Chapter Sixteen Mother of the Realm

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MOTHER OF THE REALM

The next morning, I sit in for Qin Zheng at my first court assembly, positioned on a second, smaller throne behind his empty one on the dais. From the rafters of the high ceiling, a bead curtain streams down in front of the thrones, preventing the officials from seeing me clearly. It’s such overkill when my mask and veil already hide my face, but this is the traditional setup for when the wife or mother of a ruler sits in for him. Qin Zheng is all about smashing tradition until it provides a convenient excuse to keep other men away from me. He certainly has…issues.

I go along with it because it’s a sensitive time. Whatever helps keep the central court in line. Wan’er stands beside me, holding my ceremonial scythe. She must seem like mere decoration to the court, but I know she’ll have good political advice when I need it. I mean, she managed to unionize the palace workers despite being one of the newest hires. “Staffers” they now demand to be called, not “servants.”

“I wish to reiterate once again that every decision I make is by my own will,” Qin Zheng says on a livefeed from his quarantine chamber. It plays on two screens, a small one affixed to the back of his empty throne, for my eyes, and a big one dangling in front of the dais for the officials to gaze up at. “With our pilot bond, my empress cannot deceive me. She shall be my eyes and ears until I am well enough to return to the palace.”

My gauntlets give a metallic squeak as my fists clench. Across the bead curtain, most officials get visibly less tense at his declaration.

However, a particularly old one in the purple-robed front row speaks up. “Your Majesty, if I may: it would be much wiser to depose Lady Wu so Chief Strategist Zhuge may return to serve you. Lady Wu will—”

“Governor Chu, we have been over this,” Qin Zheng cuts in wearily from the throne room speakers.

Shockingly, the official fires back with more ferocity. “Lady Wu may not be able to deceive you, but she is a mere peasant girl, with a mind filled with childish fallacies! She knows nothing of the true complexity of political and economic matters. Whatever Your Majesty has heard from her cannot possibly be more than a bastardized truth!”

“Who the fuck is that?” I whisper to Wan’er. “Do you know?”

“That’s Chu Suiliang, the new governor of the Tang province,” Wan’er whispers back. “He used to be the vice governor, but got promoted after…the, um, incident.”

Ah. He must hate me more than he likes his promotion.

“Governor Chu!” Sima Yi raises his voice, standing a few spots over from Chu Suiliang. “Who are you to question His Majesty’s judgment?”

“And who are you, Strategist Sima, to speak against this matter when you have the most to lose once Chief Strategist Zhuge returns? Your jealousy of him is no secret!” Governor Chu retorts. The officials between him and Sima Yi stand stiffly in place, wide eyes aimed at the floor.

“That is slander! I respected him greatly!”

“Then why are you here, posing as our new Chairman, while Chief Strategist Zhuge has been forced into hiding?”

“Because I respect His Majesty more, while Zhuge Liang does not! He thinks himself so righteous that he can interfere in His Majesty’s personal matters! If anything, he’s the one holding His Majesty hostage—with his pompous rhetoric!”

“The choice for the mother of the realm is no personal matter!” Governor Chu yanks out the long pin securing his bureaucrat hat to his topknot and hurls the hat to the ground. “For over forty years, I have served Huaxia, and I vowed never to do wrong by my duty. Thus, I beg of Your Majesty: heed Chief Strategist Zhuge’s warning!”

“Generals, remove Governor Chu from the court,” Qin Zheng commands on the livefeed, massaging his temples.

Qieluo and Yang Jian march toward Governor Chu from either side of the dais.

“Chief Strategist Zhuge is the single most respected scholar among us, and he is correct about the Harlot Wu!” Governor Chu points at me. “She is unhinged of mind and tainted of body! If she is allowed to remain the empress, it will be the undoing of all order in Huaxia!”

As Qieluo and Yang Jian approach him, he drops to his knees and smashes his forehead on the ground over and over in violent kowtows. Blood spreads across his forehead. Qieluo and Yang Jian seize him by his arms, but he resists.

“Get him out of here already!” I can’t help but shout.

“See how she speaks out of turn!” Governor Chu thrashes against Qieluo and Yang Jian’s efforts to drag him away from the other officials. “See past her vixen charms! She is dangerous and vile and unfit to be your empress!”

While Governor Chu spews more accusations, Yizhi breaks from his position near the dais. He’s dressed in a new kind of purple robe, more in the style of a guard’s than an official’s, tight-sleeved and bound at the forearms with leather braces. A silver-studded belt fastens beneath its crossover top, and its pleated bottom cuts off above black boots. A golden ribbon ties back his chopped hair, pointedly visible without a hat to cover it. Nervous glances follow him. He uncaps a syringe from a holster in his belt and stabs it into Governor Chu’s shoulder.

Governor Chu’s insults trail off. He slackens in Qieluo and Yang Jian’s arms, eyes rolling back.

Yizhi faces the rest of the assembly. “Order before the throne!”

“Well done, Secretary Zhang,” Qin Zheng says, though he looks deep in thought. Like he’s genuinely weighing the pros and cons of keeping me alive. And the cons just might be winning.

With a raised-fist salute, Yizhi returns to his position while Qieluo and Yang Jian drag Governor Chu away. I resist the urge to smother my face with my hands. I cannot look weak right now. That might tip Qin Zheng over to “find an excuse to be rid of me” territory. He could go along with the officials’ accusation that I poisoned him, for example. If he releases the footage of him collapsing before me, no one would think he’s callously backstabbing the girl who brought him back to life.

“If I may…” Sima Yi steps forth. “Those like Governor Chu are failing to consider how the empress will be critical in one matter: providing heirs for Your Majesty. Think of it—a pilot lineage revived from legend! How could we throw this opportunity away?”

I freeze up on my throne.

“Indeed,” Qin Zheng says. “I had no surviving children in my time due to repeated miscarriages among my concubines, but I look forward to witnessing the advancements in reproductive medicine since then.”

Sima Yi eyes the officials to his left and right. “A mother with a spirit pressure high enough to match His Majesty in a Chrysalis surely has a much better chance of carrying strong, healthy sons of his to term.”

Fury rushes like boiling water through my veins at how smoothly they’re flowing through this exchange. Qin Zheng and Sima Yi clearly discussed this—this use of my body —before the assembly, without me present. I bet they even figured out how to do it with no physical contact between me and Qin Zheng. There are ways.

Skies, is this the real reason he’s keeping me alive, even though he despises me? He wants to breed me ?

The worst part is, it’s actually pacifying the officials. Many nod absently to each other, postures relaxing. I fantasize about crushing them all in a Chrysalis as I did their predecessors, but I’ve learned the painful lesson that this creates a whole new world of problems.

“If I may also speak—” Yizhi joins in, making my heart miss its next beat. “I propose that it would be wiser to leave this matter until at least a month from now, so there will be no doubts as to the child’s parentage. We would not want to leave any room for slander and gossip.”

Acrid heat swoops up and down through me. I know Yizhi’s trying to help, but his words cut like knives, deeper than everyone else’s, because he’s the one person I trusted never to hurt me. Yet here he is, talking as if all that matters about me is my womb, and that it ought to be subject to the judgment of these sleazy men.

He’s playing a role , I remind myself. He’s acting his part.

If Yizhi were being his true self, he wouldn’t dare bring attention to my hypothetical baby’s parentage issue. While the officials are no doubt imagining what Shimin and I did in our last days together, Qin Zheng knows the hidden other possibility—that I could be carrying Yizhi’s child without knowing it. What a mess that would be. I’m pretty sure I’m not pregnant, given the precautions we took and the timing of my last bleeding, but who knows? If fate and fortune wanted to play a joke on anyone, it’d be me.

Qin Zheng says nothing against Yizhi’s proposal, but he does not look happy on the livefeed as the officials mutter among themselves. I can’t let the risk Yizhi took be for nothing. I need to…I need to…

I need to return to the war front.

The realization leaves me cold, but no way can I stay in the palace just reading books all day with Wan’er. There’s practically nothing that bothers men more than seeing a woman they think is sitting around “mooching” off her husband. If I don’t go busy myself with pilot duties, Qin Zheng and the central court will never drop the idea of making me do maternal duties.

Not to mention that if I don’t take a lead in the war effort, how could I expect to rebuild the Iron Widows as my personal power base? More girls than me need to seize power in this revolution, or we’ll all stay the playthings of men, fearing their every whim and trapped with no choice but to totter on bound feet and birth baby after baby.

“Who’s the new Minister of War?” I ask Wan’er under my breath.

She leans toward me. “It should be Xu Jingye, fourth from the left in the front row. He was a senior strategist in the army’s Central Command, like Chairman Sima and Zhuge Liang.”

Fighting down shame I shouldn’t be feeling, I open my mouth.

“I concur with Secretary Zhang!” My voice rings through the throne room, which goes quiet. I do my best to copy the pretentious way everyone speaks here. “However, I have no intention of sitting idly while waiting for a month to pass. Minister Xu,” I address the wide-faced, square-jawed man Wan’er pointed out, “Yesterday, Captain Liu and Captain Wei returned to the Han province in the Azure Dragon, correct?”

Minister Xu bows. “To answer Your Highness: yes, they did. The captains said they wished they could have stayed longer to be sure of His Majesty’s well-being, but the war dynamics at the Han frontier are too dire for them not to return to action.”

“And those dynamics became dire in part because they broke from the strategists’ scheduling to come attack me and His Majesty, correct?”

Minister Xu clears his throat. “Well, yes, and they were disciplined severely for the transgression, including being fined six months’ of their wages. But I am certain they acted due to a misunderstanding, Your Highness. It was a chaotic night. Many rumors and lies were spread.”

“Many indeed. And since I was the subject of most of those rumors, it seems I should head to the Han frontier myself to dispel any lingering misunderstandings and get its war dynamics back to a secure level.”

“Your Highness—!” Sima Yi bugs his eyes out at me like he’s trying to beam his thoughts into my head. “Have you forgotten that His Majesty is not yet well enough to pilot?”

“Tell me, Chairman Sima,” I say, “what does a male pilot in a Balanced Match do when his partner can’t go to battle? Such as when she’s heavily pregnant?”

“He would take a concubine—but it would be the utmost insult to His Majesty for another man to touch you or the Yellow Dragon!”

“What if I didn’t go in the Yellow Dragon?” I clutch my throne’s lacquered armrests. “What if I took the Nine-Tailed Fox? It’s sitting unused at the Sui-Tang frontier, correct?”

Hushed gasps flutter through the assembly. On the livefeed, Qin Zheng straightens in his chair, watching intently through whatever cameras are in the throne room. I hope he’s thinking of that conversation we had about doing a sweep for girls with high spirit pressures. He should be realizing that there’ll be fewer doubts about it if the public gets their minds blown by seeing me deploy independently of him because he’s too busy with, I don’t know, restructuring the health care system or something. We’ll make up an excuse. It’d be a powerful statement that customs can be broken as long as it keeps Huaxia safe. No matter how much denial he’s in about his condition or how deeply he wants me gone, surely he can recognize that me taking the Fox is a good strategic move when this frontier crisis is demanding that we act.

Sima Yi’s mouth moves uselessly a few times before he says, “That would still be highly improper!”

“Since when do you care about propriety when it comes to war, Chairman Sima?” I snap. “Might I remind this assembly that you were the one who campaigned the hardest for me and Pilot Li, infamous as we were, to lead the recovery of Zhou?” I eye Minister Xu, who was surely there for the discussions. He stays rigid as a statue.

“Your Highness, the situation then is incomparable to now!” Sima Yi whines. “If we’re talking about reinforcing Han, then Prince-General Yang and Princess-General Dugu should go in the White Tiger, now that they have also recuperated their qì!” He gestures to them, who’ve returned from wherever they dragged Governor Chu to.

“And how do you propose they get the White Tiger to Han if we can’t deploy the Yellow Dragon to fly it there? Let them trek it there manually, at the risk of destroying everything along the way? I doubt our roads and bridges were built to withstand the weight of a Prince-class Chrysalis.”

“If we clear the roads and let other flight-capable Chrysalises assist with the airlift—”

“Enough!” Qin Zheng grunts in his livefeed. “My empress makes a worthy point in that letting the Nine-Tailed Fox sit unused is a grave waste. I am sick of hearing this court argue against allowing woman a greater role in the war when we should be utilizing all the talent we can. My empress may have a spare co-pilot, so long as his manhood is removed.”

Every official in the assembly goes as pale as they did when he told the workers across Huaxia to rise up in revolution.

“Your Majesty, I—I beg your pardon?” Sima Yi’s voice shoots up in pitch.

“You heard me. Find a young man with a reasonably high spirit pressure and castrate him.” Qin Zheng makes a slicing motion. “Then my empress may pilot the Nine-Tailed Fox with him.”