A great house tells you everything if you count it.
I counted the rice that left the kitchens and the mouths it fed, and learned that General Lu kept a smaller household than a man of his rank was allowed, and paid his servants more than the law required, and that none of them had been beaten in living memory, which in a great house is stranger than it sounds.
I counted the guards on the walls and learned they were too few for a man with so many enemies, as if he did not much mind whether he lived.
I counted the visitors and learned there were almost none. The Ash General was a man the court had decided to forget. Invitations did not come. Officials who passed him in the street found somewhere else to look. He had a name so black that fifteen years had not scrubbed it, and he wore the blackness like a coat he had stopped noticing.
And I counted his tells, because that is the other thing the Loom made me for. Every person alive leaks the truth in a hundred small ways — a glance before a lie, a stillness before a blow, the particular way the hands settle when a man is about to take what he wants. I had read killers before. I had knelt at the feet of men who had done the things Lu Zheng was said to have done, and I knew the shape they made in a room.
Lu Zheng did not make that shape.
He rose before the servants. He ate plainly and quickly, the way men eat who have known hunger and never forgotten it. He was unfailingly, exhaustingly courteous to me, and never once let his courtesy tip into the thing men's courtesy usually tips into. When his old wound pained him in the cold — a stiffness in the left leg, a limp he was too proud to favor — he simply moved more slowly and did not complain.
His second-in-command, a scarred wolf of a man named Zhou Yan, watched me the way a dog watches a stranger's hands. Him, at least, I understood. He did not trust the pretty new wife who had arrived out of nowhere in a marriage the General had not sought. He was right not to. I found it almost restful, being correctly suspected by one person in that house.
"You count things," Zhou Yan said to me once, catching me on the gallery as I watched the guards change.
"I like to know a place is orderly," I said, in Ruan Qing's soft voice.
"Mm," he said, and did not believe me, and went away. Correct on all counts. I liked him.
On the ninth night I could not sleep, and I went walking through the cold house because a body trained to move at night does not always ask permission, and I saw a light in the ancestral hall.
I should have gone back. I went closer.
The General knelt before the tablets of his fathers with an incense stick burning in his hands. That was not strange; a filial man mourns his dead. What was strange were the other tablets.
There was a whole low shelf of them, plain wood, unpainted, crowded together the way the honored dead are never crowded. Not his family. I read the names by the flicker of the lamp, and they were common names, the names of farmers and weavers and a midwife and three children too young to have earned names of their own, listed only as eldest daughter of the Sang family, second son of the Cui family, the child at the well.
A hundred of them, perhaps more. I did not finish counting. I did not need to. I knew the place those names came from before I let myself know it.
Qinghe.
He had built an altar to the town he was said to have burned, and he knelt before it in the dead of winter with no one watching, and I saw his shoulders move once, hard, the way a man's shoulders move when grief goes through him like a blade, and then he was still again, because he was a man who had taught himself to be still the way I had.
I stood in the dark outside the door with my heart going like a caught bird, and I understood two things at once.
The first was that a man does not weep in secret for a crime he committed. He weeps for one he could not stop.
The second was worse, and I felt it slide into me cold and clean as my own needle. If Lu Zheng had not burned Qinghe — if the order was forged and the grief was real — then someone had burned it. Someone had put a whole town to the torch and hung it around this man's neck. And that same someone, fifteen years ago, had pulled a six-year-old girl out of the story and kept her, and raised her, and pointed her like an arrow at the one man in the empire who mourned her dead.
I went back to my cold bed. I did not sleep. I counted his footsteps when at last he came in from the hall, slow, favoring the leg, and I counted the days I had left, and for the first time in my life the number frightened me for the wrong reason.
Twenty-one days. And I no longer knew what I was counting down to.
