The empress glanced down at Aiai’s hands, moving quickly among her ingredients. “I’ve heard some of the others have been asking you for your scents.”
“I told them I only create for you, my lady.” Aiai had enough self-preservation to refuse the riches offered by people who sought to attract the emperor. They knew nothing of her moli, but her everyday perfumes were famed at court, and people searched for any advantage to raise their status.
However, not all of Aiai belonged to the empress. Anxious to understand more about her moli, Aiai had been taking action on her own. Daily prayers for guidance to the Peony Goddess had gone unanswered, so after setting up a shrine, Aiai decided she was on her own to understand what she was capable of. She began creating moli scents for others without them knowing. Maids, mostly. That was who she had most access to, thanks to the watchful eye of the empress, and no concubine in her right mind would allow a woman known to be close to Empress Wu near them with a mysterious powder.
She had learned a few things in the rare opportunities she had to slip a moli scent to an unsuspecting maid. It took over a year for her to understand that a person’s true love didn’t have to smell the scent themselves—as she had told the empress—but was summoned by the seeker wearing or lighting the scent. She had watched avidly as a eunuch from another part of the palace had come, lovestruck, to findone of her chosen maids. Luckily, the empress hadn’t known their love was due to Aiai’s interference and had decided it was amusing enough to buy them a small house in the city and release them from service.
Another had left her secret lover and had become inseparable from another maid, and the two cried if forced apart. Three of the maids had disappeared, and Aiai hoped it was because they’d found their true loves and had run away with them. Why else would they leave if not for love? She felt no guilt about her shadowy actions. She was giving people true love as a gift, after all.
“Good.” The empress settled back. “You belong to me, and that secret power you wield is for my use only.”
Aiai said nothing, but this rankled. Every time she succeeded in a test behind the empress’s back, Aiai felt like she was regaining part of herself.
There were days her life gnawed at her. Her time at the palace had been spent in sumptuous luxury. What Empress Wu spent on cosmetics would feed half a district, and Aiai couldn’t help but think that money could be better used to help the lives of the others in the city. She was wicked for thinking that way. Everyone had their place under the Son of Heaven, even lowly perfumers who wished they could work for everyone instead of a single ambitious woman who desired to hoard everything for herself—be it love, power, or Aiai’s perfumes.
Still, Aiai would give anything to be able to create in peace and without fearing her patroness’s cold smile. One day, she would be free.
Their solitude was interrupted by one of the river of advisers who flowed past the empress. The adviser spoke in a low voice, and Aiai tried to prevent her hand from shaking as she rubbed the powder from the ground peel into her wrist to test the scent, then jumped at a loud sound from the corridor. The maids’ gossip about strange happenings in the palace had become more lurid since the death of the Empress Wang, strangled by order of the emperor after the deathof then–Consort Wu’s baby daughter.
Wu had cried over her daughter’s death. Aiai had seen the redness in her eyes and the trembling of her pale lips before the maids had painted them vermilion. However, her grief hadn’t stopped her from taking advantage of the situation.
At the thought of the lost baby, Aiai’s hand instinctively went to curl around her belly before she brought it to her knee in the most casual gesture she could manage. Fuqian had been the first to notice the changes in her body, wondering at the expanding curves during one of their clandestine meetings. Her monthly periods had ceased for five months now, and it was becoming difficult to hide her shape. Luckily her mistress had been busy, and Aiai had made a point of eating more at meals as an excuse for the new moonlike roundness of her face and figure.
The adviser left, and Empress Wu looked at Aiai with the intensity of a hunting tiger. Aiai made sure to keep her face down and her robe fluffed out over her body. Only bad things happened when her mistress looked like that. “Aiai.”
“Yes, my lady?” She might sound like the emperor’s prized parrot for the frequency with which she repeated those three words, but they kept her safe. Had she been caught? Which secret had been unearthed? Fuqian? The maids? Both? Either could get her killed if the empress felt ungenerous.
“I never thanked you properly for bringing the emperor to me,” said her mistress in a honeyed tone that had Aiai on breathless alert. “How things have changed in the last several years, and you by my side the whole time. So loyal. So honest.”
“My lady.” She kept her head lowered to her work. Would it be better to brazen it out or to admit everything and beg forgiveness?
“Do you truly think he came because of your scent?” Wu asked in a deliberately casual tone. “That he is my true love, as you led me to believe?”
Aiai distinctly remembered doing the opposite, but knew betterthan to say so. “Few men can resist you, my lady.” She was grateful to get words out past her tight throat.
“Enough,” Wu snapped. “No sweet deceiving words, Aiai. Tell me the truth, for I have learned some fascinating information.”
“I told you what I know,” said Aiai urgently. “The Peony Goddess came to me. She said hearts will become whole, and my scents have brought love to others before.”
“Yet I have just been told something I’ve suspected for a while,” said Empress Wu. “That it was not at the emperor’s own request that I came back, but that of the old bitch Wang.”
Aiai did her best to act naturally. “The entire palace can see the emperor’s love for you, my lady.”
To her relief, Empress Wu nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Yet this is confusing to me, that he would not have moved heaven and earth to get to me if your fragrance had worked. Wang should not have had to interfere if he was my true love, don’t you think?”
“He made you his empress,” said Aiai.
“So he did.”
The ensuing silence meant Aiai was free of questioning for the time being, so she forced her icy hands to work again, pouring her blended powders into a sachet for the empress to tuck in her clothes. She thought the bitterness was faint enough to not be noticed. The work helped focus her mind and calm her heart, although it was difficult to work with the empress’s eyes on her. What was she thinking? How much danger was Aiai in? She knocked against the tray, spilling the powders.
“Ah, Aiai. What a mess. That’s not like you. Are you worried about anything?” asked the empress, her jade ornaments tinkling.
Aiai found the courage to take away some of the empress’s pleasure in playing with her. “Only the ratio of orange peel, my lady.”
The empress took the sachet that Aiai had placed on a tray and waved it in front of her nose. Then she tossed it back. “Too bitter. Tryagain.”
It took two more blends before Aiai found the right combination, and when the empress swept out, she nearly fainted in relief.
