The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,33
opinion."
"I'd be happy to, Cousin," Sandry replied. "Though how unusual can it be, that you haven't seen it before?"
Cradling the package on one arm, Rizu undid the silk tie that closed it and pushed the wrapper back. It revealed a bolt of cloth that reflected light in an array of colours, from red-violet to crimson. Daja, Tris, and Briar also drew closer to look.
They're impressed, Sandry thought. So they should be. Those threads are one colour of silk wrapped around another, leaving bits of the original colour to peek through. And those threads are twined, two shades of violet so close together that you can't call them by different names, but they still add two colours to the weave. While the embroideries — Mila bless me, but they look like they were done by ants, they're so small.
She held out her hand to touch the cloth and stopped, her palm an inch away from it. Her instincts shrieked for her to keep the silk away from her skin.
"Hmm," Sandry murmured.
Reaching through a side slit in her outer robe into one of her pockets, she found the dirty, mineral- and root-laced lump of crystal that was her night-light. Despite the materials trapped inside it, the crystal gave off a clear, steady light that made it easier to see the individual twists and turns of thread in the cloth.
Three layers, she thought, viewing the material closely. The bottom layer, crimson silk wrapped in blood-red silk. The outer layer is the two violet threads twined together. There's a cloth-of-gold thread in the outer layer, too. It shapes half the embroideries. But the second layer, that's the odd one. The smaller embroideries are tucked in there, out of sight, and the cloth doesn't want me to look at them. As if I could be stopped!
Sandry pulled a thread of her power from her inner magical core and used it to draw a circle with the index finger of her free hand just over the cloth's surface. Then she smoothed the fire until it was a round disk. She released that into the cloth.
Invisible tiny pincers, like beetle claws, sank into her magic.
Immediately she yanked free and retrieved her power. That's so shocking! she thought, distressed and angry, seeing the full shape of what had been done in this cloth. All that careful stitchery done on this, embedding the signs and making them inert. They won't even start to work until the person who wears this cloth scratches or cuts herself. Then the signs come alive to release a speck of rot here and there, until her blood's poisoned. It must have taken his mages months to do it, not to mention the time spent on just the right threads and embroideries to hold the spell. I hear there's been famine in Yanjing, and he's got his people wasting time and money on this? What kind of an emperor lets his people suffer while he sends something like this to Dancruan?!
She looked up and met her cousin's brown eyes. They flickered with mirth.
Ah, thought Sandry, returning her crystal to its pocket as she straightened. My cousin Berenene knows it's dangerous, and she's testing me. Probably Viymese Ladyhammer already told her about the magic on the cloth. That's why Berenene's Lady Rizu left the wrapping on it, and why she doesn't let the silk touch her anywhere.
"What do you think, Cousin?" the empress wanted to now. "It's so lovely, I don't want to fritter it away. I should use it for something special, but I can't think of what."
Two tests, Sandry told herself. The first to see if I would find the magic. The second to see how clever I am politically. If I tell her to send it back, she knows I'm silly enough not to know, or care, that I'd be insulting the emperor of Yanjing, who's her most powerful neighbour and sometimes enemy. The same thing is true if I tell her to destroy it, or lock it away. Besides, some poor servant might want to look at the pretty thing, and end up dying for mere curiosity. What does she think I do for Uncle, write up his party invitations?
Sandry thought fast as she tied the wrapping closed around the deadly cloth once more. "Imperial Majesty, this is loo splendid a gift to waste on anyone who can't appreciate the craft that went into it," she said at last. She smiled at Rizu before she looked at Berenene again. "We westerners lack