Where the Peach Blossoms Fall

Episode5:The Wrong Kind of Rival

Yuxiang did not sleep well after the orchard.

He told himself it was the obvious things — the Chancellor's petition, his brother's growing faction, the slow tightening of a noose he could feel but not yet see the shape of. He did not tell himself the truer thing, which was that he kept replaying the moment Su Lian's hand had moved toward her wrist in the dark, fast and trained and utterly unlike the reflex of any attendant he'd ever met, and finding that the memory unsettled him less than it probably should have.

By the third sleepless night, he admitted to himself what he'd been avoiding: he wanted to know who she really was, and not entirely for reasons of palace security.

"You're distracted," Chen Mu observed, with the particular bluntness of a servant who had earned the right to it over many years. They were in Yuxiang's study, ostensibly reviewing correspondence from a southern garrison commander, though Yuxiang suspected he'd read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word of it.

"I'm thinking."

"You're thinking about the new attendant in the Dowager's household."

Yuxiang set the letter down with more force than necessary. "Has gossip really traveled that fast, or are you simply very good at your job?"

"Both," Chen Mu said, unbothered. "Madam Hui mentioned to one of the kitchen staff that the new girl carries herself oddly for someone of supposedly humble birth. Straight spine. Quick hands. Doesn't startle easily." A pause, weighted. "It sounds rather like someone trained for something other than folding letters."

"I'd noticed." Yuxiang did not elaborate on exactly how he'd noticed, or under what circumstances, and Chen Mu was tactful enough — or perhaps simply experienced enough with his prince's habit of wandering palace grounds at inconvenient hours — not to ask.

"You think she's connected to the Su affair."

"I think," Yuxiang said carefully, "that a girl with the same surname as an executed general, who appeared in the palace within months of the Chancellor moving to seize the very records that general died questioning, who carries herself like a soldier and lies about her wardrobe — I think that's either an extraordinary coincidence, or it's the most dangerous thread in this entire palace, and I don't yet know which answer frightens me more."

Chen Mu was quiet for a moment. "And if it's the second answer? What do you intend to do?"

Yuxiang didn't have a clean answer for that, which troubled him more than he let show. The correct, careful, second-prince answer was simple: report his suspicions to the proper authority, let the matter be handled by people with the rank and resources to handle it, and remove himself from any entanglement with a possible conspirator before it could touch him. It was the answer that kept princes alive long enough to become old, irrelevant uncles instead of cautionary tales.

He found, turning the matter over, that he had no intention of giving that answer at all.

"I intend to find out who she actually is," he said, "before I decide whether she's an enemy."

"That's not the same as deciding she isn't one."

"No," Yuxiang agreed. "It isn't."

He found her again two mornings later — not by accident this time, though he allowed himself the comfort of pretending it might look that way to anyone watching. The orchard at dawn had become, without his quite choosing it, the only place in the palace where he didn't feel like he was performing a role written for him by other people.

She was crouched near the third tree again, fingers moving through the cold soil with a focus that had nothing to do with gathering petals, and she startled — actually startled, for once, a flicker of alarm crossing her face before she smoothed it away — when his shadow fell across her.

"You're digging," he said.

"I'm gardening." Her composure returned almost instantly, but not quite fast enough; he'd seen the flicker, and they both knew it.

"At dawn. In soil that's already been turned at least once before, judging by how loose it is." He crouched beside her, close enough to see the tension in her shoulders, far enough to give her room to lie if she needed it. "Su Lian. Or whatever your name actually is. I'd like to help you, if you'll let me."

"Why would you want to help a stranger you've caught lying to you twice?"

It was a fair question, and Yuxiang turned it over honestly before answering, because he suspected she'd see through anything less than honesty. "Because you remind me of someone who's spent a long time being underestimated, and I find I have very little patience left for watching that happen to people." A pause. "And because whatever you're looking for in this orchard, I think it might be connected to something I've been trying — badly — to investigate myself."

That got her attention. She looked up at him properly for the first time since he'd arrived, eyes sharp and assessing in a way that made him feel, not for the first time, like he was the one being investigated rather than the other way around.

"What would a man like you," she said slowly, "know about the southern tax registries?"

Yuxiang felt something cold settle in his chest — not fear, exactly, but the particular vertigo of watching two separate, careful suspicions click into place at once. "I haven't mentioned the southern registries."

"No," she agreed. "You haven't."

Neither of them spoke for a long moment, the silence stretched taut between two people who had each, independently and for entirely different reasons, arrived at the edges of the same dangerous truth, and were only now beginning to realize they were standing in the same place.

"My name," Yuxiang said finally, very quietly, "is Lin Yuxiang."

He watched the name land. Watched her go very still, the way a soldier goes still when the ground shifts beneath them and the only safe response is to stop moving entirely until the danger reveals its shape. Watched her do the rapid, silent arithmetic he'd already done himself three nights ago in his study — prince, not commoner; family that signed the order, not family that questioned it — and watched her decide, in real time, whether the boy in front of her was the answer to her father's death or simply one more obstacle standing between her and it.

"Second prince," she said at last, voice carefully flat.

"Second prince," he confirmed. "Largely ignored, mostly harmless, and apparently very bad at staying out of conversations I should know better than to start." He held her gaze, steady despite the danger humming under every word now exchanged between them. "I don't know what you're looking for in this orchard, Su Lian. But I know it matters enough that you dug through frozen ground for it twice now, and I know the registries your search seems to circle have already cost one general his life."

He let the silence settle, then added, quieter: "I'd rather know what I'm walking into than be blindsided by it. Whichever of us that protects."

It was, Wan thought, watching him with her pulse hammering and every trained instinct screaming contradictory warnings, either the most honest thing anyone in this palace had said to her since she'd arrived — or the most dangerous trap anyone had ever set this carefully.

She did not yet know which.

She was beginning, with great reluctance, to suspect it might be both.