In the blink of an eye, the end of the summer solstice arrived, and the heat had grown even more stifling than at the height of summer. Yan Lang was drenched in sweat by the time he entered Fengle Tower, and as the young attendant led him to his table, he complained of the heat in a continuous stream that kept her laughing without stop.
After climbing three flights of wooden stairs, he spotted Ye Tingyan seated by the window, leaning sideways to watch the street below. The last rays of evening sunlight fell across his face, and he seemed lost in thought, lazily fanning himself with a folding fan. Not a trace of sweat was visible anywhere on him.
Yan Lang sat down cross-legged across from him, waved a hand to order a round of iced drinks, and downed a full cup of iced plum juice before he could collect himself. Then he said with a teasing grin: “Is Third Young Master made of jade? With skin and bones as cool as ice, he suffers no ill effects even in heat like this.”
Ye Tingyan turned to face him and closed his folding fan, pressing the handle gently against his chest with a half-sincere, half-joking air. “In my early years I sustained some injuries—cold has settled around my heart meridians. Only my hands are still warm. Naturally I do not fear the heat.”
Yan Lang had been fooled by this man many times when they first met in Youzhou, and so he only said, “What a strange kind of injury that would be—you’re tricking me again!”
Ye Tingyan half-opened his fan to cover his smile but said nothing. Yan Lang leaned over to look and saw that the fan bore an inscribed line: “Now withered, I write the summons for a wandering soul.”
He could not help but laugh: “Withered, writing a summons for a wandering soul—a Confucian’s cap has caused many a man to stumble. Does a civil official like Third Young Master actually believe that learning is useless?”
Ye Tingyan raised an eyebrow with a faint look of surprise: “Has the Young General read this line?”
Yan Lang said: “Waving the feathered fan, adjusting the silk headband, the dust of youth and horses—my father has read it and greatly admires the bearing of Zhou Yu of the Three Kingdoms, commanding the battlefield with such sweeping authority.”
Ye Tingyan smiled slightly and slowly opened his folding fan: “Heroes have always come from the young. The Young General is no less than Zhou Yu.”
“Not at all, not at all.”
Yan Lang waved his hand and looked again, noticing that Ye Tingyan had not written the second half of the verse—only these three fragmentary lines: ‘Meeting an old friend in Xiaoxiang, the dust of youth and horses, now withered, I write the summons for a wandering soul.’
Yan Lang laughed: “You and I meet here—that qualifies as ‘meeting an old friend.’ You wielded strategy from my father’s military camp—that is worthy of a hero on a par with Zhou Yu. But Third Young Master is still young, in the finest years of his life. How can it be said you are ‘now withered’?”
Ye Tingyan answered carelessly: “I was only writing it for the amusement of it.”
He gave a light cough and asked: “Has His Majesty permitted you to leave the capital?”
Yan Lang put on a look of deep gloom: “Only permitted to leave the residence. Leaving the capital seems like a distant hope. But I am in no hurry to leave—Beiyou has been peaceful these days, and I am quite content to stay a while longer in this comfortable haven of Biandu.”
Ye Tingyan heard this and knew immediately that he was not speaking the truth, but did not press him—only said: “If you are not in Beiyou, it may not necessarily remain peaceful.”
Yan Lang said: “Then won’t Lord Ye please persuade His Majesty on my behalf?”
Ye Tingyan raised his cup with a sigh: “I do not know if I carry enough weight for that.”
The two looked at each other and laughed, and the meal was thoroughly enjoyable. The following day, Yan Lang entered the palace and passed a verbal message to Luowei.
“The Young General says: this person’s mind runs very deep—using him would be dangerous to handle, but killing him would be a waste.”
Luowei glanced sideways at Zhang Suwu, who had relayed the message, and said with a rueful smile: “His standards are sky-high—praise like that from him is not easily given. It seems Ye San truly did have some real ability in Youzhou.”
Zhang Suwu said: “If not for that, he would never have earned His Majesty’s trust.”
The two were speaking as they passed before the windows of the imperial library. Xu Dan was there, reading by the window, and seeing her approach, rose immediately to bow. Luowei waved him off. Her eye happened to fall on several bamboo bookmarks resting on the writing desk behind him—they were very elegantly made, and had dried lotus petals pressed onto them.
Her expression shifted subtly. She said, testing the waters: “Lord Xu has such refined taste—even his bookmarks are made from lotus blossoms.”
Xu Dan looked back and smiled: “Your Highness flatters me. How would this subject dare pick lotus blossoms in the palace? These flowers drifted down to the windowsill a few days ago. Unable to bear watching them wither, I fashioned them into this. Would Your Highness like one?”
As he spoke, he held one out to her. Luowei took it, thinking to herself: ever since Ye Tingyan stopped spending nights in the palace, she had come to the imperial library once every two days, but had never seen the seasonal flowers he would leave as a signal—and so had not gone to Gaoyang Terrace.
It seemed it was not that he had stopped leaving them, but that Xu Dan had happened to pick them up by chance.
“Your Highness…”
Luowei gripped the bookmark, turned, and walked away. Xu Dan raised his head, just about to say something more, but the Empress had already taken his bookmark without a word and departed in haste.
* * *
In the days that followed, the two found no leisure to meet.
The censorate officials had long harbored dissatisfaction with Yu Qiushi—it was only his enormous power that had kept them from daring to speak. Now that the wall was crumbling and the crowd was pressing in, memorials of impeachment piled up until they filled the study in the rear hall of Qianfang Palace. Only one elderly official raised his voice at the Censorate to urge restraint, declaring that “once Yu is gone, the court will surely be thrown into crisis.” Regrettably, no one understood him—they only laughed and said he had been so intimidated by the Chief Minister’s authority over the years that he had become afraid.
When Ye Tingyan heard of this, he said to Pei Xi with a bitter smile: “Of the entire court’s civil and military officials, only this one old man sees things clearly.”
Pei Xi said: “Is that not precisely what you wished for?”
At that very moment, Luowei was feeding fish in the withered lotus pond behind Qionghua Hall. Zhang Suwu asked her the same question. Luowei cast out the last of the fish food in her hand, clapped her hands together, stood up, accepted the handkerchief he passed her, and sighed: “I only worry there will be no one worthy to succeed in the court.”
She turned and walked back toward Qionghua Hall, adding in a leisurely afterthought: “But each age brings forth its own talent—there is no need to worry overmuch.”
* * *
In the late summer of the fourth year of the Jinghe reign, the Censorate and the Remonstrance Bureau jointly impeached Chief Minister Yu Qiushi for ‘disrespect,’ ‘impropriety,’ and ‘arrogance,’ with appended charges of corruption and illicit collusion.
Everyone had assumed that as long as the Chief Minister stepped forward to defend himself, found a few scapegoats to take the blame in his place, and accepted some significant losses, he could still manage to walk away unscathed—this was how he had handled many such incidents before.
But Yu Qiushi simply remained silent.
This only emboldened those pressing against him. The emperor dispatched his covert force, Zhuque, to conduct another thorough month-long investigation. At the end of the seventh month, after the Noble Consort had paid her visit home to her family, the emperor ordered Yu Qiushi taken into custody and the Yu family residence searched and seized. All members of the household were imprisoned.
The Noble Consort from the Yu family was with child and had long resided deep in the inner palace, so she was naturally spared any implication. Princess Imperial Shu Kang and her Prince Consort were sent back to the princess’s residence under house arrest, awaiting the verdict of the Three Judicial Offices.
The matter of the Chief Minister’s removal from power was, at this point, settled beyond any question.
Officials at court who had been close to Yu Qiushi were each gripped by fear for their own safety. The more clever among them prostrated themselves in front of the emperor’s study and wept, half-confessing their past conduct in veiled and evasive terms. The more foolish submitted memorials requesting to resign, or spoke out in protest during morning court, and were dealt with accordingly.
The Three Judicial Offices had intended to handle the matter through standard procedure, but Zhuque—the emperor’s own personal force—had a firm grip on the central authority over the Yu case, leaving everyone else seething with resentment but afraid to say so. So eager were the censorate officials to see Yu Qiushi removed that they held their tongues for the time being, intending to wait until the matter had settled before raising objections about Zhuque’s irregular interference in judicial proceedings.
Although Ye Tingyan was one of the emperor’s most trusted intimates, few people knew of his private command over Zhuque. In this removal of Yu Qiushi, he had taken the lead, and had also repeatedly mediated between the censorate officials and the emperor. As a result, quite a few people had come to regard him with genuine goodwill—though he was not a man of pure Confucian literati ideals, he had on multiple occasions quietly defused the tension between the emperor and certain blunt-spoken officials.
Those who could not understand him dismissed him with contempt. But the perceptive few who saw the situation clearly understood his painstaking efforts, and privately held him in quiet admiration.
On the tenth day of the seventh month, the Three Judicial Offices submitted their memorial with much trepidation, reporting that gold and copper objects had been found in the Chief Minister’s residence, along with a forged military tally. The earlier assassination attempt attributed to the Lin family, and the anonymous ballad “False Dragon’s Lament” that had circulated throughout the capital, finally came to light.
The Empress and the Chief Minister had long been at odds; to avoid anyone accusing her of using another’s hand to kill, she had not intervened in any of this whatsoever. The emperor reviewed the Three Judicial Offices’ memorial with his own vermilion brush and explicitly labeled his crime as ‘high treason against the sovereign.’
Earlier, everyone had assumed the emperor merely wanted to remove the Chief Minister from power. No one expected that his use of Zhuque to investigate would go far beyond simple removal—he had not forgotten the humiliation of being a puppet emperor, nor the overbearing pressure of a Chief Minister’s power. Once the charge was declared, the entire court was in an uproar, and the emperor seized the momentum to issue an edict, announcing that he would assume personal governance of the court after his birthday celebration on the Double Ninth Festival.
With the Chief Minister gone and the Empress silent, even those who harbored private misgivings offered no voice of opposition—after all, the emperor had already come of age, and assuming personal governance was an inevitable matter.
Yu Qiushi was remanded to the Ministry of Justice’s prison, to be executed after the autumn season.
How swift is the turning of power. Yesterday he had been the ‘Grand Preceptor Yu,’ with the power of life and death from the high seat of authority. Today he had already become a prisoner beneath the law.
When Zhang Suwu informed Luowei that Song Lan had paid a secret midnight visit to Yu Qiushi, he was somewhat worried. But Luowei said with certainty: “He will say nothing.”
When Yu Qiushi had said that day, “You will certainly not survive,” he had meant: even if Song Lan resolved to eliminate him, he would use his life in his final moments to force Song Lan to believe that Luowei already knew the truth behind the ‘Thorn in the Tang’ incident. From the day the two of them had formed their opposing positions at court, this outcome—both perishing together—had been sealed.
The stratagem of destroying a person’s spirit was meant to make him spend these last days looking back on his life with remorse. Yu Qiushi was a driven and single-minded capable official. Even if he knew he had been wrong, he would not admit it—one had to shatter his spirit entirely, leave him ridden with anxiety and unease, until he felt that he had squandered every grace bestowed upon him and could no longer bear to go on living. Only then would it be finished.
Had he not lost the will to live of his own accord, no one could have removed him so smoothly.
Luowei burned the copy of the ‘Zhongni’s Dream of the Ritual Hall’ that she herself had practiced, offering it as an early memorial tribute to him.
She still remembered when she was young, and her father had set out wine and held a banquet at home. Yu Qiushi had also come. Several men who would in later years become deadly political enemies sat at the same table together. Even when they argued so fiercely over their differences of opinion that their faces flushed and their necks reddened, they could still drown their grievances and grudges in a shared cup of wine.
In those days everyone had been so young—ideals clear, thoughts uncomplicated, with no entanglement of interests or factions, no quarrels born of wounded pride, no opposition that ended only in mutual destruction. The garden had been filled with the fragrant sweetness of fine wine, and someone on a whim began striking a clay jar to keep rhythm, singing a verse of an imperfect tune of ‘A Garden Full of Fragrance.’
Later, all those bright and brilliant figures of that era had scattered like clouds. Those who had come to the banquet were either separated by vast distances and serving different masters, or divided by death itself, their souls returned to the heavens beyond. Everything had vanished.
As the ashes of the burned calligraphy quietly died away, Luowei suddenly sensed a visitor approaching from outside the latticed window. It was nearly past the second half of midnight, and the cicadas of late summer still called without rest or end.
She turned to look, and there was Ye Tingyan wearing the red Zhuque official robes he had worn when they first met at Qionghua Hall—his hair pulled up high in a ponytail, a short blade gripped in his hand.
Unlike before, when she turned to look at him this time, he did not offer his usual languid smile. He only gazed at her steadily. She looked back carefully and saw the silver image of the moon reflected in the dark depths of his eyes.
The two of them regarded each other for a long while in that strange and quiet stillness, until Ye Tingyan spoke first. His tone was very calm, with no complaint—only his words came very, very slowly: “After I left that flower, I waited a long time on Gaoyang Terrace. You never came.”
Luowei did not explain, but suddenly asked: “What did you do while you were waiting?”
Ye Tingyan, unsure what to make of this, thought for a moment before answering: “I watched the sunset.”
Luowei stepped closer and leaned against the latticed window, tilting her head up to look.
“On the nights I was waiting for you to come, I watched the moon.”