The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 5 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue

It really does get cold, Maomao thought. She had a light wrap around her shoulders but she was still shivering. She was definitely regretting not having another cup of wine.

It would have been warmer inside the building, but quite frankly, there was too much trouble in there. She worried about what would happen to the lion now that its nose was broken, but she wasn’t feeling compassionate enough to help the big cat at the risk of being eaten herself. Yes, the lion was just a poor animal who’d been caged and put on display, but it had still attacked someone. Lahan had nonetheless thought it would be a waste not to try to fix the creature—and he’d attempted to get Maomao to do the job. Evidently he saw the tousle-haired beast as another beautiful collection of numbers, and he wouldn’t shut up about how the shattered nose disrupted that beauty. That was when she’d escaped out here.

The sky seemed so vast. There was no moon, making the stars appear to shine all the brighter. Three of them shone brightest of all, forming a triangle in the heavens. Perhaps those stars were the two lovers, and the river that separated them.

I wish they’d hurry and wrap things up in there. Maomao was just contemplating whether there might be a way for her to sneak back to Gyokuen’s mansion when she heard footsteps behind her.

“Your honored cousin is looking for you.”

“It’s perfectly all right to just ignore him.” So Maomao wasn’t the only one who’d fled the hubbub. “Don’t you have more work to do?” she asked. All right, so Basen had stolen the spotlight when the lion attacked, but surely this man could still be of some help.

“Are you hoping I’ll drop dead from sheer overwork?”

“Perish the thought,” she said.

Jinshi—who had indeed ducked away from his responsibilities—didn’t seem to think her answer was entirely sincere. The wooden bench creaked softly as he sat down beside her. Then he set something between them. It appeared to be a piece of metal.

“Basen was right,” Jinshi said. “It was weak. Quality iron would have held together better.” There were a number of ways of casting iron, and if you got it wrong, the inside could turn out hollow, weakening the structure. “It’s almost like someone wanted it to break.”

“An unsettling idea.”

There was something Maomao had been wondering about as well: the way the lion had gone straight for Consort Lishu, as if specifically targeting her. It had seemed to ignore Maomao in favor of the consort.

Just because it was starving? she thought. That was a possibility. Maybe because she’d been holding meat. Another possibility. But Maomao couldn’t stop thinking about the perfume the consort had been doused in. Something so pungent would certainly have been detectable to a wild animal. What if that was what had attracted the lion’s attention? Maomao sat and thought silently.

“Hey, don’t just go quiet,” Jinshi said after a moment.

He should have known very well by now that Maomao rarely initiated a conversation. Why had he decided to sit by her, anyway? He should stop slacking and get back to work already.

“I suppose you’re wishing I would just go back to work,” said Jinshi.

“Me, sir? Never.”

He did know what she was thinking occasionally; that was the trouble with him. Maomao had to work very hard to pretend that her face didn’t want to convulse into a major scowl.

“If I went back, one of two things would happen. Either I would have to work, or I would be mobbed by women.”

“The less popular men in the world might call for your head to hear you complain about such things.”

Men who had money and status and looks to boot were just different. A moonless night like this—he ought to be more careful.

“What they’re really after is the Imperial blood, don’t you think?” Jinshi said. Meaning his children, she supposed. Or perhaps his life.

“I should think at least half of it is your looks, sir.”

“Don’t say that.” Jinshi frowned as if he’d eaten a particularly unpleasant bug. For some reason, even though he possessed beauty beyond virtually anyone Maomao had ever seen, he seemed to have some kind of inferiority complex about it. His fingers brushed the scar on his cheek. The stain on his beauty was lamented by all and sundry, yet was it her imagination, or did he almost seem fond of it?

Maomao, quite honestly, wasn’t offended by the scar. No human was perfect. And Jinshi’s appearance had been so flawless that it had belied what was within. What was wrong with this modest alteration to the appearance he’d been born with? Anyway, a scar it might have been, but Maomao’s father had stitched it up, and he’d naturally done an excellent job. Each time Maomao had applied salve or makeup to Jinshi’s cheek—which was not infrequently—she’d felt the wound growing less pronounced under her fingers.

“I would rather say my face had been burned, and continue wearing that makeup,” Jinshi said.

“Eventually the color would cease to come out, sir. But if it’s a burn you want, I’d be happy to help you.” She could use him as a test subject for her burn medications at the same time.

“Stop that.” After twenty days of wearing the makeup, a faint patch of red dye could still be seen on Jinshi’s cheek; he’d been using a dusting of white powder to conceal it. “If I were actually burned, I think Gaoshun might collapse. But I admit, it would be easier in its own way. The makeup is certainly somewhat troublesome. I’ve found myself rather relaxed during this trip, though.”

He seemed to be referring to the fact that no town girl would willingly make a move on a gloomy man with a burn on his face; and at the same time he was free of his usual desk work. Meanwhile, Maomao had felt that there had been nothing to do but watch the scenery roll by from the carriage window as her behind got sorer and sorer. Just the thought of the trip home was enough to depress her.

“Would you like to work on your horsemanship? I know you’re getting tired of the carriage,” he said.

“Yes, but I would rather just have a proper bed.” She’d worked on hers during the trip. The problem was that she’d rarely had a chance to use it, since other people, very pleased with her work, always seemed to be lying there instead.

“Ah! Yes, I hope you’ll be able to make it even more comfortable than before.”

A shock of annoyance ran through Maomao. Jinshi had been the biggest offender as far as stealing her sleeping space. He would ride horseback as far as he wanted, and when he was tired he would come loll around. No wonder he thought it was relaxing!

“His Majesty did tell me to try to enjoy myself on this trip,” Jinshi said with a slightly twisted smile. “And to make a good choice.”

Which choice he was referring to went unspoken: he meant choice of bride. Many women had been gathered here for just that purpose. Whatever choice he made, there would be politics involved. It might affect the very government of the nation. He could strengthen ties with a neighboring country, or gain the support of a domestic faction. Jinshi’s own status might even change, depending on what he decided. The fact that Sei-i-shu had been willing to provide the venue for all this activity made their message clear: align yourself with the west. No doubt that also explained why Uryuu had brought his other daughter.

I wonder who he’ll pick, Maomao thought. Not that it really mattered to her. She was just a humble apothecary. That was her perspective, anyway...

No sooner had she registered something brushing her fingers than a hand grabbed her wrist. It pulled her until she was palm-to-palm with his other hand, their fingers intertwined. The other hand was a good bit larger than hers, and rougher. Long fingers clutched Maomao’s hand so that she couldn’t get away.

“Perhaps you’d be so kind as to let go of me, sir?”

“But if I let go, won’t you run away?”

“Are you going to do something I’ll need to run from?”

“You do make me want to hit you sometimes.” Jinshi looked at Maomao like a wild animal hunting its prey. His expression made her think of a starving wild dog. It wasn’t the face of either the eunuch Jinshi, or of the Emperor’s younger brother. It was someone else again.

“Not in the face. It would be too obvious.”

“I wasn’t actually going to hit you.”

“I know, sir.” Jinshi wasn’t the type who would lay a hand on a young woman. No, wait, actually he was—to make them vomit when they had ingested poison. “I know you wouldn’t do worse than pin me and force me to empty the contents of my stomach.”

“You brought that on yourself. Why would you even drink poison?!”

“I’m not sure I know how to answer that.”

Firsthand experience was just so much more memorable than merely asking questions. That was all. Maomao wasn’t any smarter than the average person, just a little more...dedicated. And when it came to emotion, that she actually had less of than most people. She felt sadness and happiness, anger and joy—less acutely than ordinary people, but they were there. But there were other emotions that people allegedly possessed which Maomao still didn’t understand.

She could feel Jinshi’s pulse in the palm of his hand. He had started to sweat, and the place where their hands joined was slick. She looked up to see long eyelashes lying low over eyes the color of obsidian. Those eyes watched her intently, from so close that she could see herself reflected in them.

The courtesans had a saying: once you know it, it’s hell.

But the men, too, had a saying: to know it was exactly why they went there.

That word, that simple four-letter word with its o and its e, was sometimes called vulgar, and sometimes turned out to be nothing more than a game—but some people said it was impossible to live without it.

Jinshi’s free hand reached for Maomao’s head, his fingers stroking her hair—but they stopped behind her head. “You’re actually wearing it,” he said. His hand had found the hair stick, the silver piece with the moon and the poppy. Maomao had thought maybe it had come from Lahan—but apparently not. No wonder everyone had seemed so intrigued by it.

“Oh, it was from you, Master Jinshi? The moon is well and good, but the poppy is a questionable touch.” She was thinking about the White Lady. The flower on the hair stick looked like a larger version of the common poppy, but it was technically an opium poppy. It could be used to make the drug.

“Please. I had that made before we left on this trip. To replace the other one.” His voice came from above her, his chin resting on her head. His fingers played through her hair, and she could feel his breath on her. Anyone who happened to see them could be forgiven for assuming they were in an intimate embrace.

“Master Jinshi, please keep your distance.”

“Why should I?”

“What will you do if someone sees us?”

They couldn’t be the only ones who had ducked away from the banquet. The trees shielded them from sight, but there was no guarantee someone wouldn’t happen by. Jinshi of all people knew exactly why this banquet was being held.

“Sir, Consort Lishu is not your niece. You don’t have to worry about closeness of blood,” Maomao said calmly. Jinshi’s face, though, grew tighter. Maomao went on, “Wouldn’t she be the safest choice?”

She would forget all about the moment she’d seen Lishu and Basen gazing at each other. Yes, she’d pretend it had never happened. Even if something were to blossom between them, it could have no meaning. Better to act as if it had never existed.

“The safe choice. Like hell!” Jinshi’s voice in her ear was like a cold blade. His fingers stopped running through her hair and slid down to the nape of her neck, curling themselves around her throat. Long, slim fingers that began to press.

“It hurts...”

“Oh, does it?”

It was painful—but Jinshi only squeezed harder. His other hand, still intertwined with hers, worked its way up her back. No, no! He was going to twist her arm out of joint.

With her throat crushed and her arm wrenched, Maomao’s face contorted with agony. She tilted her head back in hopes of somehow managing to get some air, her mouth flapping open like a fish. She must’ve looked ridiculous—and there was Jinshi, looking down at her.

Until finally—

Maomao greedily sucked in the air she was suddenly allowed. An aroma of flowers tickled her nose. Jasmine. Somehow, she’d always thought a celestial nymph would smell like peaches. Her thin lips felt dry and hot.

The hand that had choked her moved to support the back of her head, while his other hand disentangled itself from her fingers and wrapped around her waist instead.

She didn’t know how long they sat that way. All she knew was that Jinshi was looking down at her with a faintly triumphant expression, as if he saw that the breath had reached every corner of her body now. He wiped away the tears that had sprung to her eyes as she struggled to breathe.

It was then that Maomao felt a flash of intense anger. “I said that if you were going to kill me, you should do it with poison,” she told him.

“I refuse to let you poison yourself,” Jinshi said, his fingers tracing her lips. “You can’t pretend you didn’t know that you were one of the candidates. As much as I’m sure you’d like to.” He wasn’t done, either: “Who was that man, anyway? I’m sure you’re not a dancer.”

So he had been watching them!

“I was just paying for my drink,” Maomao said. “It didn’t cost much.” She tried to look away, but with his hand on her head, she really couldn’t. Maomao was thinking fast, trying to come up with any way out of this situation. “Exactly what use did you think I could be to you?”

“Lahan accompanied you, didn’t he? That’s what everyone else will see.”

Maomao understood what Jinshi was getting at. Perhaps it was even what Lahan had been counting on from the beginning. She felt the anger again; she would have to give his toes a good crushing later.

The La family was unique among the named clans in that they had no faction at court. One could argue that made Maomao a safe choice in her own way—much as Rikuson had said. There was just one problem.

“You’d make an enemy of you-know-who.”

She meant the monocled freak, of course. She could only imagine what might have happened here had he been present. He would have made a scene so big that an escaped lion would have seemed like child’s play in comparison.

Jinshi shivered—how could he not?—but it quickly passed.

“We were going to continue things later, weren’t we?”

She found herself pinned again. He was pushing her down onto the bench. His hand in her hair pressed so hard. Something more than breath came past her lips. Now she saw those obsidian eyes, that feral look, from inches away. They shone brighter than any star, and yet there was a subtle darkness to them. This was a man who’d had everything in life, and yet sometimes he seemed to hunger for something that he struggled to satisfy.

Why can’t he pick someone else?

There had to be someone out there who could give Jinshi what he was seeking. There were certainly plenty who wanted to. Why did he need to go out of his way to pick a creature who lacked precisely that desire?

She wanted to run. This could only bring more trouble, more uncertainty. She wanted to dodge all those problems—but those eyes, the eyes of an untamed dog, weren’t going to let her escape. He was going to devour her, and all in pursuit of something that wasn’t even there. Maomao could only look back at him with empty eyes, like those of a puppet or a doll.

That only seemed to further agitate the dog’s anxieties; he leaned his weight onto Maomao as if he was going to crush her. So now he wants to suffocate me, she thought. He must have weighed twice what she did. She knew the courtesans sometimes took customers three times their size. Didn’t it hurt them? But even if it did, what would her sister Pairin, a professional among professionals, make of such griping?

“You can’t let him grab the initiative just because he’s the customer.” Maomao remembered hearing her say that once, a bit of advice she’d accompanied with a sultry gesture. That was back when she’d been teaching Maomao the courtesan’s trade (very much over the younger woman’s objections).

Maomao said nothing. Honestly, perhaps it would have been better to remain still and quiet, like a doll. Or maybe not. What we can say is this: remembering Pairin meant remembering the techniques Pairin had taught her, had drilled into her despite her protests; she’d worked Maomao to the verge of tears, until Maomao was able to perform them to her sister’s satisfaction. Until those techniques became not just a response, but an instinctive reaction. So let it be said that Maomao could not be held responsible for what she was about to do.

Meaning what? Meaning...

Maomao swallowed the saliva in her mouth with a heavy gulp. Her lips began to drift apart, then opened, an invitation to him; and then, again instinctively, she slid closer to him.

Jinshi’s expression was a mixture of surprise and happiness, but it didn’t last long. Soon his body responded with gentle spasms, and his grip on Maomao loosened.

To say again: none of this was Maomao’s fault. This was beyond her control.

She responded to him with the most refined techniques of the pleasure quarter.

○●○

How long was one beholden to a weathered old promise made as playful children?

Ah-Duo chuckled to herself. She sat on a cold rock in the garden, a blanket across her shoulders and a drink in her hand. The night air could truly chill here in the sandy capital. A good, strong alcohol was just what she needed.

She’d already put Consort Lishu, all but feverish with tension, to bed. Now she was enjoying the drink she hadn’t had a chance to savor before.

“I’ve no interest in anyone but you for my bride.”

Don’t make promises you can’t keep, she said in her mind. You don’t have the authority. She knew perfectly well that some of his closest advisors had hounded him after she had lost the ability to bear children. And her own hands weren’t exactly clean. She’d tried to get her kind, beautiful friend to be unfaithful.

Her poor friend had been forced into a marriage with a partner who had been chosen for her, purely to perpetuate the family line. Why not ignore that situation, Ah-Duo had thought. Why not rather be a flower that bloomed at the very crest of the nation?

But it hadn’t gone the way she’d imagined it would. The conversation had ended with her friend slapping Ah-Duo’s cheek as hard as she could and crying, “Don’t mock me!”

Ah-Duo knew this young woman to be kind. To be beautiful. To be intelligent. She’d prepared a far better, a more fitting place for her—and yet it had only made her friend furious.

Ah-Duo just didn’t understand the female heart. Maybe it was because she herself was no longer a woman, or maybe she had never understood it. In any case, she saw that she had badly wounded her friend’s pride.

She became a consort as an extension of friendship, without love. And then she’d borne a child. Ah-Duo had always thought she was a rather twisted excuse for a woman, but apparently she still possessed what they called the maternal instinct. She had loved the child she bore at the cost of her own womb more than anything. The infant was wrinkled like a monkey; it waved its hands, so small they looked like they would break at the merest touch, and cried for milk.

There was a nursemaid there, but Ah-Duo had insisted on holding her own child. She’d tried to give it milk, but there wasn’t enough to satisfy the baby. Ah-Duo’s body was no longer that of a woman.

The infant was returned to the nursemaid.

Wracked with despair, Ah-Duo thought only of her child. She thought only of how to help the tiny, vulnerable thing survive. And she reached a decision.

“They look so much alike.” Her child and his uncle had been born at almost the same time. Concerned about her infant’s failure to put on weight, Ah-Duo had marshaled herself to go see her mother-in-law. “You could switch them, and it seems like no one would know.”

She’d been half joking, but half serious—gauging which way the other woman took her. All of their various attendants and nursemaids had been dismissed from the room.

“You might be right. Could you take care of him, please?” her mother-in-law said, picking up Ah-Duo’s child. She removed his swaddling clothes, preparing to change his diaper. Meanwhile, Ah-Duo accepted her brother-in-law and did the same, replacing his diaper with the one she’d brought along.

Each of them had just given birth, and each of them felt like she was missing a piece of her heart. There was nothing in Anshi’s eyes as she looked at her own child. Nobody seemed to notice because Anshi constantly kept a smile on her face. But she looked at Ah-Duo’s baby with genuine warmth. Perhaps she found her son’s child lovable even as her husband’s seemed hateful to her. Perhaps that was why she said nothing, even when Ah-Duo left and went back to her pavilion with Anshi’s child still in her arms. They exchanged the healthy, bouncing babies as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Later, the child that Ah-Duo was raising died. Perhaps, without that switch, it would have lived. Ah-Duo mourned the loss, for she had come to love the child—but she was also glad to know that her own offspring was still alive. Anshi’s child had died unloved by its own mother, with its rightful place usurped by its nephew, and all before it could even bewail its own fate.

The death appeared to shake both Ah-Duo and Anshi. The naughty little troublemaker who had always given the serving women such headaches was now enough of a grown-up to sense it—but he was also young enough that he had to lash out somehow. A doctor was banished from the rear palace.

Fate was a strange thing, though: that physician’s adopted daughter was now her son’s favorite. There were the princesses from foreign lands, the daughter of Empress Gyokuyou’s household, Consort Lishu, the girl in question, and—just for good measure—Suirei as well. Ah-Duo hadn’t brought her along simply on a lark. She might have her...issues, but when it came to bloodline she was every bit as qualified as the others. Although if that had become known here in this place, it would have caused quite the commotion.

Ah-Duo chuckled again.

A promise between playful children. That’s all it had been, and yet he was intent on trying to keep it. Yet he hadn’t been able to refuse a request from the little moon, little Yue. He had picked a flower from the vast garden that was the rear palace and made Yue a little brother. The reason he had sent Yue to the rear palace as a eunuch—was it a punishment for a promise broken? Or was it compassion, a way of giving him more chances to see Ah-Duo?

Whichever, Ah-Duo took full advantage of the opportunity to tease the lovely eunuch each time he visited her. It was the most delightful thing.

Ultimately she had been dismissed from her position as one of the Four Ladies, but now she lived in a villa and listened to him complain. She wished the bearded old grump could send someone a little younger in his place. She was glad the children had been able to come live with her. Yes, youth was a wonderful thing. And it was so much fun to tease Suirei.

But there was something else Ah-Duo must not forget—a second playful promise. A vow made when the question of whose status was appropriate for what had not yet entered her mind.

“Sure, why not? I might as well let you make me a mother of the nation.”

And the idiot, he’d agreed immediately. Had he understood what he was really saying? And did he still remember it now, now that he had a great flower of the west for his Empress?

“We’ll just have to see what happens,” Ah-Duo said to herself, swirling the drink in her cup, resolving to watch over Yue and discover which flower he chose.