Read Online The Hidden Blade by Sherry Thomas - Free Book Online

of making you my apprentice since you turned five,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “You are now a month short of nine and I still haven’t. Because I knew you’d be a trying student.”
    Ying-ying’s head snapped up. She stared at Amah indignantly.
    “The order, by tradition, admits only orphaned girls, or those who have been sold off by their families. For good reason—they are beyond grateful and they work hard. But you, clever and agile as you may be, are spoiled, lazy, and too willful for your own good.”
    “I am not!” Ying-ying shot back. “You are—”
    The slender, glittering knife was in Amah’s hand. She set it gently down on the table, the blade pointed at Ying-ying. What Ying-ying was about to say froze in the back of her throat.
    “I have been too lenient with you.” Amah didn’t raise her voice; she had no need to. “But the graver fault lies with Fu-ren. She has raised you as if you were somebody, when in fact you are nobody.”
    Ying-ying gasped in outrage. She was not a nobody. She lived in this splendid courtyard with pomegranate trees and goldfish big as her hand swimming in huge urns. Her clothes were made of the finest silk from Hangzhou. The pins in her hair were adorned with real pearls. And though she wasn’t a flawless beauty like Mother, she was a very pretty girl. Everyone always commented on her large, lovely eyes, her perfect double eyelids, and—the envy of all—her long, long eyelashes.
    “You are talking rubbish!”
    “Am I?” Amah asked. “Who’s your father, then, if you are somebody?”
    Ying-ying opened her mouth, but nothing would come out. She thought back to the photograph, the foreign devil with the aggressive stare.
    “You dug up that picture,” Amah said, as if reading her mind. “Didn’t you wonder who he was?”
    Ying-ying shook her head so hard her vision swam.
    “He was your father, an Englishman, though you never saw him, nor he you.”
    “You are lying!”
    It became Amah’s turn to act as if she hadn’t heard. “Your mother came from a scholar’s household. But her father tried opium and liked it too much. He drained the family purse feeding his habit. Then his son fell sick. There was no money for a doctor or medicine. So he sold your mother. After all, she was only the offspring of a concubine, and only a daughter. The slaver took her to Shanghai and sold her to a fancy brothel.”
    Ying-ying wanted to stick her fingers in her ears. She couldn’t. The story was dreadful, but dreadful in such a way that she must go on listening.
    “She was beautiful and learned, so she didn’t suffer the fate of common prostitutes. They billed her as the loveliest girl in Shanghai. Your father came to see her out of curiosity. He liked what he saw, so he bought her from the brothel. But after two years, the big crash came. He lost everything. One night he got drunk with his friends and never came home. Three days later they fished him out of the Huang-pu River.”
    Ying-ying stared down at the table, at a refinished spot where she had tried to carve her name into the wood.
    “I found your mother tottering on a chair, trying to put her head through a noose. He had left her with nothing but a big belly. But she was too young to die, only nineteen.”
    That would make Mother twenty-eight now. Ying-ying never knew her age.
    Amah sighed. “I still remember the day you were born. I had a big basin of water to drown you if you turned out to be a girl. A son could advance in the world, and repay the suffering of his mother. What good was a girl but another mouth to feed?”
    Ying-ying gaped at her in disbelief. Drown her? Of course, she knew that lots of people, particularly in the south, killed infants, most often girls, that they couldn’t afford. But those were illiterate, ignorant people. How could anyone as cultured as Mother even think of such a thing? Drown her?
Her?
    “After you came, I sent the midwife away and told your mother to pull the