I paused. “Twice-born?”
Auntie Li beckoned to one of her servers. He bowed and brought a small porcelain jar with two cups. She made an impatient gesture. “Drink your tea, drink it down. Indulge me, child. I will read the leaves for you while we enjoy this wine.”
I downed my tea, leaving the leaves strewn and stranded on the bottom and the sides of the thin porcelain cup. Auntie Li studied them, tilting the cup this way and that. She set it aside and poured a measure of rice-wine for both of us, motioning for me to drink.
“So?” I obeyed. “What did you mean by the twice-born one, Auntie?”
“Born once into life, twice out of death, or so they are saying.” Her brow furrowed. She drank her own rice-wine, then picked up the teacup again and bent her head over it, a straight white line delineating the part in her hair. “Hints of your fate are written here. Do you see? Here and here?”
I peered at the tea leaves. Despite Snow Tiger’s best efforts, I was fairly illiterate when it came to reading Ch’in characters. During that last week I had lingered in Shuntian, she had teased me about it, wielding her long, braided hair like a ticklish brush and drawing characters on my bare skin.
Surely you recognize that one, Moirin.
The memory made me smile. I saw the shape of that character echoed in the pattern of the tea leaves. “Desire?”
“Desire, yes.” Auntie Li nodded. Her forefinger moved, pointing. “But you see here, it lies in conflict with judgment. Does that mean anything to you?”
I thought about it before shaking my head. “No. I don’t know. Whose judgment, Auntie? Mine?”
She shrugged. “I can only tell you what the leaves say. I cannot tell you what it means. Desire in conflict with judgment lies ahead of you.”
“To be sure, it lies behind me.” Raphael de Mereliot’s face surfaced in my thoughts, his grey eyes stormy with anger. Even though there were untold oceans between us, it made me shiver. I had been very young and very foolish. I’d let Raphael use me to summon fallen spirits. If it hadn’t been for Bao and Master Lo, a terrible force would have been loosed into the world. “But that is not a mistake I will make again.”
Auntie Li smiled wryly, refilling our cups with rice-wine. “There are no end of mistakes to be made, dear.”
“Am I making one now?” I asked her.
Her face softened. “Ah, child! I cannot tell you that, either. Do you love the boy? Is that why you seek him?”
A hundred memories of Bao cascaded through my mind: Bao staring insolently at me as I sought to master the Five Styles of Breathing, Bao shouting at me as he drove the demon spirit back, Bao helping Master Lo tenderly to his feet, Bao sporting his battle-grin as he sparred with Snow Tiger.
It should have been simple, only it wasn’t.
I did love him. I remembered the moment I had realized it. When I had first fled Shuntian with the dragon-possessed princess and a handful of loyal ruffians, Bao and Master Lo had gone ahead to lay a false trail. They had been late in returning, and I’d begun to fear they weren’t coming.
I would not let that happen, Moirin.
Those were the words Bao had spoken when they did arrive and I confessed my fear to him, the closest he’d ever come to a declaration of love. My heart had leapt.
And yet…
It wasn’t why I was following him. I was following him because he had half of my diadh-anam and I couldn’t do otherwise.
“I don’t know, Auntie,” I said truthfully at last. “It’s a question I’m hoping to answer, and I cannot do it alone.”
“Poor child.” Auntie Li patted my hand. The look of kindness in her shrewd eyes nearly undid me. “Don’t pay too much heed to an old lady’s rambling. If the boy’s got a lick of sense, he won’t run far.”
I smiled despite the sting of tears. “I’m not sure he does.”
She sipped her rice-wine. “That probably makes two of you.”
I laughed. “You’re probably right.”
THREE
So began the pattern of my days.
For the most part, it was a lonely time. I thought I was accustomed to solitude. I’d grown up in the Alban wilderness with only my mother’s companionship. But she had been a constant in my life; and later, there had been Cillian, my lost first love, killed in a foolish cattle-raid.
Here, I had no one.
Oh, there were folk I met along the way, though none who took so lively an interest in me as Auntie Li. But with each new day that dawned, I was forced to leave them behind and set out on my lonely road.
I was grateful for the company of my horses. I named the chestnut saddle-horse Ember, and the grey pack-horse I called Coal. As a child of the Maghuin Dhonn, I was able to sense their thoughts and moods in a way most folk couldn’t. Betimes I would let my thoughts drift, touching theirs, enjoying the simplicity of their reactions to the world around them.
Betimes I immersed my own thoughts in the world around me, breathing the Breath of Trees Growing and listening to nature.
Winter was coming, sooner than I would have hoped. I heard it in the sleepy murmurings of the trees, the sap growing sluggish in their veins. I heard it in the anxious whispers of the winter wheat in the fields, straining to outrace the coming frost. I saw it in the worried faces of farmers along the way.
The days began to grow shorter.
I wasn’t worried, not yet. So long as I was in the empire of Ch’in, I was safe. I could always find a place to lodge, supplies to purchase. It grew harder to communicate as I rode, for the farther away from Shuntian I went, the fewer folk spoke the scholar’s tongue. Still, I managed with friendly gestures and a few words of dialect picked up along the way; and the Emperor’s seal spoke for itself.
But I was fairly certain Bao was no longer in Ch’in.
I couldn’t be sure beyond doubt. It was a vast country. Still, when Snow Tiger had bade me consult my diadh-anam in conjunction with a map, it had been clear that Bao was headed for Tatar territory.
And I had a suspicion of the reason why.
Master Lo’s tranquil voice echoed in my memory. Through no fault of his own, Bao is a child of violence.
Violence.
Rape, he meant-the crime D’Angelines called heresy. Folk who know no better reckon D’Angelines are a licentious lot. They are not entirely wrong-in Terre d’Ange, all manner of love and desire is freely celebrated-but it is far from the whole truth. Blessed Elua, the earth-begotten son of Yeshua ben Yosef and Mary the Magdalene, the deity who Naamah and the other Companions chose to follow, turning their backs on the One God’s Heaven, gave his people one simple precept: Love as thou wilt.
So they do, but it is within the bounds of the sacred tenet of consensuality. To violate it is to commit heresy.
Bao’s mother had been raped during a Tatar raid, that much I knew. When it became evident that he was the result of that violence, and not the legitimate offspring of his parents’ marriage, they had sold him into servitude to a travelling circus. He had been trained and raised as an acrobat, but fighting was in his blood. At the age of thirteen, he had begged the troupe’s best stick-fighter to teach him. And Bao had been willing to pay any price to learn.
He say, you be my peach-bottom boy, I teach you.
Thinking on it, I shuddered.
In some ways, I think it troubled me more than it did Bao. I hadn’t been raised to think of myself as a D’Angeline-indeed, I was ten years old before it occurred to me to wonder who my father was-but I had always felt Naamah’s presence in my life. The bright lady, I had called her. When the Maghuin Dhonn Herself at once accepted me as Her child and sent me forth to seek my destiny, I had no idea where to begin. So I set out to solve the only mystery I knew, and crossed the Straits to seek my father in Terre d’Ange.