Page 22 of Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

But then the others mounted their horses and they were back in the Great Forest, on the path winding through the trees, and the clearing vanished like it had only been a beautiful dream.

•••

They reached the Imperial City before nightfall.

The path became a wide cobblestone road, flanked every mile by the Emperor’s banners. Xifeng gazed up at the dragon with a forest curled within its talon, remembering the emblem from the concubine’s procession three weeks ago. They passed people leading donkeys and pushing wagons full of goods. Soon, a massive stone bridge appeared before them. In the rushing waters below, men loaded small vessels with sacks of charcoal, lumber, and rice for the city dwellers.Across the moat, Xifeng saw two other identical bridges in the distance.

“I didn’t know there were this many people on the earth,” she told Hideki, who fell back to allow a large caravan to pass. The men walking beside it stared at his elegant Dagovadian horse and muttered to each other in a foreign tongue.

“There are many opportunities in the city. This is where people dream of a better life. See the men with the crude wooden spears? Likely recruits hoping to join the Emperor’s army.”

Xifeng noticed a great number of travelers were young women. Several were clearly seamstresses, laden down with bolts of fabric and baskets of supplies. She recognized the cheap silk she and Guma had used. “They must have purchased those from an outside market. I suppose silk is much more expensive in the city.”

“I’m sure of it. The taxes are higher closer to the palace, at least in Kamatsu.” Hideki watched a girl struggle with four reams of cloth. “Silk is worth a king’s ransom back home.”

Xifeng nodded. Silk was made only in the Kingdom of the Great Forest; it was against Imperial law to take silkworms outside its borders. Guma used to rant about the preposterous levies they’d had to pay for materials, despite how much profit the kingdom was making.

Other young female travelers carried few possessions, like Xifeng herself. Did they, too, approach the city with a fortune similar to hers? “The Fool,” she murmured, scanning their faces, but they were all plain and unremarkable, and soon she grew bored and turned her attention back to the entrance.

A stone wall hundreds of feet high surrounded the city. Soldiers patrolled the towers along the top, above a burnished gold gate carved with images of dragons rampant. The immense doors stood open, flanked by armed guards observing the crowd.

The men with crude weapons clustered around one guard. He seemed to be directing them through the city. Xifeng caught the wordstraining fieldandtomorrow afternoon,and knew Hideki had been right after all; they had come to try to secure a place among Emperor Jun’s warriors. They looked laughably rural to her, with their twigs that longed to be spears.

She glanced at Wei, who wore an expression of ferocious delight as he studied the Imperial guards’ weapons: exquisitely crafted crossbows, iron-tipped arrows, and scabbards worked in the finest bronze. She could easily imagine him in armor, wielding such beautiful and deadly tools. If he went to the training fields, she knew he could outshine those hopeful recruits.

What he might be able to do, if only he were trained,she thought.

The guards allowed them to pass without question when Shiro presented a scroll bearing the stamp of the Kamatsu king. Xifeng noticed them scrutinizing her companions’ black steeds. None of them bothered to look at her old horse, and as a result, Xifeng herself. She wished fleetingly she had insisted upon riding one of the Dagovadians.

The road widened into a bustling avenue lined with fruit trees and graceful buildings, and immediately Xifeng felt her eyes and ears being pulled in every direction. She had never seen so many people in one place: men and women, young and old, their hair every shade in between black and brown and their skins gold, russet, and ebony. There were monks, officials, merchants, and seamstresses in silks of every shade, walking and riding and leading horses, oxen, sheep, and camels. They spilled from taverns and inns with sloping roofs, gated monasteries, and warehouses full of heavy crates and furniture.

The smells of roasting garlic, onions, and pepper wafted over from the food carts lining the avenue, and a cluster of stalls sold a hundredvarieties of fragrant spices: saffron and cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, cassia and ginger. A stage in the square featured dancers accompanied by an old man on a barbarian’s fiddle. The instrument had twisted silk strings that produced a lilting melody when he drew a stick of horsehair across them.

Xifeng turned to ask Shiro whether they had similar fiddles in Kamatsu and saw that he had developed a sickly pallor. He swayed atop his horse, a fine layer of sweat coating his face.

Hideki steadied him, his face grim. “Hold him up, Wei. I’ll make inquiries about a physician.” He rode off and returned a few minutes later, breathless. “We’re in the market district, quite far from the best physicians in the city, but there is one down the street. There’s just one thing. She’s a woman.”

“You mean she’s a healer?” Xifeng asked. In the poor villages surrounding her town, there had been women reputed for their knowledge of herblore. But they had mostly been called to attend difficult births or help get rid of pregnancies. In times of true need, people sought a male physician with great skill and prices to match.

Wei shook his head. “Can’t we find someone else? There must be another nearby.”

“She’s a trained physician and she is the closest, but still...” Hideki bit his lip.

Shiro sagged against Wei’s arm and Xifeng gave a growl of frustration. The men turned to her in surprise. “She’s the best chance we have. Better to see if she can help than stay here and have Shiro sicken even more. Would you risk his life?” Wei’s mouth turned down at her forceful manner of speaking, but neither of the men could argue with her logic.

“To the woman physician, then,” Hideki agreed.

The tidy building they found stood on a quiet offshoot of the avenue. It had two levels and a sitting area shaded by the curving roof. A tall woman emerged who was older than Xifeng, but not yet middle-aged, with hair so black it looked blue in the shadows.

“Are you Bohai, miss?” Hideki called. “We seek a physician for our wounded friend.”

“My family name is Bohai, yes.” The woman spoke in a low voice, the kind music would suit well. To Xifeng’s surprise, she spoke the common tongue with the same lilting Kamatsu accent as Shiro and Hideki. Hideki looked astonished as well, but made no comment as the woman approached Shiro and studied his face. She was not a beauty; Xifeng assessed that at once. But there was something pleasing about her intelligent eyes, smooth, flat nose, and wide mouth, which turned down as she felt Shiro’s forehead.

“This man is deathly ill. Bring him in. You can put your horses in the back.”

Hideki leapt off his horse at once and carried Shiro inside, laying him on one of several clean pallets in a chamber off the front room. Xifeng followed, scanning the shelves that held jars of herbs, roots, and powders, each labeled with the neat calligraphy of a learned woman.

The physician looked at Xifeng as if to say something to her, but then she turned to Hideki. “Could you please bring me the jars of peony root and wolfberry? They are in the front room, on the bottom shelf.”

---