GUNPOWDER MAGNOLIA Chapter 21: The Strong and Flowering Tree (Patreon)

Hi Patrons!

Sorry it's late and very, VERY rough, but here's the newest chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia. Apologies in advance for the typos and repetitive, clunky prose (I really messed up and ran out of time on this one), but I hope you enjoy anyway!

If you're not caught up, you can find all available chapters here.

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Chapter 21: The Strong and Flowering Tree

The Falconer’s Keep was a distinctly Yao structure. Walls of stone encircled a collection of slender, imperious towers that looked like the architects had wanted their creation to breach Heaven more than they had wanted it to stand on the earth. The castle’s namesake messenger birds perched high on those spires, occasionally ruffling and preening their sleek flight feathers. Most were small birds of prey, but there were also great black eagles with wingspans the size of Lanthe’s horse.

Lanthe processed all this in a daze and wondered weakly whether she was imagining that some of those eagles looked big enough to snatch a soldier. The ride had rendered her a corpse. It wasn’t that it had taken a long time—just a day and a half. This was Yelhwa’s doing. Lanthe’s last conversation with the princess had left her strung so tightly that she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep…

During their stop overnight, her eyes had stayed wide open on the stars as Tairo snored softly beside her. Had Lanthe been anything other than a soldier of Ro, she would have keeled over from sheer exhaustion during the next day’s ride. But she could sit straight in her sleep—and did so as her vision blurred, darkened, then abruptly jerked back to light whenever she felt herself falling.

Tairo noticed, naturally. He wasn’t blind.

“Are you sure you’re not injured, Captain?” he had asked as many times as was appropriate without disrespecting Lanthe’s strength.

“I’m sure,” she said each time and, knowing that wasn’t an adequate explanation for how haggard she had grown, “I just didn’t sleep.”

That was all she was willing to give him.

The thought of relaying what Yelhwa had told her had crossed her mind, obviously, but only for a moment before she shut it down. What sort of burden was that to put on Tairo? How much do you think your father loves you? Do you think your father would turn traitor to his king for you? Do you think he would tear our homeland in half for you? How could she ask him that? And why should she? Lanthe was the captain, which meant the burden of decision was hers.

She just had to decide whether Tairo should marry Yelhwa in the hopes of a Ro civil war or deny her on the assumption that it would mean war on other fronts…

Inside the high walls of the Falconer’s Keep, a flurry of nobles and servants greeted the party. There were more high-ranked military men, more lords, more ladies Lanthe should be observing and attempting to identify. All she could do was hold her head up and keep her eyes open. Since most of the Yao were also battle-worn and exhausted, Yelhwa’s party was quickly ushered to the correct quarters to rest—the wounded to the infirmary, the soldiers to the barracks, the nobles to the fine chambers inside the tower. As a guest of the princess and a bodyguard to Tairo, Lanthe was escorted inside with the nobles.

The Falconer’s Keep was odd inside. There were few trees in Yao, but walking the tight interior corridors, Lanthe felt that the builders of these towers had tapped into some fundamental understanding of great trees—the way they swayed with the high winds but never toppled. The Keep was not only a communications hub for messenger birds but a seasonal retreat for the nobility. Inside the main tower, an attempt had been made to emulate Kaisia’s opulence. But even among finely embroidered tapestry, there was a rough-hewn wildness to the Keep, not in the art itself but in the ancient creak of the wood and the howl of the wind outside. There was something of the farmhouse and the barracks in that continuous sound, and Lanthe was hopeful that maybe, here, finally, she might get some sleep.

A male servant showed Lanthe to a modest room across the narrow creaking hallway from Tairo’s. When Lanthe saw that there was already a tub of water and a roll of fresh bandages, she told the servant to leave her.

Having moved to take her saddlebags from her, hesitated. “Sir?”

“I can look after myself,” she said, dropping the bags with an unceremonious thud. “Leave.” And her ragged voice must have come off quite icy because the man retreated without further protest.

It was mechanical muscle memory that stripped Lanthe’s clothes, scrubbed the blood and grime from her body, and rewound the bandages around her chest… As soon as she had donned the sleeping robe the servant had provided, she let exhaustion take her and fell back on the bed. But as the light faded to night outside, Lanthe only half-slept on the overly soft silk-covered bamboo. Tiny creaks would wake her. Which was untenable. The Falconer’s Keep was just a stop on their way to the Medyan border. Lanthe needed to sleep in order to stay on Fidget’s back for several more days—to say nothing of dealing with Yelhwa and the threat of war.

When she woke for the dozenth time, Lanthe resorted to her usual method of relieving stress with the same mechanical efficiency that had moved her body for the last two days. She slipped a hand between her legs, pressed them into herself, worked her fingers.

She imagined what she always did: she was a wave starting deep in the ocean, rolling toward the shores of Kailong Bay… Too late, she thought of the fact that the wave was no longer an abstraction. Accompanying Yelhwa’s party, each day brought Lanthe closer to the bay, to the border, to war. Her muscles tightened, clamped around her fingers.

Unbidden, Yelhwa filled her head.

The curve of her shoulders, the imperious danger in her eyes as she stalked toward Lanthe, reached for her sword—Lanthe grabbed both the princess’s wrists, pinning her back on silk, on wood, on grass; it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the way Yelhwa gasped as her black hair spilled around her. For once disheveled. For once surprised. Her lips parted.

Lanthe’s hips jerked, and her eyes flew open in cold shock. What was she doing? This had never happened. Not when she tried to picture any man. Why was this happening?

Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to force Yelhwa from her mind, tried to still her own fingers, but the wave had picked up too much momentum. Lanthe braced a bare foot on the silks, spine arched. Horrified, she realized that she couldn’t stop.

“No!” she said aloud, and physically threw herself from the bed. She landed hard on her hands and knees. The blessed simplicity of sharp pain jolted a fraction of sense back into her. And she was on her feet, pacing. Stumbling to the wash basin, she plunged both hands in and scrubbed at her right until her callouses went numb. And she was out in the hall, pacing more, faster, wishing the cool of the wood floor beneath her feet would cool the madness. Both hands dug hard into her hair which had grown too long on the sides of her head since she had been in Yao without a razor.

Was this General Runkai’s fault? He had put this bizarre idea in Lanthe’s head—that she might think of Yelhwa that way… It had to be his fault for seeding the idea since, otherwise, it wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible—on Lanthe’s part, if not Yelhwa’s. Yes, aristocrats like Yelhwa and Tenro could have unconventional tastes if they wanted. Nobles were allowed their quirks, their decadence, their complexities. But Lanthe wasn’t like that. She was strongest in her simplicity. She wasn’t like that, she thought, her feet picking up speed. She couldn’t afford to be like that. Not here. Not now.

Lanthe turned a corner—and jolted to a stop, her heart dropping through the floor. In her rush to escape the confines of her room and her thoughts, Lanthe had forgotten how small the interior tower was. She hadn’t thought about the fact that a few steps might bring her face to face with disaster. The narrow hall had opened onto an exterior walkway with a view of the stars, and a figure leaned into the railing ahead, head tilted to look up at the sky. And Lanthe was horrified to realize that she had come to know that figure so well that there was no question who it was—even before she turned and spoke.

“Nightmares, Luyang Lanthe?”

If only. “Something like that, your Excellency.”

The princess wasn’t properly dressed. Just a silk robe, belted with a sash around her waist—like the day Lanthe had met her. The garment was a soft seashell color this time instead of blood red, the pink matching the shine of her pale godmarks in the moonlight. And how was it that looking at the princess now, after so many days in her company, Lanthe didn’t feel that she understood her any better than she had that first day?

Yelhwa placed the heels of her hands on the rail and pushed off it in an oddly childish movement, deadly fingertips gripping the rail to maintain suspension as she tilted back on her heels.

“You wander in the night to calm your thoughts?”

“No, your Excellency. Not usually.”

“Mmm. Neither do I.”

What was that supposed to mean? Had Yelhwa wandered from her quarters without a guard for a specific reason?

“If you have business, I wouldn’t disturb you, your Excellency.”

Lanthe started to step back, to bow herself out of the princess’s presence. But at that moment, Yelhwa’s fingers tugged sharply at the railing, spinning her around in a bright whir of silk. Her robe swished to a stop as she came out of the turn to lean against the railing—and the fabric had all slid just slightly out of place. Suddenly there was too much of Yelhwa’s skin, catching the moonlight, clavicle bones sweeping in opposite directions like a crane’s flight feathers, the soft upper curve of a breast…

And for a moment, all Lanthe could think was that it was a shame no erudite male suitors ever got to see Yelhwa like this: a little undone. The poetry that could spring from a man’s mind, an artist’s mind. Yet Lanthe had no power of poetry, only this anxiously burning ache and horrifying thought: what if Runkai was right? About her. About Yelhwa.

If he wasn’t right, then why was Yelhwa looking at Lanthe with that little smile on her lips? And why was Lanthe standing here, mesmerized? Why did Yelhwa say, “Maybe there is no pressing business”? “Maybe I was just lonely with my thoughts.”

“You were… lonely?” Lanthe said, blinking stupidly.

“A little,” Ylehwa said, “and I find that no matter the night, there’s always someone else awake, restless with thoughts of the future.”

It wasn’t exactly the innocent coincidence she was suggesting. If Tairo had noticed Lanthe’s sleep deprivation, of course, Yelhwa had too. And unlike Tairo, Yelhwa knew exactly what fears might be keeping Lanthe awake. She had put them there. If someone in this fortress was going to be awake, Yelhwa had good reason to assume it would be Lanthe. Was it possible that this meeting was not an accident? Could Yelhwa really be that good at anticipating Lanthe? Or was she just implying it to put Lanthe on her back foot?

“Shall I show you what I do to calm my nerves in the night?”

And Lanthe was thankful for the darkness, that Yelhwa couldn’t possibly see her godmarks flush dark blue nor the skin around them grow pink. “I don’t know that that’s necessary, Your Excellency.”

“Not necessary, no,” Yelhwa agreed. “But diverting. Come.”

Yelhwa moved abruptly, sweeping on bare feet into a nearby corridor—and Lanthe’s body followed like a moth to the flame before her mind could form an objection or tell her feet to stop.

Lanterns in the Falconer’s Keep were few and weak, and Lanthe didn’t register where Yelhwa was taking her until she stepped through a doorway and the flowery scent of cosmetic oils hit her. The shapes of ornate furniture solidified in the dim light—including a bed, half-obscured behind a sheer canopy, silk blankets peeled back where a princess had slipped out.

Lanthe froze, understanding too late that she had entered Yelhwa’s bedchamber.

“Your Excellency...”

Yelhwa turned back to her in the low light, hair spilling like ink over her shoulders. “You didn’t realize where I was taking you, did you?”

“Why are we here, your Excellency?” Lanthe demanded. “Where are your guards?”

“Why? Am I not safe with you, Captain?” Yelhwa gave Lanthe a teasing smile before answering in earnest. “Lady Suzu is responsible for guarding me or assigning others to do so—and she’ll give me my space on nights I tell her to. So, you can relax, Mage Slayer. No one is coming to seize and behead you unless I scream quite loudly.”

Lanthe was not reassured. “Lord General Runkai warned me to watch my step around you,” she told Yelhwa. “He suspects that my intentions are… ungentlemanly.” She didn’t mention that Runkai seemed to think Yelhwa was returning—even, perhaps, initiating—the flirtation. Lanthe just wanted to see how the princess would react.

As usual, she got little: a faintly interested raise of an eyebrow and a light, “Does he?”

The reaction gave Lanthe exactly no insight into Yelhwa’s feelings about her zealously protective foremost general. Did she respect Runkai as a fatherly figure—the way he seemed to see himself? He hadn’t come up when she was mourning her relationship with General Inshu… In fact, Yelhwa had implied that she considered the Red Weasel her only intellectual equal among her father’s generals—which, in turn, implied that Runkai did not meet the standard. But Lanthe was making a lot of logical leaps. She hadn’t seen enough of Yelhwa and Runkai together to understand their relationship beyond the requisite level of trust and respect between a general and his young ruler.

But regardless of Yelhwa’s feelings on the matter, Lanthe had absolutely no doubt that Runkai would see her dead if he knew she had entered the princess’s private quarters.

“Your Excellency, I really shouldn’t be here.”

“I told you to be here,” Yelhwa said. “You’re exactly where you should be.”

“Not if you want to secure a political marriage,” Lanthe protested in frustration. “What if someone finds that I’ve been here with you?” A foreign, peasant man—the Mage Slayer—in the princess’s private quarters. It was one thing for them to secretly meet in the palace at Kaisia with its many obscuring curtains and secret passages. But this fortress was small, and the walls were thin. The fact that no one had waylaid them in the halls didn’t mean some hidden night watchman hadn’t seen them. It didn’t mean some sleepless noble hadn’t heard their footsteps.

“Well,” Yelhwa smiled. “Isn’t that what makes this sort of meeting exciting? The transgression?”

Exciting? Lanthe was incredulous. How did risking discovery here with Lanthe serve Yelhwa’s purposes in any scenario? If she meant to marry some as-yet-unknown foreign noble for the purposes of political alliance, being caught in private with Lanthe wouldn’t do her any favors. If she meant to marry Tairo, it was arguably worse. What lord’s reputation could recover from losing at courtship to his far shorter, far plainer, common-born bodyguard? The princess was reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. Not here on her preferred field of courtship and closed doors. So why was she doing this?

“Is it inconceivable to you that I enjoy your company, Luyang?”

Lanthe paused to digest the words for a moment before answering honestly, “Yes, your Excellency.” What was Lanthe to someone like Yelhwa? An illiterate in a world of graphemancers, a plain face in a world of exceptional beauties, a simple soldier in a world of great tactical minds. Lanthe’s only distinction among everyone Yelhwa knew was that she had slapped the princess in the face. “It’s feeling a little inconceivable.”

“You think too little of yourself, Mage Slayer.”

Ah, right. That was Lanthe’s other notable distinction: she had killed one of Yelhwa’s graphemancers.

No, Lanthe decided. There was no way this invitation to Yelhwa’s chambers was purely earnest or amicable. Lanthe just had to find out the princess’s real reason. And, as usual, it seemed direct questions would take her nowhere.

All she could do was follow as Yelhwa proceeded through a curtain into a room adjoining the bedchamber. Pushing through the curtain after her, Lanthe found herself in a scriptorium as big as any chamber within the Keep. As Lanthe turned in bewilderment, wondering why someone would attach a writing room to a royal bedroom, Yelhwa explained, “These quarters were built during the decline of graphemancy. King Yungsei hoped that by providing his family beautiful, intimate spaces dedicated to calligraphy in every place they stayed, he might inspire his sons to capture the magic of Heaven as their ancestors had.”

“But it was unsuccessful?” Lanthe asked.

“My esteemed ancestor King Yungsei, I think, misunderstood the true source of graphemantic power. The essence of graphemancy doesn’t come from hours in the scriptorium, eyes on the paper—although that is an essential component—you can’t spend all your spare time at a desk finessing your technique. Places like this are best used in the quiet lulls when no one is around.”

She slid into an ornate chair behind one of the desks.

There was ink and paper laid out before her like she had already spent part of the night writing to calm her nerves—then given up at some point and walked away. Scooping the sleeve of her robe back with her left hand, she took up a fresh calligraphy brush in her right and dipped it like a fishing bird dipping its beak into the water. Her hand moved smoothly across the paper. Not lightning fast as it did in graphemancy, but luxuriantly like a warrior practicing the slow version of a combat form, indulging in all the little subtleties of the movement.

“When I can’t sleep, I find the nearest ink and paper and practice poetry. Not the composed kind. The kind that moves without thought. This is what calms me. Come.” She beckoned Lanthe with a tilt of her head. “Maybe it will calm you too.”

Lanthe almost laughed when Yelhwa plucked up a spare brush and held it out as if expecting her to take it. “You know I can’t write, your Excellency.”

“But you have a hand, and a will, and a soul. Sit with me.”

The furniture here might be largely foreign to Lanthe, but even she could see that the desk before Yelhwa, as broad as it was, was only built for one person. Pulling another chair over would put the two of them close together in a way that was not conventional among scholars—nor any two nobles who weren’t married, Lanthe was fairly sure.

“I prefer to stand, your Excellency.”

“As you wish.” Yelhwa was still holding the spare brush out to Lanthe, handle first like a dagger. “You can write standing.”

“Write what, exactly?” Lanthe couldn’t even write her own name.

“Anything,” Yelhwa said. “If you put your favorite glaive form into lines, what would it look like?”

Like a glaive form, Lanthe thought impatiently. Three dimensional and ending in a steel blade, not ink on flat paper. That was a glaive’s utility, Lanthe’s only utility. Yet here she had been taking one stumbling step after another into Yelhwa’s favored domain, losing balance with each step. She would not take this one step further.

“Is this your attempt to reassert your superiority, your Excellency?” Lanthe decided to ask bluntly. “After I disrespected you during the Medyan attack? You want me to take that brush and humiliate myself now that we’re back on your turf?”

Yelhwa blinked up at Lanthe in surprise. “That wasn’t my intention, Luyang,” she said but set the spare brush down all the same. Her eyes had flicked upward again, surveying Lanthe with that discomfiting over-intensity. “I thought we had passed our period of antagonism, you and I.”

“You told me that my country is doomed to war.” The words just fell out. Heaven, Lanthe was too tired. Far too tired to be engaging with the princess of Yao.

“Not of my making,” Yelhwa said. “Surely that’s not what has you in a spin, Ro, Mage Slayer. I thought you weren’t afraid of war.”

“I’m not afraid of war, your Excellency. For myself, I’m not afraid…” Lanthe was saying too much. She stopped to take a breath, regain control of her stupid tongue.

“But you have family near Kailong Bay,” Yelhwa said in soft realization, “near the waters Ro shares with Yao and Medyan. That’s why you’re upset.”

“I never mentioned my family to you,” Lanthe said.

“You didn’t have to. Your time in the military has smoothed over the regional quirks of your accent, but they’re there. They’re there when you’re tired, when you’re earnest, when you speak without thinking carefully first.”

Shit. Was she right? Was Lanthe’s region of origin still that obvious?

“It’s subtle,” Yelhwa said, seeming to register the confusion on Lanthe’s face. “I don’t know that most people would pick it up, but this is the secret of graphemancy. The difference between power and impotence is in these tiny, tiny subtleties of flavor that most people gloss over. It’s in those little details that you reach God in Heaven and move Him to answer.”

“So… you really think you’re writing to God in Heaven?” Lanthe knew that was what ancient graphemancers had thought they were doing. Somehow, it seemed so impossibly presumptuous for someone—even someone as prideful as Yelhwa—to say right to her face.

“I know I am,” Yelhwa said evenly. “How else would he answer?”

That was fair logic, Lanthe supposed grudgingly. If anything spoke of divine power, it was materializing water, fire, and lightning from nothing.

“You would understand if you’d ever experienced it.” Yelhwa leaned forward. “If you would let me teach you…”

Lanthe didn’t meet her eyes. “This kind of power wouldn’t work for me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not a Yao noble,” Lanthe said. She was not Yao at all. “I don’t have the right bloodline.”

“The magic of Yao isn’t carried through a bloodline, Luyang Lanthe. I would have thought that was obvious from how many commoners and minor nobles I’ve brought to proficiency in the art.”

“I suppose… I assumed they all must have noble lineage somewhere in their ancestry,” Lanthe said. “I thought the great historical graphemancers were high-ranking nobles.”

“They were,” Yelhwa said, “because historically, only the nobility have the spare time, ink, paper, and great tutors to get really good at the characters. If every peasant from northern Angtei to the Middle Sea had those things, there would be a mage in every family.”

Lanthe knew her skepticism was showing on her face.

“My dynasty was founded eight generations ago by southern raiders who conquered the indigenous Yao tribes and brought many cultures to heel under a single red crane banner. Before that, the four tribes of Yao were all busy conquering neighboring people and intermarrying with them. The concept of a sacred Yao bloodline is a myth spun by skillful poets like all powerful things. There is no Yao bloodline that carries this magic from one generation to the next.”

“But… that’s the foundation of your dynasty,” Lanthe said, shocked to hear Yelhwa dismiss her birthright so readily.

“Graphemancy is the foundation of my dynasty and my whole nation,” Yelhwa said. “To reduce the art and its great practitioners to their bloodlines is to misunderstand the meaning of the art and, by extension, the nation of Yao. The beauty of a language that belongs to the nation in all its variety and complexities. This is why some of my most promising new graphemancers are peasants. There are particulars of ancient Yao that have only been preserved in the speech of the lowborn. This is what King Yungsei and his sons missed. Daylight is not for the scriptorium. It is for the streets. It turns out my tutors were all wrong, and I was smart to skip so many of my lessons to go play gambling games with the servant children.”

“That’s where you learned to curse like a bandit,” Lanthe realized aloud.

“Like a bandit!” Rather than looking offended, Yelhwa’s eyes had lit up slightly as she drew in a prim little gasp. “You flatter me, Captain!”

“And… that’s the part of graphemancy King Yungsei was missing?” Lanthe said, struggling to grasp the idea of filthy peasant expletives possibly being relevant to a high art like graphemancy. “Common gambling games?”

“Among other common things,” Yelhwa said. “Often, when Yao nobles attempt graphemancy, their prose is a bit stale, over-worded, and they don’t get the results they’re looking for. A lot of them don’t have the range. Ah! That’s one the nobles don’t know how to use.”

“What is?”

“‘A lot.’ With them, it must always be ’a great deal,’ which is lovely in some cases. In others, it’s a waste of strokes without adding meaning or flavor.”

“And God likes… flavor?” Lanthe said.

“He does, as a matter of fact. Contractions are another crucial sticking point. The ancient Yao loved contractions in service of rhyme and rhythm. It was a mark of sophistication to incorporate them into one’s speech at the right intervals. Your average contemporary Yao noble isn’t fluent in as many contractions as the average peasant. When I say this writing is the soul of Yao, I mean that entirely. This script is all of Yao, from the poorest farmer to the highest king. There are parts of it, in its roots, that are Ro as well, and Medyan, and Bayin. This is why I believe there would be immense value in teaching this art to someone like you.”

“Assuming it’s possible for someone like me to learn,” Lanthe said, though she didn’t truly believe it was, “you don’t actually want a Ro soldier tapping into the powers writing system, do you?”

Yelhwa shrugged as though the idea of her country’s greatest weapon falling into foreign hands wasn’t particularly bothersome to her. “Personally? I teach anyone who’ll sit with me.”

“Right,” Lanthe said, still cynical and slightly confused. “In search of your next mage prodigy.” Perhaps Yelhwa was so confident in her ability to manipulate anyone who came into her orbit that she didn’t think she needed to worry who learned her secret art.

“Not just to find graphemancers,” Yelhwa said. “While this writing system survives, the soul of Yao survives. Do you not feel the same about the soul of Ro?”

“Our elders say that Ro is in the land,” Lanthe said, “not in the language.” Dialects of Ro were so different that her home dialect was closer to Yao than it was to the Imperial Ro Tairo had grown up speaking.

“Ah.” Yelhwa nodded. “I suppose that makes perfect sense. Your land is good to its people. Our land is not so rich nor so kind. What do we have? We have our arts and language, the ways it prompts us to think, and the ways it binds us to each other.” Yelhwa’s brush slowed as her lips pressed together, and she stared down something far ahead that Lanthe couldn’t see. “I think I was called by God to defend Yao, not so that we could raise oceans and fires across the land but so that the soul of our people could live. I believe that soul is in this script. It’s beautiful in itself, powerful in itself, even when it doesn’t lift the seas. Other people only glimpse its beauty and power when they see what a graphemancer can do with it—that’s where they see the value in learning it—but they don’t understand. It is inherently valuable… as Yao is inherently valuable.”

“So, you wouldn’t mind if your script wasn’t a potential weapon?” Lanthe said. “You would practice it—and teach it so readily—anyway?”

“I would,” Yelhwa said, all calm confidence—as though she expected Lanthe to believe that without question. “Although I think you’ve misunderstood the art in the same way King Yungsei misunderstood it. The use of Yao script as a weapon can only follow from appreciating the language for its own sake. It can only follow from deep love and beauty.”

“So, that’s how you burn men to death, your Excellency?” Lanthe said, following the movement of Yelhwa’s hand down a new page in what looked from their layout like lines of poetry. “With beauty?”

“Is there no beauty in destruction?” Yelhwa asked. “In fire?”

“I…” Lanthe didn’t know how to answer. Instead, she deflected. “Some things just aren’t beautiful,” she said. “Aren’t some things just… inherently ugly?”

“That depends on the calligrapher.”

“What do you mean, your Excellency?”

Instead of answering the question, Yelhwa said, “Has Chang Tairo never taught you how to write your name?”

“He’s shown me how he writes it,” Lanthe said, but obviously, the sweeping lines were meaningless to her. “He’s never tried to teach me to write it myself.”

Yelhwa’s nose wrinkled. “What sort of friend is he, anyway?”

“A military one,” Lanthe said defensively, “who knows his place and mine.”

Yelhwa made no verbal response, but the exasperation in her expression was scathing as she turned her attention back to the paper.

“Do you know what the name Lanthe means?”

“That my older siblings had names beginning with ‘lan,’ and in my village, families name their offspring in matched sets.” It was a good sorting system when one walked into a home with several generations living together. The look Yelhwa gave her was so quietly pitying that Lanthe said defensively, “Fine, a tree, right? It means something to do with trees?” One of the most mundane things to be found in the Ten Kingdoms.

“No need to be cross, Luyang. It was a trick question. There are three masculine forms of the name Lanthe and one feminine. In his entreaties for your life, Chang Tairo used the masculine form most common in Ro, so I’ll assume that’s the correct one. That is to say, it’s how he perceives you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Assuming you never wrote your name for him, he could have chosen this form of Lanthe”—Yelhwa’s hand moved down a fresh page in a tumble of strokes that meant nothing to Lanthe—“which pairs the tree radical with a feather and star to create a very old Ro word for ‘arrow.’ Or he could have chosen the ‘land’ radical, which naturally creates the common Eastern Ro and Angtei word for ‘woodland.’” Another character swept from the end of Yelhwa’s brush in elegant strokes. “A good common name for a man of Ro—strong, rooted, of the land. But instead, he chose this character…” Her brush moved to a third line and suddenly moved with more purpose, more excitement. The lines grew bolder like the strokes of a swordsman finding his footing. “Behold!” Yelhwa lay down several straight, powerful lines. “The tree becomes its most noble attribute. This masculine form of Lanthe means ‘steadfast’... ‘steadfast as the tree.’”

Lanthe looked down at the character standing in proud, strong black against the paper. How well did Tairo really know her? And how much did he idealize her in his own self-deprecation? Was Lanthe really steadfast? she wondered as a gust of wind creaked the walls of the scriptorium around them. No tree stood alone on the plains of Yao. The wind was too strong.

But if she wasn’t the steadfast man that Tairo thought she was, who was she?

“And…” in spite of herself, Lanthe couldn’t help but ask. “What about the fourth version? The feminine?”

A smile spread across Yelhwa’s face. Not the mocking, vaguely flirtatious one to which Lanthe had become accustomed. A real one, genuine and open, crinkling her rose-colored godmarks with joy. “The feminine form is my favorite.”

“Why?”

“Because the feminine detracts nothing from the masculine Lanthe that Chang Tairo admires and writes with such reverence. She is everything the man Lanthe embodies but more. Let me show you…” Yelhwa dipped her brush. “Steadfast is the tree,” she murmured as she started the same stroke combination as the previous character, “but look!” More strokes fell into place alongside the original shape. “This time, it flowers!”

“Those…” Those don’t look like flowers, Lanthe wanted to say, but the words stopped at the movement of Yelhwa’s fingers. There were flurries of petals in the way she moved. And Lanthe understood. The meaning was as much in the movement—in the calligrapher—as the shape itself. When Yelhwa finished the character, an impression of that movement remained in the tapering and swish of the strokes. It seemed to live and scream ‘Yelhwa’ even as it dried on the paper.

“And here we have your full name.” Yelhwa restarted on a new line. “Luyang… the sun in autumn casts its light on a strong and flowering tree: Lanthe.”

As Yelhwa spoke, Lanthe glimpsed the network of images and symbols that held the language together. It was like faint moonlight on the most beautiful garden in the world, alive with a thousand flowers, trees, and whirring insects—only for the moon to vanish behind a cloud.

“There!” Yelhwa finished out the character with an indulgent caress that clung almost seductively to the page. Naked and shameless. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yes,” Lanthe agreed but only because of the way Yelhwa was looking at the character.

She supposed if she were God in hiding in Heaven, if anything were to bring her back to the mortal realm, it would be the joy in Yelhwa’s eyes and the soft sweep of her fingers. Looking at that Heavenly light in Yelhwa’s eyes… For the first time in her life, oddly, Lanthe wanted to be a woman.

“It’s a shame…” she said without thinking.

“What is?” Yelhwa asked.

“That I’m not the feminine Lanthe…” She immediately realized how odd that sounded when Yelhwa knew perfectly well what was really under her robe. “I mean—if I was when I was born, it’s not what I grew into.” She had no blossoms to catch the artistic mind of a princess. She had only the simple straight lines Tairo saw when he looked at her—if that.

“I don’t know about that.” Yelhwa looked from the page into Lanthe’s face, and, for a heart-skipping moment, the glow didn’t leave her expression.

“What do you mean?”

“Many trees don’t stop growing at twenty-five. Heaven, many even bloom in autumn. And any poet knows we all have a bit of the feminine and masculine in us. Feminine and masculine aspirations, feminine and masculine… appetites.” She bared her teeth slightly around the last syllable as though biting into a peach. It sent a tingle like fruit juice dribbling down Lanthe’s skin.

“Found your blossoms, steadfast Luyang.” Yelhwa lifted a hand to Lanthe’s face.

A thumb brushed Lanthe’s cheek, and she jerked back so sharply that her thighs hit the neighboring desk. Wood scraped too loudly against the floor, and thank the Heaven Lanthe wasn’t really a man; when Yelhwa cast an amused glance between her legs, there was nothing to see.

“I should go.” Lanthe turned toward the door and sensed Yelhwa sliding languidly to her feet at her back.

“I wouldn’t.” The slight sing-song in Yelhwa’s voice made Lanthe stop—and thank Heaven she had. Because it was only in that beat of stillness that Lanthe heard the footsteps. Someone was in the hallway outside the scriptorium, moving closer…

Lanthe’s heart dropped as she whirled on Yelhwa and whispered, “Who is that?”

Yelhwa’s only response was to smile with a twinkle of mischief in her dark eyes. Lanthe’s dread shot through with a searing bolt of rage as she realized that Yelhwa had known someone was coming. This was all a game she was playing, and Lanthe’s head was on the board with a blade hanging over it.

Reaching up, Yelhwa put a hand on Lanthe’s shoulder and pressed down.

Lanthe folded with the pressure because there was nothing else to do. For the second time that night, her knees hit the floor while her heart tried to jump out of her chest—all because of Yelhwa. She was curled up under the desk when the door opened.