The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)

by Nghi Vo

Chih was old enough to know that no one was harmless, and still young enough to obey instantly that tone of command from an older woman.

Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.

when I was only five, the county sent me along with one hundred san of birch water, thirty young goats, and fifty caskets of orange dye to the capital. It was meant to be fifty-five caskets of dye, you see, and they hoped if they sent me along that the tax collectors would be forgiving.

and I spent the next four years scrubbing the Palace of Gleaming Light, never raising my head. I got to know the palace by the baseboards, the wood of the floors, the smell of the paper screens, and the way that lamp oil burned all night,

History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read.

there never was a dress like this one again. There could never be. It is beautiful, but every stitch bites into her history, the deaths she left behind her, and the home she could not return to.

“I thought that you looked very strange to my eye,” I said finally. “And very alone.” “I am alone,” she said, tying her robe herself. “But maybe I am less alone than I thought I was, hmm, Rabbit?”

Being close to her was like being warmed by a bonfire, and I had been cold for a long time.

“May I come up?” “She said you could, didn’t she?” “Yes, but that doesn’t mean you said I could.”

I scorned the countryside as much as any of the other girls, more, because I was always worried they could smell the mud on me.

She disappeared like Kazu did, like any number of women did over the years, unremarked, and their demise as unremarkable as surely they were not.

In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.

“As you live with anything, I suspect. You bear it, or you end it. So far, we have proved equal to bearing it.”

She did not promise to make it up to me, because there was no such possibility, and she did not say that everything would be all right, because it never would be.

“Save that anger,” Mai said with a sigh. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”

It was her gift to me, the best she could do. She could not give me Sukai’s life but, at the very least, she could give me the death of the Minister of the Left.

They hung a rope from the rafters that I pulled on when the pain was too great, and at dawn, with me delirious and half-insensible, a girl was born. “Are you sure?” asked In-yo, and I nodded. She and Mai cleaned me and the child, and while I slept, In-yo carried the baby out into the world, her daughter born of a miracle.

The story is over. Do you understand? * * * “I think I do now, Dowager Empress.” Slowly Chih knelt in front of Rabbit, pressing their forehead against the dusty wood.

Honor is due to you as the mother of the Empress of Wheat and Flood, and honor is due to you as the friend of the Empress of Salt and Fortune.”