Jade War

Shae picked up the phone again. She had a sudden impulse to call the clinic back to demand a retest because maybe there had been a mistake after all, but she knew that was mere denial. Instead she dialed her secretary and told her to reschedule the rest of her appointments for the day, as she was not feeling well. Shae got up, took the elevator to the ground floor, walked across the spacious lobby of the clan’s office tower, and out the front doors of the building.

* * *

Outside, she began walking west. It was a hot but soggy day; people streamed in both directions along the sidewalk, wearing summer clothes but carrying umbrellas. Shae walked for thirty minutes, until her feet ached in her black pumps and sweat plastered her blouse to the small of her back under her blazer. Rain fell, not steadily but with insulting indifference, scattered fat droplets that flecked the asphalt and landed noisily on awnings, car hoods, and garbage lids. Where Ship Street ended, Shae turned right and kept going, out of the Financial District, until she passed between the stone pillars and through the treed courtyard of the Temple of Divine Return.

Shae went straight to the front of the sanctum and knelt on one of the green prayer cushions. Rainwater from her damp hair left speckles on the stone floor as she touched her head to the ground three times and whispered, in a litany that she had repeated so many times that she barely had to call it to mind consciously, “Yatto, Father of All. Jenshu, Old Uncle. I beg you recognize my grandfather Kaul Seningtun, the Torch of Kekon, gone peacefully from this earth to await the Return. Recognize my brother Kaul Lanshinwan, taken from us before his time. Have mercy on the soul of Yun Dorupon. Give peace to the spirit of Haru Eynishun. Above all, guide and protect those of us who remain in this world, especially Wen and Niko and Ru, and my brother Hilo, for whom I also beg your forgiveness.” Shae fell quiet, trying to put her churning thoughts and emotions into words. From the front of the room, the steady burning energy of the meditating penitents filled the white spaces in her mind.

She spoke aloud, almost in a demand. “What do I do now?”

She couldn’t believe she was pregnant—not intellectually, though she had no reason to doubt the clinic’s verdict. When her cycle was late, she’d assumed that the stress of dealing with the public scandal had something to do with it. She and Maro had taken precautions. She was an educated professional woman, she was the Weather Man

. She would’ve placed an unplanned pregnancy well below sudden assassination in her internal ranking of things that she considered likely to happen to her. The timing, she mused despairingly, could not be worse.

Shae had never been able to say if she wanted children. She loved her two nephews dearly but didn’t feel a maternal longing of her own. There was no room for the feeling; her position in the clan was all-consuming, and she’d been beleaguered in her role from the start. Perhaps if things were different, the urge to have children would happen naturally. But nothing in her life, it seemed, happened naturally—only as unavoidable blows, like those of a sledgehammer.

There was no precedent for a woman with children in the leadership of a Green Bone clan. Ayt Mada had no offspring of her own and continued to pointedly ignore those who questioned her about the succession. After Lan’s death and the ouster of Doru, it had been difficult for No Peak to accept a young woman as Weather Man, but it had been a desperate time of clan war, and Shae was a Kaul. She still wore the label of being the Torch’s favorite grandchild, she was backed by respected men like Woon and Hami, and few people dared to challenge her brother.

Those advantages would not help her now. She was already under attack for her past supposed misdeeds; she couldn’t walk into a boardroom or into Wisdom Hall pregnant out of wedlock with the child of a man from a family of little standing in the Green Bone community. Ayt and the press would dig into Maro’s past, would question his parentage and his many trips to Shotar, would flay open his family’s history and discover that he was the bastard of a Shotarian soldier. Maro was not a Kaul; he was barely green. He was not equipped to handle the animosity and scrutiny, the risk to his professional career and to his safety. It would ruin his life.