“You see my dilemma,” says the Princess to Liù. “I would sooner die than marry a man I do not trust. And”—blood, pain, helplessness, fear—“I do not trust any man.”
“I do see,” Liù murmurs.
“Raise your eyes.” The Princess waves a capricious hand. “We should be friends. I am beginning to think there is something else besides the Stranger’s name I must learn from you.”
Liù looks up, questioning.
“You are in love,” says the Princess plaintively. “What is it like?”
“It is like drinking water endlessly,” says Liù, “and never slaking your thirst. It is like starving in front of a painting of a feast. It has a great deal to do with pain, Daughter of Heaven. I think you might like it.”
Cadenza
Liù has never met the Princess. She has never entered the empire to which the Princess is heir. Liù is little more than a child, and her Prince—who does not yet know exile, is not yet a Stranger to anyone—only a few years older.
“And how have things been,” he asks as she adds wood carefully to his hearth, “downstairs? Is the head housekeeper still giving you trouble?”
Liù blushes. “Not since we last spoke, my lord.” The head housekeeper used to beat Liù over little things, often things she hadn’t done. Liù suspects, though she is too shy to say it aloud, that the Prince himself put a stop to this. It is the sort of thing he would do.
“We are having an entertainment tomorrow,” the Prince says, idly studying himself in the mirror. He is glorious, draped all over with blue and purple cloth. “Minstrels from the River Amur. That’s where you come from, isn’t it? I wonder if—oh, but you’re finished there. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep you.”
“My lord’s room has a great deal of silver in need of polishing,” Liù says as she rises from the fireplace.
“Oh?” says the Prince.
He raises his eyebrows and smiles, and his smile tells Liù everything she will ever need to know.
He knows she is making excuses to stay—to keep hearing him speak. He knows that she loves him. Liù herself does not quite know it until she sees it, in that smile, reflected back at her.
And it doesn’t matter. The Prince is kind, but no Prince can marry a slave. If he were selfish, he might string her along, use her for pleasure. But this Prince is a good Prince. Lovestruck slaves are nothing strange to him. He will be kind to her naturally, carelessly, as he is kind to everyone. He will take no undue liberties. Then, after being her friend for a time, he will go running off after a suitable Princess and forget her.
She sees all of this and can do nothing. His smile makes that clear. For him she will live her whole life and her life’s end. The Prince will be the death of her; for the Prince’s name is Love.
“She loves me,” says the Stranger. It is dark. The severed heads lining the palace’s walls shake yes and no in the wind.
The Stranger’s name is Love. He is as hungry and relentless as love ever was. And Princes, even exiled Princes, are not taught to starve quietly.
“Stop it,” says Liù. “You are hurting her. She is terrified of you. Did you never hear her first aria, the terrible memories that haunt her? Did you never hear what she sings after you answer the riddles, how she begs the Emperor not to let you force yourself on her? How can you continue, how can you do this, when you claim to love her?”
“She loves me,” says the Stranger.
For an instant Liù sees him as the Chancellor sees him. Paper-thin. A libretto stamped with someone else’s words.
The libretto, after all, proves him right. At the end of the opera, when Liù is dead and rotting, he presses his case until the Princess gives in. That is what happens, in the opera’s proper form, every night. That is the happy ending the audience cheers for.
The man Liù loves is kind, brave, gentle; but he cannot deviate from his role. Cannot even imagine it, no matter how little kindness the words possess. If the libretto says, This is what Love is, then kindness will bow and make way for it.
Liù stares into his eyes, and thinks, He is more a slave than I.
The Other Soprano, who puts on finery and becomes a Princess each night, is famous. The Conductor does not grab her in the wings. She is difficult to approach. Not screaming and glowering like some stage women, only remote. And so dazzling in her legions of fans and recording contracts that even the smallest unkindness—a rolled eye in the dressing room, a mispronunciation of the Soprano’s name—feels like fate. Deserved. Unchangeable.
The Soprano waits in the wings for the Other Soprano, heart pounding. Perhaps the terror itself is what makes the Other Soprano pause by her, meeting her eyes, when the curtain call finally ends.
“This . . . thing,” says the Soprano. “This thing we’ve been doing, where the opera changes. Have you felt it?”
The Other Soprano’s face closes up. “The improvisation. Yes. So?”
The Soprano wonders if she will have infinite nights for this, if the Other Soprano will kill her again and again until she has the words to say it right.
“I wanted to ask you about it. About how it feels to you. Do you feel that, to you, on some level, the Princess becomes . . .”
“What?”
“Real.”
The Soprano feels something frozen between them. An icy, closing vise. “That’s ridiculous. It’s only an opera.”
“I only meant . . .”
“It means nothing. It can’t mean anything. That can’t happen, do you understand? It is fiction.”
The Other Soprano hurries away as if pursued. The Soprano thinks about the Princess, about the very great fear straining under her skin. She stands very still, and thinks, Then what am I?
The truth comes to the Princess like a tiger, stalking just out of sight. She will remember all the warning signs later: The breathing that she heard but thought nothing of. The stripes she would not let herself see. And Liù, a constant reminder of the things in this world that are hidden, that no one will speak of.
When the truth pounces, she is alone in the garden, watching the fish in the pond. She stays there, weeping, unmoored from time. It is her father who approaches her at last, without a guard at his side or even a servant. Not the Emperor resplendent in his dragon robes: only her father, his frail bones rustling through the grass.
“Noble Father, I—” she chokes. “Lo-u-ling—”
He is weeping too. “I tried to tell you.”
“It wasn’t her in the garden. It wasn’t my ancestress. It was the Bellflower Rebellion. It was me.”
“I know, my daughter.” He holds out his arms. She does not move toward him, and he lowers them again. “I know.”
“So you see,” says the Princess to Liù later, when the shock has worn off, “that is what all this is really about.”
“Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù, “I am so sorry.”
“Sorry?” says the Princess. “Liù, I am a tyrant and a murderer. I do not want pity. I simply want to talk to someone who will not glare from the side of their eyes like a courtier. The Stranger was not the one I needed to kill, was he? The men who deserved that are already gone.”
Liù has no plan for this, no idea what to say. “Daughter of Heaven,” she stammers, “you would forever have my gratitude if you did not kill him.”