The court wanted General Meng to be guilty, which was the surest sign in the world that he wasn't, and Xiao Yan sent me to be certain of it in the only way I trusted — with my own eyes, on the man's own ground.
Granny Lin arranged it, because a soldier newly in from the frontier acquires camp ailments, and camp ailments are beneath a lettered physician and squarely the business of a medicine-woman and her apprentice. So I came to the general's quarters in the guest barracks to treat a festering hand — a real wound, a splinter of siege-timber gone bad, the kind of thing I could clean and drain in my sleep — and while I worked I took the measure of the man the whole court had decided to hang.
Meng was a slab of a man, scarred, blunt, with the particular flat directness of someone who has spent thirty years in a profession where lying gets your men killed. He watched me lance and clean his hand with an interest that had no fear in it, and when I was done he said, without preamble, "You are the girl who saved the prince." Not a question. I went still. He snorted at my stillness. "The whole north knows it, girl. You think a thing like that stays in a palace? The men who served under Xiao Yan have been praying to every god they own since the word came south that some servant cut the death out of him. Half the frontier army would die for that boy. Do not look at me like I am going to report you. If I wanted him dead I had six years of chances and a whole war to hide it in."
That was the thing about Meng, and it was why the court's suspicion was so exactly wrong. The men who had actually stood beside Xiao Yan on that wall loved him with the specific ferocity soldiers reserve for a commander who goes back into a breach for a nobody conscript. Meng had bled for him. Meng had buried men for him. The idea that the frontier army was behind the arrow was a fantasy that could only be believed by people who had never once left the capital, and someone had counted on exactly that — on a court that feared the soldiers it depended on, and would believe the worst of them at the smallest push.
But Meng gave me something better than his innocence. He gave me the money.
"You want to know who killed the surgeon Ho," he said, when I finally told him the shape of what we hunted, because I had decided, watching his hand, that this was a man I could spend a truth on. "I will tell you what I know, which is not the hand but the purse. That summer, the supply train that brought Ho north came with a paymaster I did not know — a soft man, a merchant's man, not army. He signed for things no quartermaster would sign for. He moved coin through a house in the capital, a lending house, the Silver Reed, that handles money for the great families the way a laundress handles linen — takes it in dirty, sends it out clean, no names on it." Meng's flat eyes held mine. "Ho was paid through the Silver Reed. I know because I tried to have the man investigated when I smelled how wrong the whole season stank, and I was told, from very high up, to leave it. A general does not get told to leave a thing alone by anyone below a throne, girl. Follow the Silver Reed. That is where the coin went to be washed. Whose coin it was before it got there — that, I could never reach."
I brought the name back to Xiao Yan like a specimen in a dish, and I watched the strategist in him seize on it, because a lending house is not a face but it is a ledger, and ledgers, unlike people, cannot be drowned in a calm river.
"The Silver Reed," he said softly. "A washing-house for great families' dirty money. Meng is right that the coin that paid Ho ran through it. And a house like that keeps records — it must, or its clients could never trust it — hidden, coded, but kept." His eyes met mine. "We cannot storm it. We cannot subpoena it; I am a dying prince with no power to compel anyone. But money remembers what men forget, and somewhere in the Silver Reed's ledgers is the account that paid a surgeon to score an arrow. Find whose account it was, Cora, and for the first time in fifteen years we will have a thing the drownings and the incense cannot erase — a number, in a book, with a hand behind it." A grim satisfaction. "They can silence a witness. It is much harder to silence a debt."
We had the money now, or the road to it. And the road ran not north to the soldiers the court feared, but inward, into the capital, into the quiet houses where the great families washed their sins — closer, always closer, to the soft beloved heart of the palace I still would not let myself look at directly.
