"My own, Majesty," Lian had said, because there was nothing else true enough to say.
The Dowager had laughed. A short dry sound like a fan snapping shut. Then she had told Lian to come back tomorrow and pour again, and dismissed her, and that was all.
Seven days later Lian still didn't know what the laugh meant.
She began the ledger on the eighth night, at the hour when even the palace cats gave up and slept.
Tao had found her the book, autumn poems by a dead court poet, bound in blue silk. The left-hand pages were blank, for a reader's own verses.
Lian's were dreadful. Each line of each poem began with a character whose stroke count, counted backward from the end of the line, gave a number, and the numbers walked her through a grid of the thousand characters every child learned first. It was a cipher she had invented at eleven to pass notes to her brother during lessons. Qiao had broken it in a day. Nobody else ever had.
Page one. Nine lines about wild geese.
Luo Pingshan, secretary. The granary. Fifty-three days.
Chief Eunuch Pan, who carried the drugged cup.
Physician Qin, who swore to the poison.
Rong Xiu, who wept. Her father the Duke, who paid for the tears.
Censor Hu, who read the charges and enjoyed it.
General Yan, who held the gate.
Bai, who forged my hand.
The ninth line she left blank for a long time. Then she wrote one character for plum, and sat looking at it until her candle guttered.
"Miss." Tao, at her elbow, with a fresh candle and a cup of ginger tea. "You'll ruin your eyes. Empresses aren't allowed to squint. I asked."
"Whom did you ask?"
"A eunuch in the kitchens. He said the last empress squinted and the court poets were very cruel about it." Tao set the candle down and peered at the page with frank curiosity. She couldn't read more than her own name. "Is it a love poem? For him?"
"It's a list of geese."
"Oh." Tao considered the geese. "Sad ones?"
Lian put the brush down. Her hand was cramping. She looked at Tao in the candlelight, at her round cheeks and the stray hair falling out of her braid, and thought of the Censorate cellars, and had to look at the window instead.
"Tao. If something happens to me..."
"Nothing's going to happen to you."
"If it does, burn the bundle of letters under the false floor of my cosmetics chest. Then go home to your mother."
Written the first sleepless week, before the cipher: every name and date of the old life, in her own plain hand.
Tao's hand had gone still on the teacup. "Miss, you're frightening me."
"Promise me."
"You won't fall."
"Promise me anyway."
Out in the gardens a night heron croaked twice. Tao looked at her with an expression Lian had never seen on her in either life. Then she nodded, once, and went to turn down the bed without another word.
Qiao came the next afternoon, which was permitted, since a brother was family and the Ministry of Rites had business in the inner palace anyway.
He brought a basket of candied hawthorns from the cook at home, each one wrapped in a twist of pink paper printed with plum blossoms, the way their mother had always ordered them. Lian unwrapped one and the smell of sugar and sour fruit put her straight back in the Shen kitchen, nine years old, hiding under the table with her brother while the cook pretended not to see them.
She cried. She didn't mean to.
"Hey. Hey." Qiao knelt beside her chair and put an arm around her. His sleeve smelled of ink and horses. "Is it him? Did he do something?"
"No. He's kind." She wiped her face on the back of her wrist like a child. "I'm being stupid."
"You're being homesick. It's allowed." He held her a little longer and then sat back on his heels. The linen strip was gone from his left hand, and a narrow pink line ran across the palm, healing. "Do you want me to stay for supper? I'll bore you with Ministry gossip. Minister Feng has a new wig. It's magnificent."
She laughed, wetly, and he stayed.
The Emperor came that night.
He had come most nights since the wedding and slept every time on the narrow couch in the outer room, to his eunuchs' horror. Tonight he didn't go to the couch. He stood in the doorway of her inner chamber with his hands behind his back, watching her at her dressing table with the blue poetry book open in front of her.
"You write at night," he said.
"Badly, Majesty."
"Heng." He came in. "When it's only us. I'd like someone in this palace to use my name."
He stood behind her chair. In the bronze mirror she could see him looking down at the page, and at the back of her neck where Tao had pinned her hair up for the night. He didn't touch her. If she leaned back an inch, her shoulders would rest against him.
She didn't lean back. She didn't lean away either.
"Wild geese," he read. "That's a sad poem."
"Everyone asks that."
"Because it is." His voice had dropped. In the mirror his eyes moved from the page to her mouth and stayed there. "Lian."
The door rattled. Tao, breathless, without knocking, which she never did.
The Emperor stepped back. Tao saw him, went crimson, and dropped to her knees so fast the floorboards rang.
"Forgive me, Majesty, I didn't, my lady said if I found..."
"Get up," Lian said. "What is it?"
Tao looked at the Emperor and then at her mistress, and Lian saw her decide. She came forward on her knees and held out a fold of paper, crumpled, smudged with something gray.
"My cousin sweeps the Treasury offices," Tao whispered. "You told me to ask about Clerk Bai. She found these in his brazier this evening, half burned. She thought they were rubbish. Then she saw your name."
Lian took them.
Practice sheets. A dozen lines copied over and over in a careful hand that grew more confident down the page. A hand she knew better than her own face, because it was her own face, in ink. The tilt of her horizontal strokes. The little hook she gave the character for heart.
And the words. She knew the words too. She had heard them read aloud at her trial, nine years from now, in the voice of Censor Hu.
To the honored General of the Northern Banners. The tiger is ready to leave its cage. When the Emperor rides to the autumn hunt, my brother's men will hold the eastern gate.
Someone was already practicing the letter that would kill her.