Broken broom with tin charms tied around the handle.
Broken makeup compact. Alabaster, grease, and carmine.
Birch bark scroll. Birch bark, black feather, lock of hair, and blue silk thread. The birch bark is rolled around the hair and the feather, and tied together with the thread.
Chih jumped when Rabbit came and took the birch bark scroll away from them, holding it in her hand as if she wanted to crush it.
“I will not ask if you understand this one, either, because if you were not born and raised in the Palace of Gleaming Light, you would not. In those days you could say a thousand things with your choice of ink and paper even before someone read a word of your poetry.”
Chih looked at the object in Rabbit’s hand, wondering why the hair and dark feather looked suddenly so grim.
“I thought it was just trash.”
“It is trash,” she said shortly, “but if you want to understand people who have gone, that’s what you look at, isn’t it? Their offal. Their leavings.”
Chih waited patiently. It was the bulk of their training, learning how to wait for a story rather than chasing after it, and soon enough, it came to them.
Rabbit sighed.
* * *
This came to her door after she gave birth to the imperial prince, who was Kau-tan, known as the prince in exile. They’d taken him against her wishes, to wash him, they said, but she cried exhausted tears, knowing well she might never see him again.
I’d washed and bathed her, and after they took the little prince from her arms, I crawled into the bed with her, holding her and comforting her as best I could. There is nothing that can comfort a mother whose child was taken so unwillingly from her arms, though, and after the first sound of grief, she never made another. Instead, she asked me to tell her stories of where I had come from, my people, and I reached into the depths of my memory to tell her about living in the inn, how my father cooked enormous pots of barley stew for the people passing by, and my mother had read the fortunes of the great and the small alike between her chores.
The ladies of the women’s quarters left us alone in the dark, and so we lay together, skin to skin, for almost two weeks as she healed and I told her about my life out of the palace. It did not matter that it was so humble; what mattered was that it was outside the palace gates, and that was what she craved most.
This came for her from the emperor’s own hand, much as you see it now. Strange how some trash survives, but precious things are lost, isn’t it?
I sat with her and showed it to her, and when she wondered why her husband would send her trash, I explained it to her, wishing that the sky would open up and swallow me.
The hair belonged to her mother. It was as long as hers was and sleek black threaded with iron, known as well to her as the smell of snow waiting in the sky and the taste of seal meat. Seeing it here and wrapped in birch bark, the empress knew her mother was dead.
The jacana feather was a sign of exile, hers. She was lucky it was not a shred of willow bark, which would have meant execution.
The emperor had his heir from the north. He no longer needed a northern wife.
When I explained it to her, she went silent and turned her face to the wall, still as the sky before a lightning strike.
* * *
Chih waited to make sure that Rabbit was done, and then they nodded.
“I think I understand this, grandmother.”
“Do you, cleric from the Singing Hills? Because I am not sure I wish to.”
Rabbit was still, almost shaking with an emotion that had lived underground for a long time.
Gently, slightly nervously, Chih rested their hand on the woman’s shoulder. They were faintly surprised to find Rabbit to be truly flesh and blood, and not the cold, misty dampness of a revenant.
“It is trash, and where I come from, we burn trash.”
Rabbit looked startled, and then she nodded.
“Yes. We do that here as well.”
That night, the smoke from their fire curled up into the wide sky, like the incense from a temple sacrifice. When they went to sleep, Chih dreamed of a woman in a beautiful tunic made of seal fur, iron threaded through her black hair. From the ice gates of the north, she looked south, unblinking, waiting for her daughter to return home.