Chief Eunuch Pan confessed before dawn. Physician Qin held out until noon.
By evening the palace had its version: Pan wanted the Empress shamed, Qin was paid to cry poison, and Luo was a fool who drank from the wrong cup. Luo himself had woken in a cell beneath the Censorate with a headache and a perfect memory of nothing at all. He swore he had said nothing to the Empress. He swore he didn't know what she was talking about.
Pan was sent to the imperial tombs to sweep graves for the rest of his life. Qin was stripped of rank and his medicine cabinets were sealed. Luo, for drinking a cup he couldn't prove he knew was drugged, kept his head and lost his blue robe.
Three names, Lian wrote in the poetry book. Cracked. Not broken.
He told us.
She sat with the brush in her hand until the ink dried on the tip.
The Emperor came after midnight.
She was still at the dressing table in her sleeping robe, the blue book closed under her hand. He stood in the doorway of the inner chamber in a white under-robe with no slippers, his hair loose and his face gray, like a man who had run a long way from something.
"I dreamed of a platform," he said.
Lian set her brush down on its rest very carefully.
"Rain," Heng said. "A crowd saying nothing. And you." He came into the room. He didn't seem to know he was doing it. "You were kneeling. Your hands were tied. There was a scroll, and a man reading, and I was behind a screen, and I knew I could stop it. I knew it the way you know your own name."
"Heng."
"I've dreamed it every night since the wedding. Pieces. Tonight I saw all of it." He was standing over her now, looking down, and his eyes were wet. "In the dream I let it happen. I coughed. I didn't say anything, and they..." He stopped. "Tell me it's only a dream, Lian."
She didn't.
The silence went on long enough that he understood it. She watched him understand it. He sat down on the edge of the bed across from her as if his knees had been cut.
"How long," he said.
"Ten years. I was your wife for ten years." She was surprised how level her voice was. "It ended on the twentieth day of the third month, at the Meridian Gate. In the rain. They said I'd written to the northern rebels. They said I'd poisoned Rong Xiu's baby. You'd taken her as a consort by then."
"I would never..."
"You did." Her hands were folded on the blue book. "And on the morning they did it, you sat behind a screen. I heard you cough. I waited for you to speak, and you didn't."
He put his face in his hands.
She let him. She found that she wanted to cross the room and touch his hair, and she sat on her hands instead, the way she had as a little girl in lessons.
"There was a man," Heng said at last, through his fingers. "In the dream. Before the platform. He stood at my shoulder in the study and told me that if I spoke for you, they would take you back to the cell and strangle you slowly instead. He said silence was the only mercy I had left to give you. He had his hand on my sleeve." He lowered his hands. "I can't see his face. I've tried every night. I only remember he smelled of ink, and of horses."
Something cold went down through the middle of Lian.
She thought of a sleeve against her cheek, a basket of candied hawthorns, plum paper.
She put the thought away from her so hard that it hurt.
"Lian." Heng was looking at her. "I don't know how to ask you to forgive something I haven't done yet."
"Then don't ask."
"I don't know what else to do."
"Stay," she said. "Do that."
He stood. He crossed the space between them and knelt in front of her chair so that for once his face was below hers, and he reached up and took her face in both hands with the ink stain on his finger cool against her cheekbone. He waited. He was giving her the choice, and he was shaking.
She bent and kissed him.
Their first wedding night, long ago, had been shy and polite and full of apologies. This was a long slow kiss tasting of salt, his fingers sliding back into her hair and hers knotting in the white silk at his collar. When they broke apart, his forehead stayed against hers.
"I won't sit behind a screen," he said. "Not this time."
He slept beside her that night, on top of the quilts, one arm across her waist. She lay awake and listened to him breathe and thought about horses.
The message from home came in the morning. Lord Shen had taken a chill and was asking for his daughter.
By the Emperor's leave she went that afternoon, with Tao and six guards, in a closed sedan. The house on Willow Lantern Street was exactly the same. Her father was in bed with a mustard plaster on his chest, and he complained at her happily for an hour about his physician and the price of ginseng.
"Your brother's at the Ministry," he grumbled. "Always at the Ministry. Go and find his good inkstone in his study, the green one. I want to write to my physician and tell him he's an idiot."
Qiao's study looked out on the plum garden, bare black branches against a white wall. His brushes hung washed and sorted by size. The green inkstone sat on the left where it always had.
Beside it, a small drawer stood open a finger's width, as if somebody had closed it in a hurry.
Lian opened it.
Sealing wax. A stick of red ink. And a seal, small enough to hide in a fist, carved from pale yellow stone.
She turned it over. Five petals.
She pressed it into the soft meat of her own thumb. When she lifted it, a plum blossom sat on her skin in red, perfect, exactly the size of the ninth seal on her death warrant.
The door slid shut behind her.
"Welcome home, little sister," Qiao said. He stood with his back to the door, still in his Ministry robe, pushing his hair off his forehead with his left hand. "I did wonder how long it would take you."
Then he turned the hand palm out, so she could see it. Across the middle ran a thin white scar, healed now, exactly as long as the sharp end of their mother's phoenix pin.