Arrogance
The Empress's audience chamber was steeped in the air of the East.
Sienna, come to see her, glanced about the room and let out a thin little laugh.
There's even more of it than the last time I was here.
A throne inlaid with jade. A twelve-panel folding screen of the sort one expected to find in the imperial household of Jin. Furniture of costly rosewood, every piece of it exquisite.
At a glance it would have been easy to think she clung to her homeland more fiercely than she had in the days when homesickness ruled her. The truth was nothing of the kind.
These days a fierce competition raged among the Empire's noblewomen for so much as a single invitation to the Empress's residence. Drink one cup of dragon's tongue tea in this audience chamber, and a lady might dine out on it in society for years.
In the end, it was a web of connections spun out of a fantasy of the East.
Sienna had known for a long time that the Empress was not doing this in play. She had known, too, that the woman was laying a foundation.
I simply never imagined she would play games with me.
A moment later the Empress appeared, her maids in train.
A beauty in a crimson daesam, the broad-sleeved robe of her homeland, with a shawl they called a xiapei—if Sienna had the name right—draped over her shoulders. She still looked frail, if one judged by appearance alone, but the light in her eyes was very much alive. Watching her enter slowly and with perfect grace, attended by two maids, Sienna could almost understand why the noblewomen of the Imperial Capital adored her.
"Forgive me for making you wait, Sienna."
"Did you have a cup of lemon tea?"
"...Not quite. I was writing to the child in confinement. I had winter clothes prepared for her as well. If not I, who would look after Anais?"
To bring up Anais herself, of her own accord.
Sienna put on a smile and looked the Empress full in the face. If they could go straight to the point, so much the better.
First she produced the thing she had brought to put pressure on her.
Twenty doses of psilocybin.
Cultivated psilocybin, to be precise. Unlike the old days of crude gathering and sorting, one had only to take it from the greenhouse and refine it.
With this, she could bring the greatest pressure to bear on an Empress dependent on psilocybin—
"You have my thanks. But there will be no need to bring any more, Sienna."
"What?"
Sienna stared, thrown, and the Empress smiled.
"I can hardly go on depending on the two of you forever, can I? ...The truth is, three months ago I commissioned an office in my homeland—the Imperial Medical Bureau—to learn whether a mushroom of similar virtue might be cultivated. Thanks to the particular care of His Majesty my father, they were able to set more than two hundred medical practitioners to the work."
"And?"
"They tell me they found the way at last. Soon I shall cease to be a burden upon you."
She said it, and smiled with a warm, enveloping ease.
For an instant Sienna felt bewilderment flood through her.
Well, fair enough. Back when the health syrup had been in fashion, Allan had said as much: that in pharmacology Jin was likely more systematic than the Empire. Empress Yeonhwa was a princess of that Jin. Not just any princess, either, but a daughter her emperor-father had cherished beyond all measure. If a princess such as that made a request...
No. Wait.
Thinking it over, something felt slightly wrong.
Had the Empress truly reached a point where she no longer needed Allan's psilocybin?
It might be true. A bluff seemed far more likely.
Allan had spoken of this as well. He had said he was the only person alive who could cultivate psilocybin mushrooms.
It had stayed with her all the more because he had not been boasting. He had said it in passing, as if it hardly mattered.
However vast Jin's population, could it produce a man like Allan? Impossible.
Sienna decided she would trust Allan before she trusted the Empress.
"Your Majesty. You don't have to go to such lengths. I won't cut off the psilocybin, so please don't worry."
"I told you, did I not."
"You should have claimed you'd mobilized two hundred herb-gatherers and secured a supply that way. Even Allan was surprised the mushrooms fruited more readily than he'd expected. There's no chance Jin's physicians managed it so easily. Don't lie to me."
Sienna looked at the Empress, smiling brightly.
The Empress had the sense, it seemed, not to descend into an ugly contest of wills.
Most likely she had been trying to set down a move that would keep Sienna from swinging psilocybin like a weapon. The ploy had failed, and yet the Empress showed not the slightest surprise. She only smiled, pleased, as if to say not bad.
So this is only the beginning.
Sienna felt no contempt for an Empress who practiced intrigue as naturally as she breathed.
She was no different herself.
"Then speak. Why did you do it?"
Sienna tipped her chin as she put the question.
A brief silence fell between them.
What did she want?
At her daughter's question, Empress Yeonhwa only smiled.
More than six-tenths of it is already done.
What remained, if she was honest, was nothing but the tidying up.
Allan Madoff.
To make that difficult subject a member of the imperial house—that had been her greatest aim.
She could not abide the sight of an uncontrollable man, a man whose depths could not be sounded, working in the shadows while he wore nothing grander than a knight's rank.
And yet his merits were too great, his gifts too precious, to purge him by force. Better to take him into the imperial embrace.
It was also true that she had wanted, if she could, to match him with her youngest.
She had not expected Allan Madoff to accept. Just as she had foreseen, the second daughter bit down on the bait at once.
"Sienna. I could not simply leave Allan as he was. He is a threat to the imperial house."
"I'm not so sure. Allan is—"
"What he himself wishes does not matter. He is a threat by the mere fact of existing. ...Consider it. How foreign courts will look upon a knight who cast down the long-eared race single-handed. They do not show it, but every one of them will be sick with fear."
"......"
"In truth, a merchant of the Darien Kingdom once approached Allan Madoff's family. Schemes we have yet to uncover are surely underway somewhere as well. ...Sienna. Do you understand what that means?"
"A nation bold enough might try to buy Allan. Failing that, they'd work on the people around him and try to draw out whatever they could learn about heroin."
"I am glad you understand."
The Empress laughed softly and reached to stroke Sienna's hair—
Only for Sienna to turn her head, lightly, and slip the touch.
There was a moment in which the hand she had already offered felt just a little ashamed.
Even so, the Empress did not regret it.
She had been raised in a country that killed first, and looked afterward, at anyone who threatened imperial authority—a country in which every organ of the state existed to raise the emperor's power and keep it raised.
In Jin they would have kept Allan under watch until the suspicion cleared. And whether it cleared or not, they would have purged him all the same.
Because that was difficult here, the method she had devised was a marriage among the imperial princesses.
Certain that her husband would refuse if she tried from the outset to bind Allan to the First or the Second Princess, she had deliberately named the youngest. That was all.
"So... Anais was the bait?"
"Not entirely. I was reasonably certain that you or your sister would step in. Even so, I did hope Allan might quietly accept Anais as his wife. She is my own child. How could I leave her in a convent until she dies?"
"And would Anais have been glad of it?"
"In a match, what the person wants does not matter. So long as the interests agree, one can compromise, and live. In the end, we are all pieces on the board."
"......"
Here Sienna's brow tightened, faintly.
Was it the word pieces? The Empress laughed under her breath and fluttered her fingers.
"I am no different, Sienna."
"......"
"Consider it. How do you suppose I came to be Empress of this country? Because my imperial father cherished me so dearly. He thought that if he married me to a sovereign across the sea, then at the least I should not grow old only to be sent into exile—and so he placed a dowry in my hands and sent me away."
"And in exchange you came down with homesickness, didn't you?"
"But I am alive, am I not? I live giving thanks. Always."
Only after the Empress had gone this far did Sienna subside.
The child surely knew that throwing herself against her mother over a matter already finished was unwise. She would know, too, that compromise was the more reasonable judgment than a fight.
Chin propped on her hand, the Empress regarded Sienna.
Then, in a soft and supple voice, she asked something of her stepdaughter—
No. She instructed her.
"I shall see to the formalities, so be betrothed to Allan in two months or so. First we must raise that friend of yours to a dignity fit for an imperial son-in-law, must we not?"
This far, there was no sign of resistance.
Of course, it did not end here.
"And later, help me win Anais a pardon. When I say help, I mean only that you are not to interfere. You can do that much, can you not?"
"...Please. Go on."
Accepting it, then. Just as expected.
In that case, one thing more at the last.
"From next year I mean to advise His Majesty that the cultivation of opium be placed under the control of imperial law. I looked into the matter. Both morphine and heroin take opium as their essential material, do they not? However prodigious that friend Allan may be, he cannot make heroin with nothing to make it from."
"......"
"I do not mean to forbid the making of it. Only that it be made in the open, so His Majesty need not be uneasy. And only in those cases where the state has need of heroin."
Having said this much, the Empress looked at Sienna, long and steady.
In truth, there was more she wanted.
Once Allan had been brought into the imperial house, she meant to have the psilocybin grown within the palace grounds, and to make use of his gifts so that her ties to Jin, her homeland, might be kept with ease. Jin, too, had no shortage of noblewomen afflicted with maladies of the heart.
That is a matter I may pursue once I have made him my son-in-law.
So thinking, she studied Sienna's face where it had sunk into worry.
A face lost in thought, the baby fat not yet gone from it. A sweet look.
She was still a child, after all.
Sienna let the Empress's far too easy gaze slide past her.
The notion of setting the law to watch over opium cultivation did grate, if she was honest.
But there would be a satisfaction in running the business that close to the line. Breaking the law in the open was, strangely, the less stirring of the two. A workaround sounded like fun.
And Anais's pardon?
That, she truly hated. Still, she could shut her eyes to it. When the time came, she had only to arrange matters so that a pardon was no longer possible.
Unable to find any way to steady her wavering heart, Sienna bowed her head.
Perhaps mistaking it for surrender, the Empress tapped her cheek.
A habit she had fallen into often, since the two of them had grown close. Having known the grace of Allan's hands, Sienna found it a little hard to bear.
And then—
"A wise decision. Though I wonder whether it is a thing upon which to congratulate Allan Madoff. How hard it will be, living out a life enduring that temperament of yours."
The Empress had gone and said a thing like that.
By her own measure, she had probably meant it as a joke.
Sienna lifted her head. The Empress wore a gentle, benevolent smile.
Now that it was finished, were they to go back to being a fond mother and daughter?
But Sienna could not laugh it off. She could not have said why. Only that it was a joke that sent anger climbing through her.
"Enduring it. And living that way, you say?"
That remark, at least, she would never allow.