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Longfang did her level best not to make any expression whatever as Emperor Luo Binghe reviewed her manifest for the semi-annual textile importation. The trick got much harder when the Emperor said the words the entire civil service had, over the past decades, come to outright tremble at.
“That which you have brought this Lord is a matter for his Empress.”
Longfang winced.
The consignments were destined for the northern markets. Longfang had been hoping to be granted the Emperor’s seal and waved along to one of the northern queen’s demon clerical disciples. Instead, the Emperor was calling her out.
Said Emperor slid the manifest back into the pouch hanging from his courtier’s neck quite decidedly and raised a polite, frosty eyebrow at her.
“Of course, Huangshang.” Longfang acquiesced, offering the honorific and flattening herself to the floor before the Emperor could slide in any comment on her perhaps-evident attempt to circumnavigate procedure (and thus Shen Qingqiu). Emperor Luo Binghe missed very little: it was always safer to assume that he missed nothing at all.
Longfang absented herself hastily, skittering out the door and down the hall. The reason she’d risked provoking her Lord’s not inconsiderable temper was that she feared even it less than the alternative. Everyone in service knew what his Excellency the Xiu Ya sword could be like.
It wasn’t that the man was impolite. She’d never seen Shen Qingqiu be less than coolly civil by the standards of either realm in which he was recognised as a lord. Sometimes very coolly, but even so. At a banquet Longfang had attended five years ago, she’d seen his Excellency decapitate a would-be assassin with a fan, and then apologise to the western demon lord he’d saved for the blood’s having splattered on his robes as though the matter were some piece of social awkwardness. Neither was the problem that all-too-common blight on civil servants’ lives: an ignorant minister who’d earned his position by virtue of imperial favour alone, who was unqualified to hold it. Shen Qingqiu was famously learned in subjects human and inhuman. His research into demonic customs was invaluable to his husband; the elegant calligraphy in the Emperor’s private office was in the Xiu Ya sword’s own hand. Nor was the issue Shen Qingqiu’s apathy regarding his office.
No, just the opposite.
Longfang found the master of the palace in his bamboo garden, taking tea with the first and second princesses. The family was seated at a small white stone table. Shen Qingqiu was looking over some paintings the girls had presented him with, making approving noises about a cluster of vague and blotchy ducks that seemed to be swimming through fire. This was either a bold artistic choice, evidence of confusion on the second princess’s part as to the nature of ducks, or a surprisingly accurate attempt to depict Twin-Tongued Scorching Flame Mandarins. Longfang did not venture to guess which.
The domesticity of the scene was somewhat misleading. At nine, this first princess had blooded her sword on her birthday Ordeal. She had won and received her courtesy name in accordance with the old traditions which had necessarily lapsed after her grandfather’s imprisonment and her father’s disappearance. The first princess was nearly ten now, and at the unfamiliar noise of Longfang’s moving onto the white gravel path leading to her father and little sister, her bright black eyes darted up and her hand came to rest on her sword hilt automatically.
Her father, who was yet more capable of detecting and dispatching threats, only gave his eldest a glance—as if to say, ‘well, aren’t you eager?’ The sigil on the first princess’s pale forehead flared bright, then guttered. With an embarrassed huff, she threw herself down on the chair next to her father and buried her curly head in the crook of his arm: seeking solace from the very person who’d rebuked her.
Longfang bowed, presenting her manifest to his highness. He took it from the messenger bag, and Longfang waited to hear the words palace functionaries dreaded above all others: the very reason the Empress’s jurisdiction was such a fearful thing to be referred to.
Shen Qingqiu scanned the first page’s summary of the full report, pursed his lips and spoke.
“I have a few minor thoughts.”
And there it was. Longfang swallowed her wretched groan.
When truly engaged, Empress Shen Qingqiu was a critical, hyper-focused nightmare. This exacting perfectionist believed absolutely that there was a right way and a wrong way to do a thing, and that there was hardly any point in doing a task at all, if you were going to quarter-ass it. Shen Qingqiu was fond of snipping that his servants might as well go and work for the northern queen, if they took that kind of corner-cutting attitude to their work (a terrible threat: it was really cold up there).
There was hardly a member of the service who hadn’t suffered from Shen Qingqiu’s wrath—oh, pardon, his ‘few minor thoughts.’ Shen Qingqiu would idly pick apart your entire methodology, just as though you weren’t bringing him the culmination of months of work. He’d suggest (read: insist) on a consultation with the people the cloth was going to as to why they needed it, because according to him, that could determine what sort of cloth Huan Hua ought to secure in the first place.
It wasn’t that Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t be right. The worst part of it all was that he mostly was. Which meant that however onerous implementing his advice would be, you couldn’t, in the proud tradition of a thousand household stewards, nod and smile and say it had happened just as master had said. You had to consider Shen Qingqiu’s opinion seriously, or come up with a very good reason not to.
Under Emperor Luo Binghe and his most loyal adherents—nobles of that Lord’s own generation, who’d broken with their elders to support his succession—the demonic realms’ infrastructure had developed dramatically. A generation ago, there had been no civil service whatsoever. Now, the Xiu Ya sword set the exams. And whenever any of his ‘outermost disciples’ (as they jokingly called themselves) wanted to take a single shortcut, there the Empress (who’d ruled decades, and who, despite being an Immortal, loftily claimed he ’needed something to do with his old age’ after his Peak generation had collectively stepped aside) was, asking if your time-saving trick was quite as good an idea as you’d thought it.
Worst of all, Shen Qingqiu would—after all this!—turn around and claim he was a mere dabbler. That the Empire was his husband’s affair, really. Would stress that he was a lax, easy-going sort of man. If anyone tried to flatter the Empress by observing the extent to which Shen Qingqiu was the power behind the throne, he’d look at them as though they were stupid or confused. This kind of thing made you want to haul off and just punch him—which wouldn’t have done much good against the Xiu Ya sword even before the man had spent decades dual cultivating with the demonic Emperor.
“Please, be seated,” Shen Qinqiu said to Longfang with a gesture of his omnipresent fan at the unoccupied chair, still perusing Longfang’s report. “Permit me another moment to look over this.”
“A Die,” the second princess said, glancing at the manifest and scrunching up her small face, “what’s the story?”
“You had better hurry up and learn to read, hadn’t you?” Shen Qingqiu said, running the hand holding his fan over her neat braids without looking up from the report and then using its guard to give the crown of her head the lightest of taps. “Then you’ll be able to see for yourself!”
“It’s Fuhuang in public, meimei,” First Princess sniffed.
“Fuhuang, foooo hwaaaanguh,” Second Princess repeated, singing the word as though it were unfamiliar and funny while swinging her small feet under the table.
The first princess straightened up, her proper bearing a contrast to this display.
“Empresses have to read a lot,” she tried to explain to her sister. Her expositional mode was copied exactly from her father: she waved her hand as though she expected a fan to simply appear in it.
The second princess, who was all of four, did not seem to sense the gravity of the wisdom being imparted to her.
“Well then you’ll have to, not me,” Second Princess observed, rolling her eyes at this piece of pomposity.
“Will I, Fuhuang?” First Princess looked up to her father, all airs discarded in an instant. Trust shone in her eyes: clearly whatever Daddy said must be absolutely right.
“Do you want to be Empress?” Shen Qingqiu asked her, flipping a page of the document he was still perusing. “Or Junshang?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” the first princess asked, blinking up at him.
“Hmm,” Shen Qingqi stroked her cheek with the back of his knuckles as he read. “Not necessarily. Your imperial father didn’t. I very much doubt your grandfather ever did, though you can ask him when we visit Zhao Hua. The Dowager Empress might have been another story—but then, perhaps Huan Hua was world enough for her.”
He patted his daughter's curls.
“When you’re older we’ll talk more about what Zhizhi would like, hm?”
Upon the completion of her ordeal the first princess’s new-minted courtesy name had replaced her milk name, which had been ‘Zhi’, for straightforward. But it seemed that within her family, the first princess was still called after a woman who’d had nothing to spare, who’d nevertheless spared her father’s infant life.
Longfang observed the queer conversation and wondered to what extent the first princess understood the changes her fathers were overseeing, which had already reshaped what the infant Junshang might expect of her life. The Emperor’s Council of Nobles and the Empress’s army of ministers had radically altered the demonic realms, likely forever. If the first princess ascended, it would be to a different throne than the one her forefathers and foremothers had occupied for twenty-six generations. The demonic realms were no longer crippled by scarcity: Huan Hua’s riches had been used to float trade agreements which had since repaid themselves tenfold. The era of young lords and ladies undertaking random raids against the realms above to establish themselves in the realms below was long over. Longfang’s own people enjoyed an unprecedented recognition at court.
The second princess yawned. Shen Qingqiu glanced at her, then asked the first princess to take her sister off for her afternoon nap. Perhaps a nursemaid should have done it, but there were very few servants in this part of the palace. Longfang supposed that perhaps the Emperor didn’t trust anyone at all with his family.
The princesses only agreed to leave when the Empress promised to follow them as soon as he was done.
“And you won’t take too long?” the first princess pressed.
“Of course, of course. Tch. So clingy!” The Empress scolded them. The word sat soft in his mouth, and his eyes were fond. “You certainly don’t get it from me!”
Shen Qingqiu said this with perfect confidence—as though, for even a moment during his entire interview with Longfang, he’d ever stopped patting his daughters’ hair, or tucking them against his side like little bamboo leaf-wrapped parcels of sticky rice.
“Remember, Fuhuang! Not too long! You promised!”
The Empress rolled his eyes and waved the girls on with his fan, as though he were wafting away steam from a hot cup of tea.
The first princess then marched off, tugging her sister behind her with ill-grace.
Longfang tensed when the Empress turned to looked up at her through his long lashes.
“I have always found,” Shen Qingqiu said casually, “that parenting largely consists of pretending there are answers, and that you might know some of them.”
It was unmistakably the tone of someone offering a piece of advice.
Longfang shifted. “Your Excellency is well-informed.”
Longfang was a minor lady of the Zhulong southern snake tribes, so named for her prodigious, venomous fangs. A human should hardly have been able to look at her and divine that back at home her partner lay coiled on a nest, keeping their eggs warm.
“My lady’s colour is a trifle piqued,” Shen Qingqiu said delicately, by way of explanation. Longfang’s flushed scarlet scales were testament to her recent gravidity.
“Your first clutch?” he asked.
She was yet young. Shen Qingqiu’s guess was fair, and it was correct. She bobbed the human-like face which crowned the long, slender coil of muscle of that comprised her body in answer.
“Best wishes,” the Empress said with a gracious inclination of his own head. “Now tell me, why is Sha Hualing trying to slaughter the North?”
He waved the report like it offended him.
“She’s left them with hemp? It wouldn’t keep out a draft! Not everyone has the cultivation she does, and can wear a napkin and call it good. The better-quality supplies can only have gone to her,” he muttered, as though to himself. “There’s no one like Hualing for getting in first. So,” he looked to Longfang, “what does she even want the good stuff for?”
Longfang shifted.
“This humble one cannot speculate on that great Lady’s actions.”
“That ‘great Lady’,” Shen Qingqiu sniffed, using his closed fan to punctuate the words—the very image of his huffy daughter, “is nothing but a brat I’ve known since she was fifteen, and still thought going around without shoes was the height of sensuality. I’d say it to her face. Well,” he flicked his fan open, “don’t speculate, then. Just tell me what you know.”
Longfang decided that Sha Hualing was theoretically vicious, and far away. Shen Qingqiu, however, was glaring at her from across the table like a man who expected to be answered.
“The increasing population of her capital has strained the central plains’ cave systems.” Living in traditional natural caverns was a luxury no longer universally available, even in the temperate belt, where digging meant earthworks rather than the northern territories’ battle against the permafrost. “We think she’s claimed the wool for insulation, for the walls of new Clan-longhouses. Mix it with some seaweed, which we’ve plenty of, and it makes for a stronger brick as well.”
“Aha,” Shen Qingqiu said. “Well, it’s your decision,” (it wasn’t—not if the Emperor heard about his servants having acted against his Empress, at any rate), “but can’t we lean on the human realms for a more amenable replacement for Mobeijun’s consignment than hemp?”
“Not,” Longfang pointed out, “at this budget.”
“I see,” Shen Qingqiu said, getting it. “And you don’t want to ask the treasury for more, because?”
Longfang coughed. “It would undermine our department’s reputation for efficiency.”
Shen Qingqiu arched an eyebrow at her. “Is it better to be effective, or to seem so?”
“Seeming is being,” Longfang snapped, unthinkingly. “His Excellency ought to know that our guanxi with the whole of the service is inseparable from our efficacy.”
Shen Qingqiu paused to take the point, but apparently (Longfang breathed a sigh of relief) little offence at her comment. He drummed his fingers on the table, considering.
“Then Sha Hualing needs to talk her people out of wool, or I need to make a discretionary intervention with the treasury on your behalf. One of the two. Correct?”
Longfang felt a flare of irritation, because her department did have other work to get on with. The northern queen’s office would have just accepted the diktat and made their own independent arrangements. They’d have cobbled together something shoddy, but workable. If this aspect of the manifest was useless and wasted everyone’s time, it was only one element in a larger whole. Shen Qingqiu’s revisions represented a lot of bother over a single, if important, item in the year’s state-sponsored importation programme.
But as the food supply solidified, the demonic population was only going to continue to grow. This was a problem that would never be smaller than it was today. The Empress was both a right nuisance if you wanted to get on with things and an excellent lever to pull if you ever wanted to stop dealing with a vexing matter.
“Having fun, Shizun?” someone said from behind Longfang.
No prizes for guessing who. After all, most people still knew Resentment: it was a classic of the genre. And even if you were too young to have heard the ballad, it would have been difficult to miss the widening of Shen Qingqiu’s eyes, quickly suppressed though it was. Whenever they met, for just a moment, the Empress looked at the Emperor as though he’d only partly trusted he’d ever see the younger man again.
Shen Qingqiu schooled his expression, and his lip quirked. “This teacher adores trade disputes, of course. ‘Marry the Demon Emperor’, they said. ‘Endless debauchery and adventure’, they said.” He pointed at his husband with the tip of his fan. “You’re late, you know. Go tell the girls a story. Any moment now, your eldest will be out here checking to see why I’ve not come in yet.”
“She’s your eldest too, Shizun.”
The Emperor walked around Longfang, coming forward with his hands tucked behind his back—giving his husband a pout.
Shen Qingqiu arched an eyebrow at the Emperor, flicking his gaze over him.
Luo Binghe laughed.
Longfang took this as her cue to (in the most deferential manner) start immediately slithering towards the door. No one wanted a repeat of the Regnal Birthday Incident.
“Yes,” Shen Qingqiu coughed, calling out to Longfang’s rapidly retreating back, “just leave this with me, I’ll—mmpf!”
Longfang did not turn around to see what had caused the Empress to abruptly stop speaking. One needn’t consider such questions too deeply.
Longfang supposed Shen Qingqiu really was all right. He was an asset to the Lower Realms, he’d given the Emperor two strong princesses, etcetera etcetera. He was simply simultaneously—and for precisely the same reasons he was invaluable—a right pill to work with. Longfang grumpily resigned herself to a whole week of renegotiating the wool shipment, with only her colleagues’ abundant sympathy for her having survived a meeting with the Empress to bolster her. At least her maternity leave was around the corner—as soon as the clutch hatched, the Wool Cohong could be someone else’s problem for a while.