The next morning, Xie Zhan changed his mind.
I found him standing by the window, already dressed in a coarse grey robe, his hair bound up plain, no jade and no pins. He had done something to his skin that dulled it right down, so that he looked like nothing more than an ordinary shop clerk off the street.
If I hadn't known that ramrod-straight back, I'd have nearly walked past him.
"Where are you going?"
"Taking you home."
I stopped short. For three days I'd begged to go home and he'd brushed me off every time. Now, all of a sudden —
"You saved my life last night," he said, as calm as if we were discussing the weather. "I don't like owing anyone. You want to know what your father is hiding — I'll take you to find out."
He put a hand on the window frame. Very lightly. As if I wouldn't notice.
"Besides. I want to know too."
"You coughed up black blood last night," I said, frowning. "Now you want to go out into the wind, and if the poison flares on the road, who's going to needle you? Me? I don't have the time to save the same fool twice in one day."
He looked at me, the corner of his mouth twitching as if amused.
"Then stay close to me. In case I'm a fool."
Huichun Hall was just as I'd left it.
The familiar reek of bitter herbs rushed up my nose and stung the bridge of it. Only three days. And it felt as if I'd been gone a very long way.
My father was weighing out herbs behind the counter. When he saw me walk in — in an heir-wife's brocade, a strange "shop clerk" trailing behind — he froze, and the scale dropped out of his hand onto the countertop.
"Wan'er? Why are you... why have you come back?"
"Close the shop, Papa," I said. "There's something I have to ask you."
The three of us went into the back room.
I didn't circle around it. I grew up in an apothecary; I know that circling a patient only lets the illness deepen.
"Papa. I need to see the case-record you keep locked at the bottom of the chest."
His face changed.
"There's no such record. Whoever's been filling your head with —"
"Ice Silkworm," I cut in. "My husband was poisoned with Ice Silkworm. Last night it flared, and I forced out the poisoned blood."
I laid the cloth I'd kept from the night before on the table and opened it out.
The stain had dried dark, but even in the light it was plain — black shot with green, and through it that very faint thread of red.
"Two-colored blood," I said, looking straight into his eyes. "I've seen this exact color once. Only once. In the record you never let me read — the one I sneaked open when I was ten, and got beaten for."
My father looked at the stain on the cloth.
In that instant he aged ten years.
The hands that had held a medicine knife steady for decades now shook uncontrollably.
"Why... why have you brought this thing back here..." His voice had gone hoarse. "Wan'er, put it down. Go back to the estate, pack your things — I'll take you out of the capital tonight. Don't touch any of this. I'm begging you."
"It's too late, Papa," I said. "I'm already married in. My husband is dying of this poison. If I don't save him, I become the widow of a murder anyway. Where would you have me run?"
My father sat down heavily.
For a long time.
Then he rose, dragged himself into the inner room, and hauled out an old wooden chest. He opened three locks. From inside he lifted a case-record with a rotting cover, its pages gone yellow.
He didn't hand it to me. He turned the pages himself, to one near the back, and set it down on the table.
"Fifteen years ago," he said, his eyes not leaving the page, "I met this exact poison. Once. Ice Silkworm, cut with one more herb of extreme cold, to turn the blood two colors — so that even a skilled physician who managed to force the poison out could never tell whether it was murder or illness. The mind that devised this... I have never in my life seen one so cruel."
"The patient that year, I couldn't save."
His finger came to rest on the page — on the spot where the patient's name should have been, torn away, only the ragged edge remaining.
"After that I swore an oath. Never to speak of it again as long as I lived. Never to go near that family again. I shut the shop for half a year and took you back to your mother's home country, and only dared return when you were five. I thought... if I buried it deep enough, fifteen years on no one would ever dig it up again."
All this while Xie Zhan had stood silent in the corner, not a word.
Now, at last, he stepped forward.
He bent over the record. His eyes ran across the date written at the head of the page.
His whole body went rigid.
"The twelfth month, the twelfth year of the Jinghe reign," he read, his voice terrifyingly soft. "Patient male, in his forties, of vigorous constitution, wasted away suddenly over half a year, died in his sleep. Publicly given out as sudden illness."
He looked up at my father.
"Physician Ye. The patient you couldn't save that year... in whose estate did he die?"
My father raised his head.
For the first time he looked closely at that dulled "shop clerk's" face — looked into the eyes.
Then all the color drained out of him.
The brush in his hand dropped to the floor and rolled away.
"You..." His lips shook. "You are the marquis's son. The son of the old Marquis of Zhenguo."
He said nothing.
But he didn't need to.
I stood between the two of them, and in my mind something clicked softly into place, like the last piece of a puzzle finding its slot.
Xie Zhan's father — the old Marquis of Zhenguo — had died fifteen years ago of "sudden illness."
He was the patient my father couldn't save.
The same poison.
The same two-colored blood.
Fifteen years ago, the father.
Fifteen years later, the son.
"So..." My father looked at me, then at Xie Zhan, his voice breaking. "My girl, married into the marquis's house. Not by chance, was it?"
"No," Xie Zhan said. "I traced the antidote herb to this shop. I didn't know you had once treated my father. Until this moment, I didn't know."
He looked at my father, his gaze fathomless.
"But you knew. You've known for fifteen years. You know who stood behind that bowl of medicine — don't you, Physician Ye?"
My father didn't answer.
He only reached out and slowly folded the record shut, as if to bury it one more time.
"Some things," he said quietly, "you learn and then you die for it. I've hidden this fifteen years, and not to save my own life."
He looked up at me, his eyes red-rimmed.
"To save yours, Wan'er."
