They took her. They took Wen Su, when the muster rolls came up out of fifteen years of dark and said, in the plain hand of the war office, exactly what a blind monk and a broken seal and a stolen lullaby had said — that the garrison had been forty li east, that the western road had been opened by the Grand Preceptor's warrant, that the fire had come up from the capital wearing a border general's face. A thing refused for fifteen years, once opened, falls very fast.
I will not pretend I watched the rest with a clean heart. Wen Su was stripped of his offices and his clan's protection and, in the spring, given the three feet of white silk the law grants a great man in place of the axe — a mercy the people of Qinghe were not given, and I have made my peace with thinking so. The Silk Loom was pulled up by the roots. Its house of embroidery burned; I asked that it burn, and they let me light it, and I stood in the heat of it and felt no warmth at all except the strange clean cold of a thing finally out of the world. The younger needles, the children still only children — those I asked for. Some were too made to unmake; the Loom had reached them the way it reached me, and grief in them had already learned to become a plan. But some were young enough. I have spent a good part of the years since finding them proper homes under proper names, and teaching the ones who will listen that you can count other things than exits. It is slow work. Slow is smooth.
Matron Bai I did not have to decide about. She took the Loom's last mercy before the court could — a needle of her own she had carried longer than she had carried me — and died in her cell with her clever hands folded, and I did not go, and I have never been sure whether that was strength or only the last thing she taught me. I light her no stick. I light her, instead, a little, in the telling. That is more than she earned and less than a daughter's whole heart, and it is the truest count I can give.
Lu Zheng's name was returned to him, and more than his name; a court that has wronged a man for fifteen years is generous once it can be generous cheaply. They offered him the western command again, the passes, the border. He asked instead for Qinghe — the burned town itself, to hold and to rebuild — and the young Emperor, who was learning fast what his grandfather's court had cost, gave it to him without a word about the strangeness of a man asking to be sent to the place that had ruined him. The tablets came down from his ancestral hall at last and went home to a shrine on the hill above the town, common names carved proper in good stone, and among them, on a marker with nothing beneath it, Sang Sui, eldest daughter, of the well-court, because we agreed the girl who died at six should be allowed to rest even though the woman who wears the other half of her name is still, stubbornly, alive.
Zhou Yan stood up for me at the tribunal — the man who had wanted me out in the snow. He told the court, in his flat soldier's voice, that the Seventh Needle had turned three weeks before it could profit her, and had kept the proof that hanged her masters at the plain price of hanging herself, and that if the law wished to take the one honest assassin in the empire it would have to go through the general's guard to do it. The Emperor, young and newly awake to how long he had been lied to, found it in himself to be merciful to the woman who had cut the lie open. I was pardoned. I was even, in the strange arithmetic of courts, thanked. I keep the pardon in the same plain box where I keep the one thing I could not give the fire.
I kept one needle. Just one, drawn from the phoenix pin, its resin long since scraped clean and buried. The rest I gave to the flames with the Loom. A woman is allowed to keep one true thing to remember what she chose not to be.
