“Let this one do more, Son of Heaven!” begged Mao Yen-shou. “Let that wretched girl be moved from the Inner Courts, whose harmonies she spoils and where, by chance, your eyes might light upon her, to the Cold Palace.”
Silver Snow had been kind to Plum Blossom and Apricot, whose portraits had received so little attention, but not even they showed any sorrow at that sentence of exile.
The Cold Palace! It was utterly isolated. That, Silver Snow felt in her present mood, might be a blessing, but the Cold Palace was as inauspicious as it was isolated. Some of the more timorous women even whispered that it was haunted by foxes.
“It is not so bad, mistress,” whispered Willow at her side, but Silver Snow had stiffened, hearing a ribald murmur from one courtier to his fellow standing two floors below her vantage point. “Perhaps the girl will hang herself. I know I would, were I a maid with a face like that!”
That snapped the control that Silver Snow had kept on herself all the weeks of her journey and all the months of her imprisonment, which would now be solitary and for the rest of her life. Knowing only that she must escape, that she must hide, she flung herself out of the passage and into a corridor that she had never seen before. Gone were the tiny, decorous steps enjoined upon fine ladies. She was no fine lady; she was but a girl so sorely insulted that she did not hear her maid’s hiss of caution, nor did she realize what she had done.
The passage down which she ran was screened from the Hall of Brilliance but by a thin veiling of silk; and it was directly across from the Dragon Throne. As she ran, the outline of her form, graceful in its trailing robes, flickered across the silk for all the court—and the Son of Heaven himself—to see.
“Hold! What is that?” He half rose from his chair, one hand pressed against his heart. “My lady, whom even the wisest of my wizards could not restore to me.
Tears streaming down her face, Silver Snow had fled long before the echo of the Emperor’s heartbroken verse had died away.
8
On the other side of the wall, sweet strains of flute and zither rang out, almost as sweet and considerably less artificial than the laughter and sighs of the ladies who drifted across the arched bridges or who, with outcries of mock fear, reclined on intricately painted boats on the lake in the central courtyard. Sunbeams slanted down into that court, though they seemed, thought Silver Snow as she gazed down at her hands, never to illuminate her own shabby courtyard in the Cold Palace.
Today, for a change, she sat not in the courtyard with its unpruned trees and its bushes that had gone to seed, but in the green and white octagonal pavilion that, even now, had not lost the chill of winter. No wonder, she thought, that this place was called the Cold Palace; but it was a cold not so much of air or water, but of the spirit.
She shut her eyes as if she were infinitely weary. Yet even in the darkness, with Willow kneeling beside her, crooning a wordless song, she found no comfort. The day’s humiliations had left wounds in her heart and mind, wounds that still bled. Even now, she panted as if, once again, she had to run weeping through the palace corridors, had reached her own tiny courtyard, and flung herself down, only to find herself almost instantly assailed by servants. With courtesy distinguishable from insolence only by an observer who worked hard to make that distinction, they had invaded her room, stripping even the hangings from her bed as they packed up her few possessions and hurried them—and herself—to the Cold Palace.
Her gamble to bring her father to the Son of Heaven’s attention had failed. Now, lifelong imprisonment was the punishment for losing her game.
The Cold Palace, isolated and unlucky, was a quiet, solitary world. No one called on her, except, of course, those who sought to save on tips to servants by using her for labor: an elder concubine or two who needed some tedious chore or other to be completed by someone who would not complain; a young woman whose fear, laziness, or caprice brought her to Silver Snow to remedy a mistake or shorten a lengthy task. Having little else to do, Silver Snow complied with their requests; had she refused, she might have lost the little goodwill that she might still have left. It was better to be patronized, she thought, than to be persecuted.
Such women swept in, bestowed the work upon her as if they honored her by their presence, and pressed her to complete it speedily. When it was finished, though, they came no more to the Cold Palace. It was better, she decided then, to be ignored than to be patronized.
Occasionally, Silver Snow heard their voices ring out over the wall. They called her the Shadowed One. That name that had spread throughout the Inner Courts and chilled Silver Snow even more than the usual dearth of fuel for her braziers. Even the one or two servants assigned for their misdeeds to wait upon her used that name when they spoke of her. To her and to Willow, they spoke as little as they could, and there was no way she could punish them for their insolence. Few creatures, she quickly learned, had as little influence as she who lives in disfavor among eunuchs and women.
Once or twice an occasional pitying girl with more sentimentality than intelligence might glance in upon her, then flee, as if fearing that Silver Snow’s disgrace might contaminate her too. After all, birds peck at the one who is different and judged to be an outcast; the pretty, bejeweled creatures of the Inner Courts much resembled those birds. By tormenting an outcast, they hoped to prevent themselves from being made outcast too.
Silver Snow might have sunk into a quiet, despairing madness had she not had Willow with her. Loving, patient Willow, who sat with her during the twelve hours of the day and, when she could not sleep, during the watches of the nights that grew shorter and shorter as the season turned toward a summer of joy and beauty in which Silver Snow, alone among palace maidens, might not share. (She did, however, accomplish more than one woman’s share of the needlework for the various festivals.) It was Willow, who gazed for long moments into her scrying mirror or cast the hexagrams time and again, trying to discern in their arrangement some scrap of good fortune.
“It is all change, Elder Sister,” the maid sighed after one such session. “Change and travel.”
Silver Snow threw down her brush with such force that it snapped. “But I am not destined to travel; I am immured here!” she cried. “Your yarrow stalks are as crooked as your . . . oh, Willow, forgive me!”
She covered her face with tiny hands from which the months in the Cold Palace had peeled the bow calluses and wept. To think that she would turn thus upon Willow, who had put her life in jeopardy to follow her and asked only to serve her! To think that she had lost control! How ashamed her father would be—almost as ashamed as she herself was.
After what seemed like a long, miserable hour, a soft, hesitant touch on her knee made her lift her head and see Willow crouched at her side.
“Oh, Willow,” said Silver Snow, dashing her hand across eyes that she had not painted all spring long, “rather than live as such an ingrate, I should hang myself with my sash from that withered tree before I too wither.”
“Mistress, hush!” cried Willow. “There is nothing,” she added with a mischievous glance, “in the hexagrams to tell me you face death.”
Despite her shame at her self-pity, Silver Snow found herself laughing. “Ah, Willow, Willow,” she said, “you make me realize just how true is the proverb that one does not live in vain if there is one person in all this world who totally understands one.”