The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis

"Rise, Empress," the priest said, and the word went through me like a blade that had been warmed by the fire first.

It didn't hurt.

It made something within me snap into place.

The doors to the hall opened on that, and the outside answered back. The drums to the east picked up the pattern that meant come and see; the bells echoed from the west; the banners stirred like the wind had remembered its job. The ministers lowered their foreheads to the floor as if they had practiced it all morning, which they had.

Mingyu held out his hand. He didn't make me use the steps down to the dais the way a proper woman should have. I stepped off the last inch of stone and onto the ground beside him, a small, bright violation that would make the gossips itch and the loyal feel taller. He didn't let go. His thumb traced the line of my knuckles like he was counting something only he could hear.

We walked out into the larger hall, the one meant to swallow sound and reflect it back gilded.

The throne there was higher, the dragon at its back coiled and watching, the floor a lake of polished wood with the room's sky painted in it. The city waited beyond the wide doors, a thousand faces layered on a thousand more, the winter light making everything sharper.

Deming stood at the foot of the dais with Longzi, both in dark robes, both carrying expressions that told anyone watching the day would be clean.

There are a hundred things an emperor is supposed to say right then, but Mingyu did not say them at all.

Instead, he said three things: "Amnesty for debt in the burned districts. Grain tax is reduced by a fifth in the border provinces for one year. The rebuilding of bridges and wells begins tomorrow—paid for by the palace. Speak to your magistrates. If they do not listen, come, speak to me."

The sound that came back was not a cheer. It was a letting out. A city remembering how to breathe.

He looked at me. I didn't raise my voice, but the hall carried it anyway. "My mountain is closed for a season," I said. "No one climbs unless they carry tools and not torches. Bring me lists of missing children from the south and the west. I will find what can be found."

The scribes sucked in breath and started writing too fast, blotches blooming where a hand shook. I watched a minister's mouth flatten with the discomfort of a woman ordering the world and didn't care enough to enjoy it.

They made us sit then, because ceremony requires sitting the way a river requires a bank. The crown pulled a little at the root of my hair. The beads clicked when I turned my head and tickled my cheek. I let the weight remind me I had a body, that bodies can rest as well as fight.

A petition was brought forward—some small thing about a mill-owner cheating the measure.

Mingyu sent it to a magistrate with a note that would make the man very attentive for the next six months. Another petition—varnish for temple doors that had cracked in the cold. Deming took it with the bland face he wore when he was about to give a holy man exactly what he asked for and then twice as much work.

I let my mind drift to the quiet places: the smell of the old hearth in the mountain house the day before it burned, Lin Wei's ribbon biting my wrist because I'd tied it too tight to make sure I didn't lose it, the way Shadow's tail thumped once against my foot now because he had decided this was as good a floor as any to nap on.

The day kept making itself around me, and I let it.

Li Xuejian was not in the hall. Bai Yuyan was not either. I did not look for them. It wasn't their day.

At some point, the priest made us stand again. We drank from a single cup of wine because the ancestors like to watch mouths touch the same place and think it means something they invented.

The wine was warm and not quite sweet and I could have done without it. Mingyu pressed the cup back into my hand after his sip and the ghost of his heat stayed there because it belonged there.

The last bell of the rite was a thin one, almost shy. It faded quickly. The priest's voice announced what the city already knew: the throne had a name and that name would not be lifted again without a lot of screaming.

The crowd outside moved the way water moves when a rock lifts out of it. Bows rolled through ranks; hands made the shapes they were supposed to make. Somewhere in the back, a child shrieked with delight, then was shushed. Somewhere closer, an old woman cried like a kettle, clean and relieved.

We walked back the way we'd come.

Ministers peeled away to begin their sprint through the work we had just casually promised on a cushion of cushions. Longzi murmured something to Deming that made his brother laugh once and then sober. Yaozu slid into place beside me as if we had rehearsed it, and Shadow shook himself hard enough to make a nearby clerk jump.

"Hungry?" Mingyu asked, low.

"Always," I said. He smiled like he'd been waiting for that answer since he was born.

In the smaller corridor, away from eyes that wanted to tax every breath, he caught my wrist. The beads of the crown on my head kissed my cheek again. He pressed his forehead to mine for the length of a heartbeat and a half. "Empress," he said, like it was a thing he'd been carving in his mouth for months so it would come out smooth.

"Emperor," I said back, and let the word home take a shape that had space for both of us in it.

We didn't go to the feast right away.

Let them begin without us.

The palace could perform satiation with or without the people who actually fed it. We cut through a side court where the winter sunlight fell in a clean square and warmed the tiles like a held breath.

My shadow and his made a single dark shape for three strides before they separate again. I let myself think: I could plant mint here. Feverroot in that corner. A basin for rinsing metal filings. A room for a boy to sleep where the wind wouldn't find him.

"Later," Mingyu said, as if he had read my thought on my face. "We'll do all of it."

"All of it," I echoed.

From somewhere deeper in the palace, the first drum of celebration began. Lighter than the morning's, quicker, the rhythm of a city that has chosen to live. The sky above the eaves was the clean blue you only get on winter days when the cold is honest. I lifted my head and let it find my eyes.

The crown was still heavy. But under it, something in me finally set down what it had been carrying since the first man walked into my mountain with a torch.

The world had the names it needed.

The rest would be work.

But I have always been good at work.