Chapter Text
It didn’t take all that long for Zip to track down one of the whores I’d grown up with. Zip’s got connections everywhere; if he doesn’t know then he knows a body who does, you follow? And in any case, it lets me give him some money, which he wouldn’t let me do otherwise. He doesn’t like being dependent on anyone and I can’t argue that. But I pay him enough to keep him decently fed and housed and in return, he keeps an eye out for me, finds out what I need to know.
Truth be told, he’d do it for free, just for me, but the two of us let it bide without saying a word. It’s just how we do things. We grew up together and I like Zip - and even more importantly, I trust him - which is more than I can say about most people I know. Not long after I came to the house LoLo caught him skulking about, looking for me, and hauled him inside by his ear, gave him the third degree. And then fed him, because that’s what the man does. He told the both of us that we were lunkheads - like the neighbors wouldn’t take note of some raggedy street kid hanging about and call the cops - and told Zip to come back in a few days. When he did - and I honestly wasn’t sure if he would, but he did - LoLo had a basic looking brown delivery uniform with a cap and a badge and a delivery box with a lid, told Zip to make sure his hands and face were washed and that when he needed me to bring the box and go to the side door leading into the kitchen like he was supposed to be there instead of looking like he was casing the joint. It worked like a charm, too. He’s been doing it ever since. Like I said before, nobody in our neighborhood pays attention to the help, and even Wu himself has wandered into the kitchen once or twice while Zip’s been in the back corner where LoLo feeds the various delivery kids (they fight over who’s delivering to us, I’ve been told) and hasn’t even bothered to look twice. Mako might have recognized him - he’s good with faces and he damn well looks, not being from this neighborhood - but Zip made sure he only came when Mako was out.
I dressed down some and took the tram into the city proper to where I needed to go. No point in flashing my car around down there; that’s just asking for trouble. The address he’d given me for Laughing Lan was a few steps up from the Flower District; I was glad to see it. Still a poor neighborhood, but there were electrical poles and flowers in windows, tidy stoops and alleyways, that kind of thing. As I was hoofing it over I saw a few kids playing and while their clothes were most likely secondhand, they were clean and cared for. Definitely a better place than where I’d last seen her.
I checked the address three times before ringing the bell. A girl around Naoki’s age answered, giving me quite the look. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is Lan in?” I was hoping she’d kept her name when she left the district. Not everyone did.
The girl nodded at me, and then called inside, “Mama! There’s a person here to see you!”
“Who is it?” came a voice from inside. I knew that voice, it took everything in me not to jump at it.
“Tell her it’s Qi,” I told the girl, trying to look friendly. It’s not something I’m very good at, but I was trying.
She stared at me for a good long moment before calling back, “She says her name is Qi.”
I heard Lan coming before I saw her, but she got there quick enough. She was older than she was - well, weren’t we all? - and she’d gotten a little plumper, which looked good on her. She had on a housedress and an apron, with her hands full of flour. She hadn’t even stopped to wipe them off. She looked me up and down. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, and then she laughed, that big old booming laugh she’d always been known for. “It’s our little Qi, all growed up!” She shook her head, still laughing, before looking over at the girl. “Sweetling, go and put on a kettle for me, would you? And then you go on out to the courtyard, play with your brothers.” The girl obeyed, but not without giving me another look over her shoulder. “My oldest, Ting,” Lan told me, and then she gestured me inside. “Come in! Come on in! Vaatu’s rancid ass but you’re a sight for sore eyes!”
She sat me down in her little parlor while she bustled around her kitchen, washing her hands and making us some tea. The room was a bit shabby but clean and neat as a pin. She had a little statue of a dancing girl that was put in a place of honor. Nothing to the priceless treasures I’d just brought home, but I expected that it meant the world to her. I’m not so high and mighty nowadays that I can’t appreciate that. Or at least I hope I’m not.
She came in and we chatted a bit - she told me she’d seen my pictures in the paper and she’d known me right away - and she explained that she’d met a builder working across the street from the whorehouse who’d ended up falling in love with her, marrying her and bringing her home. Every whore’s happiest ending, the one that just about none of them ever got. She had three children now, two boys and a girl, and she showed me a photograph of them, clearly proud. They were nice looking kids, and I told her so.
“But Qi, tell me now. Why you here? It’s not that I ain’t glad to see you - ain’t I glad! But I can’t think, all that money of yours now, why you’d bother.” She was watching my face. “You hoping to find something out about your people? Now that you getting married and all?” She laughed at my surprise. “Naw, I can’t read none, and neither can that man of mine, but all three of our kids, they getting schooling. My Ting, she’s read the newspaper to me. Prince Wu! Will that make you a princess?”
“Royal Consort,” I said, with a bit of a grin.
“Well, la-di-dah!” and there went that laugh of hers again. I joined in. It was pretty fucking la-di-dah when it came right down to it. She put her hand on my arm, rubbing up and down on it like she was glad to see me. “So, Royal Consort Qi, what can I tell you?”
I swallowed, hard. It wasn’t like it was easy for me to ask. To give Lan credit, I think she knew. She was kind about it. Then again, she always had been. “I just…are any of them left?” I shot her a look. “Drunk Lu?”
Her face was sad. “Aw, sweetling, I’m sorry to tell you, but she left us not long after you did. Too much drink for too many years, her heart just gave up on her. We all knew she’d saved your life, she told us what happened. Not that any of us would have sold her out for doing for that damned pimp. He were bad news and deserved what he got.” She patted my knee. “She would have been tickled pink to see you now, she loved you to pieces, you know.” She thought for a bit. “Most of the rest…either they’re gone or I’ve lost touch. Whores don’t usually live too long, you know. Unless they’re like me, and they get out. And I don’t go down there no more.”
“I know you knew my Mama, Pensri.”
She gave me a look then, one I didn’t understand. “Pensri?”
“My Mama. Not that I remember her, but I knew her name.”
She leaned towards me. “Qi, baby, I don’t know what you were told or what you understood, but Pensri wasn’t your Ma. She fed you, that’s true. Her baby was born dead, saddest thing in the world, but you come along about a week later and she still had milk, so she fed you. Got herself a good deal with it, she only had to entertain the company once or twice a day between feedings. She was a nice enough girl, Pensri, but she wasn’t your Ma.” I just stared at her. I didn’t know what to say. I’d always thought she was my Mama, that teenage girl who’d shown up pregnant. Lan must have known, because she took my hands in hers. “Your mother was the Madame. I don’t know why you thought different, but I promise you, I was there. She was your Ma.”
I froze up. I didn’t even know what to say, my mind was swirling in a thousand different directions. Madame? The Madame of the house? My Mama? I felt numb.
“Oh, Qi. I thought you knew. That’s why she was always on you to keep up with the embroidering, she wanted you to have something more than a life on your back. She was saving up to send you away to school, too. She should have sent you when you were seven, but she got sick, you remember, and I think she wanted you nearby. She wanted you to get your education, she was always so proud of how smart you were. But then she died and her sister showed up and took over the house, claimed everything in it was hers, including the money set aside for you. And then she sold you off the way she did…” She reached into her pocket and fetched out a handkerchief, wiping away my tears the way she’d done when I’d been little. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry. I am so damned sorry.” She reached out her arms then, and folded me up into her, patting me as I cried.
I don’t know why I was crying, not really. What difference did it make who my Mama really was? Well, I was telling myself that, but I wasn’t feeling it. All these years, I thought I knew who I was, but I didn’t, not really. Don’t know if you know what that’s like, but it ain’t no good feeling, not when it comes down to it.
When I’d settled some, she told me the rest. How my Mama had done the one thing whores weren’t supposed to do, how she’d fallen in love with a customer, one that was married. “She was fooling herself that he was going to leave his wife for her, poor woman. They never do. I got lucky with my Yuto, but he weren’t no customer and he weren’t married, neither.” My Mama’d kept hoping he’d come around once he’d heard she was pregnant and so she’d had me, despite knowing it was a bad idea. “She went to his home a few days after you were born, taking you with her, but his wife chased her off. Not that I blame her. And he only came one more time, told her never to come near him or his family again. Ah, she was heartbroken. Poor desperate thing.”
My Mama - my real Mama - had gotten a sickness in her breast, by the time she took it to a healer it was too late for her. She’d made the arrangements with Lan and Lu to make sure I’d get sent off to school - some country boarding school in the northwest coast of the United Republic, Lan wasn’t sure why - but then her sister had shown up. “It all went to shit at that point. The house, all of it. She was no good. Your Ma, she’d been decent to work for. She was tough, but she was fair. She didn’t put up with any shit from the customers and she made sure the house was kept up and that we ate regular and had a healer if we needed it. Let us have our fun, too, knew it made for a better house that way. She wasn’t the lovey-dovey type or nothin’, don’t get me wrong. She were running a business and she had a good head for it, knew how to read and write a bit and do her sums. But it wasn’t a bad place, as far as those things go. Her sister, your auntie, she’s another story. She sold you off like that and none of us girls cottoned to it. You were our little Qi! And your Ma, she didn’t truck with nobody who sold child whores, neither. Pensri was young, but not as young as she played herself off as, and your Ma knew it.” I’d been gone for a day before Lu got it out of her where she’d sent me - got it out of her with her fists, apparently - and she and Lan and several other of the women had scattered across the district, looking for me. “Lu was the one who found you. Told you to run, too. Not that she thought anyone would care you’d done for the pervert in the room with you. She told you to run because far as your auntie was concerned, you were her property. She would’ve just sold you again, that bitch. I heard tell there was some bad business some years back that ended up with her dead and gone, though. You don't need to worry none, Qi. She can't do you nor nobody else no more harm now.”
We sat there for a time before she got up and came back with some cheap sake, filling both our tea cups full. I needed it. I think she did, too. Finally she sighed. “I’m guessing you want to know about your Daddy. Didn’t ever know his name, it’s not like the customers usually gave them. I do know he were a locksmith or maybe a watchmaker? Toymaker? Something that had to do with his hands and little tools like that. He had a shop somewheres near the theater district, if I’m remembering rightly. But that’s been years and years now, so who knows. Couldn’t tell you nothing else, and I’m sorry for it. Your Ma, though, her real name was Sayuri. That much I can tell you.”
I just stared at her. “Sayuri? Like the lily?”
She smiled. “What, you remember the song she used to sing to you? You were such a wee little bit then! The sayuri song, the one about the small lilies in spring? Only tender thing I ever seen her do for you. I don’t mean she didn’t love you. She did, it was just her way. Life hadn’t been easy for her, you know? Like so many of us there. She named you Qi, though, said that you were exceptional, that you’d bring about change. And she weren’t wrong, was she?” She laughed again. “A royal consort! What would your Ma have said! You read and write now?”
I nodded.
“That’s fine, Qi. Real good.” She patted my knee again. “And your prince? Prince Wu? He make you happy?”
“I love him,” I told her, and she leaned forward and kissed my cheek.
“That’s all your Ma ever wanted for you, that you’d be safe and happy, well away from the district. Oh, she’d be proud.”
We visited for a time and I got to meet her two sons, twins about a year or so younger than the girl. Nice kids. I wasn’t going to offer it - don’t I know about the tetchy pride poverty brings? - but I was going to see to it that they got some decent schooling on my yuan. Least I could do. Lan had always been good to me.
I’d said my goodbyes and was walking back down the street to the tram stop, my head still spinning, when I heard someone calling my name. “Princess Qi! Princess Qi!”
I turned and saw the girl, Ting, coming full pelt down the street towards me, waving something in her hand. She caught up to me, panting for all she was worth. “Take it easy there, get your breath back.”
“Mama, she said with everything else she forgot, says it went plumb out of her head. Says she had something that was yours, always kept it for you, just in case.” She handed over a sealed envelope. My name was written on it. I stared at it for a moment before looking back at her.
“Thanks. You tell her thank you for me?”
She nodded. “You a real live princess?”
“Something like that,” I told her. I reached into my pocket, fished out a little yuan. Not too much - she’d just get accused of stealing - but a bit. “Here, you get you and your brothers some candy, yeah? Share, though.” I winked at her. “Don’t tell your Mama.”
That got me a grin. “Thanks!” She took off, running just as fast as she’d came. I looked at the envelope, cheap paper, yellow with age, and ran my fingers across it before putting it carefully into my breast pocket. I wasn’t going to open it there. Taking a deep breath, I headed back towards my life.