Where the Peach Blossoms Fall

Episode4:Blade Beneath Silk

The Dowager Consort's household ran on a kind of silence Wan had not expected — not the silence of peace, but the silence of people too careful to speak plainly in front of each other.

She had been formally assigned to the Dowager's outer chambers six days after her arrival, a transfer she suspected had less to do with merit and more to do with the fact that the Dowager's steward, a sharp-eyed older woman named Madam Hui, had taken one look at Wan's straight back and quiet competence and decided she'd be useful. Wan had let herself be decided about. It put her closer to the heart of the palace than any orchard ever could.

It also put her, for the first time, within arm's reach of the people who might have written her father's death warrant.

"You're new," Madam Hui said on the second morning, not looking up from the ledger she was annotating. "Most new girls drop things. You haven't dropped anything."

"I'm careful," Wan said.

"Careful girls last longer here than clever ones." Madam Hui finally looked up, and her eyes were not unkind, exactly, but they missed nothing. "Clever girls think they're the only ones being careful. That's how they get caught."

Wan filed the warning away with the rest of her growing collection of palace truths, and said nothing, which seemed to be the correct response, because Madam Hui returned to her ledger with the faint air of someone satisfied by a test passed.

It was three days later, while sorting correspondence in the Dowager's antechamber, that Wan first heard the name that turned her careful composure into something closer to ice.

"—Chancellor Wei's petition, the Crown Prince has already lent his seal," one of the senior attendants was saying to another, low-voiced, behind a half-closed screen. "Three years ago it was the southern registries that got General Su killed for asking too many questions. Now the Chancellor wants them folded entirely under his personal authority, and no one above the rank of eunuch seems willing to ask why."

Wan's hands did not stop moving. She had trained for this — the years of her father's quiet insistence that a soldier's daughter learn to keep her face still no matter what her ears were doing — and she was grateful for it now, because everything in her wanted to turn, to demand names, to ask exactly which Chancellor and which seal and which questions her father had asked that had been worth more than his life.

Chancellor Wei. She had seen that name on the buried list. Third from the top.

"Don't speak so loudly about the Su affair," the other attendant murmured back. "Walls listen in this palace more than people do."

"It's old news. No one cares about a disgraced general's family anymore — there's nothing left of them to care about." A pause, then, with the particular cruelty of someone who didn't realize they were being cruel at all: "I heard the daughter disappeared. Probably drowned herself in shame, or starved somewhere in the provinces. Either way, it's finished."

Wan set down the letter she was folding with exquisite care, because her hands had begun, very slightly, to shake, and shaking hands made noise.

The daughter disappeared. Good. Let them believe that. Let every soul in this palace believe Su Wan was a ghost or a coward or simply gone, right up until the moment that belief stopped being useful to her.

She finished her work for the antechamber in silence, and that night, when the household had gone to sleep and the corridors had emptied into the particular hush that belonged only to the deepest hour before dawn, she went looking for Chancellor Wei's quarters.

She did not intend to confront him. She was not foolish enough, yet, to mistake fury for readiness. She intended only to look — to learn the shape of his household, his guards, his habits, the same way she had learned the orchard's rhythms before she trusted herself to move through them unnoticed.

What she found, crouched in the shadow of a side gate with her borrowed attendant's robes traded for darker, plainer clothes she'd stitched together herself from scraps too unremarkable to be missed, was a household far better guarded than a mere Chancellor's rank should have warranted. Two patrols where one would have sufficed. A side door bolted from within despite the lateness of the hour, as though someone expected trouble specifically through that entrance.

Men like this don't fear thieves, her father's voice reminded her, somewhere in memory, from years of training drills in their own modest courtyard. They fear the people who know what they've actually done.

Wan was beginning, very carefully, to become one of those people.

She was three-quarters of the way back toward her own quarters, moving through the orchard's outer path because it offered the most shadow and the fewest patrols, when a voice spoke from the darkness ahead of her and very nearly stopped her heart.

"You're out remarkably late for someone gathering petals, Su Lian."

She had her hand on the small concealed blade at her wrist before she'd even fully registered who'd spoken — and then recognized, with a jolt of something that was not quite relief, the dark traveling robes and sword-straight posture of the stranger from the orchard, several paces away, watching her with an expression caught between curiosity and something more careful underneath it.

"Lin Xiang." She let her hand fall away from the blade, slowly, hoping the movement had been too quick and too dark for him to have noticed it at all. "I might ask the same of you."

"I told you. I think better when the palace is asleep." His eyes moved over her — the plain dark clothes, nothing like the attendant's robes he'd seen her in before — and something sharpened in his expression, though his voice stayed light. "You've changed your wardrobe."

"Attendants do laundry too." It was a weak lie and she knew it the moment it left her mouth.

"At this hour. Near the Chancellor's residence." He said it without obvious accusation, almost gently, which somehow made it worse. "Su Lian, I'm not going to pretend I believe that."

Wan's pulse hammered, calculating exits, calculating how much he'd actually seen, calculating whether the calm, careful young man in front of her was about to become the first true threat to a plan she'd barely begun building. "Then what do you believe?" she asked, and was faintly surprised to hear how steady her own voice came out.

He studied her for a long moment in the dim orchard light, head tilted slightly in that same way he'd looked at her the first morning, as though she were a puzzle he found more interesting than alarming.

"I believe," he said finally, "that you're not who you say you are. And I believe I'm not entirely sure yet whether that should worry me." A faint, unreadable smile. "Walk with me back to the inner gate. It's safer than wandering alone in the dark near a Chancellor's household — for reasons I suspect you understand better than you're letting on."

It was not a command. It was, somehow, worse than a command — an offer, extended with no demand attached, from someone who had every reason to be suspicious of her and chose, instead, to simply walk beside her in silence.

Wan fell into step with him, blade still hidden at her wrist, secrets still hidden everywhere else, acutely aware that the boy beside her was either the most dangerous person she'd met in this palace or, infuriatingly, the only one who'd looked at her all week and seen something true.

She did not yet know which. She suspected, with growing unease, that she was going to find out far sooner than her plans had allowed for.