woman you seek. A woman so skilled in curing ills and mending wounds it is claimed she too has the Blessing of Heaven. I heard about her some years ago when my daughter lay close to death as she sought to bring another life into this world. My court physicians were appalled, of course. Allowing a foreigner access to a princess of the royal line. A near-blasphemous act in their eyes. I had to execute two or three before they stopped grumbling.”
Vaelin’s eyes returned to the little girl. Her dolls lay forgotten now as she batted a leather ball around with her small hands, tongue poking from her lips as she frowned in concentration. “Sherin delivered her,” he said.
“And saved her mother. By way of reward I offered her riches, enough for her to live out her days in luxury had she wished. But she declined, instead asking for funds to build a healing house in the town where she had made her home. I funded it of course, but still the debt I owe her is substantial. I now consider it partially settled in sparing you.”
Business is the sun and rain, Vaelin remembered. Everything here is measured in debts owed and paid.
“If you would permit me to take her back to the Unified Realm,” he said, “you would repay her in full. If you would but tell me where she is . . .”
The old man laughed, the sound as rich in surprise as mockery. “What a shambling, clumsy people yours must be. So lacking in guile, so devoid of subtlety. It mystifies me as to how your dread Fire Queen conquered so many lands so quickly.”
“Because many who live in those lands consider themselves to have been freed, not conquered. Can any of your subjects say the same?”
He had expected some form of angry retort but the Merchant King merely laughed once more. “Freedom, eh? The freedom to do what? Pay taxes to their queen? Serve in her armies when she commands it? My people realised long ago that freedom is an illusion, a notion best left to the rumination of philosophers. My subjects do not look to me for freedom, they look to me for two things above all else: opportunity and protection. It is to the latter that I now principally concern myself, and why I have use for you. Tell me, what do you know of the Jade Princess?”
“She’s said to have lived for countless years, thanks to the Blessing of Heaven.”
“Quite so. I was a boy when my father sent me to hear her song. Thirty years later I returned and whilst my belly had grown and my beard turned grey, she was as young and fair as before, even her song hadn’t changed. That is what she represents, you see: stasis. She does not change and neither do we. It has long been a belief of my people that the Jade Princess is the embodiment of Heaven’s favour. As long as she resides in the High Temple, our lands, our cities, our songs and wisdom will endure. Wars and famine may have beset us through the ages, the Emerald Empire may have crumbled, but the people of the Far West have always continued to grow and prosper. But now the Stahlhast menace our borders and the Jade Princess is gone.”
Vaelin recalled the final moments with the Messenger, the odd mix of regret and malice. Sherin, gone to minister to the Jade Princess . . . “And the woman I came to find,” he said. “The Grace of Heaven . . .”
“Gone with her. The healer was summoned to the High Temple. A strange request since the Jade Princess is immune to illness, but it was assumed one of her beloved servants had been taken ill so the local Prefect issued the required travel warrant. Within days a messenger arrived informing me the Jade Princess and the Grace of Heaven had vanished. I had the Prefect flogged and dismissed from my service.”
“And all your spies and messengers have no notion of where they went?”
“Just a vague report they were seen travelling north by way of a mountain track. If true, this route will soon take them into the borderlands, where the Steel Horde now raids freely. I simply cannot imagine what could have compelled them to such a course.”
The Merchant King fell silent and moved towards the edge of the island, pausing to play a hand over his granddaughter’s head. She had lost interest