The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

balconies …; out on the mountain.’

      What little colour was left in Yuet’s cheeks drained away. ‘What in the name of Cahan was she doing there? When this was all coming down?’

      ‘We were supposed to meet at the balcony this morning.’ Tai pulled at Yuet’s arm. ‘Hurry!’

      Yuet followed, frowning, until her eyes suddenly lit briefly with recognition. ‘You’re from Linh-an, you’re her jin-shei-bao.’

      ‘Hurry.’ Tai seemed to have forgotten every other word she ever knew. All that was beating in her heart, in her blood, in her mind, was hurry. The broken doll on the ledge below the balcony, that was just the shell of Antian – but if they didn’t hurryhurryhurry the shell would melt and shred in the mountain winds like a cloud and disappear for ever …; and this was Antian, the Princess who laughed, who cared, who loved, who would be Empress one day …;

      Yuet had the presence of mind to snag a relatively able-bodied male servant on their way to the balcony, surmising – rightly – that Antian would have to be extracted out of some unspeakable wreckage before she could be helped. But that hadn’t prepared her for the devastation of the mountainside when the three of them finally emerged onto what was left of the little balcony. Yuet gasped, her hand going to her throat.

      ‘She survived this?’ Yuet said breathlessly.

      Tai had run to the edge of the chasm. ‘Antian? Antian, I’m here. I brought help.’

      The manservant reached out and scooped the struggling Tai out of harm’s way, and peered carefully over the edge himself.

      ‘We would need rope, I think,’ he said.

      ‘There is no time for that now.’ Yuet had approached and was gauging the distance between herself and her patient. ‘I think there is space enough. Lower me down, and then go fetch a rope and another pair of hands to help you. This will need doing gently. Dear sweet Cahan, she is still alive. Princess? I am coming down to you.’

      Antian whispered something, very softly, and Tai thought she heard, No, it is too dangerous. But Yuet had already grasped the manservant’s wrists with her hands, and he had wrapped his own fingers around her wrists and was trying to judge the most stable spot to lower her down on.

      ‘I don’t think there’s a good place,’ Yuet said at last. ‘There’s no time, there’s no time! Lower me down there and go get help!’

      ‘Yes, sai’an.’ He grasped her wrists firmly and the corded muscles in his arms knotted as he lowered her slowly, gently, down to where Antian lay. Yuet felt her feet touch something solid, then it lurched beneath her heel. She gasped.

      ‘Wait!’

      ‘I won’t let go, sai’an,’ the servant said, his voice tight with the effort of holding her suspended above the tumbled chaos at her feet. ‘Not until you tell me.’

      Yuet felt with her foot, found a foothold that felt solid, tested it. It held. She brought the other foot closer, fitted her heel into the arch of the grounded foot like a ballerina, found her balance, stood. The manservant felt one of her long fingers tapping at his wrist.

      ‘You can let go now. Go, get a rope. Get help. For the love of Cahan, run!’

      ‘Yes, sai’an, I go!’ He released her arms, turned, and ran back the way they had come. Tai could hear him calling out urgently as he ran, but then he was dismissed from her mind and she knelt on the edge of the ruined balcony and craned her neck down to see what Yuet was doing.

      The healer shifted her weight very gradually, very carefully, aware that a single false move she made could send both her and the Little Empress tumbling all the way down to the bottom of the chasm below.

      ‘I come, Princess. I am coming.’

      ‘It’s too late,’ Antian whispered, her voice a breath.

      Yuet bit her lip, looking at the broken body at her feet. The fingers of Antian’s hand, lying over the spreading black stain on her robe, were slick with the blood that had seeped through. The cut on her forehead was starting to clot but was still seeping, and a thin stream of it had flowed past the corner of her eye and down her temple, soaking the glossy black hair. Yuet could read the signs, and the signs were all over the Little Empress – the pallor of her skin, the white shadow around her lips, the shallow breath that moved the thin ribcage beneath the blood-soaked robe. This was just one more face of the death that Yuet had found at every turn in the Palace that grim morning.

      ‘Oh, no,’ Yuet found herself whispering. ‘No, no, no, no.’

      ‘Do something,’ Tai said desperately from the edge of the balcony, just above them.

      Yuet took another careful step, which brought her right up to Antian’s body, and went down gingerly on one knee. ‘Let me see, Your Highness.’

      Antian allowed her hand to be removed from her bloodied side, her eyes closing. Her lips were parted, and she breathed so shallowly that Tai, staring at her from her perch on the edge, could not swear that she breathed at all. The breath came a little more sharply as Yuet’s gentle fingers probed the wound in Antian’s side and came away bloody. Yuet kept her eyes lowered, looked down the line of Antian’s hip and onto the unnaturally bent leg, allowed her fingers to linger there as well, drawing another sharp gasp of pain.

      ‘That’s just a broken leg, we can mend that,’ Yuet said soothingly. ‘I will make a splint, just as soon as we get you up.’

      Antian’s eyes opened, cloudy but alert. ‘What …; happened to …;’

      Yuet tried to look away but a sudden rush of tears she could not hold back betrayed everything, and Antian bit her lip.

      ‘They are dead, aren’t …; they? All of them?’

      ‘I …; I don’t know, Your Highness, but …; we have not found Second Princess Oylian yet.’

      ‘So she won’t …; be Empress,’ Antian said, and glanced up to catch Tai’s eye. It cost her something, because she could not help a soft moan as she tried to turn her head. ‘And neither …; will I.’

      ‘It’s just a broken leg,’ said Yuet stubbornly.

      ‘And this?’ Antian whispered, only her eyes flickering down to her side. It seemed that her eyes were all that she had the strength to move.

      ‘Where is that man with the rope?’ Yuet snapped, fretting.

      ‘I can help you,’ Tai said suddenly. ‘I can help you bring her up here.’

      ‘You can’t hold her weight,’ said Yuet sceptically, glancing up at the slightly built eleven-year-old on the ledge above her.

      ‘She is not heavy. And if you will hold her from below, I can catch her up here.’

      ‘We should not move her at all!’ Yuet said with an edge of despair in her voice. ‘Let alone a push-me-pull-you method like that! Her ribs …;’

      Tai’s breath caught on a sob as she turned around and scanned the gardens behind her for any sign of the returning manservant with the rope and the reinforcements. ‘She’ll die.’

      She is dying anyway. She will be dead by the time the man gets back here. The thought was as clear in Yuet’s mind as though Szewan, her mentor and the master-healer woman to whom she was apprenticed, had spoken them while standing right beside her.

      She glanced up again, to where Tai had risen into a crouch, tense, weeping. Then down, at the fragile broken body at her feet. Then at the ledge where she stood, precarious, unstable. If she moved too fast, too carelessly, if she turned an ankle on a loose piece of rubble …;

      ‘All right,’ she said abruptly. ‘Wait there until I say.’

      There was a long tear in Antian’s robe; she must have caught it on something as she was