When Keton had shared this story, I doubted its truth. “It was said she threatened to kill herself rather than marry the emperor.” She must have killed at least fifty men that day.” Keton had paused. I’d seen her myself-fierce as any warrior. She had fought alongside her father’s army. In return, Emperor Khanujin would take the shansen’s daughter to be his empress and tie their bloodlines together. The shansen agreed to withdraw his men from the South and reaffirm his loyalty to the emperor. At dawn of the New Year, they met to make peace. My youngest brother so rarely spoke of his time fighting for Khanujin, I could not forget his words: “Not unless the emperor and the shansen came to a truce. “The war would never end,” Keton had told me. Where was Lady Sarnai? Didn’t she care that thousands would die if this marriage did not proceed? The warning hushed everyone in the square. “Find Sarnai, or there will be no wedding-only war.” “Find my daughter!” he barked at the emperor. She let out a scream as the shansen dropped her onto the stone steps. “I-I-I-I d-don’t know,” she blubbered, her wailing intensifying before she repeated, “I don’t know.” Would the shansen slit her throat-or would the emperor beat him to it? No, they’d let her live until she talked. “Where is my daughter?” the shansen roared.Īlready, everyone around me was placing bets on the poor girl’s fate. The false princess’s legs thrashed wildly beneath her skirts, the long satin train of her wedding robes rippling beneath her. Now he held her, shrieking and kicking, above the Hall of Harmony’s eighty-eight steps-and he ripped off her veil. The shansen had shoved Khanujin aside and seized his daughter by the neck. Then-as the drums reached their thunderous climax-someone let out a scream. The drumming began again, growing louder, faster, until it was so deafening my ears buzzed and the world began to spin. Slowly, ceremoniously, Emperor Khanujin began to lift her veil.
She bowed before her father, then before the emperor, falling to her knees. I frowned as she continued to wail, a shrill sound that pierced the tense silence. Strange, that Khanujin would not have insisted she wear one of Amana’s dresses to show off to the shansen. It did not even shimmer, as any of the dresses I’d made for her would have: woven with the laughter of the sun, embroidered with the tears of the moon, and painted with the blood of stars. An embroidered veil of ruby silk covered her face, and the train of her gown dragged behind her, crimson in the fragile moonlight. A soldier parted the carriage’s curtains, and Lady Sarnai tottered forward to join the emperor and her father.
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