Imperial Lady

1

Vivid bronze and green against the slanting rays of the winter sun, the pheasant darted up from its cover in a flurry of snow. Just as swiftly, Lady Silver Snow raised her bow of wood and horn, released an arrow. The heavy bird dropped into the underbrush. She nodded, and one of her escort rode off to retrieve it.

“An excellent shot, most worthy lady!” cried the old trooper Ao Li, his voice as bluff as if he spoke to a recruit. “Not even the women of the Hsiung-nu . . . this one humbly begs your forgiveness. The women of the Hsiung-nu are harsh, ill-spoken, but the thrice-worthy lady ...” His words trailed off, and his weathered face flushed with mortification.

None of the others cheered her, as they might one of their fellows. Old soldiers all, they had campaigned with her father, and now, close to the borders of their ancient enemies, the Hsiung-nu, they guarded her.

Even as Silver Snow held up an imperious hand, Ao Li flung him self from the saddle to her feet in abject shame, yes, and fear of his general who, disgraced and enfeebled though he might be, was still master in his own house.

Lady Silver Snow turned, her gloved hands so quick upon the reins of her shaggy northern pony that it almost reared. Snow cascaded from its coarse mane and pelt.

“Rise, please,” she commanded, smiling at him to excuse what he believed as a grave fault. “How should I be offended?” she asked. “Your words honor my lord and father, who taught me. Have I not always heard that the women of those beyond the Purple Wall hear the language of birds and can even gather meaning from creaks of stones and wood, while the most powerful among them even hear the shadow language of the untimely dead calling from their graves?”

Her breath steamed, a pale mist against a white jade sky, and her feet, in stitched boots of heavy felt, tingled from the cold; but her cheeks burned as crimson as the blood of the fowl that Ao Li scooped up and tied to the board of his saddle, wrought according to the fashion of the Hsiung-nu, who, barbarians though they were, without a doubt were also mounted warriors beyond compare.

Even as she gravely commended the old guard’s skill in tracking and appraised the plumpness of the pheasant that her bow, lighter and more supple than those of the steppes, had brought down, she blinked away tears of grief and of anger at lierself. She was ungrateful. The Son of Heaven might well have executed her father’s entire household for treason; for, if its head turned to evil, how could anyone ever trust the body?

Thus far, however, they lived; she and her father; lived and even, after a fashion, had been content. At times, she could even forget that they lived, existing solely upon a whim, which even a cup of heated wine could change to death.

A horncall rang out, followed by a cry, so shockingly loud that Silver Snow expected to hear the crystalline snap of icicles falling from trees. It brought Ao Li around, one age-spotted hand snatching at his swordhilt, the other pulling at his pony’s reins. His mount whinnied a protest as he forced it between his general’s daughter, whom he had sworn to protect with his life and soul, and this intruder.

She saw, before she felt, Ao Li’s apologetic touch to her horse’s harness.

“Lady,” he dared to whisper.

Behind her, men strung bows and drew swords. Silver Snow shivered, despite the warmth of her sheepskins. They had ridden out far today; had the Hsiung-nu seen them and decided to attack?

She turned to follow Ao Li’s pointing finger. Though she had always thought him fearless, his scarred hand was trembling now.

Silver Snow nocked her bow with even greater speed than she had used when she brought down the pheasant. She groaned inwardly and stole a longing glance at the gleaming, curved spine of the Great Wall. It might, she thought as her heart froze and sank within her, be the last thing that she would ever see. Beyond it lay plains and freedom of a sort—as her father had no doubt discovered during his years of exile. Perhaps he should have stayed there, unfilial and ungrateful wretch though she was for daring even to harbor such a thought. For conquered and disgraced though he was, his choice of surrender rather than massacre caused the downfall of ministers in shining Ch’ang-an. He had remained with his captors for ten years as had the deplorable Li Ling, general and traitor. Like General Chang Ch’ien, who had lived among the Hsiung-nu, wed and even bred among them, yet, in time, he too had fled back to the land of the Han.

Now, riding toward her on a sweating, steaming horse, came such a messenger as she had feared for ten years. What if he came from Ch’ang-an, the capital, where the Sun of Heaven sat in glory on the Dragon Throne and voiced his edicts against those houses he perceived as traitorous? Perhaps this messenger had already delivered the scarlet cord to her father and rode now to order her also to take her own life. Did Chao Kuang’s body now hang cooling on a tree, or lie contorted by poison, or bleeding from a swordcut? She would not survive him long, she vowed; and that choice was not dictated by the will of the Son of Heaven, either.

Despite the iron control in which she had early been schooled—first as a child growing up in a sad, poverty-stricken inner court, then as a girl raised by a grim, injured father—one tear streaked down her cheek, hot, but rapidly cooling. She forced herself back to a hunter’s stillness as she stared out across the border between Ch’in and the steppes. Guardian of Ch’in since the reign of the First Emperor, the Great Wall curled about the land like a sleeping dragon. That ridge of stone and rammed earth rising grimly above the plain showed pale now, silvered over with fresh drifts and windblown gusts of the translucent snow from which, before she had died of sorrow and solitude, Lady Silver Snow’s mother had named her child. Nor had the lady any living brothers. Sons of a senior wife, those all had died on the frontier, hoping to expiate their father’s sin. For he had been a marquis and general who had failed the Son of Heaven’s trust. Not only had he surrendered the bleeding remnants of an army of Han warriors to the barbarians, but, having done so, he had dared to remain alive.

Ao Li gestured sharply, sending the others riding out to flank her, their instant response possible because all of her protectors had campaigned together since before she was born. Silver Snow glanced at the old man, then quickly away. His fintire life had been governed by the code of military obedience. Would he really dare to order an attack upon a messenger from the Son of Heaven? Could she, her father’s daughter, draw bow upon such a man?

She parted trembling lips and swallowed, nerving herself to order Ao Li to hold off. Then, she gasped. Her eyes were younger, quicker than those of the troop leader, despite the way that tears of thankfulness now blurred them when she perceived that the rider whose steaming horse slid and stumbled up the track wore the shabby livery of her father’s men.

She flung out a hand and touched Ao Li’s, and the old man recoiled as if he had brushed a coal. “A friend,” she murmured, and reined somewhat farther behind her escort, donning proper female shyness like an extra fur cloak.

The rider would have left saddle to kneel when a growl from Ao Li stopped him. Very young, the boy dared to glance up at her only for an instant. Then he had lowered his eyes to the snowy ground, offering her more the homage due an Empress or a marquis’ first wife, not properly to be given the shabby and unbetrothed virago daughter of a disgraced soldier.

As winded as his horse from the speed of their coming, the messenger gasped harsh lungfuls of the thin, cold air, then coughed until Silver Snow flinched and vowed silently that that very night, she and her maid Willow must brew herbs against lung-fever. “A ... a proclamation ... an edict from the Son of Heaven ...” He prostrated himself until Silver Snow could scarcely hear the words that he forced out between coughs. “Your most-honored father the general summons ...”

“We ride!” The way Silver Snow’s clear voice carried shocked her, as she turned her back on the Wall, leaving behind the bloodstained snow on which, so briefly, the trophies of her hunt had rested.

This day, Silver Snow and her guards had ridden far in search of game. Even as she pressed her horse for greater speed, she reproached herself. If a messenger from the Son of Heaven guested in her home, she, as lady there, should have been present to ensure that all was done as best as possible to honor the Emperor’s man and to demonstrate that, Northerners though they might be, they served the Dragon Throne with loyal hearts.

If, however, she had remained ever dutifully at home, she thought, the official from Ch’ang-an might have had to dine off scraps. It was well that their hunt had been successful; the few aging women left in the inner courts would be able to prepare a feast that might not be too unworthy of his tasting.

Who knew, she thought with another quick jolt of alarm, what guards such a southern lord might have dispatched on his own orders? Even now such men might be watching her. She had been scanning the land about her for enemies, but now she cast down her eyes. With a guest from the capital at her father’s estate, she must remember to observe all the proprieties, even this far from her home.

A watcher, she knew, might ascribe such a withdrawal to the most decorous modesty, appropriate to an unwed maid. What words would either her Ancestors or the Book of Rites use to describe a maid who flouted proper conduct and even endangered virginity itself to ride out with a bow and hunt like a wild boy? Though the hardships of her life had made her break with customs, she knew she had much to answer for. But the Ancestors might frown at her reply, she told herself in an unusually rebellious, therefore candid, instant.

This unseen, unknown official might dare to criticize; however, thanks to her, he would eat tonight: and—what was far more to her liking—so would her father, her household, and these her outriders, whose saddles and horses’ flanks all bore the bloody traces of successful hunting; that thereby the Ancestors would continue to be honored.

Those would not be so served by Silver Snow herself. As a daughter, she might not burn incense and paper images at their shrine to summon their august attention. They might only be attended by her father himself, too crippled now by years in the saddle and old wounds to ride out to hunt; but liale enough to teach his surviving child to take up the bow in his stead, to play chess, and to think and want to act in a manner that she knew full well that Master Confucius—much as she and her father venerated his Li Chi , or Book of Rites, and his Analects in all other ways—would not have at all approved.

Indeed, Chao Kuang’s First Wife had chosen to hang herself rather than live, shamed and degraded after it was decreed that the general was general and marquis no longer. Her sons, Silver Snow’s thrice-honored brothers, had ridden out to die in battle against Khujanga, shan-yu of the western hosts. Autumn Smoke, the second wife, and heavy with child when the news of her lord’s capture and seeming defection had come from Ch’ang-an with the decree of their disgrace, had remained alive in the hope of bearing a son whose piety might, one day, redeem what the father had lost. At Silver Snow’s birth, however, she had lost hope and life, and left her daughter with a name as melancholy as her own. Such a child might well have been exposed; but, through the love of her mother’s old nurse, she was saved and raised; and, somehow, she throve.

When she was ten years old—past the age when a gently reared maid should be confined to the women’s quarters, never to leave them until she was borne to her wedding—her father escaped the Hsiung-nu. Rumor, which traveled faster than he, credited him with the abandonment of a wife (if such as the Hsiung-nu recognized that basic human tie) and baby son, causing fears, in the shabby, chilly women’s quarters, for even the restricted life that had been Silver Snow’s up to that moment. How would the most noble (though, by the Emperor’s decree, he was that no longer) marquis and general Chao Kuang react to the news that he had a daughter and no living sons at all?

With many head-shakings and warnings, her nurse had presented Silver Snow to him. Even now, as she recalled, it had been a heaven-sent miracle that she had not burst into frightened sobs: her father seemed more like an Ancestor come to uncertain life than a man. For all of a man’s proper, vigorous semblance had fallen from him. His beard and hair, beneath a sober cap, were silvered, while the ample folds of an ancient, frayed silk robe, with its heavy, though cracking, fur collar and lining, sagged inward because of their wearer’s painful thinness.

Even more painful than that loss of flesh and vigor was the limp that must have made the mad escape from the West a torture worse than any that an Emperor’s officials might inflict. In full sight an ebony cane lay near to his hand, beside a silken scroll of Master Confucius’ writings and the bronze burner wrought in the form of twelve mountain peaks, inlaid with precious metals and carnelian, a treasure of the house. From the burner wafted delicate trails of the piney scent of artemesia; ever afterward in Silver Snow’s mind, she linked those gnarled and enduring pines with her father and his ordeals.

Even now, as Silver Snow held up one chilled hand and breathed upon it, she recalled the warmth and fragrance from that burner. Then, it had been her one comfort as she had approached, barely moving her feet warily, one short step following another, her eyes downcast, toward the man who sat upright despite the padded cushions at his back, as if mistrustful of their softness. At that moment, as if decreed by kindly gods, sparks had flown from the brazier, and Silver Snow, her painstaking humility forgotten, looked up to meet eyes that immediately compelled her love and trust as they had the right to compel her obedience. Her father extended a hand—thin, weathered, and missing a finger—and she had run to him.

Thereafter, all thoughts of proper reticence and distance were dispatched: Silver Snow, at age ten, was to be raised as the son who her father now lacked: to be taught to hunt, to play chess, to sing, and—the most audacious of all—to read and to write poetry.

So, they continued to live in the North, close by the Great Wall. Traditionally, there had lain their family’s estates since th£ mist-enshrouded reigns of the Five Emperors; but traditionally, too, there also languished now other exiles, those laboring under the disgrace of a condemnation to life.

The North might be thought to be exile, but Silver Snow had always loved the severe beauty of her homeland, the vast sweep of plains, broken by the protection of the Wall and the less ancient but equally weathered shelter of her ancestral home. Now the feeble rays of late afternoon sun slanted across the Wall, awakening splendor from the ice and snow upon which her horse and those of her escort cast long violent shadows.

A greater shadow, to her way of thinking, lay upon her mind, cast by the Wall upon which she had turned her back as she hastened home to obey whatever orders the Son of Heaven, after ten years of silence, had sent them. What her father had told her of the Hsiung-nu made Silver Snow stare out across the great barrier with more curiosity than fear. She knew that beyond lay more than endless wasteland possessed by unholy savages who ate their meat raw, never bathed, and tortured civilized men. Aye, beyond the Wall lay vast spaces and open air—as well as freedom and her father’s lost honor.

By the time Lady Silver Snow reached the ancient half fort, half mansion (the aged archers in its watchtower nodding as her party swept by in a cloud of snow and breath-steam), the cold was pushing her to full effort just as much as the desire to obey her father and to hear whatever news had caused this youngest of his retainers to risk death to horse and rider in such haste to summon her back. Shaking from cold and excitement, she turned the last corner—past the empty space from which, mysteriously, a jade statue had disappeared last winter, past that wall where a painting had been fading for at least two generations—to reach at last her own tiny courtyard. Here, screens and walls barred the clamor that must surely erupt afresh in the rest of the household at her return.

Her nurse seized upon Silver Snow, with hands that had the texture of a chicken’s feet and the strength that apprehension lends old age, to tug her toward the innermost room where a fire, steaming water, and robes, which might be shabby but were, most assuredly, warm and scrupulously clean, awaited.

However, when the old woman would have undressed her, Silver Snow forestalled that. “Old mother, this service ”—and this speed, she thought—“is too much for you. Where is my maid Willow?”

“She is out there. ” The woman pointed toward the courtyard. Despite a careful arrangement of faded screens, the opened door admitted a chilling draft and a glimpse of an evening sky that had turned as violet as a first concubine’s spring robes.

The nurse made a sign against ill-luck. Had the old woman not been ancient, almost a grandmother to Silver Snow, she might have slapped her.

“Your mistrust is foolishness,” she did contrive a faint re-

proof. “For ten years, ever since my father bought her, Willow has given me devoted loyalty and perfect service.”

The old woman bowed—her hands laden with Silver Snow’s heavy, padded, and befurred coat—and muttered something, undoubtedly the usual rumor, about Willow.

“More foolishness,” said Silver Snow. “Old women’s tales. Why should the girl turn against the house that saved her life?” She tested the bath with a finger. “That water looks too cold. Fetch a kettle more of hot, then leave me alone.”

Unused to her nurseling’s recent adoption of the manners of a grand lady, the woman bowed and fled. Her numbed fingers prickling as blood and warmth returned to them, Silver Snow fumbled with the fastenings of her robes as she padded toward her maidservant. Just outside the screen, Willow knelt, oblivious, as it seemed, to the cold. Even the meager light from the fire and the one or two lamps that burned, thriftily distant from the windy courtyard, struck ruddy splendor from Willow’s long hair, the same color as the vixen with which she now seemed to chatter at in little whines and sliarp barks, much as stablemen communicated with horses and children with pets of all types. A scrap of meat saved from Willow’s dinner lay on the ground.

Trained as a huntress, Silver Snow knew how to stalk silently in her heavy felt boots. Fox and maidservant alike heard her though, and froze as might hunted beasts. Willow turned to face her, and fear flashed across her face, gleamed in the eerie green eyes that, as much as her reddish hair, caused the dark-haired, dark-eyed Han to condemn her as supernaturally ugly, the very semblance of one of the dreaded fox-spirits—a prejudice that Silver Snow, usually the most indulgent of mistresses, had always condemned severely.

“Younger sister, gain what news you may, but finish quickly. I have need of you.” Silver Snow spoke softly and with a smile, but her voice was firm.

As if they actually could understand one another, Willow and the fox traded whines. Then the vixen barked once, sniffed the air, snapped up the meat, and ran off. Slowly, clumsily, Willow rose, her green eyes never leaving the spot where the fox vanished into the darkness. Then she limped over to attend her mistress.

“Had you not been born with a clubbed foot,” Silver Snow murmured more to herself than to the girl, “would you have stayed with me, or would you have wished, just as the rumors whisper, to change your own skin and run away with your sister-in-fur?”

She thought that she had spoken too softly for anyone to hear her, but she had not reckoned on the night wind’s betrayal or the preternatural keenness of Willow’s hearing. The maid gently loosened Silver Snow’s fingers from the fastenings of her robes. Her own hands were warm, hot even; another fault that the other servants held against her, for all knew that the blood of foxes—and of fox-spirits—is kindled to a higher degree than that of ordinary women. Such nonsense, coupled with Willow’s red hair and her skill with small, wild creatures, had almost gotten her killed before Silver Snow’s father purchased her. Since then, she had served the house devotedly; and, as always, Silver Snow relaxed beneath the deft, warm touch of her maid’s hands.

Tears spotted the fur of Silver Snow’s outer robe.

“When your father bought me to be your maid, he saved me from being killed out of hand as a fox or, later, as a slaver’s cull. How shall I ever leave you—even were I unblemished and able to run with the sisters-in-fur—when I owe you my very life?” Willow asked. “Though,” she added, her eyes glinting with some unspoken emotion, “it may be you who leaves me.”

As quickly as her tears had flowed, they dried. Limping, Willow urged her mistress across the room. They might well have been heartbound sisters rather than mistress and maid. Willow, Silver Snow thought as she always did, simply could not be a fox-spirit, since, as all knew, fox-spirits could not love, teasing spitefully behind pretenses of caring.

“I leave you?” Silver Snow asked. She breathed deeply to subdue an awakening excitement. One must, she knew, summon li and chih —the attributes of propriety and wisdom that Master Confucius decreed were necessary if one were to attain chung yung, the serene and undeviating behavior that every decent person surely must wish for her own—though those proper thoughts were now difficult to heed. She must hasten to obey her father’s summons, that was true; yet she could not hurry into his presence as if one were improperly lessoned in the august way of li.

“You might,” Willow said, long lashes veiling those green eyes that seemed ever to be alive with a shadow of mischief. Were she indeed a usual inhabitant of inner courts, she should be uncomfortable at Willow’s presence. Yet, from the instant that they had seen one another, they had been as sisters.

“Your most honorable father received messengers from Ch’ang-an today.” Willow unfastened the heavy, divided riding skirt from around her mistress’ thin body.

Silver Snow nodded, then stepped into the herb-strewn water of the bath. At least, their hunt had provided the best part of a proper feast. She must bathe and dress quickly, quickly, then hasten to the kitchens and the banqueting room to see that all was prepared with the propriety worthy of a marquis—even a degraded one.

“They brought a proclamation,” Willow was continuing.

“That much I guessed,” said Silver Snow. She patted the hot water on her wind-dried face as Willow proffered fragrant oils. This must indeed be a most special occasion if Willow and her old nurse had agreed to use some of the carefully hoarded perfumes from her mother’s day. Refreshed and relaxed, she asked, “How do you know more?”

“From my sister,” whispered Willow. Her smile betrayed white teeth, and she gave a quick motion of head and neck. For an instant, she looked very much like the beast with whom, earlier, she had entertained herself outside the chamber door. Silver Snow stood, and Willow wrapped her in a warm robe. There was no need to fear Willow, not ever. If the girl could turn rumor into a pleasantry to make her mistress smile, that but increased her merit. If she were unusually clever at making friends with animals, what of it? Such a talent was a gift.

Silver Snow herself, when riding out, was aware of small creatures that appeared to watch her curiously. In return, she was careful about what—or whom—she hunted.

“What did your sister tell you?” Silver Snow turned again, humoring Willow, as the maid combed out her long, black hair, as straight and fine in the lamplight as Willow’s was red and waving. She gazed into the mirror that Willow held for her, a highly polished disk of silver, incised along the edge with wishes for good luck. This burnished moon disk was the one thing from Willow’s previous life that she had brought to Silver Snow’s home; rightly, she treasured it.

For a moment, the room behind her—small, shabby, but familiar and much-loved—wavered, engulfed in a brief vision of vast spaces and felt tents; there followed a rush of wind that drowned out the small, daily sounds of women working among women. Then she blinked and saw, once again, a lady of the Han with creamy skin, large, deep-set eyes the shape of almonds, brows that needed no plucking to shape them into moth wings, a tiny mouth. She shook her head, unpleasantly surprised at what she brusquely dismissed as unfitting vanity.

“We have heard”—Willow slipped the mirror once more into its protective silken bag—“that the Son of Heaven’s beloved First Concubine died in childbed.”

Silver Snow nodded as she dressed cautiously, fearing each time she wore the thin, ancient silk garments that she would tear them beyond any mending. Even this far to the north, the nobles had mourned that much-honored lady, who had been so brave that once, when a tiger had gotten loose, she had stepped before the Emperor until the beast could be lured again into its cage, saying to all that his life was more precious than hers, which was at his service.

“Did not the fur merchant who came last moon,” Willow continued, “say that during the Son of Heaven’s mourning, he returned all of his other ladies to their homes? Though all of the ministers and poets praised the depth of his mourning thus, it was a hardship for the tradespeople when the silks and furs could no longer be offered to those behind the Phoenix screens.”

It is a truth, thought Silver Snow, that with no ladies to buy silk, to demand gems and embroideries and delicate foods, those supplying such would suffer. How not? But I myself am poor, she thought. What is strange about poverty? Surely a right-acting man need not suffer at heart, even though his rice bowl is near empty. Confucius had much to say about that, she knew. Did not her father’s serenity, despite wounds and captivity, even in poverty and disgrace, prove the rightness of such acceptance?

“Did you know,” Willow breathed slyly into an ear that Silver Snow’s mirror assured her was as rosy and delicate as the rare shells from the far-off sea, “that the Son of Heaven wrote a poem about his lady before he summoned his wizards?”

A single bracelet of old white jade clicked against the lacquer chest before which Silver Snow sat. That thought brought more shivers than a winter wind. “The Emperor summoned wizards?” she breathed. “More quickly! Already I have tarried too long in obeying my father.”

“Your pardon, Elder Sister,” said Willow, “but I would rather err by tarrying than have you sicken in your lungs. My sister-in-fur’s fifth cousin”—again, Willow smiled and flashed that uncanny impression of a beast at her mistress—“sat outside the Emperor’s court in Ch’ang-an, and thus she heard him speak:

Silver Snow joined Willow in a heart-felt sigh. “Most beautiful,” she breathed, “and so melancholy. But why did he then summon wizards?”

“To call her back.” One of Willow’s russet, level brows— an imperfection that no Emperor would have permitted among his ladies, but one that gave Willow a curiously trustworthy appearance—quirked, as if she had her own opinion of such wizards and such doings. “What they mumble is mostly foolishness. The Tao goes as it goes; and we, man and beast, are born and we die. Yet, the Son of Heaven is all-wise; so he summoned his wizards, who strove mightily—for men who dabble in such things. Finally, just one wizard produced a shadow . . . the merest flicker . . . against a silken hanging. “Then the Son of Heaven wept and cried out:

“My honored father will say worse than that of me, should I delay longer,” cried Silver Snow. “Are you finished with my hair, or are you not? And will you hold me here longer, you slothful girl, listening to silly news you claim to snatch from the mouths of foxes?”

Willow laughed, exposing white teeth as she threw back her head, showing her strong throat, as white as a fur blaze on a fox’s chest. “Here, Elder Sister, is my most important news. After numerous tears, even more numerous verses, and more memorials than anyone would care to reckon, the Son of Heaven has agreed to choose another Illustrious Concubine, and perhaps even more than one.”

Silver Snow’s hand went to her throat. “But I am the child of a disgraced ...” Then she drew a deep, shaky breath. “Oh, but what could I not do were I to become a favorite! What could I not do for my father? A grant of favor, his titles and honor restored, perhaps ...” Her thoughts took wings and flew as high as the moon overhead where, surely, the lady who lived in that orb saw them and smiled. “Do you think . .

“I think,” Willow interrupted, “that many other ladies dream such dreams tonight. However, what a mirror, mine especially, has shown you is truth. You are very fair, Elder Sister. However, the Hall of Brilliance will be filled with the fairest ladies of the Middle Kingdom. And many of them will have gems and garments that outshine you as much as your eyes outshine mine own.

“Lady,” Willow continued more gravely, “the messenger arrived, the messenger spoke with your father, and you have been summoned. That is all, I tell you with all my heart, that I know to be so. Go you, to find out the rest.”

Abruptly Silver Snow’s eyes flashed, and though fear gripped her, she forced a laugh. “I hear and obey, at once, Elder Sister,” she told Willow as she made for her father’s study.