“I didn’t make a cursed doll…I embroidered it after your likeness…” Shen Zhuxi said.

“And you don’t call that a cursed doll?” Li Wu held the sachet up against the light and scrutinized the little embroidered figure from every angle, his brow drawing tighter and tighter. “You say you embroidered it after my likeness? My legs are this short? My head is this big? My eyes look like sesame seeds? And my arms are two different lengths?!”

Every word Li Wu said was the truth, and even Shen Zhuxi, the original creator, would have flushed looking at her own handiwork a second time.

“I…I never really learned embroidery properly…” Shen Zhuxi said in a small voice, her fingers twisting the fabric of her clothes. “Anyway, I embroidered it. You don’t have to throw it away.”

But Li Wu did not throw it away.

“I spent two days being eaten alive by mosquitoes in the mountains for this thing.” He tucked the sachet into his front, still muttering and grumbling. “Even if you’d embroidered a dung beetle on it, I wouldn’t throw it away.”

Seeing him accept the sachet, Shen Zhuxi let out a quiet breath of relief. Even though the embroidery had turned out poorly, it was still her very first piece of needlework. If Li Wu had truly despised it enough to discard it, she would not have said anything — but she would have felt hurt all the same.

She returned to the inner chamber and settled back on the short daybed that had been temporarily overtaken by needles, thread, and cloth, functioning now as an embroidery table. She picked up her supplies.

Li Wu lifted the bamboo curtain and followed her in.

“With that beginner’s skill of yours, what are you still embroidering?”

“I’m not embroidering — I’m drawing embroidery patterns —” Shen Zhuxi said, putting her needle and thread away into a small wooden box and setting the prepared cloth to one side.

Once the surface of the daybed table had been cleared, she took out a sheet of paper no larger than her palm, picked up a brush, and set it lightly to the page.

With just a few strokes, the full outline of a cluster of grapes hanging from a branch had already begun to take shape.

Li Wu stood watching, and the more he watched, the darker his expression grew. He pulled the sachet from his front, held it up beside the drawing in comparison, looked back and forth between them, and said with ill temper, “You can draw like this, but you can’t embroider it? Shen Zhuxi, did you do that on purpose?”

He could be as annoyed as he liked. What of it.

Shen Zhuxi focused entirely on the drawing in front of her. The grape pattern was meant for Zhou Sao — the symbolism of abundance and many children was something she would surely appreciate. When the grape design was finished, she took a second sheet of paper and drew a gracefully curved crimson hibiscus. That pattern, naturally, was intended for Jiu Niang.

“Shen Zhuxi — can you hear me talking to you?”

Drawing embroidery patterns was far easier than doing the actual needlework, and Shen Zhuxi had finished each one in just a few strokes — yet the sachet for Li Wu had taken her a very long time.

A long time, and the result was still something no one should have to look at.

That it could be given to Li Wu at all was a small mercy. Otherwise she would not have known what to do with something she had painstakingly made with her own hands, yet could neither bear to display nor bring herself to throw away.

“Shen Zhuxi, you —” Li Wu stopped mid-sentence. He suddenly reached out and caught her wrist. “What happened to your fingers?”

Shen Zhuxi glanced at the small pinprick marks dotting her fingers. “I accidentally pricked myself while embroidering the sachet.”

“Did you put anything on them?” Li Wu’s brow furrowed.

“No need for medicine. They’ll be gone in a day or two.” Shen Zhuxi smiled, finding him a little dramatic. “When I was first learning embroidery, my hands always looked like this. It’s lucky that the — ” she stumbled, “— the Prince Consort spoke on my behalf and I didn’t have to keep learning.”

“What is the Prince Consort to you? Why would he speak on your behalf?”

“The Prince Consort is the future husband of the Princess of Yue. I simply benefited from being close to the Princess of Yue.”

Li Wu raised an eyebrow, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. He let go of Shen Zhuxi’s wrist, turned and left the inner chamber, then returned after a moment carrying a small earthenware jar no bigger than his palm.

He sat down across from her on the daybed table, dipped a finger into the jar, and drew out a small scoop of something greenish, which he applied carefully to the needle-pricked spots on Shen Zhuxi’s fingers.

“What is this?” Shen Zhuxi asked, curious.

She brought the treated fingertip to her nose and sniffed. A cool, clean scent of grass reached her.

“An ointment ground from herbs. It works well enough for small surface wounds.” Li Wu closed the jar and let his gaze fall on the embroidery patterns spread across the daybed table. “Who are you planning to ask to embroider these for you?”

“I’ll ask Zhou Sao first.”

“Do you see any embroidery on the clothes she wears?” Li Wu asked.

Shen Zhuxi tried to picture it. No, she did not.

Li Wu continued, “She knows how to sew clothes, but not how to embroider patterns. And even if she did — Zhou Sao’s embroidery wouldn’t be what you’re looking for.”

He picked up the grape pattern and studied it. “Besides, Zhou Sao is busy working in the fields, feeding the pigs, gathering firewood from the mountain, and drawing water from the river whenever she has any time to spare. When would she have the leisure to embroider something this intricate for you?”

All of Shen Zhuxi’s carefully considered patterns suddenly had nowhere to go. She could not hide her disappointment.

“Then I suppose I’ll just have to buy ready-made sachets and put the thoroughwort inside…”

“Says who?” Li Wu held out a hand. “Pass me the embroidery hoop.”

“You know what an embroidery hoop is?!” Shen Zhuxi’s eyes went wide.

“Hurry up,” Li Wu said, raising an eyebrow.

Not knowing what he intended, Shen Zhuxi quickly handed over the embroidery hoop beside her.

An embroidery hoop was used to hold cloth taut while stitching — an essential tool for embroidery. Essential to embroiderers, yes, but for any man with no knowledge of needlework, it ought to have been a term entirely outside his ordinary understanding. So how did Li Wu say it so naturally?

Li Wu took the hoop and held out his hand again. “Cloth.”

Shen Zhuxi passed him a pre-cut piece of embroidery fabric. “What are you going to do?”

Li Wu answered with action. He mounted the cloth onto the hoop with practiced ease, his movements smooth and fluid — so fluid, so knowing, that it put Shen Zhuxi, who had two years of embroidery training behind her, entirely to shame.

“You — you can embroider?!” Shen Zhuxi stammered, feeling as though the world had shifted beneath her feet.

“What of it?” Li Wu said.

Common wisdom held that a gentleman kept his distance from the kitchen — yet Li Wu was a fine cook.

Needlework was needlework — and the very name made plain what it was considered to be. Just as sitting the imperial examinations was something only men could do, needlework in the eyes of the world was something only women did.

Yet Li Wu — not only a fine cook — could embroider as well.

Shen Zhuxi refused to believe he could produce anything of real quality. At best, she told herself, it would be the same clumsy stab-and-hope method she used. But Li Wu picked up the embroidery needle, and the ease of his movements made short work of her self-comfort.

Those large hands, the ones that could frighten Shen Zhuxi into silence just by threatening to strike — they took to delicate needlework without a trace of difficulty. She watched as Li Wu’s long, lean fingers held the needle head steady with perfect control, the thread seeming to move of its own accord, darting in and out of the cloth with a nimbleness entirely unlike her own attempts.

Shen Zhuxi stared in a daze.

There were men in this world who could embroider.

Half an hour later, the rough shape of a cluster of grapes had appeared on the cloth. It could not rival the work of the palace embroiderers, but it was already several times finer than anything being hawked by street peddlers — and far beyond anything Shen Zhuxi could produce.

“How are you able to embroider?” Shen Zhuxi finally asked, unable to hold back the question.

“An orphan with nowhere to go learns as many skills as he can to stay alive,” Li Wu said.

“But you’re a man…”

“When you’re starving and desperate, you’d even kill a man. What’s the matter with picking up an embroidery needle?” Li Wu said, without looking up, with a lightness that made it sound like he was describing something that had happened to a stranger. “I remember, when I was small, a great snowfall came. No food. No padded clothes. Cold and starving, I thought I might simply fall asleep and never wake up. Back then, if someone had given me a bowl of hot porridge, I would have licked the mud off their shoes.”

He said it lightly, indifferently, as though speaking of something utterly removed from himself. But listening to it, Shen Zhuxi felt an inexplicable ache rise in her chest.

Looking at Li Wu — tall and solid before her now — the image that surfaced in her mind was of a small child in tattered clothes huddled in the snow.

“Sometimes, I think you don’t seem like a palace maid,” Li Wu said suddenly.

“Why?” The subject had shifted to her, and Shen Zhuxi’s heart gave a quick jump. She worked to keep her expression composed.

“You have a backbone — and most ordinary people don’t.” Li Wu looked up, his gaze sharp and direct, cutting straight through to Shen Zhuxi’s eyes.

She looked away as though she had been burned, with a flicker of something like alarm.

“Well — not bad, my embroidery work?” Li Wu said then.

Shen Zhuxi looked at the hoop. The grapes on the cloth were already more than halfway finished. Not quite the level of the master embroiderers at the gold-and-silver establishment in town, but easily several times finer than anything sold by a street vendor.

“You embroider beautifully!” Shen Zhuxi’s eyes shone with delight as she gazed at the cloth in his hands. “In a past life you must have been an embroiderer!”

“Don’t be absurd. I would never be an embroiderer.” Li Wu said. “I’ll help you embroider these, but I don’t do unprofitable business.”

“Name your price then. What do you want this time?” Shen Zhuxi looked at him expectantly.

Even if he asked for another sachet, she would start on it without a word. Though — given that he himself could embroider this well, why had he wanted her clumsily made sachet in the first place?

The sudden puzzle did not linger in her mind for long, because Li Wu was suddenly leaning close.

He looked directly into her eyes, as though trying to see past her startled gaze and straight into her heart.

“I only need you to answer one question honestly.”

“What…what question?”

“You have to swear on your parents’ names that you won’t lie to me.”

“I don’t even know the question yet — how can I swear on my parents’ names?!” Shen Zhuxi cried.

“That is my only condition.” Li Wu tossed down the embroidery hoop, unbudging. “If you won’t agree, then embroider it yourself.”

“You —”

Shen Zhuxi stared at the half-finished grape embroidery, anxious and angry both, eyes slowly reddening.

Li Wu saw how things were going and coughed, a little awkward, then picked up the hoop again from the daybed table. “All right. You can hear the question first, then decide whether to swear before answering. Is that acceptable?”

That was at least a reasonable thing to say.

Shen Zhuxi nodded, wondering what he could possibly need to ask that required swearing by parents’ names.

“I’m asking —” Li Wu pressed a hand to the daybed table and leaned toward her. His expression was unusually grave and serious. His manner infected Shen Zhuxi, and she found herself swallowing, tension creeping in unbidden. “What are you asking?”

“I’m asking you,” Li Wu said slowly, his gaze fixed unblinking on hers: “Are you a woman of the Emperor’s?”

“…What?”

Shen Zhuxi froze.

Li Wu settled back, though his gaze remained on her without wavering.

“I’ve asked my question. Will you answer it?”

“Of course I’m not —” Shen Zhuxi began.

“Swear it,” Li Wu interrupted.

Shen Zhuxi swallowed. She really did not want to answer such a foolish question.

A woman of the Emperor’s — surely that included the princess as well?

If she were still her rightful self, the Princess of Yue in all her dignity, Li Wu would have forfeited his head a hundred times over for saying that much.

But she truly could not bear to give up Li Wu’s embroidery. The grapes he had stitched were so exquisite — a hibiscus, surely, would be no less beautiful. And the weather was growing warmer; her sachets needed changing. She had her eye on a pomegranate-pattern sachet…

“I swear on my parents’ names…” Shen Zhuxi weighed each word carefully as she spoke: “I am of Cuiwei Palace, living side by side with the Princess of Yue day and night, and I am absolutely not a consort of the inner court…”

She did, in truth, reside in Cuiwei Palace — in the main hall of Cuiwei Palace.

She had also, genuinely, lived side by side with the Princess of Yue day and night — for she saw her own reflection in every mirror and every pool of water.

And she was not a consort of the inner court.

Not a single word was a lie. So she met Li Wu’s stare with a clear conscience and a steady heart. He looked straight at her, and she held his gaze without flinching.

After a moment, Li Wu’s expression eased.

“It’s your good fortune the Emperor never took notice of you. With that meager bit of cleverness you have, if you’d really become a woman of his, you wouldn’t even know how you’d ended up dead.”

“…I’m not as foolish as all that,” Shen Zhuxi muttered.

“It’s not a matter of foolishness. You’re simply not suited to a place where every day is a contest of scheming.” Li Wu bent his head and returned to the embroidery.

“Then where do you think I am suited?” Shen Zhuxi asked, curious.

Li Wu did not look up. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said:

“Wherever I am.”