Only when Song Lan’s figure had been entirely swallowed by the mist rising off the river did Ye Tingyan lower his bow and arrow, as if a taut string had finally gone slack.

He had been holding himself so rigidly for so long that now, in the sudden release, he had no desire to keep up any pretense — he simply slid down along the ship’s wall to sit on the deck. Luowei sank down beside him, and leaned against him with languid ease. “I thought you had such confidence in yourself. How is it that you have no strength left now? Surely that look of having struck your mark at a single blow was not just a performance for his benefit?”

Ye Tingyan did not argue. “Shameful, shameful.”

Luowei turned her head to look at him, and said softly, “All these years — the truth is, you have not changed at all.”

Ye Tingyan did not quite follow her meaning. “Hm?”

Luowei said, her thoughts drifting elsewhere, “I was looking at you just now, and I suddenly thought of the past. Of Xuzhou, of Jingchu — how you stormed into their camp alone and killed the leader of the ghost cult, how you risked making enemies of noble families and wealthy merchants to open the granaries for the disaster victims… Watching you then, I always felt that nothing in the world could ever stop you.”

Ye Tingyan gave a rueful smile. “You thought too well of me.”

Luowei replied, “Yes. And so after the third year of the Tiansi reign… I kept asking myself, over and over — a man like that, why would he suddenly die? He had not yet had the time to fulfill the promises we once made to each other, or to build something that would endure through the ages. He didn’t even die on a battlefield, or on the road of sacrificing himself for something he believed in. A man like that — why would he die at the hands of petty and contemptible people?”

Ye Tingyan saw that her eyes were already turning red, and could not help reaching out to cup her face in his hand. He said gently, “But I did not die, did I?”

Luowei nodded emphatically. “Later, when I came to know you again from the beginning, I finally realized… you are an ordinary person after all. You lose your temper. You feel suspicious and uneasy. You second-guess yourself, you waver — you can even lose your footing entirely. Before, I only ever saw the image of you drawing your bow to drive back the enemy. But now I have found out — you are capable of fear too.”

Ye Tingyan asked, “Are you disappointed?”

Luowei held him and shook her head. “I am glad. You don’t need to… always be the hero.”

He knelt before her, and they held each other tightly. He was just about to speak when he suddenly caught a glimpse of a trace of blood on the hem of her skirt.

Whose blood was that?

Ye Tingyan suddenly recalled a phrase that had slipped from Chang Zhao’s lips.

“Fortunately I thought highly enough of you to have him killed in advance.”

In his earlier anxiety, he had entirely missed the key — this retreat, as they had planned it, should have unfolded at the ferry crossing. She had followed his arrangements and rescued Su Shiyu. But how had she managed to bring this person along and bluff her way through inspection, making it all the way out to the outskirts of the capital?

If Song Lan had intercepted the vessel at the crossing, where the waterway between the crossing and the main river was narrow, and they had encountered an ambush there — their escape would not have gone nearly so smoothly.

He understood now what had been wrong about Luowei. From the moment she first spoke, a strange feeling had been nagging at him, impossible to shake.

Now he saw it clearly. This embrace, these words — they were not her way of comforting him. They were her reaching out for something to hold onto.

Luowei held him tightly, and after a long while said in a low, hoarse voice, “When he first came to the Su household, he was already a man of few words. Even when he later passed the imperial examination with brilliant distinction, he refused to take the prominent official post that would have set him apart. That was simply the kind of person he was — he never wanted anyone to feel that he had done them a favor. He would rather be misunderstood than say one word more.”

“All these years, so many people at court and in the wider world have speculated that we were not close. From the very first time I asked him for his help, he should have refused me. I would not have blamed him. Song Lan may have been suspicious, but he would not have taken his life — keeping himself out of harm’s way would have been the clever choice.”

Ye Tingyan said, “But you were his family.”

“Yes. Family.” Luowei said, dazed. “And so he steeled his resolve and, at the cost of his own life, stayed by Chang Zhao’s side, trying to find a crack in his armor. He had already… done so well. He was just a little short of succeeding. If it were not for the fact that Chang Zhao’s face had already been destroyed long ago, the one who would be dead now would be him.”

Her voice suddenly tightened. “Do you know — the very last thing he told me before he died…”

“At the Mochun Tournament that year, after he had arranged everything, he could not restrain himself, and went to see Suiyun one last time. He told me it was hurried — he only wanted to give her the fragrant sachet he had never managed to give her before. But by some terrible coincidence, Yu Qiushi happened to go looking for Suiyun at that very moment, and found she was not in the painted hall. He questioned the guards, and had a plain carriage sent to bring her back. The two of them passed through the streets, and happened to cross paths with A’Fei.”

“Suiyun only put all of this together after A’Fei’s faked death. Combined with the annihilation of the entire Yu clan, she had long since resolved to die. My elder brother had already guessed her intentions when he was exchanging letters with her under Chang Zhao’s very nose. From the very beginning, neither of them had planned to come away whole. The cup of poisoned wine at the execution ground — he smelled what it was. And he drank it anyway.”

Ye Tingyan held her against him, and felt a spreading dampness on his shoulder and neck.

“He held onto his last breath, and it was to tell me this.” Luowei wept in his arms. “He told me it was they who had let me down, who had let A’Fei down. He told me not to feel guilty… That if the day comes when the court is cleansed and the world restored to peace and clarity, wherever they may be — in heaven or still in this world — they will be content.”

They sat on the deck for a long while, until a full moon climbed to the center of the sky.

Luowei had cried herself tired, and drifted in and out of a hazy, half-waking doze in his arms. In the night wind, the two of them talked for a long time.

Ye Tingyan told her of his wanderings — after recovering from his injuries in Youzhou, he had first gone down to Jiangnan, where he set about putting the Jiangnan officialdom in order, and then continued south from Jiangnan. Along the way he had encountered flash floods and earthquakes, and witnessed one eclipse of the moon…

He spoke of the common people’s dependence on the heavens — praying for rain in spring, praying for snow in deep winter, their lives miserable beyond description whenever drought or disaster struck, sometimes driven to trading their own children for food. In those remote and forgotten places, corrupt officials ran rampant. People would walk a thousand li to the capital to lodge a complaint, and could not even get past the city gates.

He had visited feudal lords and noble families across the land, offered ideas to officials for building dikes, and led farmers whose land had been forcibly seized to beat the drum at the Yingtian government office to appeal their cases. Over three years, he had thrown himself deep into that land and its people. Before preparing to return to the capital, he had finally gone back to Youzhou, where he went to pay his respects to the old General of the Yan family. When the old General learned he had not died, he wept so hard his tears and nose ran together, and demanded to know why he had not come sooner.

At the time, he had had no answer to give. Suspicion and fear had always been the demons in his heart.

Luowei in turn told him seriously of all that she had arranged over these years — of walking the fields herself to plow alongside the people at the spring sacrifice, of personally pouring wine for the soldiers from a high platform when she saw the Yan family off from the capital, of holding in check the open and covert struggle between Song Lan and Yu Qiushi. Things he had lived through directly, she seemed to have read about in official memorials — and on several of them had personally written comments and replies.

When they had finished speaking of the recent years, they spoke of their youth. Luowei thought of the day the Ye family’s funeral procession entered the capital with its three young masters, and found she had no clear memory of the third. She did remember, however, that Song Yaofeng had flushed red and offered the eldest — that young, valiant general — a branch of roses.

Ye Tingyan recalled how she had attended a night banquet together with his parents. Song Qi had stolen the ceremonial crown from the Crown Prince’s investiture, and Song Yaofeng had chased him and beaten him soundly for it. His eldest brother had sent a memorial from the frontier to congratulate the Crown Prince on his investiture, and with the letter had enclosed the fresh flower cakes that had been his favorite since childhood.

Growing old and meeting spring again feels like being drunk on wine — and now, old friends have been scattered, half drifting away, half withered and gone.

Luowei saw his grief and lifted her gaze to the moon in the sky.

On so many nights before this one, when she had looked up at the moon, she had never imagined there would come a moment when she and he would share it across the same sky.

Beneath that same moon, Song Lan gripped his blood-stained sword and slumped in defeat in Qianfang Hall, lifting his eyes to the idol he had placed on the hall’s eaves.

The idol towered above him, eyes cast downward, looking at him and the bodies of the inner attendants at his feet — its expression impossible to read as either compassion or mockery.

Empress Dowager Chenghui stood behind him. She watched the inner attendant who had served her for many years killed, and showed no reaction at all on her face — only recited a line of Buddhist prayer. She no longer showed any trace of the madness she had displayed before, and even wore a strange smile. “Zi Lan — let me tell you one more secret.”

Beyond the gates of Qianfang Hall lay the deep night of the forbidden palace. Chang Zhao made his way along the red walls, passing through the dark and silent back passages to leave the palace. Since the Empress had been placed under house arrest, the palace gates had become more permissive in accordance with the Emperor’s will — no longer as strictly guarded as before. The palace gate was still standing open at this hour. The Censorate, given the bloody examples set before them, dared not venture a single word of objection any longer.

He lifted the curtain of the carriage and looked outside. Moonlight fell on his face in shifting patterns of light and shadow. The attendant at his side leaned in and said quietly, “The people sent from the palace to pursue them southward — do we really call them back?”

Chang Zhao gave a cold smile. “They can’t be caught anyway. Let them put on a show of trying. Better to leave him with that headache — the more it exhausts and fools him, the better.”

The attendant hesitated a moment, then still spoke up. “That one borrowed the identity of the Third Young Master, and was able to plot together with the Empress. One would think the former master must have been…”

Chang Zhao was silent for a moment. “He is dead. What waves can the two of them stir up? Besides — what difference is there between them and Song Lan? These imperial people with their hollow shows of feeling — they are all the same in the end.”

The carriage passed through a quiet intersection. Deep in the lane, in many of the households, one lamp still burned without being extinguished.

Xu Dan sat beneath that lamp, his mind in tumult, writing a long memorial. As he wrote, he suddenly became greatly agitated, and with a trembling hand wrote half a line from the poet Qu Yuan — “The whole world is mired in corruption” — but before he finished it, he felt it was unwise and could only crumple it and throw it into the corner.

The corner had accumulated more than a dozen of his memorials. Some had never been sent out; some had been returned to him.

Into his ears drifted suddenly the voice of a woman — clear and bright, asking him: “Lord Xu, where is the library you keep in your heart?”

The latticed window had not been closed, and the voice floated out through the latticework and drifted away.

That voice traveled downstream, all the way to the city of Jinling at the lower reaches of the great river.

Zhou Chuyin was in the middle of reprimanding Zhou Xuechu when she suddenly heard Bai Sensen give an excited exclamation of “So that’s it!” He didn’t bother putting on his shoes, just ran out of his inner room piled high with medical texts and shouted, “I know what poison she was given!”

Zhou Chuyin gave a start. Before she could speak, Zhou Xuechu cooperated with great enthusiasm and yelled back, “What poison!”

Bai Sensen did not answer. He only said with gleaming excitement, “A poison of unrivaled rarity in all the world — no wonder Song Lan felt so unassailable. My master once told me that the poison called ‘Withered Orchid’ was refined by his own teacher’s elder martial brother. Only three doses exist in the world — one was lost, one is hidden deep in the palace, and one was taken by Ling Ye…”

“So the poison she was given is also ‘Withered Orchid’?”

“No, not at all…”

“Then why are you so pleased?”

Bai Sensen said, “To neutralize the poison she has been given, the blood of someone who has taken ‘Withered Orchid’ is needed as a catalyst.”

He turned and dashed back excitedly into the inner room. In passing, he knocked a volume of ancient medical texts off the shelf. The old book’s cover crinkled as it fell, and then a pair of slender hands reached down and picked it back up.

The moon was still the same moon. Beneath it, the towering walls of Youzhou rose high.

Yan Lang was polishing the long spear in his hands. He glanced at those hands. “Your Highness has developed quite a few new calluses.”

Song Yaofeng lowered her head to inspect them herself. “Yes. Archery is so difficult. The soldiers here on the frontier train every single day — they work far harder.”

She rose and walked toward the window, thinking as she went. “When I was young, I watched the archery of another young general from Youzhou… He had just arrived in the capital, and a group of noble family’s young men egged him on. He drew his bow without effort, and shot clean through an iron target. I admired him tremendously, and dragged Luowei along to practice martial arts with me. But I didn’t keep it up — she, though, learned it well.”

Yan Lang was listening with great interest when a young soldier suddenly lifted the tent flap and rushed in, weeping. “Young Master — the General is not well today. He is asking for you.”

Old General Yan had been ill for many days. A pall of gloom hung over the entire army. Fortunately the news had not leaked out, and the northern frontier had remained quiet.

Yan Lang dropped his spear and ran to the main tent. Before he even stepped inside, he heard a sound of heartbroken weeping from within. His legs gave way, and he sank to his knees before the tent entrance.

The moonlight was cold and dim, falling on the iron armor he had not yet removed.

“Young Master — this is what the General left for you.”

Yan Lang raised his head and accepted the heavy military seal, and with it a worn and faded brocade pouch.

Behind him came soft footsteps. Song Yaofeng draped a black cloak around his shoulders, and in silence lowered herself to her knees and bowed her head to the ground.

The black cloak snapped in the border wind.

On the river, the wind was equally strong. When Qiu Xueyu came out carrying an identical black cloak, Luowei had just been blinking away the wind in her eyes. Only when the cloak was wrapped around her did she come back to herself.

She reached up and wiped from Ye Tingyan’s cheek a tear — she could not tell if it was his or her own — and said with a smile, “Seeing A’Fei has made me think of something else from our younger days.”

Many years before, on the night of the seventeenth day of the eighth month on Dongshan, Luowei and Song Yaofeng met Qiu Xueyu riding by at full gallop in front of the house, and the three of them felt an instant kinship.

The Mid-Autumn Festival had just passed, but the moon was still perfectly round and bright. Zhou Xuechu was in the capital that day, and Luowei had brought her along to the gathering. Zhang Buyun from the Lingjin Embroidery House happened to have come along with her to take measurements for the Marchioness of Yue’s gown.

After a few cups of wine, Luowei was suddenly inspired. She dragged a small sandalwood side table out into the garden, declaring she wanted to pray to the moon together with the others to seek good fortune.

Song Yaofeng was immediately in accord. Zhang Buyun, being shy by nature, raised no objection. Qiu Xueyu and Zhou Xuechu, though they rolled their eyes a little at the idea — saying that the Mid-Autumn Festival had already passed and moon-prayers were useless — ultimately could not hold out against everyone’s pleading.

The young women arranged a few platters of snacks on the table, filled their wine cups to the brim, and knelt side by side beneath the moon.

Luowei lit incense with great solemnity, cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and began to recite: “May the Moon Goddess grant her blessing — may we rise early to the moon palace and scale the immortal laurel…”

Song Yaofeng frowned. “Is that not a little off? Those are prayers for men, aren’t they?”

Qiu Xueyu countered, “It sounds perfectly fine to me. Women ought to have such aspirations too.”

Luowei opened one eye, just about to speak, when she caught a glimpse of another girl’s silhouette behind a tree not far away. She crept quietly closer — and found that it was Yu Suiyun.

Yu Qiushi and Xue Wenming had been on good terms, and he had never quite gotten along with Lu Hang, Qiu Fang, and Song Ling. So Yu Suiyun had spotted the group from a distance but had not dared to come forward.

But Luowei was not one to stand on such ceremony. She called out warmly, “Little Sister Suiyun — since fate has brought you here, why don’t you join us and pray to the moon?”

Before Yu Suiyun could even come to her senses, she had already been pulled and ushered to kneel among them. Delighted in her heart, she settled herself neatly into position, pressed her hands together, and followed the others in earnest prayer.

“May the Moon Goddess grant her blessing — may we be as beautiful as Chang’e, as full and bright as the moon; may we rise to the moon palace and scale the immortal laurel!”