Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 Read Online Free PDF

hope that one day she would be Empress Dowager regardless if her issue had been a girl instead of a boy.
    It helped that I was born a geomancer and blessed by the Five Gods with command over the elements. Most emperors were geomancers. It was easier to claim the favor of Heaven that way.
    But I was only sixteen and my situation could change, so I resolved only to be a dutiful daughter, come what may. As Emperor, my father had many things to consider. He made decisions like a farmer grows rice. My future was but one patch of the land he tended.
    Since my younger sister’s marriage, Imperial Father bade me to sit whenever he spoke with his ministers. He showed me the petitions that came to the capital from across the Kwanese Empire and tested me on what I read, asked if I understood. Eunuch Lei told me in private that the Emperor had said I was the brightest of his daughters. Imperial Father said nothing to me himself.
    When I was twenty, the eunuchs and maids bowed to me deeper than they had when Fifth Princess was still unwed, but sometimes I caught them unaware in the midst of gossip. The Emperor is still trying, they said, when they thought I could not hear. He must be very anxious. Maybe one of the new concubines will do better. But for now poor Princess Gwan-yu has to wait.
    A proper emperor wants a son, a Crown Prince who will take his place as wongdai when his time is done. But if one isn’t born, the Emperor cannot be without an heir. He cannot marry off all his daughters where they will honor the ancestors of their husbands and leave no child for himself and his own.
    Everyone in the palace knew why he could not arrange my marriage. He still hoped for a son, and so I would have to wait until he no longer wished to try. Sometimes I would hear of other daughters held back from marriage while their fathers tried for sons. Then when no son was born, their fathers would arrange for a groom to marry into their family. The groom’s children would bear his bride’s name so there would still be someone to continue the family line and honor the family’s ancestors.
    But my father was the Emperor. A man with just a wife could only try for so long before his wife would leave her childbearing years. My father took new concubines every few years in hope of a son. I could wait a very long time.
    I was twenty-two the first time I traveled to the northern territories. Every other year Imperial Father would take a retinue of courtiers with him to keep ties with our nomadic cousins, to camp in tents like our ancestors and remember what it was like before our armies swept through Kwan and made this country ours. They would be out there for weeks.
    Imperial Father requested I accompany him. I would have to learn, just in case.
    My days were spent sitting quietly behind a low-slung table in the largest tent, listening to Imperial Father praise the virtues of living on the steppes and hearing the Hangul clan leader compliment the skill and fortitude of my father’s servants. Though we slept in tents, we lay in beds with blankets and there was tea and sweet meats enough to last throughout our stay. The servants, long accustomed to such biennial sojourns, had prepared well.
    Our only cause for worry came the time it rained and we thought the camp would flood. The geomancers in Imperial Father’s retinue streamed out around the perimeter, calling on the strength of their prayers to move the earth and water to dig trenches and form new rivers around us. But the ground was hard and would not yield.
    Imperial Father strode out of his tent and glared out into the rain, with one of the eunuchs scrambling behind him to hold an umbrella over his head. The Emperor’s gaze swept over the soggy camp and he barked a command for the geomancers to clear a space for him. I watched from the opening flap of my tent as Imperial Father knelt in his fine golden robes, heedless of the muck at the camp perimeter, and placed his hands on the stubborn