An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches for the magical bond of jin-shei, the women’s oath, in her ancestral home of Syai, unaware that her quest will bring her to the very person who may destroy her and her family. And yet, she must face him, or all hope for Syai will be lost…
**An Excerpt from EMBERS OF HEAVEN**
Iloh himself waited in the courtyard.
For a moment, I did not recognise him - he would have been
only forty two years old at the time, but he looked older, with prominent bags
under his eyes as if he hadn't slept well for a long time. But the eyes themselves
- ah, the eyes were the same, black and brilliant, and hungry.
I stopped, staring at
him. He stared right back.
"You haven't
changed," he said at last, breaking the silence.
"Oh yes," I
said quietly, "I have..."
"No, said
Shou'min Iloh in the voice he usually must have reserved for proclamations,
because it had the ring of because-I-say-so authority. "You have not. Oh, I don't mean that you
are still the child that you were when I first saw you - you're not that, not
by a long way.
But you... you are still the same. Only you would walk up to
this place and assume that your name alone would get you taken straight through to me. Of all the women I have ever
known in my life, you remain the only one who doesn't know the meaning of
fear."
I couldn't help it, I
laughed. "I? I am afraid of everything..."
"Not of
me," he said. "That has always been your hold on me. You have never
knelt to me. Come."
I suppose I could
have proved him wrong and refused what was fairly obviously a command, and one
that he assumed would be obeyed - he had turned and walked away, and it was
obvious he expected me to follow - but this was what I had come here for, after
all. So I obeyed, and fell into step - not behind him, beside him. I saw him
smile at that, but he didn't speak again until we were out of the open
courtyard and into a quiet room which was apparently an inner sanctum - a desk,
an office chair, a typewriter, a lamp, an iron bedstead, and not much else. He
closed the door behind us.
"You look tired," I said, and oh, the place where
that tenderness came from - the place I still carried within me after all those
years - the shores of the ocean of yuan, of the fate that had first delivered
me to him. Xuan was my life and the
practical sunlit hours of my days - but Iloh had always been the other half of
me, the fevered dream of my nights, and nothing had changed there, nothing at
all.
This was the man who had broken my family on the wheel of
his ideals, who had fuelled the fire of the Rising, who had brought in the Army
to quell it when it became inconvenient - a man who had never stopped looking
for his Iron Bridge, feeding whatever he could into the furnace to create the
New Man who would come to live in his dream and make it a glorious reality. But
he was the heart of this country, for all that. And hearts notoriously do not
waste time on practical things. They yearn. They want. They love, beyond hope
and beyond reason.
Alma Alexander is the author of Secrets of Jin Shei and Embers of Heaven. Read
Alma’s personal blog and access her articles at www.SFNovelists.com
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