Where the Peach Blossoms Fall

The rain had stopped an hour before dawn, but the ground beneath the peach orchard was still soft enough to dig. Su Wan worked in silence, her hands raw, her sleeves soaked through with mud and something darker that had not quite dried. Each shovelful of earth came up heavy and reluctant, as if the ground itself understood what it was being asked to hide. Above her, the peach trees stood bare of blossoms — it was the wrong season for them, weeks too early, and she found herself absurdly grateful for that small mercy. She did not think she could have borne it, burying her father beneath flowers in full bloom, petals drifting down onto a shallow grave like something out of a poem written by a man who had never buried anyone at all. General Su Jian had been a careful man his whole life. Careful with his soldiers, careful with his words at court, careful — fatally, as it turned out — with his trust. He had served three campaigns for the Jiankang throne without losing a single garrison, and in the end none of it mattered, because the men who wanted him dead had never needed him to be guilty. They had only needed him to be inconvenient. Wan set down the shovel and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, smearing mud across her cheek. Somewhere beyond the orchard wall, the palace bells were ringing the change of the night watch — three notes, low and indifferent, marking an hour that did not care what had been lost in it. "They'll send soldiers to look for you," she said to the grave, because there was no one else to say it to. "They already think you're a coward who ran rather than face the block. Let them think it a little longer. It will make this easier." She had not cried since the execution ground. She did not cry now. There was a kind of grief that moved past tears entirely, settling instead into something colder and more useful — a grief that organized itself into a plan. Her father's last words to her, passed through a jailer bribed with the last silver they owned, had been four sentences long. The charges are false. The Chancellor's seal is on the order, but the hand that wrote it was not his. Trust no one in red. Find the orchard at Jiankang Palace — what I buried there will tell you who to burn. She had not understood the last part until she arrived at the palace gates three days ago under a dead woman's identity papers, and asked, with carefully practiced indifference, which orchard belonged to the old Dowager's household. The steward had pointed her toward this one without a second glance — an unremarkable patch of peach trees behind the eastern wall, tended by junior attendants too far beneath court notice for anyone to watch closely. It was, she now understood, exactly why her father had chosen it. Some secrets were safest hidden where no one thought to look for secrets at all. She had spent her first night as a palace attendant digging by moonlight instead of sleeping, and what she found beneath the third tree from the well — wrapped in oilcloth, buried deep enough that three years of seasons hadn't disturbed it — was not the proof of innocence she had hoped for. It was worse. It was a list of names. Officials. Generals. A tax registry for a province that, according to the Ministry of Revenue, did not officially exist. And at the bottom, in her father's unmistakable hand, six words that she had read so many times in the past three days that they had stopped looking like writing and started looking like a wound: The Chancellor is not working alone. Wan knelt now beside the place she had reburied both the papers and her father, and she allowed herself — just once, just for the length of this single dark hour before the orchard workers would begin to stir — to feel the full weight of what she had walked into. She was nineteen years old. She had no family left, no name she could safely use, no allies inside walls built specifically to keep people like her out. She had a sword she'd hidden in a hollowed-out roof beam, three years of training her father had given her in secret because a general's daughter was not supposed to need such things, and a list of names she did not yet know how to use. It would have to be enough. "I will find out who really gave the order," she whispered, pressing her palm flat against the cool turned earth. "I will find every name on that list, and I will watch this palace burn around them if that is what it costs. I swear it on the peach blossoms that should be blooming over you right now, and aren't, because the world owes you that much beauty and hasn't paid it yet. I will make them pay it instead." The bells rang again, four notes this time — the watch had changed, which meant the orchard's day workers would arrive within the hour to find an attendant they didn't recognize already at her tasks, hands dirty, eyes red-rimmed from a sleepless night she would blame on homesickness if anyone asked. She rose, smoothed down her borrowed attendant's robes, and looked for the first time at the orchard in the gray light of approaching dawn — at the bare branches that would, in a few weeks, be heavy with blossoms whether she wanted them to be or not, because peach trees did not know how to mourn, only how to bloom on schedule regardless of what was buried beneath them. She did not yet know that the path she had just sworn herself to would lead her, within the month, into the company of a prince she had never met and was already destined to either save or destroy. She did not know his name yet — Lin Yuxiang — or that he walked these same orchard paths most mornings before court, alone, for reasons of his own that had nothing to do with revenge and everything to do with a prophecy he'd spent his whole life trying to outrun. She knew only this: that grief had given her a sword's edge instead of a wound, that her father's name would be cleared or the empire would burn trying, and that somewhere beneath her feet, six buried names were waiting to become six reckonings. The sun rose over Jiankang. Su Wan picked up her shovel, smoothed the last of the disturbed earth flat, and walked back toward the palace to begin the work of becoming someone the court would never suspect — right up until the moment it was far too late for them to stop her.