The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

aftershock hit the mountain. The pile of debris that Yuet had been standing on tilted, nearly throwing her into the hole, and then settled at a different angle, a different slope. When the panicked shouts had settled down, they could no longer hear the voice they had been following in their attempts at rescue, and Yuet had called her team of aides off.

      ‘It’s useless, look, it’s all fallen in down there.’ She looked up and out across the debris, wiping sweat and dust and drifting ashes out of her eyes, and straightened up as she met the eyes of Antian’s little jin-shei-bao. ‘You? What are you doing here? Are you all right?’

      ‘I want to help,’ Tai said, her voice trembling just a little. She wore a borrowed gown, at least two sizes too large for her, and looked pitifully small and young and fragile.

      ‘Wait there a moment.’ Yuet scrambled down from her pile of rubble and came to stand next to Tai, lifting her chin with one hand, peering into her eyes. ‘You should be lying down somewhere and …;’

      ‘Please,’ said Tai, ‘I cannot. Let me help.’

      Yuet hesitated. ‘There is little that you can do.’

      Someone shouted out, a shout that held gladness; Yuet looked up. A senior servant of the women’s quarters, his tunic torn and his face and arms scratched and sooty, came scrambling over at a trot, carrying something in his arms.

      ‘It’s a miracle, but he is still alive,’ the servant said, offering Yuet a bawling baby swaddled in a torn silk wrap. ‘I don’t think he is hurt, even; the crying is just fear and hunger.’

      Tai intercepted the child, cradled him in her arms, and he stopped crying, blinking up at Tai’s face with a puzzled expression and teardrops caught on his long dark lashes. ‘Shhhh,’ Tai said, rocking him gently against her. ‘Shhh, it will be all right. It will be all right.’

      The ground trembled again under their feet, and Tai could not suppress a cry, clutching at the child, who whimpered but did not resume his desperate wailing.

      ‘Where did you find him? Are there …; ?’

      ‘No,’ said the servant, dropping his eyes. ‘Only that one. His mother is dead.’

      ‘Are there other children?’ Tai asked.

      Yuet nodded. ‘Maybe half a dozen or so. From swaddling babes like this one to six- or seven-year-olds. They’re in the outer wing.’

      ‘I know it,’ Tai said. It was the wing where she and Rimshi had always stayed when they were at the Summer Palace. ‘I will take care of the children.’

      ‘You need …;’ Yuet began, but Tai lifted glittering dark eyes and Yuet stopped, biting back what she had been about to say.

      ‘I need to do it,’ Tai said, very softly. ‘For her.’

      ‘Go,’ Yuet said, after a pause. ‘Go, take care of the children.’

      ‘You are still wearing …;’ Tai began, but then her eyes filled with unexpected tears again, and she turned away quickly, gathering the child to her, and was gone. Yuet glanced down at her robe, and smoothed down the part where Antian’s bright blood had now dried into a stiff brownish stain. Yes, she was still wearing …; she was still wearing Antian’s own blood.

      She almost forgot about Tai and the children in the next few hours, taken up with trying to cope with the aftermath of the disaster. She set broken limbs, tended burns, cuts, grazes, gashes and bruises. She cleaned and bandaged and gave out some sedative herbs to the worst-off. She took control of the servants, sent a clutch of them to set up a makeshift kitchen, brew copious quantities of soothing green tea, prepare a meal for the shocked survivors. In the Imperial Palace, decimated of its royalty, Yuet, the healer, reigned as queen for the day, and none questioned her or disobeyed her.

      When she finally circled back to the children, they were no longer in the place where she had told Tai they would be, and after some searching she finally found the whole small group in the stables. There were more there than she realized; the survivors from the villages close to the shattered mountain had crept to the Palace in pitiful groups of two or three at a time, seeking help, and Tai had shunted all the children into her group. There were now maybe two dozen youngsters there. Tai had herself commandeered a single servant, and between them they had cleaned out several mangers and made them into makeshift cribs for the youngest babies. Some of them were wailing from hunger, but they were all clean and freshly swaddled and many of them were blissfully asleep. Tai had discovered a litter of eight-week-old puppies in the kennels, and had brought them out to the stable yard where the older children played with them happily, squealing with delight at puppy antics.

      Yuet stopped dead, watching the scene; it was the first sight she had had all day of innocence and contentment. She felt the weariness fall from her shoulders, a little, at the sound of children’s laughter.

      She found Tai huddled inside the stables themselves, sitting on a bale of hay with her chin resting on the knees drawn up against her chest into the circle of her arms. White-faced, with dark circles under her eyes, she looked as though she had aged ten years in the space of the last few hours.

      ‘You have wrought miracles,’ Yuet said, coming up beside her.

      Tai looked up, without releasing her legs from the circle of her arms. ‘You have had the harder task.’

      ‘May I?’ Yuet said, indicating the bale, and Tai shifted sideways, giving Yuet space to subside beside her with a sigh. The healer knuckled her eyes, kneaded her temples with weary fingertips. Her head ached abominably. Her heart ached worse.

      ‘I am glad you were here,’ Tai said suddenly.

      Yuet looked up, startled. ‘What?’

      ‘You care,’ Tai said.

      ‘I care about life,’ Yuet said.

      She could not remember a time that she hadn’t had a calling to heal. Her very earliest patients had been the handful of animals on the tiny homestead where she had been fostered when she had been orphaned at barely four years of age. And then, aged only six, Yuet had stood beside her foster mother as she spoke to a passing dignitary, no less than a healer to the Imperial Court of Syai. Yuet’s foster mother had made some respectful remark about the health of the royal women, and somehow it had come out that she herself was suffering from a blistering headache at the time.

      ‘Willow bark,’ the young Yuet had piped up before the royal healer had had a chance to respond. ‘You should boil up some willow bark.’

      ‘Hush, child!’ Yuet’s foster mother had said, embarrassed at the utter lack of decorum shown by the orphaned child whom she had charitably taken into her household less than two years before, mortified that her teachings had not instilled better manners in the girl.

      But the healer had lifted her eyebrows and was gazing at Yuet with interest.

      ‘And what would you do for a stomach ache?’ she had asked, almost conversationally.

      Yuet had told her. The information had been accurate, and delivered without an ounce of self-consciousness or shyness.

      The healer had smiled, and it had gone no further at that time. But less than a year later the letter had come to the house, written in flowing jin-ashu script, asking if Yuet wished to be apprenticed to the Imperial healer in Linh-an.

      Yuet had had a very clear sense of her future, and knew that she would probably have graduated quite naturally to becoming the healer and still-woman for her village’s wounds and sicknesses, both animal and human. But even as a very young child she had always possessed a profoundly practical and realistic streak, and she had realized that she’d just been offered an extraordinary chance to pursue her calling in the far more exalted sphere of the Imperial Court when she had apprenticed to old Szewan. She had gone to the city the morning after Szewan’s letter reached the homestead where she had spent her earliest childhood.

      She could not have known then that this day would come, that disaster