Three days passed, and still I hadn't managed to read Nanny Xu's pulse.
Not for want of trying.
I tried three times.
The first time, she smiled gently, said a lowly old servant would never dream of troubling her lady for a pulse-reading, and withdrew.
The second time, she brought me a bowl of lotus-seed sweet soup, said her lady worked so hard nursing the young lord and ought to have something cooling, and slipped away the moment I set the bowl down.
The third time, I'd barely opened my mouth when she "suddenly remembered" a pot of medicine on the stove and hurried off.
She was always smiling.
Always courteous.
And always — gone just before my fingers could reach her wrist.
An ordinary person wouldn't have noticed.
But I'm a physician.
I know a healthy person has no reason to fear having their pulse taken.
Unless there's something on the wrist that can't be shown.
In those days, Xie Zhan visibly improved.
I'd had every stick of incense in his rooms quietly replaced with incense I blended myself — plain agarwood, clean, nothing mixed in. Deprived of the cold that fed it, the Ice Silkworm slowed its spinning.
His color came back. He slept through the nights. Sometimes he even fought me for the longan in the sweet soup.
"You're the heir to a marquisate," I said, rapping my chopsticks across the back of his hand. "Squabbling over longan with your wife — no shame?"
"My wife is a miser," he said serenely, plucking the last one anyway. "Counts every fruit in one bowl of soup."
I glared.
He laughed.
The plate of osmanthus cakes on the table went on being replaced, fresh, every day.
I asked the maids. They shook their heads and said they knew nothing.
I asked Xie Zhan straight out. He only raised a brow. "Cakes? I don't see any."
Lying, and not even troubling to lie well.
I bit into a cake and didn't call him on it.
For some reason, inside, it left a sweetness.
On the fourth night, I decided to wait no longer.
What ought to be done, I always do.
I knew that every night after the second watch, Nanny Xu went into the small rear courtyard — where she blended her incense — to prepare the next day's supply.
I let her go in, then followed quietly behind.
The door stood ajar.
Inside, Nanny Xu sat with her back to me, a row of small porcelain jars before her.
I held my breath and watched.
She opened a jar set apart in the corner, spooned out a little white powder with a silver spoon, and stirred it into the incense she was half through grinding.
White powder.
Extreme cold in nature.
The very thing I'd smelled in the ash of the burner that night.
My hand went cold.
So it was true.
I took a step back, meaning to turn and find Xie Zhan.
But my heel struck a wooden stool.
The sound rang out through the deep quiet of the night, clear as anything.
Nanny Xu whipped around.
The gentle, kindly smile she wore every day vanished in an instant, wiped clean off her face.
I didn't run.
Where I found the nerve I'll never know, but I lunged, seized her left wrist, and shoved the sleeve back.
There, in the lamplight, on the inside of that wrinkled wrist —
a lotus.
The lines had faded with the years, but they were plain enough.
"It's you," I breathed. "Fifteen years ago, you threatened my father. This half-year, you poisoned the young lord. It's you."
Nanny Xu looked at me.
Then she did something I had no time to stop.
She didn't cry for help. She didn't deny it.
She snatched up the porcelain jar of white powder and smashed it at the foot of the burning brazier.
The powder met the fire and rose up in a thick, milky smoke.
The room was small, the door shut. In the space of a blink it was choked with fog.
Cold.
Dense.
A dose like that could kill several healthy men — and to me it —
My head swam, my chest closed up, my legs went to water beneath me and I dropped to the earthen floor.
Nanny Xu rose, unhurried, drew a cloth up over her nose and mouth, and watched me fade.
"My lady is a good person," she said, her voice still gentle, more chilling for it. "But my lady should never have turned this wrist over."
I sank down against the cold floor.
Awareness dimmed.
The last thing I heard came from outside the door.
A shout.
My name.
"Ye Qing!"
The door was kicked off its frame.
The figure there checked at the threshold.
Only for an instant.
But I knew what he'd seen in that instant.
The milky smoke coiling through the room — no one on this earth understands cold better than he does. He knew exactly what was rising in there. Knew that to carry Ice Silkworm in your veins and step into this room was to throttle your own heart with your own hands.
He held for one breath.
Then he walked in.
I had never seen Xie Zhan like that. The man who was always composed, always calculating, always keeping three parts back, who had feigned death for half a year without a hitch in his breathing — now walked into his own grave, his eyes never leaving me for a single instant.
It wasn't that he hadn't had time to think.
He had thought. And he came in anyway.
He shoved Nanny Xu aside, dropped to his knees, and gathered me up.
"Ye Qing. Wake up. Look at me."
His hands were shaking.
Not from the poison.
From fear.
I wanted to tell him he was a fool, that coming in here only got us both killed.
But I couldn't make my mouth move.
He hauled me up and had just turned to bolt for the door when a shudder went through his whole body.
I felt it — through the cloth of his robe, his heart pounding wild, then skipping a beat.
The cold in that room was only faintness to an ordinary man.
To a man carrying Ice Silkworm in his veins — it was a summons to death.
