“Flattery, cleric,” said the tiger. “It doesn’t taste very good, and it has never filled a stomach.”
“History, madam,” Chih responded hopefully. “History and your place in it. We have the stories of Ho Dong Vinh and Ho Thi Thao, and—”
“Ho Thi Thao?”
The tiger spoke sharply, and at her side, her two sisters sat up, their eyes narrowed and their whiskers pressed aggressively forward.
“Cleric, what have you done?” asked Si-yu flatly, and Chih resisted the urge to shrink back a little from the display of predatory interest.
“What do you know about Ho Thi Thao?” asked the tiger.
“Well, my job is rather to find out what you know,” Chih said, remembering at the last moment not to smile. Smiling bared teeth, and Chih knew that theirs would not hold up next to the tiger’s.
“Singing Hills does archival and investigative work, and I know for sure that we would love to have your account of the marriage of Ho Thi Thao.”
“Our account,” sneered the tiger. “You mean the true one.”
“Of course,” Chih said brightly.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then . . .”
“No, I think you are going to tell us what you know instead,” said Sinh Loan.
“We’ll tell you when you get it wrong,” growled Sinh Hoa abruptly, her voice like falling rocks. “We shall correct you.”
“Best not get it wrong too often,” advised Sinh Cam, her voice like dangerous water.
“What are you doing?” hissed Si-yu.
“Telling a story,” Chih said, and they wished that Almost Brilliant was there to scold them for such a foolish thing.
* * *
The tigers waited patiently as Si-yu and Chih built up the fire, Sinh Cam even briefly turning into a human to drag over an armload of firewood from behind the way station. She was younger than Sinh Loan; Chih guessed that both she and Sinh Hoa were, given how they deferred to their sister. When Chih and Si-yu came forward to take the gift of wood, Chih saw that Sinh Cam’s face was completely still, as if she were not used to human expression, and that she gave off an odor of mud and cold and clean fur.
As Chih built the fire, Piluk made an uneasy groaning sound, swaying from foot to foot like a nervous child. She bumped Chih with her trunk gently, as if trying to draw their attention to the three predators lounging at the mouth of the barn.
“I know, baby,” Chih said. “It’s all right.”
“It might be,” Si-yu murmured, rising from Bao-so’s side. “He woke up enough to say a few words to me and to ask for water. He’s not in tremendous shape, but he’ll last. If we don’t all get eaten.”
“Oh it could be much worse,” Sinh Loan said cheerfully. “His heart has grown steady now, not jumping around like Hare at the sun’s feast.”
Si-yu made a face, and Chih reminded themself of how good tiger ears were.
Finally there was a fire roaring between them, built well enough to last the night, if they lasted all night. When they finally sat down by the fire, they felt colder immediately, and Chih gratefully took the extra blanket that Si-yu offered.
Piluk had settled down, still uneasily whimpering from time to time, but easier now that Si-yu had dragged Bao-so close and came to sit next to her as well.
Chih looked through the flames at the three faces watching them hungrily, took a deep breath, and began.
Chapter Four
MANY YEARS AGO, there lived a scholar named Dieu, who had studied for eighteen years and whose tutor finally reckoned that she was ready for the imperial exams in Ahnfi.
In those days, Ahnfi was the greatest city in the world, from the shores of the Mother Sea to the dry places where the dragons’ bastards lurked in the black sand dunes. To be anyone who was anyone, you should have been born in the capital to one of the six great families, ideally as an able-bodied eldest boy, ideally without a single mark on your skin and without a taste for esoteric magic or radical politics. Since most people in the capital could not even manage this small thing, the next best thing was to excel at the imperial examinations, held every four years in the Hall of Ferocious Jade.
Unlike the examinations at the provincial and commandery levels, which took place every other year, the imperial examinations were dazzlingly complex, dangerously competitive, and thanks to some eight generations of mysterious deaths in the Hall of Ferocious Jade, more than a little haunted. The candidates came from all over the empire, and the prestige, wealth, and power of an imperial appointment meant that no one who had come so far intended to go home with anything less than top marks.
Dieu’s great-grandfather had finagled a pass to the imperial examinations and then got assassinated before he had gotten a chance to use it. Her grandmother would have gone to the examinations, but she got distracted by a life of crime in the high mountain passes. Dieu’s father might have been a fine scholar, but he died young with his wives in a river fording as they fled from their enemies one terrible autumn night.
So in the end, there was only Dieu left, living in a tiny house in Hue County, being raised by a series of diligent tutors and compassionate maids. There was a hawthorn tree in the front, a tiny garden in the back, and a wind from the north that seemed to blow as much good as bad. The house was rented, so she truly possessed only few treasured books, a face that was long and oval like a grain of rice, a mouth that smiled rather too little, and a little jade chip that guaranteed the bearer entry to the imperial examinations.
She was an over-serious girl, and years of studying late into the long Hue County night left her with an inclination to slouch. Except for the slouch, she would have been tall, and except for her squint, likewise acquired, she might have been passingly pretty.
Instead, Dieu was well-read in the classics, clever with compositions and translations, and versed in the many laws of the land. At the age of twenty-eight, her tutor nodded and collected enough money to purchase for her a suit of good traveling clothes, a decent map, a few paper talismans, and a little embroidered bag on a woven string so she could wear the jade chip around her neck.
“Well, I have taught you all I could teach you,” he said to her one crisp fall morning. “You are as ready as anyone can be to enter the Hall of Ferocious Jade and emerge a court official rather than a bundle of bones tied up with your own guts—”
* * *
“Oh!” Sinh Cam exclaimed, sitting up in surprise. “That’s right! A bundle of bones tied up with their own guts, that’s what we say.”
“It’s a tiger’s term?” Chih asked. “I thought it was just what the ghosts of the examination hall did to those scholars who who didn’t follow the proper sacrifices . . .”
“No, it’s ours,” said Sinh Loan pleasantly. “It’s what we call someone who is a disappointment. Because that’s what we turn them into. Please continue.”
“Of course.”
* * *
“I’m not sure I’m ready,” Dieu said. “I still have to memorize the lesser chrestomathies, and I feel like I still have a ways to go on the errata of the greater ones. And my Vihnese is still—”
“I don’t think they really test on the lesser chrestomathies any longer,” her tutor said with confidence, “and who speaks Vihnese anymore, anyway?”