Jeff Olsen
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Jeff Olsen
A Novel of Tang China — Volume One of Three
by J. S. Olsen
An empress bears twin sons on a night of thunder and sends one of them out of the palace in a basket, four hours old. Twenty years later a girl starts pulling at the story she was given — and goes off a hill road.
In the ninth year of Jìngpíng, in one thunderstorm, four children are born.
Two of them are identical sons of the Empress. Twin heirs are an omen no throne survives, so she does the only thing she can think of to keep both of them alive: she sends one out of the palace in a basket, four hours old, and tells nobody for twenty-three years.
One boy grows up a Crown Prince, taught to stand very still while men bow to him. The other grows up nine days south in a river town, counting crates on a landing and learning to be unremarkable — with the family mark on the wrong shoulder, and a pull in his chest he has no words for.
A third child born that night is a daughter, in a sealed house, to a condemned widow. She is raised as a princess in the palace by the Emperor himself, and she is twenty years old before she begins to notice that the story she was given does not add up.
Old stable ledgers. Three requisition dockets. Four words from an old woman in a lane. She pulls the thread, and it leads her onto a road along the Ling where real bandits are waiting.
Volume One of three. Parts One to Three — The Founding, The Childhood, and The Thread and the Hill. It ends the morning after that road, with a physician giving a household three findings and one instruction: do not tell her who she is.
A complete screenplay adaptation of this novel is also available from the author.
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