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The palace was captured by the Chen-Pa sometime in the afternoon.
Jiayi couldn't have said when with any certainty. It felt as though she should have known, as if someone should have sounded the temple bell to announce it; it was strange, kneeling in the dimness of her chamber in the women's palace with maidservants huddled close around her, listening to their quiet sobbing and realizing all at once that she couldn't tell. If battle continued, it was not close enough to hear. Perhaps it was all already over. Or perhaps even in this moment the last of her husband's men were falling, Chen-Pa soldiers cornering them in courtyards and corridors, cutting them down.
Her husband was almost certainly dead already. No one had spoken as much aloud, not even Jiayi, but it didn't need to be said: he had been king in Nangxiu, and the Chen-Pa had come, and whatever else might be said of Xun Daluozhen, he had been a man who knew his duty and performed it. He wouldn't have run, and he wouldn't have hid, and he wouldn't have surrendered. He would have fought, and if the fighting was over, then he was dead.
Jiayi thought this and didn't flinch. She looked inside herself distantly for—for something, pain or regret, even the barest twinge of grief. But it wasn't there, not any of it. She was tired, that was all. Tired; a little frustrated. If he had run, he might not be dead. But of course he wouldn't have done that, not Daluozhen. He had believed in honor, rightness in thought and action, propriety. He would have fought, knowing he couldn't win, understanding that he would die—he'd chosen it, eyes open. Why should she grieve a fate he'd picked for himself? By that measure, he'd been a lucky man indeed.
There was a sound somewhere in the distance, a crack—perhaps of wood—and one of the maids pressed against Jiayi jerked and trembled harder, until Jiayi smoothed a steady hand over her hair. It was funny, except in all the ways it wasn't: Jiayi knew what they liked to say about her when she couldn't hear. That she was ice, that she was metal; that she was stone. And perhaps it was true after all, because with a storm breaking upon them, they'd come and sheltered themselves in the lee of her without shame.
Another sound, louder, and a few of the maids cried out a little with fear.
"Hush," Jiayi said. "They'll find us soon enough. Scream then, when you have reason."
Two of them looked at her and then at each other, and one of them shook her head and laughed a little, eyes wet. "And will you scream with us, Majesty?" she said, striving to keep her voice light even though it shook.
Jiayi considered the question. "No, I don't think so. But you may if you like," and her tone was bland even for her, because if they were busy glancing at each other and sharing silent thoughts of Jiayi's coldheartedness, then at least for a moment they wouldn't be afraid.
They had settled again in silence, and some of them had even begun to dry their faces on their sleeves, when there was another sound. This one was unmistakable, a man shouting—and distant at first, but it grew louder, and then there were footsteps too. Footsteps, the indistinct soft thumps of a struggle, more shouting. In Chen-Yu, Jiayi thought; and then the carefully-wrought wooden filigree that made up the door of the inner chamber rattled, and half the maids gasped and threw themselves back toward Jiayi and the far wall.
A few loud barked words Jiayi couldn't understand, and then a man's voice gasping out, "Yes—yes, I swear," and then the door cracked all at once under a sharp blow and swung open, listing at an angle.
Chen-Pa, Jiayi thought at first, seeing the fine gleaming mail armor, and then had to stop and look again: the soldiers standing were Chen-Pa, yes, but the squirming bleeding man they were dragging with them was Nangren. "Please!" he cried, and didn't look up—for no doubt he felt himself shamed, knowing Jiayi and all her servants were seeing him this way.
"Which one?" a Chen-Pa bit out. A woman, at least to judge by the voice, and that would have shamed him more still, Jiayi thought.
The Chen-Pa cared not at all about such things; they armored their women as thoroughly as their men, gave them swords and spears as long and as sharp, and sometimes you couldn't even tell which was which unless you saw a beard or heard one speak. It was bad, in Nangxiu, to be shamed by a man—but worse to be shamed by a woman, or in front of one.
"Which one?" the Chen-Pa said again. "Don't waste time! The general is waiting. Come now—which one?" The soldier was dragged up by a hard grip on his chin and made to look round the inner chamber. His gaze went across the faces of the servant women, all Jiayi's attendants and maids, back and forth; and then to Jiayi among them, and then away.
Ah. Of course if they were here for anyone, they were here for her. There wasn't any advantage in delay. If Jiayi had had some plan to escape the inner chamber, the women's palace, the city itself, and a little more time would have helped her—then, perhaps, it would have made sense to kneel here in silence and hope the man didn't give her up. But it wasn't so; and if the Chen-Pa general wanted her dead, he'd only have needed to order these soldiers to kill every woman they found here.
Jiayi stood, ignoring the soft cry of the maid nearest her and the clutch of a trembling hand in her sleeve, and said, "I am queen in Nangxiu."
The Chen-Pa soldiers all looked at her. The woman who'd spoken stepped past the Nangren man on the floor and tilted her head, looked Jiayi up and down and narrowed her eyes a little. "Clean yourself up," she said after a moment, gesturing with a brisk motion to Jiayi's clothes, her hair. "Then I take you to the general. Yes?"
"Yes," Jiayi said.
The maid who'd caught Jiayi by the sleeve as she stood was called Xuan; the one who'd laughed even as she cried for terror was Feng. Jiayi took them both by the hand and brought them with her from the inner chamber to the enclosed courtyard, where there was a fountain—still welling up with bright clear water, brilliant in the afternoon sunlight, as if no wars had ended today at all.
Jiayi had been shaken from sleep early this morning, had risen and stepped outside and seen the smoke rising from the city and understood. She had summoned all her maids, had ordered them to do what they could to brace the doors leading to the outer chamber; to make sure there was food within, to run and see whether the captain of the palace guard was still alive and if he was to see what he had to say, whatever she could think of to keep them busy. And then—
Then it had been time to wait, shut up in the inner chamber, and see who would find them and whether they would die.
It hadn't mattered to Jiayi this morning that her hair was still hanging loose, that she'd thrown on the first robe she found with her own two hands and tied it herself. Early in the day, the wind had picked up and brought the smoke sweeping low, until Jiayi had ordered that the way to the courtyard be closed up, and all the lattices covered over with silk; probably she still smelled like ash, and no doubt some remained on her face, in her hair.
It hadn't mattered, earlier. But now it did.
She thrust her hands into the fountain and scrubbed at them, splashed her forehead and her cheeks and wiped them clean, and then rubbed her wet fingers through her hair. Xuan said, "Oh. Oh—" and turned and ran, and then came back with a comb, and together she and Feng managed to get Jiayi's hair in some sort of order, binding it up and braiding it. They had no pins; but Xuan looked at the comb and then at Jiayi and said, "It's jade," and pushed it in to one side. It wasn't meant to be a hair ornament, wasn't jeweled or lacquered. But it was jade, and besides, the Chen-Pa general probably wouldn't know the difference.
Her feet were bare; there wasn't anything to be done about it. There wasn't time to get a gown, or a clean robe that no one had been crying frightened tears into. But at least this one could be straightened, the wrinkles dampened and smoothed out of it by Feng's careful hands, the tie retied properly while Jiayi held her arms up out of the way.
"All right," Jiayi said when they were done. "That will do."
"Majesty," Feng said, and then swallowed once, twice, and caught Jiayi again—by the wrist instead of the sleeve, so she wouldn't wrinkle it again. "If you—if they—"
"The general won't kill me," Jiayi said. "Not if I can help it." And Feng laughed again, soft and shaky, covering her eyes with her hand; and then Jiayi turned and crossed the courtyard with her bare feet and went back in.
The Chen-Pa soldiers were still waiting for her, the rest of her servants now cautiously standing—she passed among them with her chin high, and they bowed low as she went, and by the time she reached the Chen-Pa woman she might have looked like a queen after all.
"Well. Good enough," the Chen-Pa woman said, and led her out.
Jiayi didn't know what she had expected. There was disarray, disorder; broken doors and cracked paneling, wall hangings torn down. Blood, here and there, spattered across glazed tiles and polished stone.
But the Chen-Pa seemed to already have been at work removing bodies from their path, for there were no dead men in the corridors, or at least not the ones the Chen-Pa woman led Jiayi along. And there had been fire in the city, Jiayi remembered—but not here.
The general waited in the king's audience hall. Which is to say that was what it had been, Jiayi reminded herself, but it wasn't anymore, not when there was no king left.
The Chen-Pa soldiers stopped just beyond the doors, the woman and one of the men who had come with her pausing, one of them to either side of the hall. When Jiayi looked over, the woman gestured her sharply on. So she went.
She wondered whether perhaps it was meant to frighten her, that she must walk the length of the hall alone. She supposed it might have, if she were different; but as it was, it was only a relief that at least the hall was nearly empty. So often she had walked it under the weight of a thousand eyes, Nangren nobles murmuring behind their fans what a shame it was that her father had had no sons, nothing but one daughter, and that one with a heart fashioned hard as stone. So often she had walked it with her dutiful, proper, honorable husband waiting at the other end.
But now there was only a Chen-Pa there, sitting on Daluozhen's throne in full armor, sword balanced neatly across broad strong thighs.
Jiayi considered the merits of kneeling; but the general had wanted someone to bring her here because she was queen. Better to seem it.
So as she drew closer, she only slowed a little, and then stopped and carefully inclined her head.
She had a moment, looking up again, to think: no beard. A general, though, had to be old enough to grow one, surely?
And then the Chen-Pa general said, "So. You are the queen of Nangxiu," and oh. This—this was a woman, too.
Jiayi dared to take another step closer, two. She wasn't sure she would have guessed, had the general stayed silent; the woman's face was broad, strong cheekbones, sharp jawline, and her skin weathered with sun, wind, cold, in a way the faces of royal women in Nangxiu were not. The Chen-Pa general had removed her helmet already, and Jiayi could certainly see the slim dark braid that fell over her shoulder. But that meant nothing, for many men in Nangxiu wore their hair in such a way.
The general looked at her a moment longer, clear dark eyes steady on Jiayi's face, and added, "I am General Tsamcho. And if I must address you—?"
"Yan Shunjiayi," Jiayi said. It wasn't the right way to introduce herself at all, or at least it wouldn't have been in a room full of nobles; but General Tsamcho didn't care for Nangxiu ideas of courtesy and wanted a name to call Jiayi by, and so Jiayi would give it to her.
Tsamcho's eyes narrowed, the barest furrow forming across her wide smooth brow. "Yan," she said.
"You recall a beloved exalted lord of Nangxiu," Jiayi said carefully, "who has since departed on the Great Journey," and she politely dropped her own gaze to the floor. "Yan Mengluofeng was my father. It was Xun Daluozhen who sat upon this throne last."
She tried to choose her words delicately—this throne, refusing to attribute it to any particular owner—and to keep her tone very even, without suggestion of anger or blame. Nevertheless, there wasn't any way to banish the unspoken corollary: that Xun Daluozhen did not sit on this throne anymore, and never would again, and that both of them knew very well why.
Tsamcho sat back a little—Jiayi kept her eyes down, but she could hear Tsamcho move, the clink of that finely-wrought Chen-Pa mail against the throne's gleaming surface. But Tsamcho didn't speak, and didn't speak, and didn't speak. What would she say next? Would she demand to know why Jiayi hadn't killed herself the moment a Chen-Pa soldier had broken down the door, the moment she must have known her husband was dead? Would she waste time and breath insulting his memory to his widow's face? If she did, would she prefer Jiayi angry, or despairing, or cowering? It was distasteful to think of, and Jiayi didn't know which to pick, hadn't enough of a sense for Tsamcho's nature to guess what might please her with any hope of accuracy—
"His armor bore a seal," Tsamcho murmured at last, more gravely than Jiayi had expected. "And he wore a ring with it, too. Like this?" she added, and lifted one scarred hand to gesture in the air, marking out an approximation of the strokes of a pair of characters Jiayi couldn't help but recognize.
"Yes," Jiayi said, very quietly.
She had looked up to see what shape Tsamcho would trace out, and for some reason she was—she didn't look down again, even though she should have. She stood there with her chin high, looking at Tsamcho; and Tsamcho looked back and then unfolded her other hand.
The ring, with the royal seal of Nangxiu upon it. And blood. Only a little; it made no sense that that, at last, was the thing that should make Jiayi's breath catch in the back of her throat.
The last time she'd seen it in a hand that was not the king's, that had been how she had known that Baba was dead. That Baba was dead, and still had had no son, and there must be a king in Nangxiu.
Tsamcho said something sharp under her breath that Jiayi didn't understand—Chen-Yu, probably—and closed her hand around the ring again. "I should not have," she started, and then stopped and pressed her lips together. "I will clean it, Yan Shunjiayi, and then return it to you."
Jiayi bit the inside of her cheek and didn't look away. "Thank you," she said.
It probably should have been harder to say. To look into the face of the woman who'd killed her husband, who sat now on his throne still in her bloodied armor, and speak of gratitude—sometimes it was useful, Jiayi thought, to have a heart made out of stone.
General Tsamcho was silent a moment longer, still watching Jiayi in that steady careful way. And then she stood, and stepped down from the throne until she was standing hardly a stride from Jiayi.
"So it was not that Xun Daluozhen had won this throne," she said, "or was owed it, but rather that it is known in this land to rightly belong to the one who takes you to wife, Yan Shunjiayi. Is that right?"
And of course she'd want to be sure she understood. She'd want to be able to tell the tsanpo of Chen-Tse who it was that one of his sons might want to marry, in order to make Nangxiu more comfortably his own. Because, Jiayi thought, this wasn't just a raid, retaliation for some perceived insult. General Tsamcho hadn't burned the palace down, and that was for a reason. It was hard to rule a kingdom from a pile of cinders and rubble.
Jiayi swallowed, and made herself look away again. She'd succeeded in this once. She'd made herself agreeable to Xun Daluozhen, or at least not disagreeable; she had made herself pliable, respectful, dutiful. She'd sworn her stone heart to silence, though she couldn't make it beat. Daluozhen had been king in Nangxiu because she had known what she needed to do and had done it—had allowed it to be done, had chained herself carefully down and made it easy. She could do it again.
She must.
"Yes," she said aloud. "If, perhaps, there is some willing son of the tsanpo—" she added, as though she wasn't sure, cutting herself off to allow General Tsamcho to fill the gap if she wished.
But Tsamcho didn't speak. She stood there until Jiayi glanced up at her again, and then she smiled, wry and a little rueful. "Well, and I am sure there would be," she said, "if the sons of the tsanpo could see you for themselves, Yan Shunjiayi. But I do not answer to the tsanpo."
Jiayi stared at her, startled. "You are Chen-Pa—"
"I am exiled," Tsamcho said, and for the first time Jiayi saw tension in her brow, a tightness around her mouth—she was angry, and not with Jiayi. "All my life I served the tsanpo and served him well, and I was strong and I was loyal; and I was made his general. Until some fat minister who owns no sword of his own decided I did not suit his purpose, and the things he decided to say of me, the tsanpo believed.
"Believed! Believed, and called me forsworn, and banished me. And I—" Tsamcho stopped and shook her head, and Jiayi saw her jaw knot itself tight. "I cannot forgive it," Tsamcho bit out at last. "Do you understand? Even if he sent ten thousand messengers to the ends of the earth bearing pardons, I would not go back—I served my emperor because I thought him deserving of it, and by trusting the word of such a man over mine, he proved me wrong.
"So it seems that if I wish to have a lord who will rule in a way I think is worthy, I must make one. And now, Yan Shunjiayi, you have told me how to do it."
"You mean," Jiayi began cautiously, and then stopped, swallowing. Surely not. Surely not. "You mean that—that you—?"
"You have implied that to be king in this place is to marry you," Tsamcho said. "And I would be king in this place, if you will help me."
It was ludicrous, Jiayi thought. It was nonsensical. Surely Tsamcho would realize as much, any moment; surely she would relent, and find some Chen-Pa man, and all that had been required of Jiayi before would be required of her again, and her stone heart would abide it.
But she thought this from an unaccountable sort of distance, and she couldn't make herself say any of it. She was—she was staring at Tsamcho, at her face, at her mouth; at the broad strong yoke of her shoulders under that Chen-Pa armor. She'd never—Daluozhen had been her husband, and she hadn't minded and had called that contentment. But, thinking of this woman she didn't even know, thinking of her armor and what was underneath it and of being called wife by her, Jiayi felt her face flush hot and couldn't stop it.
And if Tsamcho truly meant to do it—who would stop her? No one. She had taken the city, the palace; even now her Chen-Pa soldiers filled the halls, the courtyards, the streets beyond. She had come down out of the mountains like a western wind in autumn, and Daluozhen had met her forces with propriety and honor and—
And it hadn't been enough. Jiayi had known it even then; it was the thing that made people say she was stone that had whispered it to her, though she'd tried not to listen. It hadn't been enough, because to be proper, honorable, dutiful, wasn't enough. To face such an unexpected assault and meet it with equal strength, to be struck and survive and strike back harder still—to do what it took to achieve victory: that was not Daluozhen, and never had been.
But, Jiayi thought slowly, it was Tsamcho.
It was Tsamcho, who held the royal seal of Nangxiu in her hand, who sat upon the throne that had been Daluozhen's as if she had the right. Who asked Jiayi to make her king—because she wanted not just to conquer Nangxiu, but to rule it, and understood how much easier it would be with Jiayi alongside her.
Jiayi drew a long slow breath, and let it out. Tsamcho was still watching her in that careful patient way of hers, waiting to see how Jiayi would answer. "You would accept my help," Jiayi heard herself say.
"If you will give it," Tsamcho said. "I know I could kill you; you know I could kill you. But I think that would be a waste, when there is another way. You know this land, you know its people, you know their ways. I can learn. And I promise you that if this place is mine—there is no army that answers to the tsanpo, or to anyone else, that I cannot defeat."
She didn't say it like a boast, like empty words. She said it like it was true. To propose such a thing to a woman whose husband she had killed the same day—but then maybe she could tell, Jiayi thought. Maybe she saw what everyone else did when they looked at Jiayi, only she liked seeing it.
"All right," Jiayi said, as evenly as she could. "All right, then. I'll be your queen, if you wish it."
"I do," Tsamcho said softly. Her gaze was searching, flicking across Jiayi's face and back; and then all at once she took the stride that had separated them and caught Jiayi's chin in her fingertips. "I do, and if I am lucky, perhaps soon you'll wish it too," and Jiayi stood there, disbelieving it even as it happened, right up until the moment Tsamcho's mouth touched hers.
Only for an instant, quick and cautious, but Jiayi went still beneath it and in that single instant felt some vastness open up before her, as if she looked out toward a broad horizon from—from the western mountains, perhaps, where before there had only been the courtyard of the queen's quarters in the women's palace.
"I start to think I could conquer half the world," Tsamcho murmured against her cheek, "with a queen like you," and Jiayi closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her mouth, and felt her heart pound.