They ask me sometimes, the ones brave enough to ask an emperor anything, whether it is true — the old story, the Crown Prince who was cursed to die, and did not.
I let them wonder. It is better for a throne to be a little haunted.
But I will tell you what happened, since you have come this far, and since she would tell it too crisply and leave out the only part that matters.
I was dying. That part is true. I had been dying for four months, patiently, the way my mother died before me, and I had made my peace with it the way a soldier makes peace with a wall he cannot hold — not by hoping, but by deciding it would not be a surprise. Everyone who came through my door came to watch, or to help it along, and I had learned to lie there and count which was which, and somewhere in the second month I had stopped expecting anything else.
And then they sent me a scullery girl.
She came into a room that smelled of my own death, and she did not bow, and she did not weep, and she did not flatter, and she did not flinch. She looked at me the way no one had looked at me since I was a boy — not as a prince, not as an heir, not as a coffin being measured, but as a problem she intended to solve. She put her hand on the thing that was killing me before I gave her leave, and she said, you are not cursed, and something moved in my chest that I had not felt in four months, and it took me a long while to understand that it was hope, because I had forgotten the shape of it.
I asked her once, early, whether she believed in curses. I was testing her. Everyone in that palace believed in mine.
She looked at me as though I had asked something faintly stupid.
"I don't believe in curses," she said. "I believe in what I can cut out."
I have thought about that sentence for the rest of my life.
She told me, later, what she was — that she had fallen out of another world and another time, a thousand years and a whole civilization away, a place of light and clean water and medicines that could empty half my graves; that she had gone to sleep a woman with a whole life and woken in a dead girl's skin in my dying wing, for no reason heaven ever troubled to explain. I chose to believe her, that first month, because the alternative was to believe that heaven had simply, finally, been in a giving mood, and I have never trusted a gift I could not account for. It was easier to believe she had been sent than to believe she had been spared. Later I stopped needing the account. Later it was enough that she was here.
She thinks she saved me with a knife. She did. But that is not the part I married her for. Any surgeon with nerve enough might have cut the iron out of my side. What she did that no one else in the world could do was walk into a room where everyone had already agreed I was doomed, and refuse to agree. And be right. And pay for being right with a cell and a year of grief and very nearly her life — and then do it again the next morning, for me or for a beggar in the western wards or for the guard at my gate, because she genuinely cannot tell the difference between a body worth saving and a body worth saving. There is only the one kind, to her. I have ruled an empire and I have never encountered anything as radical as that.
She grieves the world she lost. I have watched her do it, in the private hours, a grief with no bottom and no cure, for the tools she cannot make and the people she cannot save and a brother a thousand years away who will never know what became of her. I cannot give her that world back. No one can. What I can give her is this one — every corner of it I have the power to open — and a Bureau to tear apart, and a caste of forgotten women to raise into the light, and a man who will sit up three nights at her sickbed the way she once sat up at his, because I learned how from her, the way I learned everything worth knowing from her.
She kept the knife. She runs my Bureau and terrorizes my physicians and comes to my bed smelling of the strong wine she washes her hands in, and half the court still believes their Empress is faintly uncanny, and they are correct, and I have never once let them see how completely it delights me.
So — was I cursed?
I let the histories keep the word. It is a better story with a curse in it, and a throne can use a good story.
But between us, here, at the end of the telling: no. I was not cursed.
I was dying. And out of some far country I will never see the edge of, for reasons neither of us was ever told, heaven dropped a woman into my sickroom three days before the end — a woman who does not believe in curses, and believes in what she can cut out.
She cut out my death.
She has been keeping me alive ever since. It is the only thing she has ever really been for, and she would tell you so herself, in that flat steady voice, as though it were a small thing and not the whole reason the Cheng still stands.
I intend to give her a very long time to go on doing it.
The End
