteen years, and still my hands did not shake when I lifted the tray. Two physicians hurried past me in the corridor, their faces tight. Neither of them looked at me. They never did when the queen's condition worsened, as though a lady's maid might carry bad luck like a stain. I pushed open the door to the inner chamber and stepped behind the folding screen. The queen's breathing was a thin, wet rasp, each exhale longer than the last. "Lanzhi," she said. I walked around the screen and knelt beside the bed, lifting the bowl to her lips. "My lady. The medicine is warm. You should drink." She did not take it. Her hand shot out and closed around my wrist, her nails biting into my skin. Eighteen years ago that hand had been soft as poured cream. Now the veins stood up like ropes under paper. "Eighteen years," she whispered. "Of everyone in this palace, you are the one I trusted." I kept my face still. "Drink, my lady." She drank. I watched her throat work, watched a drop of the dark liquid slide down her chin, and did not wipe it away. The queen's name was Cui Lingyi, and she had been dying for eleven months. The whole court knew it. What they did not know was that I had been counting those months on a calendar I kept folded inside my mattress, one small mark for each day she lived past the date I had chosen. Not yet, I told myself. Not until the treaty is signed. The treaty was why the physicians came and went, why the queen's nephew rode in from the northern garrison, why the great hall had been swept and hung with new banners. The western provinces had been in open revolt for three years, and the crown needed peace. The queen, even dying, was the only one the western lords would treat with. Her bloodline ran through their old families like a river. And her bloodline was a lie. I had learned that in my fourth year of service, from an old woman who did the queen's mending and drank too much rice wine at the winter festival. She had told me about the three children born to a lady's maid in a hunting lodge and taken away in the night. She had died three weeks later, of a fall, they said. I set the empty bowl on the side table and straightened the queen's blanket. "Lanzhi," she said again. "Sit. I have something to tell you. Something I should have told you long ago." I sat. My heart was very quiet, the way it always went quiet before the worst. "You know I had no children of my own," she said. "Yes, my lady." "That is not true." Her eyes, sunk deep in her skull, fixed on mine. "I had three. A boy and two girls. They were born in the year of the iron horse, in the lodge at Cold Water. And they were taken from me." I did not move. I had waited eighteen years to hear her say it. "Taken by whom?" I asked, and my voice was steady, because I had practiced this question in the dark of my little room for half my life. "By the king." Her hand tightened on my wrist. "My husband. He said the children would divide the succession. He said the west would use them. He had them given to families in the far provinces, and he made me swear I would never speak of them, and I have kept that oath until now because I had no choice." "You had a choice," I said. The words came out flat. "You signed the order." Her eyes widened. "I was there, my lady." I did not raise my voice. I lifted my sleeve and showed her the inside of my forearm, where a small scar sat like a comma under the skin. "The night the third child was taken from the lodge, the woman carrying her fell on the stairs. She was my mother. She broke her arm holding the basket so the baby would not fall. You gave her three silver coins and told her to forget." The queen did not speak for a long time. Outside, I heard a servant hurrying down the corridor, a door closing somewhere, the ordinary sounds of a palace pretending everything was well. "Lanzhi," she finally said. "What is your name? Your real name?" "My mother named me after the herb," I said. "She said it was bitter, but it kept people alive. She died two winters later, in the village, because the coins ran out and the physician would not come for a farmer's widow." "I did not know." "No," I said. "You did not." She began to weep, and her weeping turned to coughing, and I held the bowl for her again and let her drink. Then I wiped her face with a cloth, because that was my job, and because I wanted her to be calm when I told her the rest. "The three children lived," I said. "The boy is a smith in the western hills. The elder girl keeps a school in a river town. The younger girl was raised by a fishing family on the northern coast and married a soldier. None of them know who their mother is. None of them know they are royal." The queen stared at me. "I found them," I said. "It took me nine years, but I found all three. And I have written down everything. The names of the families. The dates. The seals on the transfer orders. Your signature. The king's signature. The name of every man who carried a child away in the night." "Why?" she whispered. "Because the western lords have been fighting the crown for three years over taxes and grain, and they will stop fighting if they learn the king has a true heir and the heir has been hidden from them. And the king will not give them that, because it would mean admitting what he did." I stood up and smoothed my gray servant's dress. "You will die soon, my lady. When you do, the treaty will be signed or it will not. Either way, the kingdom will learn what its royal family is." I picked up the tray. "Drink your medicine. I will bring your supper at the usual hour." I walked out from behind the screen and down the corridor, past the physicians and the guards and the servants who never looked at me. My hands were steady. They had been steady for a long time.