Where the Peach Blossoms Fall

Episode6:Hatred Wears a Pretty Face

She should have run.

Every instinct her father had trained into her, every hour of drilling in their quiet courtyard that had taught her to read a room before it could ambush her, was screaming the same warning: a prince knows your face, your false name, and the direction of your search — leave now, before he decides what to do with that knowledge.

Instead, Su Wan knelt in the cold orchard dirt across from Lin Yuxiang and said, with a calm she did not feel, "Prove it."

"Prove what?"

"That you actually care about the registries, and this isn't some elaborate way of drawing out whoever's been asking questions about General Su." Her voice came out steadier than her hands felt. "Princes don't wander orchards at dawn out of idle curiosity, Your Highness. Forgive me for assuming the worst."

Something flickered across his face — not offense, which surprised her, but something closer to grim recognition. "You're right not to trust easily. I'd think less of you if you did." He sat back on his heels, putting visible distance between them, a small gesture that registered as deliberate. "Three years ago, General Su Jian was executed for treason on evidence I was never permitted to see. I was seventeen. I assumed, the way seventeen-year-olds assume things, that the adults around me knew something I didn't, and that the matter was closed because it deserved to be closed."

He paused, and when he continued his voice had gone lower, rougher at the edges. "Eight months ago I found a scroll in the ancestral archive that has nothing to do with General Su directly, but everything to do with the idea that this dynasty's foundations might be built on more lies than anyone's willing to admit. Since then I've been pulling at threads I don't fully understand, and every thread leads back to the same southern registries the Chancellor is now trying to seize outright." He met her eyes. "I don't know what happened to General Su. I know it troubles me more than it should for a man with no real power to do anything about it. That's the truth, Su Lian. I don't have a better one to offer you."

It would have been so much easier, Wan thought, if he'd lied badly. If he'd performed sincerity the way courtiers performed everything, all surface and no weight beneath it. Instead he'd given her something that sounded uncomfortably like the truth, delivered by someone who clearly wasn't accustomed to admitting uncertainty out loud, and she hated — hated — how much that honesty cost her composure.

"My name," she said, before she could stop herself, "is Su Wan."

The orchard went very quiet.

"General Su's daughter," Yuxiang said slowly, "is supposed to be dead. Or vanished. I've heard both versions."

"I let them believe whichever version was more convenient." Wan lifted her chin, daring him to react. "I came here to find proof that my father was murdered for asking the wrong questions, and to make whoever ordered it answer for what they did. That's not a confession, Your Highness. That's a warning. I would advise you to consider very carefully what you do with it."

She expected anger. She expected the cold recalculation of a man realizing he'd been speaking to an enemy of his own house, the swift retreat of someone protecting his family's name even when his family's name didn't deserve protecting. She had braced for it the way she braced for everything now — flat-faced, ready to run, blade already a calculated half-second from her hand.

What she had not braced for was the way his expression simply... settled. Not into anger. Into something that looked, infuriatingly, like relief.

"Good," he said.

"Good?"

"You have every reason to want this palace to burn, and instead of burning it blindly you're gathering proof first. That tells me you want the truth more than you want blood, even though you'd be entitled to want both." He held her gaze, steady. "I'd rather have someone like that as an ally than be the obstacle standing in your way, Su Wan. I'd much rather that than the alternative."

"You'd ally yourself with the daughter of a man your own family condemned?"

"My family condemned him on the Chancellor's evidence, presented to an Emperor who was already half-convinced by a faction eager to remove a general too honest to be controlled." Something hard entered his voice, the first real edge she'd heard from him. "If my family did that to an innocent man, Su Wan, I want to know it. I'd rather carry that truth than keep wearing the comfortable lie."

It was, Wan realized with a slow, unwelcome dawning, exactly the kind of thing that made a person dangerous to hate cleanly. She had built her entire plan on a simple architecture: the imperial house had killed her father, and every person who carried that house's blood was, by definition, an enemy to be used or removed as the plan required. It was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to let her move through this palace as a blade and nothing softer.

Lin Yuxiang, infuriatingly, refused to be simple.

"I don't trust you," she said, which was not entirely true anymore and they both seemed to know it.

"You don't have to," he said. "Trust the registries instead. Trust that we both want the same answer for different reasons, and that those reasons don't have to cancel each other out." A faint, wry twist of his mouth. "I'm not asking you to forgive my family, Su Wan. I'm asking you to let me help you prove whether they deserve to be forgiven at all."

She studied him for a long moment in the brightening dawn light — the prince who'd rather know an uncomfortable truth than rest in a comfortable lie, who'd handed her his real name in a dark orchard with no leverage to make her keep his secret in return, who looked, even now, more like a man bracing for a blow than one delivering one.

"If you betray me," she said quietly, "I will make sure the last thing you understand, before the end, is exactly why."

"Understood." He didn't flinch from it, which she found she respected more than she wanted to. "Same condition applies to you, for what it's worth. I have very little left to protect besides the truth. I'd rather not lose that too."

It was not trust. Wan was careful, even now, even with something dangerously close to relief loosening in her chest, not to mistake it for trust. It was something smaller and more provisional — a shared direction, two people walking the same dark road from opposite reasons, neither willing yet to set down their weapons.

But it was, she admitted to herself as she finally rose from the cold ground and the prince rose with her, more than she had expected to find in this palace. And far more dangerous to her plans than any enemy could have been.

She did not yet know that the careful boundary she'd just drawn — ally, not friend; useful, not trusted — was already, quietly, beginning to crack.