The moon over the Lake of Clear Ripples was so full it looked swollen, and every lantern in the palace had been lit to compete with it.
Lian came down the covered walk on the Emperor's arm in crimson and gold, with the weighted hem swinging at her ankles and the packet of white powder lying flat inside the twelfth pocket, over her heart, where someone had so kindly sewn a place for it.
She had thought about burning it for most of one night. Then she had thought about the Pavilion of Listening Rain and the faces at the door, and in the morning she had put the robe on.
"You're shaking," Heng said, very low.
"It's cold by the water."
"It isn't." His hand covered hers where it lay on his sleeve, warm, and stayed there. "Whatever you're doing tonight, I'd like to be told."
"Afterward."
"That's what I was afraid of."
The pavilion stood out over the lake on red lacquered piles, open on three sides, hung with silk lanterns shaped like rabbits and lotus pods. The court sat at low tables in a horseshoe facing the water. Mooncakes were stacked in towers. Musicians on a barge drifted past playing pipes, and the sound came across the lake soft and late, half a breath behind the players' fingers.
Luo Pingshan met them at the steps in a new blue robe. Two ranks up, by special favor of the Emperor, for the banquet's duration. He bowed so deeply his cap brushed the boards.
"Majesties. Everything is as you would wish."
"I'm sure it is," Lian said, and smiled at him. He smiled back. He had small even teeth.
Tao had spent two days in the kitchens and the laundry and came back each night with her sleeves full of crumbs and gossip. Little Fen had not gone home. She had gone to the house of Chief Eunuch Pan's nephew in the Lantern Market, and she was still there.
And this afternoon, an hour before the banquet, two of the Dowager's household guards had knocked on that kitchen door. Lian hadn't asked the Dowager for anything. She had only poured tea that morning and mentioned, idly, that the Pan family kept a runaway seamstress in their kitchen.
The Dowager had said nothing at all. Then she had sent Wen Ruo out of the room on an errand.
The toasts began. The Emperor to Heaven. The Emperor to the Dowager. The court to the throne. Lian drank from her cup each time and watched the server who refilled it, a soft young eunuch with a jade ring, and saw him glance toward Chief Eunuch Pan at the end of the high table before every pour.
On the fifth toast Pan bent between them to fill the Emperor's cup himself. Lian touched her heart, then his trailing sleeve, to keep it from the sauce.
On the sixth toast the eunuch filled her cup from a different jar.
Lian lifted it. The wine smelled of osmanthus and something underneath, faint and chalky.
Below the dais, Luo Pingshan rose for the master of the banquet's toast. He came up the three steps with his own cup held in both hands, as custom required, and knelt before the high table.
"To the Empress," he said, "on her first Mid-Autumn. May every moon of her reign be as bright."
Luo lifted his cup.
"Wait," Lian said pleasantly.
The pavilion went quiet. Luo looked up.
"In my mother's province," Lian said, "when a host toasts a guest at harvest, they exchange cups. So the luck goes both ways. It's a very old custom." She turned to the Emperor. "May I, Majesty? I'm homesick tonight."
Heng looked at her. Then at Luo. Then at the soft young eunuch with the jade ring, who had gone the color of rice paper.
"Of course," the Emperor said. "Secretary Luo is gracious. He won't refuse the Empress."
Luo's face did not change at all. That was what she would remember later: how perfectly still he kept it. He rose, came forward, and held out his cup. Lian held out hers. Their fingers touched on the exchange, and his were cold.
"To the Empress," he said again, softly.
He drank. All of it, in one long swallow, with his eyes on hers over the rim.
Lian drank his, which tasted of nothing but wine.
For a dozen heartbeats nothing happened. Luo bowed and turned to go down the steps.
On the second step his knee buckled.
He caught himself on the rail. He shook his head like a dog shaking off water. Then Luo Pingshan sat down hard on the steps of the high table, his cap sliding over one eye, and slowly tipped sideways into a tower of lotus mooncakes.
Physician Qin was on his feet before the mooncakes finished falling.
"Poison," he cried. "Majesty, he's been poisoned. The cup came from the Empress's hand. Everyone saw it." He pointed, trembling with what looked like real horror. "Search her robe!"
Every face turned to the dais.
Lian stood up. She spread her arms wide, so that the crimson sleeves fell open and the lantern light ran over the gold phoenixes.
"Please," she said. "Search me."
The Dowager raised one finger. Two of her senior women came forward and searched the Empress in front of the whole court, quickly, expertly, sleeves and sash and collar. They found eleven empty pockets. They found a twelfth, sewn over the heart, which was also empty.
"There's nothing, Majesty," Wen Ruo said.
Qin's mouth opened and closed.
"Perhaps," Lian said, sitting back down and arranging her skirts, "the physician should search Chief Eunuch Pan. He was standing very close to me during the sixth toast."
Pan began to laugh, outraged. The Dowager's women were already on him. Wen Ruo held up a paper packet, dusted white at the creases, pinched out of the Chief Eunuch's left sleeve, where Lian's fingers had put it on the fifth toast.
The noise of the court rose like birds off a field.
Through it, the doors at the land end of the pavilion opened, and the Dowager's guards brought in a girl of sixteen in a seamstress's apron, sobbing, with red thread still caught on her sleeve.
"Little Fen," Heng said quietly. "I think we'll hear from you now."
Lian didn't hear most of it. She was watching the steps. Two guards were hauling Luo upright by the arms, his head lolling, his face smeared with lotus paste.
As they dragged him past the high table, his hand shot out and caught the hem of her robe.
The guards stopped. Luo's eyes came open, unfocused, swimming. His fingers twisted in the weighted silk.
"He told us," Luo said thickly, and smiled at her with his small even teeth. "He said you'd come back cleverer this time."