Free Heart and Soul by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

exertions. “Your father?”
    The young man bowed yet again. “I am Minister Zhang’s firstborn son.”
    Jade took a deep breath. She recollected, though she’d never paid much attention to it, that though Zhang’s first wife had long ago died, he had a multitude of sons and daughters by an equal multitude of concubines. What luck of hers that she should have landed on his boat. She almost let go of the barge pole in disgust, but training was stronger than reflexive annoyance. Instead, she pulled the barge pole in, slowly, and laid it at her feet. “Your father,” she said, “has left the Dragon Boats, and disappeared—in dragon form—taking a valuable artifact.”
    “He…” the boy started. Though he was close to her age, if not older, Jade could not help but think of him as a boy. “He…what?”
    “He took a valuable artifact, which should by right belong to the emperor. And he has left the Dragon Boats.”
    The effect on the young man was immediate. Aware of the punishments visited on the families of traitors, he sank to his knees and hit his forehead on the floor-boards of the boat: once, twice, three times. “Lady Jade, this despicable son of an unworthy father did not know. My traitorous father never took me into his confidence.” He looked up, pale and drawn, and fixed her with a look of pure terror. “I beg you to be merciful with my family. My father’s ten concubines and his twenty children are all innocent.” He kowtowed again.
    Jade was not sure he was as innocent as he seemed to be, though she was certain that Zhang had, in fact, failed to communicate to his eldest son—or to any of his family—what he was planning. An old hand at court intrigue, Zhang would long ago have learned that there was no secret so safe as that which was never spoken at all.
    But she was also sure the boy might have noticed comings and goings and strange activity. Zhang, living here in this beehive of a boat, or its adjacent women’s quarters, could not have kept any absences absolutely secret. If he’d been—as Third Lady said—going to India and there entering into secret negotiations with Englishmen, then surely his oldest son would have noticed it. If he’d been plotting and laying aside money or clothes or something else for an eventual desertion from the Dragon Boats, his eldest son might have caught wind of it. And if any strangers—from other clans, or from the usurping rulers—had come onto the boat, again Zhang’s eldest son must perforce know it.
    She touched him with the tip of her slipper as he started on yet another round of kowtowing. “Get up, Zhang,” she said, addressing him by his family name. Regardless of what he knew or didn’t, to threaten him now would be unwise. A frightened young man who thought he would be punished for his father’s crime was more likely than not to take his boat away and his whole clan with him. While a young man recently promoted, who had reason to want to hold on to those honors, would be more likely to exert his utmost memory and thought to find out what his father had done and why, and where he might have gone. “Get up, Zhang, and assume your father’s position on this boat, and in my court.” She waved the ring in front of his eyes. “Do you see this ring? Do you know what it means?”
    “It means your brother, the True Emperor of All Under Heaven, gave you his power and his magic and his command, to act in his stead.” The terrified younger Zhang remained on his knees, looking up.
    “Yes, and in his stead, I appoint you to all the honors and positions your father has abandoned.”
    He gaped at her. “Me? Me, minister and in the planning councils?”
    That look alone told her he was about as ready for the planning councils as she was for an assembly of gods. But then again, what would the planning councils be? They had an opium-addicted emperor, a half-foreign princess acting in his stead and an assemblage of plotters and traitors who would come