7 Free Fall

One moment Tien Lyn was flipping her pillow to the cooler side for the tenth time, and the next... her mother's face loomed over her. Lady Chen Guang's lips were moving, but Tien Lyn must have slept right through the words. Funny, she could have sworn she did not sleep a wink! But she must have because everything felt so fuzzy.

Focusing did not help make things more real. Her beautiful mother looked like a hag. She wore a plain, shapeless dress in a terrible dark color, but it was more than that. Lady Guang's face was pale without the aid of paints, and her clever eyes - red-rimmed and troubled. She looked scared, and it sent Tien Lyn's own poor heart into a cold place.

"Mother?" Tien Lyn mouthed groggily and sat up.

"Get dressed," Lady Chen Guang commanded and dropped a bundle on Tien Lyn's bed. Scared or not, she lost none of her forcefulness. To Tien Lyn's horror, the bundle contained a copy of her mother's outfit. She did not dare to disobey and hastily pulled the dress over her head. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with the world.

They went out into the garden. Lady Chen Guang took the lead, and Tien Lyn wordlessly followed her down the path. She was afraid to even whimper, as much as she wanted to.

They stopped by a pavilion overlooking a blind back wall of the estate. Tien Lyn used to wonder why it was tacked into that corner of the garden where the view was obscured by the trees, but now it made sense. Scary secrets and dark reflections do not love open spaces.

"Your father," Lady Chen Guang said without a preamble, "is still in the Palace. He went there at dawn with Thirty Claw's body to seek an audience and plead for the Emperor's forgiveness."

Tien Lyn stared back blankly. "Forgiveness? What did Father do wrong?"

Her mother shook her head in dismay. "He spoke too freely about the urgent need to turn the Imperial oversight inwards, instead of making wars on the barbarian lands that surround the Empire. Thirty Claws was a war hero pressing for more conquest. There are people at court that would love nothing more than to make your Father look complicit in Thirty Claws' death."

"But it was Zha Yao who shot Thirty Claws!" Tien Lyn protested.

Lady Chen Guang threw her arms up in exasperation. "Think, Tien Lyn! The mythical outlaw Zha Yao is a hero of ribald songs. Why would he turn up on our doorstep just in time to pick a quarrel with Thirty Claws? It is hard to credit even if you wish to. And if you do not..."

As her mother's voice trailed off, Tien Lyn started to grasp the terrible implications. If only she could blot out last night! Instead, her memories of the banquet became clearer, and she grew certain that she would remember every single detail till her dying day.

Despite the full daylight, Tien Lyn felt like she was still asleep and besieged by night terrors, bending the reality into something frightening. Her head spinning, she pressed her back against the flimsy wooden wall. "What do we do, Mother?"

"We wait."

Tien Lyn wrang her arms, something she thought only the heroines of epic romances did. "Here?"

She felt trapped in the pavilion, rather than hidden. Should not they flee?

Lady Chen Guang nodded.

For a time there was nothing Tien Lyn could do but hope that her mother had a plan, and look at the peony shoots. Unlike all other flowers, the peonies always took their time in the spring. Their bulbous buds stayed closed long after one would have expected them to burst into flower already.

A cold hard lump formed in Tien Lyn's chest, as the troubled questions weaved their way through her mind. Would she live long enough to see the peonies bloom? Would her father? She struggled to swallow and dared to let out her breath a few times, but the sighs did not help.

Was not there a tale of a knight who charged with his sword to slay the women of a family that betrayed his lord, but was smitten by a young wife's looks? He'd wiped tears off her face with a sleeve, and married her...

"Do you know the Cautionary Tale of the Three Ancient Empresses?" Lady Chen Guang asked, staring at the blind wall. Apparently, fantasies of very different kind occupied her mother's mind. Empress Mei lopped heads off with her own royal hands at the start of her reign as regent. She inflicted terrible tortures on her husband's numerous sons. The sordid details of what she did to the honest advisors that tried to stop her folly could not be repeated in polite society.

Tien Lyn swallowed another lump in her throat. "Yes. No. Not the whole of it. Some parts...." The poem was more than ten thousand lines long and only professional storytellers knew every verse. Or at least a variant of each verse.

"Recite what you remember."

"Modest yet cruel was Empress Mei..." Tien Lyn started.

And that certainly was true, if the poem was to be believed. The shocking deeds only multiplied after the Empress usurped her own son's position, and the poem faithfully recorded the Evershining Empire bleeding its best men on the whims of the villainess for thirty years.

The verses echoed the hatred after the thousand years and more had passed since Empress Mei herself was finally poisoned on her son's orders, then dismembered and burned. Her bones were ground to dust.

To Tien Lyn's surprise, her mother listened intently, and every time she'd forget a word or a line, Lady Chen Guang would supply it unerringly.

Tien Lyn had used to think that the poem was a sad relic of the terrifying past, and its savage characters were barely recognizable as the ancestors of her civilized people. But as she sat in the small wooden pavilion hiding from the gathering dread with her mother, the long-dead Empress Mei's brutality became strangely appealing to Tien Lyn.

It did not lend her hope, for what protection could the wooden pavilion offer the two unarmed women? What the lines gave her was the strength to face the unthinkable if her father failed to secure the Emperor's pardon.

Tien Lyn did not know what she could take from the lurid exploits of the Wanton Empress Du, but she did not get that far.

The blind section of the garden wall slipped soundlessly upwards, revealing a secret door.

A black-clad man stepped through the gap and said in a strange, flat voice: "Chen Xi was executed. The Imperial guards are ordered to purge the family to the third degree of relation. Flee."

A thousand lumps plugged her throat and her chest, each one colder and harder than the rest. Tien Lyn swayed on her feet, out of words and out of the will to do anything. The purge to the third degree meant everyone, it meant Xia Dao Ni, her sweet harmless cousin, and her uncles, her aunts... she did not dare count.

Somehow she managed to push the words out, "We must raise an alarm, warn everyone to run-"

The stranger seized her by the elbow and walked her towards the secret door.

"The men will do their duty," Lady Chen said and pressed a hidden panel that sealed the wall behind them. "They will buy us time."

Tien Lyn twisted her head back as she was led down the lane to look at her home for the last time. All she could see was the roof of the second-floor gallery. The light of the westering sun colored its tiles blood-red.