Where the Peach Blossoms Fall

Episode7:The Lantern Festival Gambit

The Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival transformed the palace into something Wan almost didn't recognize.

Every courtyard blazed with paper lanterns in red and gold, strung between the eaves until the night sky itself seemed to have caught fire. Musicians played from hidden balconies. Nobles drifted through the gardens in their finest silks, trading pleasantries and alliances in equal measure, and for one night the rigid hierarchies of court life loosened just enough that an attendant might pass unremarked through crowds that would normally never have looked at her twice.

It was, Yuxiang had pointed out three days earlier in their increasingly frequent — and increasingly dangerous — orchard meetings, the perfect night to get close to Chancellor Wei without drawing suspicion.

"Everyone will be distracted," he'd said. "Including his personal guard, most of whom will be drinking by midnight. If there's a way into his study without forcing a lock, tonight is when we'll find it."

It had sounded reasonable in the cold morning light of the orchard. It sounded considerably less reasonable now, with Wan dressed in a borrowed silk robe two ranks above her actual station, moving through a crowd thick enough to hide in and thin enough to be seen in, every nerve in her body strung as tight as the festival's lanterns overhead.

"You're doing the thing again," Yuxiang murmured, falling into step beside her with a cup of spiced wine he wasn't drinking, playing the part of a minor noble enjoying the festivities for any watching eyes. "The careful-eyes thing. People will notice if you look like you're casing the building instead of celebrating."

"Forgive me. I don't have much practice celebrating while planning to burglarize an imperial Chancellor."

"Fair." A faint smile, there and gone, the kind he seemed to reserve only for her. "Try looking bored instead. Bored is less suspicious than vigilant."

She tried. It was, she found, considerably harder than it sounded, especially with Yuxiang close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the thin silk of her sleeve, especially when every instinct she'd spent years honing screamed that closeness like this was a liability she couldn't afford.

They reached the side entrance to the Chancellor's residence — the same bolted door she'd noted weeks ago — just as the festival's central drum performance began, loud enough to cover the small sounds of a lock being worked. Yuxiang kept watch while Wan's fingers found the mechanism, years of careful instruction in her father's courtyard finally proving useful for something other than memory.

The lock gave with a soft click.

They were three steps into the dark study, Wan already moving toward the locked cabinet she'd spotted through the window days before, when a voice spoke from the shadowed corner of the room — a voice that was not the Chancellor's, and far more dangerous for being unexpected.

"I did wonder how long it would take someone to try this."

A figure stepped from the darkness — not a guard, but a woman in fine consort's robes, young and sharp-eyed, whom Wan recognized with a jolt as Lady Zhen, a junior consort known at court for her ambition and her closeness to the Crown Prince's faction.

"Lady Zhen." Yuxiang's voice had gone perfectly, dangerously courteous. "You're a long way from the festival grounds."

"As are you, Second Prince. With company I don't believe I've been introduced to." Her eyes moved over Wan with an assessing coldness that made Wan's skin prickle. "An attendant from the Dowager's household, breaking into the Chancellor's study, escorted by a prince who's spent rather a lot of time near the eastern orchard lately. How curious."

"Curious enough that you've been watching," Wan said, before she could stop herself.

"Curious enough that I find myself in possession of information that could be very valuable to certain people, depending on what I decide to do with it." Lady Zhen's smile was thin, considering. "The question is what it's worth to you that I do nothing at all."

Wan's hand moved, slow and deliberate, toward the blade hidden in her sleeve — and Yuxiang's hand caught her wrist, light but firm, a silent warning. Not yet.

"What do you want?" he asked Lady Zhen.

"For tonight? Nothing." She studied them both with open curiosity now, ambition warring visibly with something that looked, unexpectedly, like sympathy. "I have no love for Chancellor Wei, Second Prince. He's blocked my family's advancement at court twice this year alone. Whatever you're looking for in his study, I find I have very little interest in stopping you." A pause, weighted. "But I will remember that I found you here. Information like this has a way of becoming useful eventually, to whoever holds it. I suggest you finish your business quickly, before someone less accommodating than I am wanders this way."

She was gone before either of them could respond further, slipping back into the festival crowds as though she'd never left them, leaving Wan's pulse hammering and Yuxiang's hand still loosely circling her wrist.

"That," Yuxiang said quietly, releasing her, "was considerably too close."

"She'll use it. Whatever she saw tonight, she'll use it the moment it benefits her." Wan was already moving toward the cabinet again, urgency sharpening every motion. "We need to be faster than this."

The cabinet held what she'd hoped for and feared in equal measure — a second copy of the southern registry, far more detailed than the fragments her father had buried, cross-referenced against names that confirmed everything the buried list had only hinted at. Chancellor Wei. Two generals still serving at court. And, written in a hand Wan didn't recognize but Yuxiang went very still upon seeing, a third name that made him go pale even in the dim light.

"What is it?" Wan asked.

"That's my brother's seal," Yuxiang said quietly, staring at a notation beside the Crown Prince's name — not damning on its own, but suggestive enough to tighten something cold around Wan's chest. "Su Wan, if Yuting has known about this — has been protecting it, profiting from it—"

He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to. They both understood, in the sudden silence of the Chancellor's darkened study, that whatever they'd just uncovered had stopped being a matter of clearing one general's name, and become something that could topple a crown prince's claim to the throne entirely.

Outside, the festival drums reached their crescendo, and fireworks bloomed gold and crimson over the palace roofs — beautiful, and entirely indifferent to the danger now sealed inside a folded scrap of stolen paper between them.

"We need to leave," Wan said. "Now. Before anyone realizes this is missing."

Yuxiang nodded, already moving toward the door, but he paused at the threshold, looking back at her with an expression she couldn't quite read in the dark — something caught between fear and a reckless, dangerous kind of resolve.

"Whatever happens after tonight," he said quietly, "I'm glad it was you I found in this orchard, and not someone I'd have had every reason to trust less."

Wan didn't have an answer for that — not one she trusted herself to give honestly, not with her heart still hammering from the danger and something else entirely, something she refused, even now, to name.

"Save the sentiment for after we survive the week," she said instead, and slipped past him into the lantern-lit dark, the stolen registry burning against her skin like a confession she wasn't ready to make.