That night Song Lan did not stay. After exchanging a few words with Luowei, he departed for Yu Suiyun’s chambers.

In summer the days are long. At the very first watch of the morning, a faint light was already beginning to show on the horizon. Yan Luo went out to the resting place where the officials waited before morning court and returned with a scattering of dewdrops still on her clothing.

“Young Master Pei relayed something to me through Liu Mingzhong—he gave me a handkerchief.”

Luowei had already risen and was sitting at the bronze mirror, washing and grooming herself. She heard this and was not in the least surprised.

Ye Tingyan had only arrived in Biandu this year, yet he was thoroughly familiar with every path in the imperial city. She had no idea how many people like Pei Xi he had working under him—she had not the slightest doubt that, were it said he had planted informants even in Yu Qiushi’s household, he was entirely capable of it.

In one night, he had probably managed to get a clear picture of the full hand Yu Qiushi had played the previous day.

But the handkerchief was a blank expanse of white—nothing on it at all.

Luowei accepted the handkerchief and casually tossed it into the bronze basin used for washing her face. When she fished it back out, characters had begun to appear faintly through it—it was one of those street conjurer’s tricks. As she took it, she caught the faint sharp-sour smell.

The hall was still dim. The palace servants did not know the Empress had already risen, and no one was standing nearby to attend her.

Yan Luo lit a candle and held the candlestick close.

In the dancing light of the flame, Luowei made out a few brief lines.

“The inner attendant surnamed Feng at the side of Yu Xiaoqing—her true identity arises from what transpired when she went out during the late spring gathering. She is implicated in the matter of the associated prosecutions from the third year of the Tianshi reign. Does Your Excellency know of this?”

At these first words, Yan Luo gave a start—while Luowei’s hands began to tremble uncontrollably.

On the day of the spring hunt at the late spring gathering, Yan Luo had gone out once under Luowei’s arrangements.

The activities of every person that day had been under her own watchful eye. Even at the back hill, her elder brother Su Shiyu had been there to ensure everything was absolutely certain before she had allowed Yan Luo to go out. How could it possibly have been discovered?

Such a sensitive and particular identity… No wonder Yu Qiushi had been so bold as to dare substitute that phrase with “the reed flowers of the waterside have been wronged.”

Yu Qiushi had long suspected that she knew the true circumstances of the Thorns of the Tang Rose case. Or even if she did not know, he intended to arrange things so that Song Lan would believe she knew—if the person closest to her side was a descendant of someone implicated in the injustice, and if this person was someone she so deeply trusted, how could she claim to have known nothing? How could she prove it? How could anyone believe it?

Even Ye Tingyan had ended with that one ambiguous question: “Does Your Excellency know of this?”

Though he had offered up that painting, the “Painting of Trampling the Red Cloud Heavens,” which laid bare the hidden desire in Song Lan’s heart to surpass his elder brother, he had not necessarily been able to deduce that the Thorns of the Tang Rose case was originally schemed by Song Lan and Yu Qiushi working hand in hand.

In Ye Tingyan’s eyes now—and in the eyes of others in time to come—the person she trusted most at her side was a descendant of someone implicated in the associated prosecutions of that year.

What would Ye Tingyan think?

He had asked the question “Does Your Excellency know of this?”—if she did not know, why did she trust this person so deeply? If she did know, why was she protecting her?

Even if she and Ye Tingyan had become inseparable allies before Yu Qiushi was brought down, she had never dared let him catch even a trace of her old affections for those who were gone. A handle of this sort, liable at any moment to cost a life…

Luowei swiftly brought the handkerchief to the candlestick flame and let it burn completely to nothing in the bronze basin.

The ashes drifted upward, like a pinch of incense ash.

Yan Luo knelt before her, her voice trembling: “Your Majesty…”

“…Do not be afraid. I will certainly keep you safe,” Luowei said, her heart in a daze, only lowering her head and speaking rapidly: “Last night when Song Lan came, he should not yet have known. Yu Qiushi said nothing yesterday—he wanted me to be unable to guess his hand and thus fall into disarray and expose myself. It does not matter—it does not matter. The sky has not yet brightened. I will find a way to send you out of the imperial palace at once. Go to You Province to find A’Lang, to find Xuechu. Or—”

Before she could finish, Yan Luo said urgently: “Never mind how to escape this heavily guarded imperial city—if I go, you will certainly be implicated.”

“Then let me be implicated!” The candle flame by her hand flickered abruptly. Luowei’s voice shook terribly: “As long as I do not break, Song Lan cannot do anything to me. If his suspicion grows too great, that too is exactly what I want—sooner or later, he will be forced to depose me as Empress.”

“Only when you have prepared everything—when the north has been pacified, when the Grand Preceptor has lost power, when public sentiment has risen against him—can he depose you as Empress! Before that, if he grows suspicious of you, all our previous work will have been for nothing!” Yan Luo seized her hands with force, her expression desolate. “If you are deposed as Empress now and fall into the Grand Preceptor’s hands—what will become of you?”

“Then what do you want me to do!” Luowei gripped her back tightly. She slipped from her chair and fell to the floor. Her beautiful eyes were suffused with a wash of blood-red. “I could not protect A’Qi back then. I could not protect those one thousand two hundred and forty-one people. Now even if it means taking a desperate gamble, I will protect you—at the very least I must stake something on it!”

“I said it years ago and I say it again: if you protect yourself today, you will be able to protect another thousand two hundred and forty-one people in the days to come,” said Yan Luo. Reaching this point, she reached up and wiped the tears from the corner of her eye. “When it comes down to it, there must have been a misstep on the day I went out—it is I who have implicated you!”

Luowei shook her head wildly: “No—no. I failed to calculate everything. Let me think—what have I overlooked…”

As she murmured low and scattered, Yan Luo lifted her head and happened to catch sight of the rose-gold hairpin resting on the dressing table. This hairpin had been fashioned for Luowei by Song Lan at the time of her elevation to Empress. On the petal after petal that bloomed open, several petals had been dyed with a faint red pigment, like splashes of blood. The brilliant gold color and the blood-red played against each other—magnificent and ardent.

The tip of the hairpin had been ground very sharp—it was a lethal instrument, something that might even be called a weapon.

At the time Song Lan sent Luowei the hairpin, it was precisely to test whether she would use it to kill him—over these years, he had in truth never ceased to suspect her.

Had she not concealed herself so perfectly, giving him nothing to discover; had she not navigated so skillfully between the court and the inner palace, managing the pressures of Yu Qiushi’s power for him; had she not suppressed every thought and temperament from her former life and remade herself into a gilded idol of restraint and propriety—she would certainly not have survived to this day.

The great Yan family army was still in the northern frontier. Those she had cultivated at court were all scholars of the upright literary faction. The manifold preparations she had made had not yet had the time to be implemented one by one. If she killed Song Lan outright, she could not redress the injustice for those gone before, and bloodshed and chaos would inevitably follow—she had far, far too many things to be careful of.

It was precisely because of all these considerations that she had been struggling within her gilded cage, painstakingly seeking the most difficult of all possible ways to survive.

Others did not know her hardship—but could she herself not know it?

In a single moment, Luowei also felt a buzzing in her own mind, her thoughts pressing and pulling in all directions. She knew she was greedy—she had always been greedy since childhood. Back when she and Song Ling were studying together, Song Qi would sit across from them making noise, asking with a grin whether elder brother you want the realm or a beauty. Song Ling never deigned to answer such a tiresome question. She had snatched the book from Song Qi’s hand and said with great self-satisfaction: why must one choose? I want both.

She wanted both a way to break the impasse and to keep the people around her safe. In this court where a turn of the hand brings clouds and a turn back brings rain—how could she ever manage it? If she sought only one side, it seemed there might be a way out through severing one’s own limb. But if she was greedy…

Before she had managed to sort out her thoughts, Yan Luo suddenly rose to her feet, snatched up the rose-gold hairpin from the dressing table, and plunged it swiftly into Luowei’s left shoulder.

The gold hairpin was sharp. It pierced through in an instant, then was rapidly withdrawn.

Yan Luo had trained in martial arts in the past. Her hand was decisive and clean, and she had avoided the major arteries.

“You—”

Luowei pressed her hand to her left shoulder, the pain so severe she could barely speak: “What are you doing…”

A flash of reluctance passed through Yan Luo’s eyes, but she still stepped away quickly, seized the celadon powder box from the dressing table, and hurled it violently to the floor.

The sound of shattering porcelain in the quiet of the early morning was like an explosion. It seemed someone had already been startled and was hurrying toward them.

Through the swirling cloud of powder, Yan Luo knelt and pressed her forehead to the ground before Luowei.

“You know what to say. Do not—do not… fail them.”

“Take care of yourself, Luowei.”

Luowei tried to reach out and grab her, but could not move. She could only choke out in a sob: “A’Fei—”

Yan Luo hesitated for a moment, but still turned and left without lingering.

With one hand she tore off the official’s kerchief headdress, with the other she dropped the leather belt at her waist. Then she gripped the short dagger she always kept strapped to her calf and leaped out through the half-open lattice window.

Luowei struggled and crawled several steps along the floor, trying to rise, but had not the strength from the pain.

At daybreak in summer, the gilded bricks in the palace hall were still this cold. She wore only layers of thin gauze. She shook all over in pain. The wound on her left shoulder bled steadily, staining the lotus pattern engraved into the gilded bricks a deep red.

Like falling into the hell of frozen ice. So this was what the so-called crimson lotus hellfire looked like.

At last a palace servant, having called out repeatedly with no answer, gathered her courage and rushed inside. The first thing she saw was the bloodstained gold hairpin on the floor. Then she saw the Empress pressing her hand to her wound. Her courage broke apart entirely. In a dazed, trembling voice she screamed: “Your Majesty! Quick—someone come quickly! Her Majesty the Empress has been attacked!”

In the instant Yan Luo had struck, Luowei had already understood her meaning.

If she claimed she did not know Yan Luo’s identity—that she had trusted her for so many years without suspicion—it would hardly convince anyone. If she said she did know, she could only insist that she had old ties of friendship with Yan Luo and had not been able to bear the thought of her death.

But under these circumstances, combined with that phrase “the reed flowers of the waterside have been wronged,” Song Lan’s suspicion of her would rise precipitously.

The time had not yet come—the time had not yet come.

This hairpin thrust was the decision Yan Luo had made for her—and it was Yan Luo’s act of self-exculpation at the cost of her own life. Both of them understood this with perfect clarity: with the palace guards so heavily deployed, there was no way she could possibly escape.

The scrambling palace servants converged from all sides, wanting to help Luowei rise, yet afraid of pulling at her wound. For a moment they did not know what to do.

Luowei pressed her hand to the wound and shivered. She forced her eyes shut.

From all around came a swell of sounds. The guards on duty to the left and right ran past the entrance of her hall—armor and blades clanging together. In the distance someone was giving hurried instructions: “Summon the imperial physicians,” “Inform His Majesty.” There was weeping: “Is Your Majesty’s injury severe?”

All the sounds of the world, changing in the space of a breath.

She tilted her head back and, in a daze, saw that lotus flower stained red with blood.

Her gaze fell—and she dropped into a vast, extinguished darkness.

*

For reasons no one could explain, today was somehow different. The assembled officials at the palace gate had waited and waited, yet still no inner attendant came out to summon them in.

A light drizzle drifted down on the summer morning. The crimson of Ye Tingyan’s court robe was dampened in patches. He pressed his lips together and suddenly recalled the soaked sleeve of his robe when he had first climbed to Gaoyang Terrace.

What had followed were tender, gentle caresses—and a pair of eyes shimmering with moisture.

Yesterday he had tried every means available to him and managed to extract that piece of information from Yu Qiushi’s circle. He had asked that one question—”Does Your Excellency know of this?”—only to confirm whether Luowei knew the identity of the person at her side. Once he had her answer, he could plan his next move.

Though in his heart he could already make some vague surmise—to come and see him was a matter touching directly on her life and safety. That she had brought only this one palace servant along was proof enough of the depth of her trust.

Before, he had also had a question: if this palace servant was an old friend of hers, it was somewhat easier to account for.

She had always been a person who valued old bonds. To take a risk and rescue an old friend—it was something she was capable of doing.

But that was the her of before.

Did “feeling” still carry that weight?

If it did—then when she wrote those letters to deceive him into eating those cakes that had drained him of all his strength, had she hesitated even once?

An old wound gave an abrupt throb of pain. Ye Tingyan gave a slight frown, then forced himself to smooth it open. He resolved not to think of these things any further.

He steadied himself and pressed his hand against an old wound that was aching for unknown reasons, his thoughts drifting idly. This situation was difficult to break, yet also not so impossible—it was only a question of whether there was an opportunity to transfer the burden to someone else’s shoulders. Besides the Emperor and the Chief Minister, those he held grudges against from that year were not confined to Lu Heng and Lin Kuishan alone.

He was in the midst of weighing which option was better or which was worse when the inner hall suddenly produced an attendant who bowed to the assembled officials and said with respectful courtesy: “Gentlemen, His Majesty has canceled the morning court session today. Please, gentlemen, take your leave.”

He was taken aback and had not yet had time to think further before the attendant leaned close and said in a low voice: “Master Ye, please remain.”

The attendant held out a bamboo-ribbed umbrella for him. Ye Tingyan followed him against the stream of departing officials and asked: “His Majesty has still kept the Grand Preceptor and several of the State Affairs Councillors behind—so it is clearly not that His Majesty is unwell. In that case, why has morning court been canceled?”

The attendant drew closer, his voice carrying the haze of mist that comes with a fine early morning rain: “Master does not know—Her Majesty the Empress was attacked this morning.”