Free The Pirate Empress by Deborah Cannon

to death. Is that what you wanted to see?”
    A scream to chill the blood came from the public square. Tao clamped pillows, one on either side of her head, to block her ears. It seemed an eternity before he released her head and allowed her to hear again. The smell of fried flesh, like sweet barbecued pork, drifted in from the courtyard into her bedchamber.
    “It’s over,” he said, rising to unshutter the windows.
    Li wiped a steady stream of tears from her eyes and swallowed several times to keep her stomach from heaving its contents. The saliva wouldn’t stay down. It kept threatening to rise into her mouth and make her regurgitate.
    Tao watched her. He made no attempt to soothe her or speak to her. In her whole life, Tao had never babied her.
    “Are you done?” he asked when she had sniffed her final sobs. He patted her hand and sighed. “Your tears are for Jasmine, I know. Forget her. She’s dead, as dead as Ju Jong is now. Take comfort in the fact that they will never again be tormented by the fox faerie.”
    “How did she kill her?” Li asked quietly.
    “I don’t know. I only know that one day Jasmine was your aunt and the next she wasn’t.”
    Li gulped and sipped the water that Tao brought to her in a ceramic cup. “Why did she do that to Ju Jong?”
    “He was a danger to her.”
    “But he was so meek. He was harmless.”
    “She couldn’t win him over. There was always the possibility that she’d lose control of His Majesty for a split second, that he might listen to his life-long financial advisor. The city’s coffers are all but empty because of the wanton spending in order to impress the foreign invaders. Starvation is not far from the door, but you wouldn’t know that living in the palace. The grand secretary was trying to keep the Empire economically intact.”
    “But if she bewitched His Majesty, couldn’t she bewitch Ju Jong, too?” Jasmine’s power was far-reaching, and Li remembered too well Lieutenant He Zhu’s adulation of her aunt.
    “Ju Jong was a eunuch. She had no power over him.”
    “That’s why she has no power over you either!”
    “You understand. Her power is in the bedchamber. That’s how she binds men to her will and feeds on them.”
    Li inhaled, exhaled shakily. “Master Yun says I must leave the palace.”
    Tao touched her hand. “He’s right. Jasmine has her eye on you and I don’t like the look on her face while she watches.”
    “Where will I go? When can I leave?”
    “Where you go is up to Master Yun. When you go depends on His Majesty. You are not quite ready to be a warrior, Li. You need to master weaponry. But you’re as strong a girl as any of the boys you’ve been training with. You can help to build a wall.”

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Fox Faerie
     
    Ever since she had bound the Emperor’s heart and body to her side, the other palace women avoided her, and that included her erstwhile niece. In front of a polished silver mirror, Jasmine admired her reflection—very pretty, indeed—before she transformed into the fox.
    Slipping out of the open window into Lotus Lily’s courtyard, she leaped over the lily pond, onto the arched bridge and up over the stone wall. The city folk noticed nothing amiss about the fleet-footed fox sailing along their streets, dodging houses and sheds, chickens and pigs, and carts loaded with vegetables. She headed for the outskirts of town across the fields and parklands to the north, over the streams and lotus-filled lakes, past the pagodas and villas and temples, and beyond the clustered ramshackle settlements of the poor.
    The terrain was mountainous and she flew on all fours, swallowing ground, sending dust flying. She forged through the scrubby land until she reached the earth rampart that was eroding away. From there, she scoured the scene. Swathed in yellow mist, the familiar range of Black Mountains snaked, rolling in sharp peaks and valleys like a dragon that had fallen from the sky. Below the next