The Secrets of Jin-Shei Read Online Free PDF Page A

high-ranking Guard captain, and his duties frequently kept him away from his family, but at least he was affectionate to his daughter when he was with her. But her mother, Rochanaa, veered between a kind of despairing affection and an inexplicable coolness; sometimes it seemed that it was all she could bear to just look on Qiaan’s face. Bounced between these reactions, the child had never known what reception her overtures to her mother would receive, and had, in the end, stopped making any. By the time Qiaan turned eleven her relationship with her mother had soured and solidified into something scrupulously correct and curiously formal. With her father all too often physically absent, and her mother abdicating emotional closeness, Qiaan was adrift, detached from her own immediate kin and incapable of belonging to the often insular “family” of the Imperial Guard. If anyone had asked her, she would have dismissed the idea of ever having wanted to achieve this distance from the Guard and all that the Guard meant—but she was reminded of her failures, her possible inadequacies, when she met up with someone who truly belonged, like Xaforn.
    The two of them reacted to each other like two explosively opposite chemicals in an alchemist’s alembic, aching to absorb the best they saw the other as possessing. They were still too young to understand the reasons why.
    Face to face in the courtyard, Xaforn, the younger by fully a year, managed to draw herself up and give every impression of looking down on Qiaan as someone clearly younger or inferior. “The captain is wanted at the Palace,” she said, “and I will go in search of him myself. But you ought to have enough respect for his position and his duty to make sure the message reaches him as soon as possible, if I do not find him.”
    “Oh, I know all about
duty
,” said Qiaan, a little acidly. “Good hunting, Xaforn.”
    “Soft,” hissed Xaforn, just before she swept out of earshot.
    “Besotted,” Qiaan returned, making sure she had the last word. She was rather good at that.
    Both girls departed, pursuing their own errands, equally stung. It was the summer, it was the heat. Tempers were frayed everywhere.
    But this was the summer of trial for both of them.
    Xaforn was intent on
becoming.
All her life she had been a chrysalis, and this was the last summer she would have to wait for her metamorphosis. If she was good, if she stayed ahead of the pack, autumn would bring promotion, and the next year would, maybe, bring more than that. Xaforn knew, knew with a passion born of yearning, that once she was a full-fledged Guard she would always have a place to belong, she would know who she was, she would have a home.
    Qiaan was equally focused on
being.
She was cast in a role, but one which she found it difficult to interpret. She was young, but she was not unobservant—and there was a coolness between her parents, a coolness which she could sense deepen when she entered the presence of both of them at the same time, a coolness which her mother then passed on to her when her father departed once again to take up his duties at the compound and the Palace. Qiaan was an unwitting pawn in some adult game—but that was just an instinct, not a knowledge, and she had no idea how to act in order to lessen the impact of the situation on her own life. She tried to be a dutiful daughter, to the best of her ability. When her mother, a transplanted Southerner who was sometimes fiercely homesick for her own people, thawed far enough to share some aspect of her childhood or her culture with Qiaan, the child tried to listen, to learn—but those times were rare, and it was more common by far to be rebuffed by a cool word or a refusal of a touch. Rochanaa did her duty and passed on to Qiaan all that a mother should teach a daughter—but no more than that.
    They were both, Guard foundling and Guard daughter, fiercely lonely.
    In the third week of Chanain, with summer coming to a boil and