She nodded again, her head bobbing.
Liu said, "If we stop, if we apologize, show dismay, run from a courtyard or a chamber, we force our audience to register our error and see that it has shamed us. If we carry on, we treat it as something that falls to the lot of men and women, and show that it has not mastered us. That it does not signify. And, sister, you will always remember that you represent this family, not only yourself, in everything you do. Do you understand?"
And a third time Li-Mei nodded her head.
"Say it," her brother commanded.
"I understand," she said, as clearly as she could manage. Six years old, mud and overripe fallen fruit on her face and hands and clothing. Representing her family in all she did.
He stared at her a moment, then rose with another grunt and walked from the orchard down the long row. He wore black, she remembers now. Unusual for a nineteen-year-old, bordering on presumption (no red belt, mind you), but Shen Liu was always going to pass the exams, all three levels, and become a mandarin in the palace in Xinan. Always.
Tai came into the orchard a little later.
It was a certainty that he'd waited for Liu to come and go, as a second brother should. The images of that day are piercingly sharp, a wound: she is equally certain, thinking back, that Tai knew pretty much exactly what Liu had said to her.
She was sitting up still, so this time she saw her brother's approach. He smiled when he drew near, she'd known he would smile at her. What she hadn't expected was that he'd be carrying a basin of water and a towel. He'd guessed she'd have been lying on muddy ground.
He sat down next to her, cross-legged, careless of his own clothing and slippers, and placed the bowl between them, draping the towel elaborately over a forearm, like a servant. She thought he'd make a funny face to try to make her laugh, and she was determined not to laugh (she almost always did), but he didn't do that, he just waited. After a moment, Li-Mei dipped her cupped hands and washed her face and hands and arms. There was nothing she could do about her specially made dance costume.
Tai handed her the towel and she dried herself. He took the towel back and set it aside, tossing the water from the basin and putting that beside him, as well.
"Better," he said, looking at her.
"Thank you," she said.
She remembers a small silence, but an easy one. Tai was easy to be with. She'd worshipped both her older brothers, she recalls, but Tai she'd loved.
"I fell," she said.
He didn't smile. "I know. It must have felt awful. You would have looked forward so much to dancing."
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
He said, "It was very good, Li-Mei, until the wind picked up. I started worrying when I felt it."
She looked at him.
"Perhaps... perhaps next time, maybe even tonight... you might do it inside? I believe that is a reason dancers dislike performing out-of-doors. Any breeze affects how their clothing flows, and... they can fall."
"I didn't know... do they prefer inside?"
"I know it for certain," her brother said. "You were very brave to do it in the courtyard on an autumn morning."
She'd permitted herself to briefly claim the notion she'd been brave. Then shook her head resolutely.
"No, I just did it where mother and the drum man decided. I wasn't brave."
He smiled. "Li-Mei, just saying that makes you honest and brave. And that would be true, it will be true, when you are twenty-six, not six. I am proud of you. And father was. I saw it as he watched. Will you dance again for us. Inside? Tonight?"
Her lip quivered. "He was... father was almost laughing."
Tai grew thoughtful. "Do you know a truth about people? When someone falls, if they don't hurt themselves, it is funny, little sister. I'm not sure why. Do you have an idea?"
She'd shaken her head. She didn't know why it was funny, but she remembered giggling when Chao toddled and toppled into leaves.
Tai added, "And father didn't laugh. He was afraid for you at first, then afraid he would hurt your pride if he smiled, so he didn't."
"I saw. He was holding it back. He covered his mouth with his hand."
"Good for you, seeing that. Yes. Because he'd been very proud. He said he hopes you'll try again."
Her lip wasn't quivering any more. "Did he? Truly, Tai?"
And Tai had nodded. "Truly."
She still doesn't know, to this day, if that last was the truth, but they'd walked out of the orchard together, Tai carrying the basin and the towel, and she'd danced for them again that night (the dancing costume hurriedly cleaned), among carefully spaced lanterns in the largest reception room, and she hadn't fallen. Her father had smiled throughout, watching her, and patted her cheek when she came over to him after, and then he had stood up and bowed formally, without laughing at all, and given her a string of copper coins, the way one paid a real dancer, and then a sweet from one of his pockets, because she was six years old.
If she were to address within herself—or explain to someone who might ask and have any claim to an answer—a few of the very great differences between her older brothers, Li-Mei thinks, those long-ago conversations in the autumn orchard would do well enough.
Liu had told her—that day, and endlessly after, in person and in letters from Xinan—that she represented the family in all she did. She accepted it as true: for her, for any woman or man. That was the way of things in Kitai. You were nothing in the empire without a family behind you.
But she is beyond the empire now. The nomads, with their strings of long-maned horses and huge wolfhounds and their primitive yurts and harsh-sounding language... don't know her family. Her father. Don't care at all about that. They don't even know—the thought comes hard to her—that she's part of the Shen lineage. She's been named as one of the imperial dynasty. That is how the Bogu see her, that's why they look so proud, glancing at her as they ride by.
The honour of it eludes her, just now. She is the embodiment of a smug deception and of her brother's cold ambition. And no one at home by their small stream will ever see her again.
She wonders, controlling emotion, if a letter will even reach her mother and Second Mother, if she sends one, or a dozen, with Bogu riders to the trading place by the river's loop in spring.
Tai had called her brave, had repeated over and again how clever she was, growing up, how both these things would help her in life. She isn't so sure any more. He wouldn't have been lying, but he might have been wrong.
Bravery might mean only that she doesn't weep at night, or insist on hearing the same interminable lament as they travel, and Li-Mei has no idea at all how cleverness might play out for the second or fifth wife of the kaghan's heir.
She doesn't even know what number she'll be.
She knows nothing of the man she's travelling to wed—whose bed she'll share, if he even chooses. In her carried litter, Li-Mei draws a deep breath.
She can kill herself. That has been done by women married in this fashion. It is considered a disgrace, of course. She isn't sure she cares. She can decide to cry and mourn all the way north, and after they arrive.
Or, she can represent her father's bright, tall memory, and the version of herself Tai has held up like a bronze mirror all her life. The version of Shen Li-Mei that an aged empress had loved and trusted in her own exile after the Precious Consort came and bewitched with music and wit and beauty, changing the world.