“You are a harsh ruler,” said Han Fei-tzu. As before, she was using philosophy to pull him out of his brooding melancholy. “Let us contemplate the nature of desire,” said Jiang-qing. “Some say, ‘what you cannot have.’ Others say, ‘what you should not have.’ I say, ‘You can truly covet only what you will always hunger for.’” “‘You only covet what you do not have.’ Who said that?” I never knew how perfectly happy we were until I learned that we could not stay together. So that I wouldn’t have to watch you wither away until now you weigh only eighteen kilograms. So that you could stand again, or even raise an arm without your own muscles tearing away chunks of bone or causing the bone to break under the tension. My desire for your bones to heal and become strong, so that they don’t snap at the slightest pressure. “We are contemplating the nature of desire,” said Han Fei-tzu. But Jiang-qing asked only so that she could also think the same thought it was part of their having become a single soul. When others asked his private thoughts, he felt spied upon. It was her way of asking him to share his private thoughts with her. “Then the gods are kind to me,” said Han Fei-tzu. Jiang-qing had never taken a step away from the Path in her life. She longed for death now, not because she hadn’t loved life, butbecause death was now unavoidable, and what cannot be shunned must be embraced. At first the words had seemed whimsical or ironic to him, but now he knew that she spoke with disappointment. She had greeted him with these words each time she woke during the past few days. Time enough for careless noise during the long night that was to come, when there would be no hushed words from her lips. He had asked his friends and servants for stillness during the dusk of Jiang-qing’s life. But Han Fei-tzu could hear her clearly, for the house was silent. Jiang-qing, for her part, must also have detected some change in him, for she had not spoken before and now she did speak.

But now he was aware of the slight change in her breathing, a change as subtle as the wind from a butterfly’s passing. Until a moment ago he might have been sleeping he wasn’t sure. Han Fei-tzu sat in lotus position on the bare wooden floor beside his wife’s sickbed.

Xenocide by orson scott card