Xie Zhan lay bedridden three days.
The flare in that smoke-choked room had nearly taken his life. I went three nights without sleep, spent the last of the Lihuo grass my father had secretly pressed into my hands, and only just dragged him back from the gates of the underworld.
Those three days, I didn't leave his side by half a step.
And in those three days, I fit the pieces together.
The one behind it all was inside the estate.
Fifteen years ago he killed the old Marquis; now he was killing the old Marquis's son.
He had power enough to bend Nanny Xu — the young lord's most trusted servant — to his will, by holding her son's life in his hand.
He had power enough to silence someone inside the estate with a single arrow, then withdraw as though nothing had happened.
In all this estate, only one man held that much power.
On the fourth day, that man came to visit.
The reigning Marquis of Zhenguo — Xie Chong — Xie Zhan's uncle.
Fifteen years ago, when the old Marquis died of "sudden illness," Xie Zhan was only ten, too young to inherit the title. The court granted the marquisate to the old Marquis's younger brother, Xie Chong, to keep it in the Xie family's hands, while Xie Zhan was named the heir — the one who would one day succeed.
Everyone said Xie Chong was a righteous man. Raising his orphaned nephew, keeping the title warm, waiting for the day he'd hand it back.
Fifteen years of waiting.
Waiting until the heir won his honors on the frontier, his name rising like a kite, one step short of reclaiming the title that was rightfully his.
I watched Xie Chong come into the sickroom in his brocade robe, his beard neatly trimmed, the very picture of a benevolent elder.
He sat down at Xie Zhan's bedside, sighed, his eyes going red.
"Zhan'er, you poor child. They say your illness came from overwork on the frontier. Hearing it, your uncle's heart broke clean in two."
He turned to me, his voice mild.
"You've had a hard time of it, my nephew's wife. It's only..." He paused, his gaze flickering with something like concern. "I hear you're the daughter of a little apothecary off the street? Zhan'er's condition is grave. To trust it to a small-shop physician — I fear that won't do. Let your uncle send for an imperial physician from the palace. What do you say?"
The words were smooth.
But I heard what ran beneath them.
He wanted to insert his own man.
Wanted to take back control of the fading life in this bed.
Nanny Xu was dead; the incense-poison channel was severed. He could no longer wait for the Ice Silkworm to seep in slowly.
He had to move quickly.
"Uncle is too kind," Xie Zhan said from the bed, his voice weak and broken, playing a gravely ill man to the hilt. "But with my wife's care, your nephew feels much recovered. I wouldn't trouble Uncle."
Xie Chong looked at his nephew a long moment, then smiled gently and rose.
"Then mind you recover well. I'll have some Goryeo ginseng sent over to build you up."
That afternoon, the ginseng arrived.
Along with a box of bird's nest, a jar of honey, and a bottle of medicinal wine "to boost the qi and quicken the blood" — brewed, they said, by the hand of the marquis's own wife.
I wouldn't let Xie Zhan touch a single thing.
When night fell, I carried the bottle of medicinal wine over to the lamp.
I opened it. I smelled it.
Ginseng, angelica, chuanxiong... and beneath it all, at the very bottom, the faint bitterness of almond.
I let a single drop fall onto a silver fingernail-guard.
The silver, in the space of a blink, tarnished grey.
I sat still for a long time.
Not Ice Silkworm.
A different poison. Fast. Fierce. Half a watch after drinking it, you'd stop breathing, and to all appearances you'd have died of heart failure from your grave illness.
The man who had patiently raised an Ice Silkworm inside Xie Zhan for half a year was now, in a hurry, slipping a kill-at-once poison into a wine bottle.
I laughed.
He was frightened.
He'd raised his silkworm fifteen years and no one had known. That was the terror of him — patient, invisible, leaving no mark.
But I had forced him to hurry. Forced him to set down the silkworm and draw the knife.
And a knife leaves a mark.
This medicinal wine, "brewed by the marquis's own wife," sent over from the main residence. A clear path. A clear hand.
For the first time, he had left behind something that could be traced straight back to him.
I stoppered the bottle and put it carefully away.
This was no longer poison.
This was evidence.
"What are you laughing at?"
Xie Zhan had woken at some point and was watching me.
"Laughing at your uncle," I said. "Fifteen years raising his silkworm, and in the end he's so anxious he hands me the noose himself."
I told him about the wine.
When I finished, he was quiet a long while.
"This half-year of feigning illness — it wasn't only to lure him into the open," he said quietly. "My uncle is the reigning Marquis of Zhenguo, a lord of the first rank, with military authority in his hand. To move against a man like that, 'I suspect him' is an egg thrown at a stone. I need evidence heavy enough to lay on the imperial desk — evidence His Majesty cannot turn his face from."
"These past months, I've been sending it up piece by piece, through a trusted man inside the palace. Your father's case-record. Then the confession of the archer who shot Nanny Xu — that night he hadn't cleared the estate wall before my guards took him alive."
He looked at the bottle in my hand, his eyes going deep.
"But one thing was still missing. Something that bound directly to his own hand — in fifteen years he never once let such a thing slip. Now I have it."
He lifted his eyes to me.
"Ye Qing, tomorrow you go back to Huichun Hall."
I looked up.
"He's struck directly, which means he's out of options. A man out of options will do anything." His gaze turned grave. "It's too dangerous here. Leave the rest to me."
"And you?"
"I'm the bait. I have to stay."
I looked at him.
This man, three days ago, had walked into his own grave for me. Now, a little recovered, the first thing he says to me is "you should leave."
Something in me went tight and sore all at once.
"Xie Zhan." I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked him in the eye. "I'll ask you one thing. Answer me honestly."
"Mm."
"The plate of osmanthus cakes. Did you buy it?"
He went still.
It was a long time before he answered, low.
"...Mm."
"Why?"
"On the day I fetched you as a bride, I sent men to follow your palanquin," he said, his voice dropping. "They came back and reported that all along the road the Ye family's daughter showed no grief and no worry — she only stopped at one cake stall, bought two skewers of osmanthus cakes, and sat in the palanquin and ate every last one."
"I thought: a girl about to marry a dying man, and she can still eat with that much appetite..."
He looked up at me, the corner of his mouth curving.
"I thought — this one is interesting."
I sat still.
So it had been from the very first day.
Not fate, not a love from childhood.
Only two skewers of osmanthus cakes, and a girl who feared neither Heaven nor earth.
"So," I drew a breath. "I won't be going back to Huichun Hall."
"Ye Qing —"
"Hear me out." I cut him off. "In all the world, the only person who can feel the Ice Silkworm is me. The only one who found the poison in that wine is me. You send me away, and tonight he slips one more dose in — who reads it for you? Who tastes it for you?"
"I'm your physician," I said. "A physician doesn't abandon a patient halfway. That's the rule."
He looked at me.
"Only the rule?"
I opened my mouth to say what else would it be.
But looking into those eyes, I couldn't get the three false words out.
"...Not only," I said at last, quietly, my ears heating again. "It's also because... I don't want you to die. Not for the clinic. For you."
"There. I've said it. Don't go getting ideas above your station."
Xie Zhan looked at me a long time.
Then he reached out, very gently, and took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine — exactly as he had that first night, when he'd caught my wrist and wouldn't let it go.
Only this time, I didn't pull away.
"All right," he said softly, and there was a laughter in his voice I'd never heard before. "Then you and I will catch this silkworm together."
Three days from now, his uncle would come again.
Come to watch his nephew stop breathing. Come to take the estate, in full and rightful order, into his own son's hands.
We would show him exactly the scene he longed to see.
Only — the ending would not be the one he had spent fifteen years calculating.
