They did not so much send me to the Eastern Palace as dispose of me in its direction.
The young eunuch's name was Fu-an, and he was perhaps fifteen and visibly terrified of his own errand, and he walked me across half the palace in the blue dark of early night. The scale of the place undid me by degrees. I had thought, from the herb room, that I understood the size of the world I'd landed in. I understood nothing. We crossed courtyard after courtyard, each one large enough to hold the hospital I'd worked in, linked by covered walkways and moon gates and bridges over black canals, the whole vast machine of it lit by lanterns and patrolled by guards who did not look at us because we were beneath looking at. Over one wall, far off, I caught the glow of the city — the capital proper, a spread of ten thousand roofs and cook-fires I would not set foot in for months, humming faintly in the dark like a living thing. An entire civilization, going about its evening, four hundred years before the invention of nearly everything I knew how to do.
I made Fu-an talk. It steadied me, and it was information, and information was the only currency I had. The deeper we walked, the quieter and more neglected the courtyards became, until we were passing through gardens gone to seed, and I understood without being told that we were walking toward something the rest of the palace had turned its back on.
The Crown Prince, he told me, in a nervous rush once he decided the doomed scullery girl was safe to talk to. Xiao Yan. Eldest son of the Emperor, named heir at seven. Sent north at nineteen to hold the frontier against the horse-tribes, because a crown prince who can win a war is a crown prince who can hold a throne. He'd held the line six years and come home four months ago a hero — and within weeks he had begun to die.
"They say it's the border curse," Fu-an whispered, as though the words might turn and bite him. "The ghosts of the men who died up there, following him home to take him too. He burns and he wastes and no medicine touches it. The Grand Physician himself attends him. Even he can't turn it." He swallowed. "Three court doctors have failed him. And when a physician fails the Crown Prince — well. So now they send girls. To carry water, and empty the basins, and be near, when—" He couldn't finish. He didn't need to.
I asked the questions a surgeon asks. When had the wasting started. Did the fever come and go, or hold steady. Was it worse at any particular hour. Fu-an blinked at me, thrown that the mute condemned girl had opinions, and answered what he could: it came and went, worst in the deep of night, worse each time it returned; the prince had seemed almost mended twice and then been dragged back down. And there was, he admitted, ashamed of himself, a smell.
Comes and goes. Worst at night. Four months of wasting from a body that six months ago could hold a war. A smell.
I am a surgeon. I had a diagnosis before we reached the gate, and it had nothing to do with ghosts.
Fu-an also gave me, without meaning to, the shape of the board I was being set down upon — because a frightened boy repeats what he overhears, and the palace overheard everything. The Emperor was aging and unwell and had not named a new heir but had not defended his old one either, and around that silence the court had arranged itself into camps. There was the Empress Dowager, the prince's own grandmother, who cared for the dynasty's stability more than for any single grandson and had, it was whispered, already begun speaking of Xiao Yan in the past tense. There was the Noble Consort Wei, the Emperor's beloved favorite of a decade, mother of the Third Prince, famous for her poetry and her charities and her softness. There was the Third Prince himself, Xiao Che, who would rise a great deal if his elder brother happened to die. There were ministers and generals and factions I couldn't yet keep straight, all of them orbiting a dying sun and calculating the dawn. Everyone, it seemed, had a reason to feel one way or another about whether the Crown Prince saw the spring.
That was worth noting. In my experience, when a strong young man begins to die slowly and inexplicably in a house full of people who benefit from his death, the ghosts are rarely the thing you should be investigating.
The Eastern Palace, once we were inside its walls, was beautiful and abandoned in the same breath — the courtiers fled from a setting sun, only a skeleton staff and a knot of hard-faced guards remaining, men who watched me arrive with the flat assessment of soldiers who had stopped expecting help to come through that gate. One of them stepped into my path. Tall, still, a scar splitting one eyebrow, the particular economy of a man who had killed and would again. Captain Jiang, Fu-an breathed. The prince's own man, brought back from the north.
"Another girl." Not a question. His eyes went over me once and dismissed me. "Basins are through there. You don't speak to him. You don't touch him unless the physician says so. When it's—" Something moved behind the flat of his face, quickly caught and buried, and I recognized it because I had worn it myself in a hundred family rooms: grief, standing at attention. "When it's time, you'll be told what to do. Go in."
I went in.
Heat met me first — the inner chamber was close as a kiln, curtains drawn, a brazier burning for no reason a fevered man needed. Then the dark. And then, beneath the incense they were burning to mask it, the smell told me the rest of the diagnosis before my eyes had finished adjusting. Sweet and rotten and utterly unmistakable: the smell of a body feeding on itself, of infection walled up somewhere it cannot drain. I have met that smell in gangrenous limbs and in abscesses buried deep in living tissue, and it means the same thing every time. Something inside this person has been fighting, and losing, for a long time, and soon it will win — unless someone opens the door and lets it out.
He lay on the bed. And even wasted, even grey, even soaked through with fever, the Crown Prince Xiao Yan was not the thing I had been led to expect.
He was watching the door.
Not delirious. Not gone. His eyes — dark, sunken, glassy with heat — found me and tracked me across the room with a cold and exact attention that lifted the hair on my borrowed arms. Here was no man drifting toward a peaceful end. Here was a man who had lain in the dark for months, too weak to lift a blade, studying everyone who came through his door and deciding, one at a time, which of them had come to help him die.
"Another one," he said. His voice was a ruin, but the words came precise. "They send them younger now. My grandmother must have decided the end is close enough to be tidy about the witnesses." His cracked mouth curved, without warmth. "Well, girl. Have you come to fluff my pillow, or to hold it over my face? Some of the others were sent for the second. You can tell, in the end, by the hands."
The correct response was to bow, to murmur, to empty a basin and keep my head down for one night while I learned the room.
Instead I crossed to the bed and did what I have always done in a room with a dying person in it. I set down every other thing I was, and I became a clinician.
"Where's the wound?" I said.
The curve went off his mouth. In the dark, those fever-bright eyes narrowed to points.
"What did you say?"
"The wound. From the north. Four months ago — something that closed on the surface and never healed underneath. Left side or right?" My hand was already moving to the edge of the quilt, and Captain Jiang was suddenly there, a grip like an iron bar closing on my wrist — but the prince lifted two fingers off the bedclothes, barely an inch, and the captain went still. "And spare me the ghosts," I added. "Ghosts don't smell like that. That's a wound gone bad."
Xiao Yan looked at me for a long, long moment. Something stirred behind the fever, something that had been starving longer than his body had.
"Left," he said at last. "Below the ribs. An arrow, at Yan Pass. The field surgeon cut the shaft and closed it and I rode home." His gaze did not leave my face. "Three physicians have looked at me since. They burned incense and told me the poison of the frontier is in my blood, and in my fate. Not one of them has said the word wound to me in two months." A breath. "Who are you."
"Nobody," I said. "A scullery girl named Shen Yao." My hand found his left side, below the ribs, and I felt him flinch, and I felt exactly what I already knew was waiting there — the heat of it, the taut swollen wrongness under the skin, a fist of trapped infection the size of my palm that his body had spent four months trying to wall away and could no longer hold. "But I'll tell you the thing three physicians wouldn't."
I met his eyes.
"You are not cursed. You are rotting, slowly, around something they left inside you, and it is going to kill you in about a week." I pressed, gently, and watched him go grey with the pain of it and make no sound at all, and revised my estimate of the man sharply upward. "Unless someone opens it and lets it out."
The silence in that room had a texture to it.
Behind me, Captain Jiang had stopped breathing. Somewhere near the door, Fu-an had gone very still.
And the Crown Prince Xiao Yan — who had lain in the dark for two months listening to wise men explain that heaven had marked him to die — began, very quietly, to laugh. It was a terrible cracked sound that folded into a cough, and the cough flecked his lip with blood, and still he laughed, because a man who has made his peace with dying finds something genuinely funny in being told he might not have to.
"They gave me a curse," he said, when he could speak again, wiping his mouth with the back of one shaking hand, "and heaven answered with a scullery girl who talks like a field surgeon." Those burning eyes fixed on mine, and whatever had been starving behind them had come fully awake. "Tell me, ghost in a servant's skin. If someone cut it open — could you do it?"
I thought about the room I was standing in. No anesthesia. No antibiotics. No suction, no clamps, no light, no clean field, no second pair of trained hands, no blood to give back what he'd lose, nothing — in the body of a half-starved girl with no strength in her arms, on a prince whose death would almost certainly take my head with it.
"Yes," I said. "But it very likely kills you, and then it kills me. So think carefully before you answer, Your Highness. This is the last easy breath either of us gets."
"I have been dying carefully for four months," Xiao Yan said. "I find I have lost my taste for it."
He turned his head to the captain, and for the first time there was something in his ravaged face that was not resignation. It was the thing I would come to know better than my own pulse, in the strange years that followed. It was appetite. The specific hunger of a man who has just been handed, against all reason, a reason to fight.
"Give her what she asks for," he said. "Whatever she asks for. And Jiang—" the ghost of the old command came back into the wreck of his voice "—no one outside this room learns that the girl touched me. As far as the palace is concerned, tonight is the night the curse begins, at last, to win."
