CHIH SHIVERED, and it was not just because of the cold. They had stoked the fire up, but it was doing them less good against the night. They were sat as close to it as they dared, and Si-yu was pressed close to them, holding Bao-so close on her other side.
Sinh Loan smiled coldly.
“Does it frighten you to think of what a hungry tiger might do in a city like Ahnfi-that-was?” she asked. “Are you thinking of all the people she might have killed?”
“Yes,” Chih said. They had been taught that where a professional demeanor and inquisitiveness could not be found, honesty would have to serve. “Ho Thi Thao was angry, and she was offended. Ahnfi was the greatest city of the age, and she could not have gone five steps beyond the door without meeting someone else to hurt.”
Sinh Cam shook her head.
“No, she wasn’t offended, or she wasn’t just offended. She was heartbroken.”
“And she was going to take it out on every human that crossed her path?” asked Si-yu with some indignation. “That’s terrible.”
“What did you do the last time you got your heart broken?” asked Sinh Cam practically.
“Shouted a lot! Signed up for every long patrol I qualified for, and made a nuisance of myself to whoever was assigned to ride it with me. Brushed Piluk until there was enough wool to felt up a coat for my baby cousin. I didn’t kill people.”
“But perhaps you wanted to?” asked Sinh Cam, and there was something earnest in her voice.
Si-yu hesitated, and Chih watched, fascinated.
“She broke up with me and took an Ingrusk posting without letting me explain,” Si-yu said finally. “Maybe.”
“But you wouldn’t,” said Sinh Cam. “And I wouldn’t. And Ho Thi Thao probably didn’t, either.”
“She did,” Sinh Loan said stiffly. “Of course she did.”
“In all fairness, elder sister, she likely didn’t,” said Sinh Hoa. “If she had, they would still have her skull hung up over the gate in Anh. She didn’t.”
“Of course she did,” Sinh Loan said, and she turned her hard gaze to Chih. “Cleric, make sure you note the story as I have told it to you, and not as my young and foolish sisters have done.”
Chih nodded, because that was what footnotes were for. They let out a deep breath, watching the plume of steam roll out in front of the firelight. They were so tired that they were shaking, and their eyes watered copiously.
“Shall I continue?” they asked.
Sinh Hoa went back to sleep, Sinh Cam nodded eagerly, and Sinh Loan, after a long moment, gestured her assent with a wave of her broad hand.
* * *
After that, there was nothing for Dieu to do but to prepare for her exams. Now that she was in the city, she was the closest she had ever been to the imperial scholars whose ranks she was hoping to join. She saw two of them on the street in their sheltered oxcarts, and when their two entourages met, a great shouting went up. None shouted louder than the two honored scholars themselves, dressed in the red robes lined with black that were their right to wear, flapping their long sleeves like indignant roosters.
They struck her as being very like roosters, ready to kick the other to death for the matter of a few grubs or right of way on the thoroughfare. She tried to imagine what she herself might look like dressed in red and shouting in the street, and she couldn’t do it, or perhaps, she didn’t want to do it.
When Dieu finally came to the Hall of Ferocious Jade, she felt like she was entering the mouth of a tiger’s cave, and it did not escape her awareness that she had done just that without this amount of fear and nerves.
This is what I am meant to do, Dieu thought, pushing away her thoughts of roosters and tigers.
She was the last prospective scholar to enter. Another turn of the water-clock, and the door would have been barred to her, not to open again for another four years.
She was met at the door by a gaunt-faced man in the examiners’ dark orange robes, and he took in her travel clothes and her ragged appearance with a carefully but not perfectly concealed disdain. He examined her jade chip under a series of stacked lenses, and it seemed to Dieu that he was disappointed to find that it was not a fraud. He had no reason to have her driven off by the dogs that waited beside him, and so he returned the chip to her hand and asked her the three questions that every scholar entering the hall had to answer.
Dieu of course, knew the questions by heart, just as she knew that she needed to answer yes to each one to be allowed entry. They were, as her tutor had said, the easiest questions she would be asked, so she should take the time to savor them before what came next.
The examiner at the gate did not bother rising from his desk, and he gave her a weary look. He had likely asked these questions eighty times that day alone.
“Do you enter the Hall of Ferocious Jade willingly and with no coercion?”
“Yes,” Dieu said, because it was true. There was no family behind her that had tacked her braid to the wall behind her to stop her head from drooping over her books in weariness. There was no lover held hostage until she emerged from the Hall with winning marks. She stood at the gates because of nothing but her own will.
“Do you swear to honor the rules of the Hall of Ferocious Jade?”
“Yes,” Dieu responded, because she did not want to be killed by the examiners or the angry ghosts of past scholars for the suspicion of cheating. The examiners could be reasoned with, perhaps even, if the whispers were true, bribed, but the dead students, not at all.
“If you come out from the examinations a triumph, do you accept your place in the heavens of the empire, underneath the authority and protection of the emperor and the nobles?”
Dieu started to say yes, and then abruptly, she realized that she could not, not honestly. In her head, she thought of the constellation that she lived and moved in, the one that she had accepted, the one under which she slept and the one to which her heart had already been given, and there was no emperor involved. There was only a flash of orange and black, the slow blink of eyes like jade.
“No,” she said to her own surprise. “No, I can’t. I can’t.”
She turned on her heel and walked away from the Hall of Ferocious Jade, even as the examiner behind her swore, even as the door closed and locked with the thud of an executioner’s blade. It separated her from the life that she had planned on living, and she realized, as she broke into a run, that she didn’t care about it at all, not really.
She ran all the way down to the docks, where a crew of sailors were trying to find a way to load the snarling tiger onto a ship. The poppy had worn off, and the tiger lashed out with tooth and claw at everyone who came near.
“I can help!” Dieu cried. “I can solve this for you!”
The captain looked at her dubiously, taking in her curved shoulders and her meager frame.
“You’d barely be a meal for it,” he started.
“No,” she insisted. “Listen. I can charm tigers, listen, only listen.”
The sailors stopped, because they had no wish to chance the tiger’s teeth or claws again, and they stepped back slightly.
“Listen,” said Dieu more softly, and she locked eyes with the tiger, always a dangerous thing to do. “Only listen. My love has gone from me, and I will never again laugh. My love has gone from me and she has taken all light with her.”
The tiger was silent, glaring from the cage, and the sailors looked skeptical.
“I sit in the moon-viewing pavilion, the hem of my sleeves wet from tears, and I cannot see for the grief has stolen my eyes, and I cannot speak for the grief has stolen my tongue.”
The tiger growled, a deep and resonant sound, and Dieu went closer. She was aware of the sailors on the dock, of the clangor of the city behind her, but nothing mattered more than the caged beast in front of her.
“I sit, weeping, eyeless, tongueless, without laughter and absent from light. I sit, and I wait for the answer that only my wife could give.”
Finally, the tiger spoke, and her words were soft as a summer wind, as gentle and smooth as Dieu’s own.
“I am yours, and so I will be your light and your laughter. I am yours, so open your eyes to look at me, and open your mouth so that I may kiss it. I am yours, I am yours, and nevermore will I leave.”
The dock fell silent at the poet’s words in the tiger’s mouth, and then Dieu opened the cage.
She released the tiger, who with her first bound came out of the cage, and with her second bound, she had swept Scholar Dieu on her back, and with her third bound, she and the scholar were away, and no one ever saw them again.
So, then, is the story of Scholar Dieu and how she wed the tiger Ho Thi Thao, and how—
* * *
“No. That’s enough,” said Sinh Loan sharply. “I hate this story, and if you finish it, I shall hate you too.”
“I would not want that,” Chih said without thinking, and at Sinh Loan’s hard look, they coughed a little. “It is only the story as it was told and written and then told to me.”
Sinh Cam shook her head.
“I don’t think I like it at all,” she said finally, “I like the poetry, but . . . But I do not think that’s what happened. I don’t like Ho Thi Thao in the cage. I don’t like that she was waiting for Scholar Dieu to free her because she couldn’t do it herself. I don’t like it.”
“Because it isn’t true,” snapped Sinh Loan. “It’s something stupid that humans made up. Imagine thinking that a little scholar could tame a tiger with poetry and a few nights of love, what foolishness.”
“Madam . . .” Chih began, and for just a moment, a certain tension in Sinh Loan’s shoulders, a certain single-minded set to her grass-green eyes suggested that the tiger had decided to end the storytelling once and for all.
Then Si-yu spoke up, her voice calm as if she couldn’t see the tiger’s killing look or the way that Piluk was snorting, throwing her trunk from side to side and shuffling her broad feet.
“Well, then? What’s the real story?”
Sinh Loan glared at her and nodded angrily.
“Fine. If only so you do not die believing that terrible nonsense.”
* * *
Ho Thi Thao stalked the streets of Ahnfi for three days and three nights, and by the end of that time, every door was barred against her, and her sides were as hollow as a drum. She killed, for she was angry, and she did not eat what she killed, for she was heartsick.
Instead she grew slower and more tired, and her head swam with taunting ghosts and bright lights. A tiger cannot go so very long without eating, and Ho Thi Thao’s days of young starvation were long behind her. She ached with hunger, and the fire that lived in her heart was apt to go out.
Finally, late one night, she found Dieu, who had married again, dressed in red robes edged with black, her face as pale as moonlight on snow. She smelled of unhappiness, and she smelled of regret, and she stood in a golden cage that kept her back from the tumult of the city.
“Well, haven’t you done well for yourself,” Ho Thi Thao said angrily. “Look at how many people have come to your wedding, and how very happy you are!”
“I am not happy at all,” Dieu said, her face full of sorrow. “I have made a terrible mistake.”
“And what mistake was that?” asked Ho Thi Thao, who wanted to hear every evil thing she could about Dieu’s new spouse.
“I have wronged you,” Dieu said to Ho Thi Thao’s surprise. “I was wrong to leave you. I was wrong to starve you. If you let me feed you now, I will go home with you to the mountains, and yours will be the only name I speak at night.”
“I don’t even know your name,” said Ho Thi Thao haughtily. “I have not asked for it.”
“Ask me for it now,” Dieu begged, but Ho Thi Thao, even starving, was possessed of a terrible pride.
“I will not ask for the name of a woman wearing her bridal clothes,” Ho Thi Thao said with dignity.
“Fine,” said Dieu, and in the golden cage with all the wedding guests watching in horror and fascination, she stripped off her robes. First came the fine red clothes trimmed in black, and then came the pale green under-robe that was sheer enough that it could be shredded with a breath. Then there was her skirt, which she kicked off, and then the embroidered band that fit over her breasts.
“I am keeping the shoes on,” Dieu said.
“I don’t care about that at all,” said Ho Thi Thao, looking her up and down.
“Ask me for my name now.”
“I am too hungry to think of that,” said Ho Thi Thao, even as she could feel the ground slipping underneath her feet. “I will not eat unless it is from your hands.”
Dieu did not hesitate. She brought her hand up to her mouth, and though her teeth were small and sad human things, she snapped them together on the heel of her hand until the blood ran and Ho Thi Thao grew faint from hunger and from love.
Dieu reached her red hand between the bars of her cage, and greedily, Ho Thi Thao lapped up her blood, taking Dieu’s hand in her mouth for a single moment before she remembered herself. When she let go, she was dizzy with bliss, and when she turned back to Dieu, there was a happy smile on her face.
“Ask me for my name,” Dieu said, and Ho Thi Thao nodded obediently.
“Give me your name,” she said. “I want it now.”
“My name is Trung Dieu,” she said, and with a single blow, the tiger broke the bars on her cage and carried her away amidst the shouting of her would-be husband and his family.
Together, they ran all the way back to the Boarback Mountains, and for the rest of their nights together, Ho Thi Thao would eat every meal from her wife’s fingers and kiss the scar on her hand before she went on to kiss the rest of her as well. They lived well-fed until they were only bones, and even their bones were happy, turning white and sharp as teeth in the moonlight.