Three days later, the Marquis of Zhenguo, Xie Chong, came to call on the sick.
This time, he came to watch his nephew stop breathing.
He had it all worked out. The wine had been sent over three days ago — more than long enough for a gravely ill man to drink it down and pass of "heart failure." Today he need only weep a few tears, see to the funeral arrangements, and take the estate into his own son's hands.
He came into the room with the grief already arranged on his face.
Then he checked.
Xie Zhan sat upright at the table. His color good, his back straight, his eyes bright. Not a trace of a dying man about him.
But Xie Chong was, sure enough, no ordinary man.
He froze for only a heartbeat before the grief on his face turned in an instant to joy — so naturally that, had I not known better, I'd have been taken in myself.
"Zhan'er! You... you've recovered?" He stepped forward, eyes brimming. "Heaven has eyes! Your uncle has knelt these several nights praying to the Buddha, and it's answered..."
"Uncle," Xie Zhan cut in, pushing the wine bottle to the center of the table. "The wine you bestowed — your nephew hasn't drunk it."
Xie Chong looked at the bottle.
His expression didn't shift.
"A tonic wine, and you won't drink it? Whatever for? Perhaps it's not to your taste..."
"There's poison in the wine." I stepped out from behind the screen and set the tarnished, blackened silver nail-guard on the table.
Xie Chong glanced at me, then turned back to Xie Zhan, sighed, his voice full of tender concern.
"Zhan'er, this wife you married in such haste. The wine your aunt brewed with her own hands, and it passed through how many servants' hands to reach here? Who dropped what into it along the way — who's to know? And you'll take the word of an apothecary girl, and suspect your own flesh-and-blood uncle?"
He shook his head, the picture of a wounded heart.
"I'll say this, and don't take it ill. Your illness went half a year without mending — and the moment you marry this girl, you 'recover.' Can you be so sure it wasn't she who put something in you to begin with, and now cries poison and pins it on another to wash her own hands clean?"
It was a vicious stroke.
One sentence, and he'd cleared himself, turned it back on me, and planted a seed of doubt in Xie Zhan all at once.
Any other husband might have wavered.
But Xie Zhan only looked at him, the corner of his mouth going cold.
And I laughed.
"Well spoken, my lord Marquis." I folded my arms. "Then let me put a few questions to you — as a physician would."
"First. The young lord's illness began seven months ago, when I didn't so much as know him. I've been married in a little over ten days. Pray tell — how did I poison him? In a dream?"
"Second. The poison in the young lord is Ice Silkworm, nursed for half a year in the incense he burned. That incense was blended by Nanny Xu, thirty years by her hand alone — a servant of this estate, not mine. On the inside of Nanny Xu's left wrist is a lotus tattoo; fifteen years ago she took silver from the mastermind and came to threaten my father. Will my lord Marquis consent to have her body exhumed for verification?"
"Third." I pointed at the bottle. "Ice Silkworm takes half a year to kill. But this wine is almond poison — drink it and you stop breathing within half a watch. Two poisons, two hands, seven months apart — both aimed at one man. To manage that, a person would need both a planted servant inside the marquis's estate to nurse the silkworm, and the means to send poisoned wine over from the Marquis's own residence. In all the capital, how many families are there for whom 'both estates are my own house'?"
Xie Chong choked.
But he hadn't fallen yet.
"Conjecture. All of it the conjecture of an apothecary girl." He ground the words out, his voice gone harder. "Not one shred of evidence points to me. An old case-record? Some old country doctor's scribble from fifteen years ago — who's to swear it's true? An archer? Seized by you and tortured — he'd confess to anything you liked. Zhan'er, you mean to bind your own uncle to a charge of fratricide and usurpation with this patched-together rubbish?"
Here was the ground he still had left to retreat to.
Because he was right about one thing — all of this, he could still deny.
Xie Zhan didn't argue.
He only clapped his hands, once.
The curtain behind him stirred.
A youth of perhaps fifteen or sixteen was helped out. His clothes ragged, both wrists still ringed with the livid marks of rope. But the eyes — those eyes were the very image of Nanny Xu's.
When Xie Chong saw him, his pupils contracted sharply.
For the first time, his face truly changed.
"This is Nanny Xu's son," Xie Zhan said, his voice light, each word like ice. "The one Uncle kept locked in a country villa outside the city, and used to force Nanny Xu to poison your nephew this half-year. Uncle killed Nanny Xu to silence her — but forgot that the one she gave her whole life to shield is still alive."
"My guards found him last night. That villa, by its deed, is farmland belonging to the Marquis's estate. Registered in Uncle's name."
The youth lifted his head, looked Xie Chong dead in the eye, his voice shaking but every word clear:
"It was you. You had them chain me. Every month a man came, and said if my mother put a foot wrong, they'd hack me to pieces and feed me to the dogs. My mother... my mother is dead, isn't she?"
The whole room fell dead silent.
Xie Chong took a step back.
This was the thing he hadn't counted on.
He had reckoned the hearts of men, reckoned the poison, reckoned even how to silence the dead. But he had forgotten — a mother who would go to her death without confessing did it not out of fear of him, but for her child. And that child, he had grudged the single knife-stroke it would take to kill.
The silkworm of fifteen years slipped free — all for one thread he had forgotten to cut.
"My house of Xie..." Xie Chong looked at me, his voice hoarse, as if he couldn't believe it. "Fifteen years of foundation, brought down in the hand of an apothecary girl."
"Not in my hand," I said. "In your own."
"You looked down on me — just as fifteen years ago you looked down on a ten-year-old boy at his father's bedside. You thought an apothecary's girl couldn't see, that a child couldn't remember. That's why you've lost. You've lost because of yourself, and no one else."
Beyond the door, iron armor rang.
The imperial guards poured in and sealed the room. The chief eunuch at their head raised an imperial decree high.
So every piece of evidence Xie Zhan had quietly sent up all this while, His Majesty had already seen. What he had waited for was precisely this moment — the moment Xie Chong walked into the snare himself, and handed over that last bottle of wine with his own hand.
Xie Chong was taken away under guard.
Passing me, he stopped, his eyes venomous.
I didn't flinch.
I only tilted my head and looked at him, the way I'd look at a case already past medicine, beyond saving.
"My lord Marquis," I said. "Your Ice Silkworm, I could unwind. But the poison in your own heart — fifteen years now, and there's no medicine on earth to cure it."
He was dragged out.
The room, at last, went quiet.
Xie Zhan came to my side.
His whole body still trembled a little — a long time on his feet, a battle of wits strung tight as a lute string just behind him, the poison in him not yet gone. How could he not be worn out?
Out of habit I reached to steady him, three fingers to his wrist.
Deep, even, strong. The thread of ice was still there, but far finer now.
"Still alive," I said.
He looked down at me and gave a soft laugh.
"Still alive."
Beyond the lattice, the sky had turned to dawn.
