"They'll expect me at the solstice," I said. The lamp was low; Zhou Yan sat across from it with his arms crossed, and Lu Zheng beside me, and between us on the floor lay the pieces of my whole life. "Wen Su told me the shape of it himself. The General dies during the sacrifice — not by steel, never by steel; a seizure, a collapse, the frontier wound finally taking him where the whole court can see and call it Heaven's judgment on the Ash General. That's the art of it. He doesn't want you killed. He wants you condemned by the sky. A murdered man might be avenged. A cursed one is only swept away."
"And you're to be the curse," Lu Zheng said.
"I was built to be." I laid it out the way I had laid out the broken jade. "So we can't simply refuse. If I stand in that temple and you don't fall, Matron Bai and Wen Su learn in front of the entire court that their needle has turned — and they still hold every other card. We have to give them the death they're expecting, right up to the last breath of it. And then we have to make it the wrong man's ruin."
Zhou Yan's scarred face was hard. He had wanted to put me out in the snow the day I arrived, and part of him still did. "Why should we believe a word of this," he said, not to me, to the General. "She admits everything. She admits she's their assassin. What better way inside our guard on the one day we're most exposed?"
It was a fair question. It was the question I would have asked. I answered it before Lu could.
"Because I turned three weeks ago," I said, "and I can prove it, and if you check my proof you'll know I turned long before I had any reason to think it would win me anything but a red thread of my own."
Here is the thing I had never spoken aloud, the one move I had kept even from the man beside me, because the Loom taught me that a plan you look at too often is a plan you leak.
The night I found the wrong reign-mark on the seal — my third night in that house, long before the road, long before the chestnuts, long before I let myself feel any of it — I had not only hidden the poison and sent a lying report. I had begun to keep a second set of books. Every letter Matron Bai sent me, I copied the stitches before I burned the cloth, so that I held, thread by thread, a record of the Loom's orders in the Loom's own hand. Every lie I sent back, I recorded, with its date, so that the gap between what I told them and what was true would itself prove the day I turned. I had a rubbing of the forged seal, taken by a seal-cutter who owed the General's house a life. I had a copy of Wen Su's counter-seal from the rejected memorials in the study. I had the monk's testimony written in my own hand, and the map to where he waited, and the two halves of the jade, and now — worst and best of all — I had Wen Su's own confession, spoken to me among the blood-red silks, believing a clear view of the machine would frighten the cog back into turning.
"You built a case," Lu Zheng said slowly, "against the day you might need one. Before you knew whether I was worth it."
"I built it," I said, "so that if you were, I wouldn't have wasted the time being sure."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth that on a lesser man would have been a smile. And Zhou Yan — who had wanted me gone, who had watched me the way a dog watches a stranger's hands — looked down at the copied stitches and the seal-rubbings laid out in their patient dated rows, weeks of a woman quietly assembling the rope to hang her own family with, and he let out a long breath and uncrossed his arms, which from him was a written oath.
"What do you need," he said. To me. The first time he had asked me for anything but my absence.
We made the plan then, the three of us, over the one lamp. It had to look, until the last possible moment, exactly like the murder the Loom had ordered. I would go to the solstice as the Seventh Needle — obedient, deadly, counting down, the poison back in my hair where a searching hand would expect a loyal blade. Wen Su would be watching. Matron Bai would be watching. And at the hinge of the rite, when the whole court knelt and the Ash General was meant to fall, we would turn the knife in the dark and drive it home.
"There's a cost you haven't named," Lu Zheng said, when it was almost done. He was looking at me the way he had looked at the jade, as though I were a thing he had already lost once. "To break the order in open court, you have to produce that witness's testimony as your own. You have to explain how a magistrate's soft daughter came by an assassin's proof. There's only one way that ends. You'll have to tell them what you are — in front of the Emperor. Under the law, the Seventh Needle hangs whether or not the Seventh Needle saved the man beside her."
"I know," I said.
"There has to be another —"
"There isn't, and if you spend the solstice trying to shield me, you'll hand Wen Su the loose thread to unravel all of it." I put my hand over his, over the crooked finger. Mine was steady; it has always been steady; and for once I was glad of the terrible steadiness the Loom gave me. "I spent twelve years being the proof of other people's lies. Let me be the proof of one true thing before the end of it. For a needle, that's not nothing. That's everything."
He turned his hand under mine and held it. "Half," he reminded me. Rough. Almost pleading. "You promised me half."
"Then help me carry this," I said. "All the way onto that altar. That's your half. Don't make me set it down before we get there."
They came for me two nights before the solstice, which told me Matron Bai was more careful than I had hoped and less certain than I feared. Needle Three had been my brother, in the way the Loom made brothers — we had bled on the same floors. He came over the plum court wall an hour before dawn, quiet as I would have been, and he was good, and I was better, because I knew he was coming and why, and a needle who knows the cloth cannot be threaded. We took him alive — Zhou Yan's men in the dark where I had placed them — and when he understood he had been expected, he looked at me with the particular hatred of one who has just learned his sister turned, and he spat that Matron Bai had known for a week, that my false reports had grown too smooth, that a real death is never described so evenly.
So she had read my lies exactly as I had read the seal — by their very perfection. We are what we are made. I had been made too well to lie to the woman who made me.
"Then she'll come herself," I said. "To the solstice. To see it done right, since her needle's gone soft." His silence told me I was right. She would be in that temple to watch her best girl kill, or be killed, and either answer would satisfy the thing that lived in her in place of love.
Good. I wanted her there. You cannot cut out a rot you cannot reach.
Two days. I had stopped counting toward a death. I was counting toward the one clean cut I had left to make, and I no longer cared what it cost me, only that it landed — and that this time, when I walked toward it, I would not be walking alone.
