The hardest patient to keep alive is the one everyone believes is already gone, because you have to hide the keeping.
For eleven days I nursed a recovering prince inside the performance of a dying one, and it was the strangest medicine I have ever practiced. By day, the Eastern Palace saw what it expected to see: a shrouded, darkened sickroom; a Crown Prince too weak to sit; a knot of grim loyal men keeping a deathwatch; and a new scullery girl carrying covered basins out with her eyes down, unremarkable, expendable, exactly as ordered. By night, behind a barred door, I changed honey-packed dressings and watched a wound granulate clean and fed a starving body back toward the strength it had lost, and Xiao Yan and I built, in whispers, the thing that would keep us both alive: a lie thorough enough to fool a palace, and a plan patient enough to outlast an enemy who had waited fifteen years.
Because it was fifteen years. He told me, in those long nights, and the telling cost him.
His mother, the Empress, had died when he was eleven — a wasting illness, the court had called it, a slow failing no physician could name. He had never believed the court. Within two years his father had raised the Consort Wei above every other woman in the palace, and her son grew up petted and positioned. The weight of the court shifted, degree by degree, over a decade — not enough to unseat a crown prince outright, but enough that when that prince rode north to a war that might oblige everyone by killing him, a great many powerful people quietly hoped it would. It hadn't. He had come home a hero, more dangerous to them alive than he had ever been. And then, on schedule, he had begun to die of a curse.
"The same patience," he said, staring at the canopy, his voice stronger every night and no warmer for it. "The same slowness. The same certainty that no one would ever look. They took my mother that way and no one looked. They meant to take me the same way. Fifteen years, and the only piece of proof was buried in my own body." He turned his head and looked at the girl who had reached in and brought it out into the light. "And then you fell out of the sky into my sickroom and handed it to me in a dish."
"It isn't proof yet," I said, because a surgeon does not let a patient believe the tumor is gone until the margins come back clean. "It's a piece of iron. It proves you had an arrow in you, which everyone already knew. To prove it was left there on purpose, we need to know who cut the shaft in the field, and why the tip broke the way it did, and who told a court physician to burn incense over a wound he should have opened. That's not medicine anymore. That's a case. And I'm a surgeon, not a magistrate."
"You are whatever this palace needs you to be to survive it," he said. "As am I. We have that in common, you and I. More than you know." He was watching me in the lamplight with that attention that never fully rested. "Which brings me to the thing I have been turning over for three nights. You are not from a rival house. You are not a plant — no one plants an assassin who saves the target. You talk like no physician I have met and no woman I have met and no servant who ever lived. You answer to a name that means nothing in any of the seven provinces. And you knew, before you touched me, exactly what you would find." A pause. "So I will ask you once, and I will not ask again, and I will believe whatever you tell me because you have earned that much. What are you, Cora?"
I had known the question was coming. I had lain awake in the servants' quarters rehearsing lies for it — a wandering physician, a foreign teacher, a temple upbringing — and every one of them had fallen apart in my mouth, because he was too sharp to sell a lie to and because, God help me, I was tired of being no one in a world where I had lost everyone.
So I told him the truth, and I watched to see whether it would end me.
"I come from very far away," I said. "Further than the frontier. Further than you can ride or sail or imagine. Not a country. A — I don't have the word for it in your language, and I've looked. Another time. I went to sleep a woman with a whole life, a name, a family, work I was good at, and I woke up in a dead girl's body grinding herbs, and I do not know why, and I do not know how, and I do not know if it holds." I made myself keep my eyes on his. "Where I come from, we can look inside a living body without cutting it. We can kill the invisible things that rot a wound. We have medicines that would have saved your mother in a week, that would have taken that iron out of you before the fever ever started, that could empty half the graves in your capital." My voice did something I did not give it leave to do. "And I will never see any of it again. I understood that the morning your fever broke. Whatever fell me into this world, it does not send people back. I am here now. This is where I die, a second time, whenever that comes."
The silence stretched so long I thought I had lost him — that even a man who had believed in an assassin's iron could not believe in a woman fallen out of time.
"My grandmother told stories," Xiao Yan said at last, slowly. "When I was small. Before my mother died and the stories stopped. Of souls that cross over. Of a person carried, in one night, a thousand years, into a stranger's skin, to finish a thing that could not be finished any other way." His dark eyes did not leave my face. "I stopped believing them the year I learned that the world is run by men, not spirits, and that the men are worse. But I lay in this bed for two months waiting to die, and no medicine and no prayer and no wise man touched it, and then a girl who cannot possibly know what she knows walked in and cut my death out with a paring knife." A breath. "I find I would rather believe you fell out of the sky than believe that heaven was simply, finally, in a giving mood. The first, at least, I can plan around."
I laughed. It surprised us both. It was the first time I had laughed since I died.
"You believe me," I said.
"I believe the iron in the dish, and I believe my own eyes, and the two of them leave me no cheaper explanation." He shifted against the pillows, and for a moment the emperor's grandson showed through the invalid, cool and certain and already three moves down a road I couldn't see. "And I will tell you what it changes, Cora-from-another-time. It changes nothing about the war and everything about how we fight it. They believe I am a dying man alone in a cold palace with a deathwatch of expendable girls. They are wrong about exactly one of those girls. That is the only advantage I have, and I do not mean to waste it by letting them find out what you are." His voice hardened. "So you will go on being no one. A drudge. A shadow with a basin. And behind that nothing, you will be the one thing in this palace they cannot account for. Can you live as no one, for a while? I know what it costs. I have watched better people than me be broken by less."
I thought about it. I thought about a lifetime of being someone — chief resident, attending, the woman who does not fall apart — and about how much of that self had been armor, and about how little of it I had left.
"I've been no one for eleven days," I said. "It turns out the work is the same either way. The person in front of me still needs me to be steady. That part travels." I picked up the dish with the little iron fragment. "So. You want a war. Tell me who I'm cutting."
He almost smiled.
"That," he said, "is the trouble. I have spent four months certain of the hand and unable to name it, because there are too many hands that would fit. My grandmother, who has already buried me in her heart for the good of the dynasty. My father's favorite, who smiles like sugar and has a son who would rise if I fell. That son. The ministers who have chosen their side and cannot afford to have chosen wrong. The generals in the north who answer to money as often as to me." He ticked them off, flat, a man who had lain awake doing exactly this a hundred nights. "Any of them could want me dead. Several of them do. And the one who acted on it has spent fifteen years making certain that when anyone finally looked, they would look anywhere but at the truth." His eyes met mine. "You told me not to pick. You told me to test. So we test. All of them. Quietly, from a sickbed, with a shadow who carries basins and misses nothing." A pause. "It is the slowest war I have ever fought, and the first one I have ever thought I might win."
Outside, somewhere across the sleeping palace, a bell marked the deep of the night, and the deathwatch went on believing it was a deathwatch, and the two of us sat in the lamplight and began, patiently, to plan the resurrection.
