Chapter 18: The Mother Gu

The jade box was the length of his hand, and the lid was so old that the carving on it had worn smooth.

A brother carried it from the Council table to the foot of the dais, and set it on the flagstones in front of Cen Yu.

Six hundred people watched him look at it.

He had always been afraid, and he had never once been brave.

He had only been the one man on the mountain who would lie still.

He had told himself that was a different thing.

His mother had one day left now, and the spoon would not hold much longer.

He opened the lid.

The Mother Gu lay curled on a bed of dried petals, the size of a hen's egg.

It was white, and soft, and it breathed.

He could see the slow rise and fall of it in the light.

Each time it breathed in, the air in the courtyard seemed to lean toward it.

"Cen Yu," said Gao Tie behind him, very low. "You don't have to. We can go to the Council another way."

"There's no other way," Cen Yu said. "She has Pei Ruo."

He lifted it out, and it was warm in his cold palm.

For a moment, only a moment, it moved against his skin.

He put it in his mouth and swallowed it whole.

It went down slowly, and every part of him remembered the Black Ancestor and tried to stand up.

He lay down on his back on the flagstones in front of the empty chair with the snow on it, and folded his hands over his stomach.

"Count," he said to himself, and began.

It started under the breastbone.

Then it was in his arms, and in his hips, and in the long muscles of his legs, eating through each of them in turn.

The Black Ancestor had been a knife.

This was a hand that opened him slowly, from the inside, and looked at everything.

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