Chapter 2 — Destiny Calls

The cook dragged the girl back into The Blue Parrot and Madam Rui instructed him to bring her into the back room by the kitchen. Xiaohe struggled against the man’s grip the entire time. The women of the brothel all looked on at her with disparaging eyes, lined with kohl and their usual smugness. Madam Rui followed them to the back room. The cook let Xiaohe fall back against the floor, but before Xiaohe could even realize what was happening, Madam Rui had backhand slapped her across the face. 

“You ungrateful wretch!” Madam Rui shouted. “How dare you do this to me! How dare you humiliate me like this?”

“I was going to give it back to him!” Xiaohe shouted, cradling her face where she’d been slapped. “Eventually! I wasn’t going to keep it, I was going to ransom it—”

“Eventually!” Madam Rui shouted. “The one time the prince walks into my brothel, you attempt to rob him! Have you no respect for royalty? Have you no fear of what could happen to you? You are lucky that the prince was merciful!”

Xiaohe flinched when the woman came after her and grabbed a fistful of her hair. The other girls began to file into the room, looking on with blank stares as their mistress unleashed her anger on the little waitress. Xiaohe could bet three months’ wages that they were enjoying this, seeing the insolent upstart of a waitress receiving her just desserts. 

“How dare you do this to me? To my girls? To my establishment?” the woman shouted. “After all these years, I fed you and clothed you, let you stay in your mother’s old room! You won’t even take a single client in return—“

“I pay you rent every month!” Xiaohe shouted in reply.

“You pay part of your rent every month! You think serving a few drinks and reading palms is going to cover what is has cost me to keep you off the streets all these years?”

Madame Rui backed away a little bit, but there was still a wild, raging look in her eyes. 

“Your mother was a good , but not good enough to overlook a trespass such as this!” she continued. “Do you know how much I lose, renting a room to you when I could have one of the girls take care of their clients in it? Yet you refuse to join your sisters, and instead you rob princes and drive clients away and put on airs like the Queen of Sheba. We are all in the gutter, why can’t you just accept your place—“

“Perhaps you and your belong in the gutter, but I don’t! I robbed the prince, but at least—”

“You think you have some kind of monopoly on misery?” one of the other girls spoke up. A murmur spread among the girls looking on at Xiaohe. They all despised the arrogant, holier-than-thou manner with which Xiaohe regarded them, ignorant of her own place in society. “Look around you, you are exactly like us!”

Xiaohe held back angry tears.

“I’m nothing like any of you!” she shouted. “You all might be fine bowing and scraping and sleeping your way through life, but that’s not the life for me!”

“Well, then if that’s how you feel, then maybe you should leave,” Madame Rui said. Xiaohe was stunned silent. She looked into the woman’s face and inwardly panicked at the lack of jest in her tone. Xiaohe swallowed.

“You don’t mean that,” Xiaohe whispered.

“You said so yourself you don’t belong here, and you’re right. Where you belong is out on the street. Get out!” Madame Rui grabbed fistfuls of Xiaohe’s shirt and yanked her toward the door. Xiaohe protested and fought against her grip. For a moment, she tore herself free from the woman’s grasp, but the other girls had joined in. They shouted and hit her as two of the strongest women grabbed her by the arms and shoved Xiaohe out the door. She landed sprawled on the dirt ground while onlookers cast uninterested glances at her. Xiaohe turned and looked back.

“Wait!” she shouted, but Madame Rui had already slammed the door shut. A minute later, she looked up and saw a window opening and things started to rain down into the street. Xiaohe recognized her things being tossed out of the window of her room. She scrambled to catch the items as they fell, but others were ruined as they crashed to the ground. A music box. Clothing landed in puddles or were trampled by passersby. Shoes were thrown down like projectiles, one hit Xiaohe on the shoulder. Even the vase that held a single flower was tossed out and was shattered when it hit the ground. Books fell from the sky. A wooden box of her mother’s old things.

Xiaohe was only able to salvage a shirt or two from being ruined, and she gathered up a few of the books in her arms. One of the last items to be thrown out was a cap. Navy blue with a faded, gold, braided rope connected around the visor. A sailor’s cap. 

Xiaohe wanted to run up to the door of The Blue Parrot and kick it down and start up a fuss again, but in the end, she found herself too tired, and the end result not worth the effort. She sighed and picked up the cap from the ground and put it on her head. Looking down at her scattered, ruined belongings she felt almost embarrassed at how little she owned. Clutching the bundle of clothing and books, she decided that the rest was not worth saving.

Around her, the bustle of the alleyway paid little attention to the poor, scrappy young girl who’d been cast out of the brothel. It was just another day in Ash Town for these people. Another day, another miserable soul flung further down the social ladder. Today, it was Xiaohe. Tomorrow, someone else. Xiaohe turned and began walking down the alley, kicking the broken music box as she passed it. 

—

It was late afternoon by the time Xiaohe decided that she had to find a place to stay for the night. After visiting several other brothels, she realized her mother’s connections would be of no more help to her. Too many years had passed between now and when her mother had been the most sought-after courtesan in Ash Town, and many of the brothels were under new management and had no recollection of Han Huilan, the Beauty Queen of the Twin Demons Empire. And for Han Xiaohe, being her daughter was of no further consequence to them. Other brothel owners simply had no intention of taking a girl in if she wasn’t planning on taking clients. 

Xiaohe found herself at the harbor, as she usually did when she had a lot to think about or a crisis to deal with. From the dock where she sat herself down, she could see the Palace, peaking out from behind the trees on the hilltop, a deep, shimmering red city with one watchful eye over the land and another over the sea. Xiaohe dropped her things down beside her as she swung her legs over the side of the dock, letting her feet dangle just above the water. It was late spring in the Kingdom of the Twin Demons, and although most peasants in the capital kept no calendar, they could tell by the smell of the mist that came in from the ocean. During the colder months, the air smelled like rusted metal, smoke, and heavy industry. It was thin and cold and stung the nostrils. But in spring and summer, the air thickened, and the scent of salt and algae sweetened the breeze. This part of the harbor, nearest Ash Town, was closest to the trading centers. Small junks and rowboats bobbed close together on the marina while an assembly line of men loaded them up with supplies to be taken to the larger vessel, which had dropped anchor further out. 

There was something about the harbor and watching the crew men loading and unloading a merchant ship — with their grunts and shouts and uniforms and the rugged look about their faces — that made Xiaohe feel oddly peaceful. Perhaps it was the uniformity with which they all worked. Side-by-side, an assembly line of people with a unified goal, living together on a ship. Surviving. 

Having grown up in and out of the brothels, streets, and slums of the Capital, Xiaohe knew a thing or two about survival. She’d survived the childhood years spent begging on street corners; sewing new soles onto old shoes and selling them at jacked-up prices; the almost-kidnappings, the almost-, the almost-murders; had survived the years and years of being asked by Madam Rui when she planned on joining the other girls in their “important work”, servicing the men of the Capital; had survived many dangerous odd jobs, working in kitchens and factories. Had survived those nights she and her mother had to sleep out in the cold streets of Ash Town. Had survived the illnesses and the fevers and the countless minor injuries. 

Soon, life for Xiaohe wasn’t life at all: it was just an endless cycle of trying not to die for 24 hours. She didn’t often feel sorry for herself. There was never time to wallow in pity or think about what might have been had her father not left. 

Xiaohe looked back at the pile of her belongings and glanced at the sailor cap at the top of the pile. She took it in her hand and held it up so that the brim of the hat sat above the horizon. When she was a young girl, Xiaohe used to cry thinking about the mysterious man who left her and her mother to fend for themselves at The Blue Parrot. He disappeared before she was old enough to have any real memories about him. In her head, he was a faceless man in a sailor’s uniform. The stories her mother told her about him didn’t always make sense. Descriptions of him and his character were often inconsistent and changed depending on her mother’s mood that day. If it was a good day, and her mother had entertained an especially kind client, she’d comment that he was sweet like Xiaohe’s father or handsome like Xiaohe’s father. Other times, when she was having one of those days, when she shouted her head off and tore up their bedroom and terrorized her young daughter, she would curse “that man” and call him an evil demon who abandoned them. It went on that way until Xiaohe’s father was more of a mythical creature than actual person.

But whenever things got especially bad, rather than curse the disappeared man, Xiaohe liked to think that she was only able to survive because she had inherited some positive qualities from him. Heaven knew that she didn’t get her fighting spirit from her mother, who chose an early exit out of this life and left Xiaohe completely alone. She looked beyond the cap at the wide, vast expanse of ocean and thought about how, somewhere beyond the Kingdom of the Twin Demons, there was an honorable man with quite a lot of explaining to do. She took the cap away and glanced at her open palm. 

There it was. Her broken and forked Life Line. Xiaohe had always interpreted the broken line to mean that she would be very seriously sick at least once in her lifetime. And she had been. When she was young, she remembered being confined to bed for days with a high fever that eventually broke, but not before giving her mother a scare that she’d die. But the fork in the line meant that she’d eventually leave this place and travel far and away.

Xiaohe often came to the harbor and watched the ships coming in and out, envious of the places they would go and the places they had been. There was nothing left for her here in Ash Town. Deep down, she knew her destiny hinged upon her escape. But when would that be?

“Captain!” shouted one of the men of the crew. Xiaohe’s ears perked up at the sound. She watched as two members of the crew approached a man in a captain’s uniform. “We’d like to report missing a crew member!”

The captain looked disturbed. “Report it, then, sir,” the captain said. 

“It appears, sir, that the cabin boy has disappeared,” the man reported. “No one has sighted the lad for at least a week.”

“Disturbing, indeed,” the captain said. Xiaohe watched the interaction intently. “When does the Sailing Master say we set sail again?”

“In three days’ time, Captain,” the sailor said. 

“Not very much time,” the captain said. “Is it possible to hire a new boy by that time?”

The sailors looked to each other. “We can certainly try, sir.”

“See to it, then,” the captain said. “Find a boy, then. No more than fifteen years old, with some experience in service. Find him a uniform, he’ll start his training on the voyage back.”

“Yes, sir,” the sailors both turned and walked back into the town while the captain got into a boat to return to the vessel. Xiaohe watched as the two sailors made their way back inland. An idea began worming its way into her brain. She turned back to the few belongings she had left and fished out the box of her mother’s old things. Inside, there was some old containers of make-up, a little bit of jewelry, and a pair of shears. 

Determination set in. Xiaohe grabbed her things and ran back into town. It wouldn’t be too difficult to swipe what she needed. She’d be out of here before long anyway.

—