Lingbo slept for a stretch and woke feeling considerably better.

She could afford to vanish for a day occasionally — the household would not fall into chaos without her. A’Cuo and Yanyan had Lin Niangzi looking after them and bringing them home, and Qinglan had arranged the midnight supper and morning meal, even setting aside osmanthus tangyuan for Lingbo to taste in the morning.

But she would only allow herself one such day.

When she woke, she was still the invincible Ye Lingbo. The small weakness of the previous night seemed nothing more than a fleeting delusion. She was not ill — she never fell ill. Fragile, ailing beauties were someone else’s story. She would only ever be the indestructible Ye Lingbo, immovable as bedrock, impossible to topple or circumvent, yet always ready to be the pillar her family leaned on.

The very first thing she did on the sixteenth day of the first month was to sit down with Han Yueqi and conduct a postmortem of the previous evening’s failure — how had Cui Jingyu managed to slip through their fingers when Qinglan had looked as radiant as Guanyin herself?

Han Yueqi shared her regret.

“The fault was mine.” She poured out the tea and pastries for Lingbo with one hand while wringing the other in vexation. “Qinglan was truly beautiful last night. I heard that several families were moved, and some even sent people to inquire why she remains unmarried.”

“Why ask us? Go ask Cui Jingyu. Better yet, let him grow anxious for a while.” Lingbo sipped her tea. “By the way, why did you leave so early last night? Qinglan mentioned that Biwei gave her brother a scolding.”

Han Yueqi only lowered her eyes, her expression unreadable, betraying neither pleasure nor displeasure.

“He was being unreasonable. It is perfectly common for the young mistress to return late on Lantern Festival evenings, and yet he presumed to lecture me — I am his wife. Biwei mocked him with a few words, and he flew into a temper. There is no point in indulging him.” Her tone was cool and matter-of-fact. “It will be over the day after tomorrow.”

“Is it not today? The Lantern Festival has passed — has the Hanlin Academy not resumed its duties?”

“Have you not heard? The day after tomorrow, the Chen family is hosting a rapeseed flower banquet at their Flowing Water Villa. Lord Chen recently acquitted himself well in a certain assignment, and the Emperor will pay a visit, though it has nothing to do with us and requires no formal dress. Nevertheless, the Chen family is counting on this occasion to wash away their previous humiliation. Our household is also invited, so he will not return to the Hanlin Academy until after the day after tomorrow.” Han Yueqi seemed mildly surprised. “You are usually so well-informed. How did you miss this?”

Lingbo could hardly confess that she had been too besotted to pay attention these past few days, so she laughed it off with a breezy wave. Inwardly, however, her resolve hardened further — no matter what, she could not afford to spare Pei Zhao another thought for now. There was real business to attend to.

Fortunately, she was soon left with no leisure to think of Pei Zhao at all.

On the sixteenth day of the first month, a great upheaval erupted in the capital.

The Chen family’s hidden transgressions came to light.

Though “came to light” was perhaps not quite the right phrase — it was more accurate to say that the scheme had borne its fruit. When the news broke, the Ye sisters and Han Yueqi were not surprised, and neither were most of the capital’s ladies. The only ones who were truly astonished were Lady Wei and the circle of women she had brought up from Yanglin City.

Ever since the Northern Pacification Army had returned to the capital, various factions had been jostling for position. Any discerning eye could see that the Emperor intended to reclaim the army’s military authority — not only had tens of thousands of soldiers been demobilized and sent back to their home villages, with only the elite battalions retained and folded into the capital’s garrison, but this arrangement was less about settling the soldiers than settling the commanders. Wei Yushan had been given an empty sinecure in the garrison.

Not that the Emperor was resorting to the old trick of discarding the bow once the birds were gone. The victory was fresh, and Marshal Wei had always conducted himself with humility and restraint, never acting with arrogance, never promoting his own kinsmen — not even his own son Wei Yushan received any particular cultivation from him. After the enfeoffment, Lady Wei purchased an estate and farmland in the capital’s outskirts, and when an official in the Ministry of War memorialized on Wei Yushan’s behalf and recommended Marshal Wei for the position of Grand Marshal — which had something of the character of deliberate flattery meant to trip him up — the Marshal saw through it, submitted a memorial declining the appointment, and the Emperor promptly responded by bestowing the title of Marquis upon them both, master and disciple alike, in an unmistakable gesture of reassurance.

But the Northern Pacification Army would be dismantled regardless.

The men worked in the court; the women worked behind the scenes. Lord Shen, as a trusted confidant of the Emperor, kept a strict and deliberate distance from the Wei family, engaging in no association with them. Prince Pingjun cultivated a close friendship with Marquis Jing of the Fire Battalion, actively drawing him in to check the Wei family’s influence. The newly ascendant Lord Chen had apparently fallen behind in this game and found himself gravitating toward the Wei family instead.

Lu Wenyin, as the young mistress of the Chen household and the primary envoy in the ladies’ social circuit, had aligned herself with Lady Wei from the very beginning, which appeared to confirm that Lord Chen intended to serve as an intermediary between the Emperor and the Wei family. This arrangement had grown strained — owing to Ye Lingbo’s dealings with Chen Mengliu, and the incident at the Spring Reception — Lady Wei had tended to side against her own camp rather than with it, and her relationship with Lu Wenyin had grown considerably tense. But no one had foreseen this next step.

The news first surfaced through the Wu family. The Wu family was a mid-to-lower-ranking noble house, not even placed within the top hundred at the Flower Reception, and naturally had no access to any fresh intelligence. But on this occasion, chance had granted them a vantage point — Lady Wei’s newly purchased residence stood right next door.

It began with the Wu household’s bondwomen and maids trading gossip. In the capital, bondwomen circulated with particular frequency — even those born into service within a household regularly crossed paths with women from other houses, whether over cards, wine, or idle talk, and information flowed freely among them. So by midday, when the news broke, Lingbo already knew.

It was Lady Wu herself who set it spreading further — unable to contain herself, she climbed into her palanquin that very afternoon and went to her maternal family, where she shared the story in full with her sisters-in-law and the ladies she was close to. The news spread at once.

The Flower Reception season was precisely the most leisurely period of the year for the capital’s ladies. Before the New Year there was still a degree of busyness, what with preparations for the holiday, but once the Lantern Festival ended, they were poised and ready to plunge into the social season — only for this thunderous piece of news to break at just that moment. Of course it spread. Within a single day, it had traveled through the entire capital; there was not a soul in the city who had not heard.

According to Lady Wu — who claimed to have witnessed it with her own eyes — Lu Wenyin had been driven out of the Wei household, and that was only the beginning. Wei Shanhu had then gathered several women from Yanglin City and gone to demand an accounting from her. The Yanglin City women, though furious, confined themselves to weeping and cursing. But Luo Niangzi Wei Shanhu, the most fierce-tempered among them, actually seized Lu Wenyin bodily and nearly dragged her from her carriage. Though Lu Wanyang stopped her with sharp words, and Lady Wei herself came out to restrain her, Wei Shanhu still refused to be appeased — and as the Lu family’s carriage pulled away, she let fly an arrow that struck the rear shaft of the vehicle square-on, sending the Lu family’s maids shrieking in terror.

The version from the bondwomen was even more explicit, spelling out the cause of the two households’ rupture — and it was exactly as Lingbo had once predicted. It turned out that Lord Chen Yaoqing and Lu Wenyin had truly developed a taste for pimping and procuring. Lord Chen had never been a man of upright character to begin with. His rise through the ranks had even owed something to favorable words spoken on his behalf by a consort in the palace. Chen Yaoqing was now registered under the knee of the Empress’s nephew, which made him, in effect, a great-nephew by adoption of the Empress’s maternal family. During Lord Chen’s three years investigating the salt trade in Jiangnan, he had not been idle — he had gathered no small number of Jiangnan beauties to present to the palace.

Chen Yaoqing naturally followed his father’s example. He kept a compound full of singing girls and dancers, held lavish banquets, and thought nothing of passing these women along to guests when the wine flowed freely. The favored ones were taken as concubines. These girls had all been purchased from Yangzhou and similar places, long since severed from parents and families, and so they claimed the Chen household as their own people, willingly serving as Lu Wenyin’s agents, wreaking havoc in the inner quarters of many capital officials.

No one had imagined that she would dare employ this tactic against the commanders of the Northern Pacification Army.

And to do it right in front of those Yanglin City women, no less. On the surface it was simply a banquet invitation extended to the Yanglin City ladies, who were asked to bring their husbands — the women would have a women’s feast, the men a men’s feast, and Lu Wenyin presided graciously over the inner quarters with the women. Who could have suspected that her husband Chen Yaoqing was outside, busy presenting beauties to these very women’s husbands? The capital’s officials, seasoned as they were in such pleasures, had fallen for it — how much more so these commanders, whose natures were straightforward and unguarded?

Reportedly, Chen Yaoqing did not offer the women directly. He claimed to be inviting the commanders to instruct his dancing girls in horsemanship and archery, to rehearse a sword dance that was to be performed before the Emperor. The commanders, never ones to refuse the role of teacher, immediately adopted the pose of Master Sun drilling his female soldiers — and apparently each instructor was paired with a single student for one-on-one instruction.

Teaching swordsmanship and horsemanship naturally involved physical contact. Soft warmth pressed close, faces lovely as blossoms — all sixteen or seventeen years old. During rest periods, they spoke of their hometowns and origins, and several turned out to hail from the same region as their instructors. They sang folk tunes in the local dialect, spoke of childhood memories, of the displacement and misery of wartime, of fragile lives and lonely fates, of having no one in the world — until the commanders, moved to compassion, swore sworn-sibling bonds with them. What followed was only natural: a villain appeared, threatening to give the girl away as someone’s concubine, or a dissolute guest at the banquet had taken notice of her and sought to claim her —

It seemed there was only one path out: the sworn elder brother would take in his helpless sworn younger sister. And Lord Chen, generous to a fault, was happy to play the role of matchmaker — even going so far as to arrange a private residence outside, so as not to give the young mistress cause for suspicion. But then the villain pursued her even there, leaving no choice but to marry at once, turning the deed done into an accomplished fact and cutting off the villain’s designs.

In roughly two months, spanning the period before and after the New Year, the Chen family had used this method to dispatch more than a dozen dancing girls. The commanders of the Northern Pacification Army’s Mountain Battalion, including the young commander, numbered barely thirty in total — and nearly half had fallen.

The unraveling came when Luo Yong discovered that one of his subordinate officers had been absent from camp overnight. When he went to investigate, he found the man had a second household, and that the woman there was already with child. Luo Yong was furious and ordered a flogging. The officer, unable to bear the punishment, cried out that he was not the only one — there were others. Luo Yong pursued the matter and uncovered the full scope of it. His relationship with Wei Shanhu was close, and she learned of it immediately, stormed directly into Lady Wei’s main hall, and hauled out Lu Wenyin, who happened to be there taking tea. She then rallied the Yanglin City women and made a scene that shook the household to its foundations.

The capital’s ladies, on hearing all this, responded with a blend of exclamation and lamentation, sympathy and mockery. The exclamation was for Lu Wenyin — who, it seemed, could not keep her fox tail hidden after all. The lamentation was for the Yanglin City women, who had followed the commanders of the Northern Pacification Army through every ordeal — through knives and fire — managing the rear, coordinating provisions, sewing battle robes and quilted jackets through the night, trudging through the snow alongside the baggage carts, many of them falling ill, some losing their children. The story of a city evacuated in the dead of night, women and the elderly and children climbing the mountain in the darkness while wolf packs closed in behind — who could hear that without a chill?

So the ladies could not help but sympathize. But neither could they help but mock. They felt Lady Wei had shown poor judgment, inviting the wolf into her house. And the Yanglin City women had been too naive, trusting that the bonds forged between husband and wife in the ice and snow would last a lifetime, never suspecting that there is nothing in this world less reliable than the human heart. A man who keeps faith with a wife married in poverty is already a sage — men’s roving eyes and hunger for novelty are the way of the world, and desire for beauty is simply human nature. The Yanglin City women had been impulsive in their response — which showed how little they understood the art of being a great household’s mistress.

What of Han Yueqi, who had been one of the Flower Reception’s leading figures four years ago? Shen Yunze still had his smoke-willow companions, and had humiliated Han Yueqi in front of the entire capital’s circle of ladies. Yet Han Yueqi, skilled as she was, had kept a firm grip on her in-laws and on the household’s management — and still the smoke-willow women had entered the gate. This was the path every great household’s mistress must walk. Every woman would tread it eventually.

So the ladies did not particularly condemn the Chen family, and they did not think Lu Wenyin especially wicked. Someone would always be sending these women; if not the Chens, then someone else. That is the pettiness of the human heart: knowing the villain is fierce and the villain is cruel, one fears them all the more — and laughs at the fools who refused to see it coming.

Lingbo had long since seen through all of this. She did not even feel pity — she felt, if anything, a kind of gleeful satisfaction. How had those Yanglin City women sneered at Qinglan at Lady Wei’s banquet? What a swift reckoning. And of all people, it was Lu Wenyin who had driven the knife in — deeply satisfying indeed.

She even sent a calling card to the Wei household — left entirely blank except for the original text of the card she had used when paying her first call there. Lady Wei would understand at once: Had you known how it would end, would you have done things differently? Two months have passed — look now at who has betrayed you. Clearly your judgment was poor — you mistook a viper for a friend, and drove away a phoenix from your door. This is no more than you deserve.

Han Yueqi, on hearing of this, laughed until she had to clap her hands. She opened a table at home at once and invited the Ye sisters. Qinglan naturally knew why, but she could not dissuade them, so she sat and watched Lingbo and Han Yueqi drink.

She and Shen Biwei were both women of considerable reading, and their perspective was accordingly different. Shen Biwei said at the outset: “I do not think this matter is so simple. Without someone powerful backing them, how would the Chen family dare to make a complete break with the Wei family? Once this is done, there is no retreating from it.”

Qinglan agreed: “Whatever the factional angle, what was done here is wrong — wrong in principle, wrong in method. Lord Chen holds the position of Minister of Revenue, head of an entire ministry. To conduct affairs in this fashion — his moves are too crooked.”

Lord Chen served in the Revenue Ministry. The previous Minister of Revenue had only just stepped down the year before, and the Emperor had promoted Lord Chen into the position immediately, demonstrating just how much he relied on him.

But that alone seemed insufficient reason for Lord Chen to make a complete break with the Wei family.

Ye Lingbo returned home after drinking at the Shen household, and Yang Niangzi hurried over and pressed a small rolled-up paper into her hand. Lingbo unrolled it — it bore only a single character: “peace.” She was slightly flushed from the wine and asked, “What does this mean?”

“General Pei wrote it for Liu Ji to pass to you, young mistress,” Yang Niangzi said.

Lingbo flung it away as though her hand had touched a hot coal.

By that point, she had already half-guessed who was behind the Chen family. If that were so, then the Wei family had no choice but to swallow this loss — for in the logic of the capital’s ladies, the commanders of the Northern Pacification Army would take concubines one way or another; what difference did it make who the concubines were? The Northern Pacification Army was always going to be dismantled; what difference did it make who dismantled it? A great camel already half-dead — if not this vulture feeding on it, another vulture would.

But no one had anticipated that the Yanglin City women would have such fierce spirits.

Though perhaps Lingbo’s own early maneuver had given them inspiration.

On the seventeenth day of the first month, the Chen family held their rapeseed flower banquet at their villa in the Zhegunshan hills outside the capital. The capital’s ladies attended in full, and because there were rumors that the Emperor himself would visit the Chen villa to make preparations for the spring hunt, the capital’s young princes and noble sons also flocked to the occasion. Some of the officials, however — those of different factional alignments, or those who thought too highly of themselves to go fawning — chose not to attend.

Her Highness the Grand Princess, designated by the Emperor as the presiding figure of the Flower Reception this year, naturally had to attend a grand banquet such as this one — a banquet hosted by none other than Lord Chen, a highly placed favorite of the Emperor. Whether or not this meant she would encounter the Emperor was another matter entirely.

It was perhaps even the Emperor’s intention. As with Lingbo and Han Yueqi’s continued effort to rekindle the thread between Qinglan and Cui Jingyu: however weighty the past, frequent encounters and proximity — like water wearing away a mountain of stones — will in time, little by little, cause even the most stubborn resistance to give way.

The Emperor still wished to win back this elder sister.

And so the Grand Princess set out at the chen hour in full state, her canopied procession stately and solemn — she was clearly prepared for a possible imperial encounter, intending to use her female officials and palace women as a screen around herself, so that she need not face the Emperor directly.

At a quarter past the chen hour, the Grand Princess’s carriage left her residence.

Wei Shanhu, fifth-rank enfeoffed lady of the Northern Pacification Army, leading more than thirty women — among them no small number of titled ladies — blocked the procession in the open street to lodge a complaint, presenting a joint petition. They accused the Ministry of Rites’s Senior Secretary Chen Yaoqing and his wife Lu Wenyin of fabricating an imperial edict, exploiting the Flower Reception for private ends, and hosting a banquet to lure the commanders of the Northern Pacification Army into consorting with entertainers, thereby corrupting the moral order of the military. They simultaneously accused several Northern Pacification Army commanders of violating military law by secretly taking outside wives, elevating concubines above lawful wives, and bringing disgrace upon the reputation of the army.

The entire capital was thunderstruck.