Chapter 4: The Maiden's Audience

Nobody had ever stood beside the Emperor's throne at an audience.

Zhiyao stood there now, in a fresh green robe Chunxi had pressed in a panic, one step behind his right shoulder.

The whole Hall of Ten Thousand Lamps was staring at her short hair.

"Is it an order?" she had asked him at the Pavilion door.

"It's a favor," he had said. "Stay close to me today. I'd like it if you did."

So she stayed close.

She watched Chancellor Cen Hongdao bow to the throne with a smooth face and cold eyes.

She watched a hundred courtiers fall silent as the great doors opened.

The Holy Maiden came in alone.

Bai Xueling was nineteen, small and pale, with long pale-brown hair and grey-green eyes.

She wore plain white, and she walked.

Zhiyao had read a hundred pages about her, and none of them had said she looked frightened.

Then the court reacted.

It happened all at once, the same way it had the day before.

Every face in the hall softened.

An old general in iron armor put his hand over his heart and began to cry.

A minister of rites dropped to one knee and offered her the jade tablet from his own sleeve.

Two young lords at the back actually started to push each other for a better view of her.

"A treasure," someone breathed. "Look at her. A living treasure."

Xueling stopped in the middle of the floor.

Her eyes went around the room, looking at all of them, and Zhiyao saw her mouth tremble.

The girl did not look pleased.

She looked like someone who had walked into a room full of people who all spoke a language she had never learned.

Zhiyao glanced at the Emperor.

He was sitting forward on the throne, one hand resting on the dragon-head armrest.

His eyes were open, and they were fixed on the Maiden.

They did not blink.

His face had gone smooth and calm.

He was smiling a little, a gentle, absent smile that Zhiyao had never seen on him.

"Majesty?" said the Chancellor.

"Let the Maiden choose a gift from my treasury," said the Emperor.

His voice was flat and sweet.

"Any gift. Any ten gifts."

The court gasped.

A pulse started to beat in Zhiyao's throat.

This was it.

This was the part of the book she had complained about.

Zhiyao had written, in the comments, "He's three thousand years old. He's met a woman before. What did she DO?"

Now she was looking at his face, and she could see what the novel had not said.

His face was empty.

He didn't look like a man in love.

He looked like a man who had been switched off, and something else was using his mouth.

The Emperor lifted his free hand toward the Maiden, palm up.

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