The Third Prince made his move in the eleventh month, and for a bright dangerous week I was certain we had our man, and being certain nearly cost us everything — which was, I understand now, exactly what it was designed to do.
It began with Fu-an, who had grown from a terrified errand-boy into something like my own agent in the palace's grey undercurrents, the network of eunuchs and servants who see everything and are counted as no one. Fu-an brought me word that the Third Prince had been meeting, secretly, at night, with two of the ministers who had most to gain from Xiao Yan's fall, and that money had changed hands, and that Xiao Che had been heard — drunk, incautious, exactly the man his brother had described — to say that the curse was taking too long and that a man who wanted a thing done had best see to it himself.
We watched. And within days we caught him at it, or near enough. The Third Prince had bought a man inside the Eastern Palace's own kitchens — bribed a scullion to report on the prince's true condition, and, we came to believe, to be ready to do worse if the moment came. It was clumsy, and greedy, and reckless, and it fit the shape of a jealous brother who had decided to stop waiting on a curse and take fate into his own hands, and for a week Xiao Yan and I built the case against Xiao Che with a grim momentum, and I felt the click of it, the terrible satisfying click of a diagnosis coming together, and I have told you before what that click is worth.
It was worth nothing. It was worse than nothing.
Because when we finally pulled the thread all the way — when Jiang leaned on the bought scullion and the scullion, terrified, gave up everything — the Third Prince's plot turned out to be exactly what it looked like and nothing more: the panicked, opportunistic scheming of a greedy man who wanted the throne and had decided to hurry it along. Che had bribed a servant to spy. Che had talked to grasping ministers about a future that suited them all. Che was guilty of ambition and corruption and the intent, someday, if it came cheap enough, to help his brother toward the grave. But Che had never touched the arrow. Che had been fifteen years old when the taster fell down the stairs. Che could not have moved a surgeon through the Silver Reed or drowned him in a calm river or turned the Grand Physician; Che could barely keep a scullion bribed without being caught within the week. He was not the patient hand. He was a loud, obvious, genuinely dangerous man doing loud obvious dangerous things in the same house where a quiet one had been working for fifteen years, and the noise of him was very nearly enough to make me stop looking.
And his mother saved him. That was the detail that finally began to turn the lock in my mind, weeks too late.
When Che's scheming came to light — and it came to light because someone let it, I am sure of that now; someone fed a piece of it to the Emperor's people at exactly the moment it would do the most good — it was Noble Consort Wei who went to the Emperor and wept. She took her son's disgrace onto her own shoulders. She begged for his life with such grace and such apparent anguish that the court's heart broke for her, and the Third Prince escaped with a scolding, a demotion, and his neck intact. It was a mother's love, everyone said. It was the most moving thing anyone had seen in a season of ugliness.
I watched it, from my place against the wall, and for the first time I let the finding out of the drawer where I'd been hiding it, and looked at it straight.
Wei had let her own son be exposed. The timing had been too clean, the revelation too convenient — Che's clumsy plot surfacing at the precise moment the court most needed a villain, drawing every eye to the loud, greedy, obvious brother and away from the quiet patient thing still running underneath. And then his mother had spent her infinite public goodwill to save him, and in doing so had made herself, once again, the most sympathetic figure in the palace — a woman who had nearly lost one son to a poisoner and now humbled herself to save another from his own folly. She had turned her son's crime into her own coronation as the court's beloved martyr. And her son, greedy foolish Che, had never even known he was being used as a shield — had genuinely schemed, genuinely blundered, genuinely been saved, never once suspecting that his own worst instincts had been quietly encouraged and then quietly betrayed by the one person he trusted most in the world.
"She fed her own child to the court to keep their eyes off herself," I said to Xiao Yan, and my voice had gone very cold, because I had finally, fully seen it. "Che's plot was real. But someone let it be caught at the perfect moment, and someone spent a fortune of goodwill to make his disgrace into her glory. Your brother isn't the hand. Your brother is a knife someone else keeps in a drawer and takes out when they need the court to look away." I met his eyes. "I dismissed her for weeks because she was too obvious, too kind, too easy to suspect. And she built that. She built a reputation so soft that suspecting her feels like a failure of taste. She has been using my own cleverness against me since the day she walked into your sickroom with a basket of tonics and hands that weren't surprised." I made myself say the name, finally, out loud, in the lamplight. "It's Wei, Xiao Yan. I don't have the proof. But it's Wei. It has always been Wei. Everyone else is a shield she keeps between herself and anyone clever enough to look."
Xiao Yan was silent for a long, long time. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and terrible.
"She out-wept my father at my mother's funeral," he said. "I told you that. I told you it was very hard to hate her." He closed his eyes. "It is because she is the one who made the grave. Of course she wept longest. She had the most practice." He opened them, and the boy who had lost his mother was gone, and what remained was something I would not have wanted turned on me. "Prove it, Cora. Find me the account in the Silver Reed. Because you are right that we cannot strike at the kindest woman in the empire on a diagnosis. But you are also right that it is her. And I have just discovered that I have hated her, quietly, without permission, since I was eleven years old — and been ashamed of it the entire time, because everyone told me she was good." A breath. "The shame, at least, is finished."
