We had been asking the wrong question for weeks. Not who is the hand — we had that now, in our bones if not on paper. The question we had failed to ask was simpler and more damaging: how does the hand always know?
Because she always knew. I saw it clearly once I looked. Every time we moved, the enemy had already braced. The pace forced at the Autumn Rite, the moment Che's plot surfaced, the pressure that rose each time the prince grew stronger — someone had been feeding Wei a steady, accurate account of the true state of the Eastern Palace, of a prince who was not dying, of a servant who was not what she seemed. There was a leak. There had always been a leak. And it was somewhere in the small circle of people who knew Xiao Yan was recovering — which was a circle of almost no one, which made it so much worse.
I found it the way I find most things, by watching who did not fit. And the one who did not fit, in the end, was the last one I wanted it to be: Steward Fang.
Fang had run the Eastern Palace since Xiao Yan was a boy. He had stayed through the dying when the courtiers fled. He had wept, quietly, the night we thought the fever might take the prince after all. He was old and stooped and devoted, one of the handful of people Xiao Yan trusted without reservation, and that trust was exactly the wound the enemy had found. Because Fang had a daughter, married to a merchant, and the merchant had failed, and the debts had fallen on Fang, and the debts had been bought — quietly, cheaply, all at once — by a lending house called the Silver Reed. And a man who owes his daughter's life to the people washing the assassin's coin is a man who will tell them, in exchange for her safety, precisely how well the Crown Prince is truly sleeping.
Jiang wanted to kill him. I watched the captain's face when we understood, and it was the most frightening thing I had seen in that palace, because Jiang loved very few things and betrayal by one of them had turned him to something with no give in it at all. It was Xiao Yan who stopped it, and the way he stopped it told me more about the man I had fallen for than any tenderness could have.
He had Fang brought, and he did not rage, and he did not weep. He looked at the old man who had betrayed him for fifteen months, and he said, "How long have they held your daughter's debt."
And Fang broke — not from fear, from the specific unbearable mercy of being asked the true question by the person he had wronged — and told us everything. The debt, bought a year and a half ago, the very season the prince came home to die. The soft man from the Silver Reed who visited monthly and asked only small things, only how does he fare, only is he weaker, only who attends him now. The terror that had made a devoted man into an instrument, one small betrayal at a time, each one telling himself it was harmless, until he looked up and found he had been the eyes of his master's murderer for over a year. He wept on the floor of the Eastern Palace and begged not for his own life but for his daughter's, and asked only to be allowed to die usefully, and I looked at him and saw Fang and thought of the drowned surgeon and the fallen taster and understood, all the way down, how Wei really worked.
She did not recruit killers. She manufactured them, out of loyal people with someone to lose. She found the debt, the daughter, the fear, and she turned decency itself into her weapon, so that the very love that should have protected Xiao Yan — a steward's devotion, a mother's, a nurse's — became the mechanism of his death. It was the cruelest engine I had ever taken apart. And it meant that every instrument we found would be, underneath, another victim, which made the hunt a kind of grief that never stopped renewing itself.
"He can testify," I said, low, when Fang had been taken away under Jiang's guard. "He's a witness who can put the Silver Reed to the poisoning — his own debt, the soft man's questions, the pattern. He's frightened and he's guilty and he's ours, and he's the first living thread that runs from the money to the method. We protect him, we secure his testimony, and for the first time we have something a court can't wave away."
"We protect him," Xiao Yan agreed, and there was a weariness in it now, the weariness of a man learning exactly what his survival had cost the people who loved him. "Carefully. Slowly. He is worth more alive than any confession." He looked at me. "And Cora — they will know, soon, that we have him. A soft man from the Silver Reed will come this month for his monthly report and find his instrument gone quiet. The moment Wei learns Fang has turned, she will do to him what she did to the surgeon and the taster. He is not safe. He is a lit fuse. We must move him and hide him and secure what he knows before she reaches him." His eyes held mine, and there was warning in them. "Slowly. Do you hear me. This is the moment we most want to hurry, and hurrying is precisely how she has always won."
I heard him. I want that remembered. He told me, in plain words, exactly what would happen if we moved too fast, and I agreed with every one of them, and then I did not do what I agreed to, because a witness's life was on a clock and I have never in either of my lives been able to sit still while a clock ran down on someone I could save.
