I didn't scream.
In my line of work you get dragged out of bed at midnight to turn a breech birth; you see more blood and broken bone than you eat rice. Screaming has never once saved anybody.
So I only looked down at the hand locked around my wrist, then lifted my eyes to his.
"Let go. Snap my wrist and who's left to take your pulse?"
Xie Zhan paused for a heartbeat.
Then he let go.
He let go slowly — as if whether he'd gripped me or not had been, all along, entirely his to decide.
He braced a hand and sat up.
The brocade quilt slid away.
Underneath was no wasted body waiting to be laid out, but broad shoulders and a straight back, every movement clean and sure. A man who had, without doubt, done time on the frontier.
The dying corpse the whole capital pitied now sat in front of me, so healthy it was offensive.
"You're not afraid," he said, as though remarking on something curious.
"Afraid of what?" I asked. "That my husband isn't dying after all? That's cause for celebration, surely."
He studied me a long moment, then laughed. Very quietly.
"So they chose right after all."
Those words put a chill in me.
Chose right.
Meaning — I had been chosen.
I gathered up what composure I had left, straightened my spine, and did my best to sit like a proper heir's wife.
"Xie Zhan. Speak plainly. You're not ill — so why marry me? What do you gain from playing a dying man for the whole capital to watch?"
"Who told you I'm not ill?"
He held out his wrist, easy and natural, as if offering it to me.
"Take it again. Read it properly this time."
Doubtful, I laid three fingers back on his wrist.
This time I closed my eyes and poured everything I had down into my fingertips.
Deep, even, strong — still the pulse of a healthy man. But far beneath that steadiness ran something very fine, very cold, threading through the vessels like a strand of ice.
I had read of it once, in an old case-record of my father's.
Not many physicians ever feel that thread.
And of those who do, most feel it too late.
My hand trembled a little.
"You really are poisoned."
"Mm." He drew his wrist back. "The poison's real. The dying isn't."
"This kind doesn't strike once and finish you. It seeps in, gnaws away a little more each day. From the outside all anyone sees is a man growing weaker, physicians at a loss — everyone assumes he won't last the winter."
He paused.
"I let them assume it."
"Why?"
He didn't answer at once. He reached instead for the bowl of medicine on the bedside table — the tonic I'd smelled from the gate — lifted it, and held it out to me.
"Before I explain, smell this."
I took it.
One breath and I was frowning.
Angelica, milkvetch, ginseng, ground rhinoceros horn. All of them warming, all of them fiercely tonic.
But —
"This is wrong," I said, before I could stop myself.
I looked up at him.
"The poison in you is yin — cold in nature. You'd want to draw it up to the surface with a guiding herb and unwind it slowly. Instead someone's pouring a bowl of pure heat and pure tonic into you. That's like stuffing dry kindling into a furnace. The stronger the tonic, the deeper the poison sinks."
I looked at the bowl in my hands, and a cold crept up my spine.
"Whoever prescribed this is either a blind quack — or..."
I didn't finish.
Xie Zhan finished for me.
"Or he wants me dead."
The dragon-and-phoenix candle spat and crackled.
"This decoction was prescribed by the imperial physicians," he said, still eerily calm. "Every herb recorded in the case-book, every page stamped in vermilion. Someone brews it, someone carries it, someone tastes it first, and only then is it brought to me. All perfectly proper."
"Which is exactly why I don't drink it."
He tipped his chin toward the orchid pot beneath the window. I followed his gaze — the plant was withered, its leaves gone yellow and slack. Clearly watered, day after day, with the medicine instead.
"Somewhere in this house," he said, "there is a person who wants me dead a little more each day. I don't know who. I only know that as long as he believes I'm dying, he won't strike a second time. He'll wait, patiently, for me to stop breathing on my own."
"I need time to find him. And I need a physician — one who has nothing to do with the imperial college, nothing to do with the court, someone no one would ever suspect."
He looked at me.
"Someone this whole house takes for a country apothecary's girl, bought in to turn a dying man's luck."
I understood then.
This entire marriage, from the first stroke to the last, was a board he had set out in advance.
And I was the piece that had just been laid down.
I drew a breath and swallowed the anger rising in me.
"You deceived my father. You deceived my whole family. You laid out a mountain of bride-price to buy yourself a discreet physician."
"I didn't deceive you," he said. "I paid a fair price. You save me, I give you what you want."
"And you know what I want?"
His mouth curved.
Then he said a thing that turned my blood cold from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.
"Ye Qing. Three months ago, a stranger came to your father's Huichun Hall asking to buy a certain herb — one of which only two sources are left in the world. Your father turned him away, and told you that if the man came back, you were to shut the door in his face."
I froze.
That had happened.
And only three people knew it: my father, myself, and that stranger.
"How could you —?"
"Because the herb he was asking for," Xie Zhan said, slow, each word falling like a drop of cold water, "is the only thing on this earth that cures the poison in me."
He leaned closer.
"The man who wants me dead stood at your family's door three months ago."
"Physician Ye — are you quite certain your father only turned him away?"
