Chapter 11: The Dancing Water Sprite

What am I even doing this for? Maomao asked herself, pouting as she prepared the cloth-wrapped package. It was the sort of thing she used when purchasing medicinal herbs. She didn't grow and harvest everything herself, after all. Sometimes she turned to a specialist, the same way one would get one's mochi from a place that made nothing but pounded rice cakes.

Maomao looked for Sazen, and found him listlessly sweeping the foyer of the Verdigris House. He'd slept for several days straight after Maomao had gotten home, but as he started to look healthier, the madam began to work him harder again, and meanwhile Maomao was making him study apothecary's work in his spare time.

"Could you watch the shop for me? I'm just going to the next village; I'll be back this evening," she said, leaning out the window.

Sazen flinched and rested his chin on the end of the broom.

"You mean it? And is watching the shop all I have to do?" Under Maomao's relentless tutelage, Sazen had become a pretty competent worker, but it seemed he was still leery of having to take over for very long.

"Take down any of the herbs hanging from the ceiling that have dried and powder them. Preserve them just like we always do."

"Yeah, sure thing." Sazen leaned the broom against the wall, then reached under his shirt and scratched his belly, which Maomao rewarded with a glower. She could see the dirt getting underneath his fingernails.

"And make sure you wash your hands," she added.

"Don't have to tell me twice."

"Under your fingernails too!"

Yes, Sazen was a quick study, but he could do with a little

more interest in hygiene. Plenty of their customers would complain if he wasn't. Maomao would have to keep reminding him.

I wonder if I'm still in time for the shared carriage, she thought. Renting a carriage all for oneself was expensive. Carriages came to the capital several times per day to deliver provisions, though, and since they unloaded their cargo here, they had room to serve as shared rides on the return journey. It took time and was about the most uncomfortable way to travel, but it had one unquestionable advantage: it was cheap.

"You going somewhere, Freckles?" Chou-u asked, revealing front teeth that were starting to grow back in. His loyal henchman Zulin was beside him. Maomao gave them both a sour look, then pushed past the children and out of the apothecary shop. "Hey, you are going somewhere, aren't you?" Chou-u called after her.

"Is it the market? If you're going shopping, I wanna go too!"

He grabbed Maomao the cat, who had been sleeping in the foyer, and used her paw to poke Maomao the human in a Take-

me, take-me gesture. "Nrah!" the cat objected.

"I'm going to the woods," Maomao finally said. "It's a boring spot in the middle of nowhere."

"The woods! I wanna go to the woods! Take me! Take me! Take me!" The cat's poking became a veritable slapping. The feline Maomao was no happier about this than the human one, kicking her legs until she freed herself from Chou-u's grasp.

Instead, Chou-u flung himself on the ground. Maomao would have thought a kid would be over throwing tantrums like that at ten years old, but maybe his pampered upbringing had left him behind on maturity. He seemed ahead of his years in some ways; Maomao could only rue that this wasn't one of them. Zulin was preparing to imitate her "boss," but Maomao grabbed her by the collar and stood her up straight before she could make it to the ground.

"I'll report you to the madam," Maomao warned her, at which point Zulin froze and shook her head vigorously. Evidently her heart hadn't been in the tantrum; she'd just been following Chouu.

"What's all the racket out here?" The madam appeared, looking tired. Zulin flinched.

"I'm going to go get some herbs. He would only get in my way, and you know it." She pointed at Chou-u, who was still rolling on the floor.

The madam squinted at Chou-u, then let out an exasperated sigh and said, "Oh, take him, already."

"What?" Maomao asked, her unhappiness written on her face. She'd been sure that the madam, an eminently practical woman, would see that there was no reason to bring a troublesome brat on a work trip.

"What? No way! You mean it, Gramma?" Chou-u sprang triumphantly to his feet.

Zulin started to bounce up and down in imitation, but the madam held her down with a hand on her head. "Not you." Zulin's head drooped in disappointment. Unlike Chou-u, who seemed to cop special treatment at every turn, she was an apprentice. If she were to be allowed to go with Maomao and Chou-u, it would set a bad example for the other trainees. Zulin had been essentially a bonus who came with her older sister, but if she didn't prove eventually that she could do something to make money, she would certainly be shunted directly into courtesan's work.

Chou-u patted his despondent lackey on the back. "Don't worry, I'll be sure to bring you a souvenir!"

"And who's going to pay for this souvenir?" Maomao interjected immediately.

Chou-u ignored her, instead continuing to Zulin, "You'll be able to go outside one day. Just hang in there—I'll buy you out eventually!"

Maomao almost choked. Where had he learned to talk like that? And did he know that most of the customers who said that sort of thing were shiftless good-for-nothings?

The madam, ignoring the jabbering kid, nudged Maomao.

"And why am I taking him, exactly?" Maomao growled at her.

The madam stuck her hand into her collar and scratched her collarbone. "You were gone for an age there. You know how

Chou-u was acting while you were away?"

Well, of course she didn't. Probably shouting and playing, like he always did. He was pretty close to Ukyou the manservant; he could get along fine without Maomao.

"Believe it or not, he was depressed," the madam said. "Think about it. The boy comes here with no parents, and then even you leave him. Anyone would be upset."

"Not what I expected to hear from a monster of an old lady who would gladly buy a little girl from a procurer," Maomao replied, the sarcasm thick in her voice. Until Luomen had adopted her, she'd been left alone in a room, ignored no matter how hard she cried. And when the infant Maomao had realized that crying never got her anywhere, she had ceased to do it. It might have been one reason her emotional expression seemed so subdued.

She didn't specifically resent anyone for that; for that matter, she didn't personally remember it. The woman who had borne her had work to do, as did Pairin, who'd been the one to give her milk. At the time, the Verdigris House had been on the edge of collapse, and Maomao had been the object of some anger. She considered herself lucky no one had simply strangled her.

"If they're being sold by a procurer, then their fate is already decided. It's their parents' karma, and not my problem. But I raise them and educate them so they can do useful work—don't you think that's awfully kind of me? Remember, if they grow up to be dumbasses who can't do anything, they're not going to stay here."

"And what about Chou-u?"

"Figuring out what to do with him is your business. I'm just keeping an eye on him to make sure he doesn't die. I do get paid for my trouble, after all."

Uh-huh. Maomao wondered solemnly exactly how much the madam was getting out of this.

"As for your transportation, you can skip the shared carriage.

I'll arrange one for you. You should be grateful," the madam said.

"Gee, awfully generous of you. I'm not paying fare, you know."

"It'll help cover the potatoes," the madam replied, then headed for the menservants' room. Maomao watched her go, tilting her head in puzzlement.

I really don't want to take him, she thought. She was heading for a place the man last night had described to her. Maomao had gotten him to tell her what he knew about the woman in the picture—where Chou-u's "master" had seen this woman with white hair and red eyes. She was curious, too, about the story of the painter's encounter with another such woman in Shaoh all those years ago, but for now she had other things on her mind.

It was more than six months ago that the painter had seen the woman in a village where he went to get pigments. He claimed she truly looked like an immortal.

"He said she danced on the water," the man had told Maomao. The scene was so uncanny that the painter thought he must have dreamed it, in part because he'd wound up at the lake while thoroughly drunk. He collected his pigments, but by then it was late, so he had stayed the night at the village. Before he knew it, it was morning, and he was sleeping in a nearby shed.

By then, the master felt sure this was no dream. It reminded him of the woman he had seen long ago, and he seemed to take it as some sort of sign. That was when his ridiculous talk of moving west had started.

Maomao knew the village the painter had gone to; she'd been there several times to purchase medicine. The perfect excuse for her to go there again. She gave the bubbling Chou-u one more glare and sighed.

After an hour bouncing and rattling along in the carriage, they arrived at a village near a forest. It stood along a river and reminded her in spirit of the quack's hometown. It mainly produced rice and vegetables, and the freshly planted paddies reflected the sky like giant mirrors.

"Wow!" Chou-u exclaimed, leaning out of the carriage and watching the scenery go by. This wasn't one of those fancy carriages like the nobility rode in; it was more of a wagon—there were no curtains and no coverings; there were even raincoats stashed on board in case it started raining.

"Careful, Chou-u, don't lean too far. Don't come crying to me if you fall out," called Ukyou, who was sitting on the driver's bench. The madam had been as good as her word—she'd rented a carriage, but she'd stuck Ukyou with driving it.

What's the story here? Maomao wondered, looking at Ukyou with some annoyance. It wasn't that she had any specific beef with the thoughtful chief manservant, but something kept nagging at her as she watched the fields roll by. The paddies were indeed stunning at this time of year. The sky was blue with no hint of rain. The land looked as sapphire as the sky, and there was something mysterious and intriguing about the blue-clad world.

Chou-u tugged on Maomao's sleeve. "Hey, Freckles. What's that?"

He pointed to a couple of small hills of sand; in each stood a stick connected to each other by a braid of twisted rope. They appeared to stand by the path of the river that ran alongside the rice paddies.

"I think it's intended to mark off sacred space," Maomao said. She didn't know much about it herself, but she knew it had something to do with some sort of folk religion. It was supposed to create a barrier to keep bad things out. The shape of the rope was a little unusual, though—maybe a local variation on the superstition.

Then, though, Maomao leaned out herself to get a better look. Huh? The rope really didn't look anything like the other times she'd seen them. She thought they used to be simpler—but this year the rope was more twisted than usual, and strips of white paper had been woven into it. It struck her as a bit more sophisticated than before, but she also knew you didn't just go changing the shape of cultic objects on a whim.

"We're here," Ukyou said. Maomao hopped off the carriage and looked into the woods. "I'll hang around the village," Ukyou informed them, pointing to what appeared to be the only place in town for some refreshment. They probably at least had some moonshine on hand. "What do you want to do, Chou-u?"

"Hmm..." Chou-u glanced back and forth between Maomao and Ukyou, then trotted over to Maomao.

Ukyou chuckled. "Think I'll go knock back a round, then." He headed for the drinking establishment.

Chou-u was clutching Maomao's robe for some reason. She was afraid he would pull her belt clean off, so she took his hand instead and pulled him toward the village chief's house.

"This place sure is empty," Chou-u said after a quiet moment. It was true—there was really nothing there—but there was also no need to say so out loud, and Maomao gave him a rap on the head.

They headed for the last house in the village, a tumbledown place with vegetables dangling from the eaves. They were probably drying them out to preserve them—a fine idea, but at this time of year, you had to be careful or mold would start growing on the vegetables before you knew it. Next to the vegetables was a braided rope, like a smaller version of the one they had seen earlier.

Maomao figured it had been three years since she'd been here last. Her service in the rear palace had kept her away for a long time, and she hoped the village chief still remembered her.

"Hello?" she called, knocking on the door. Chou-u imitated her with a solid thump, and Maomao shoved down his head angrily, just as a young woman emerged from inside.

"Yes? Who is it?" the woman said. She was quite pretty for someone so far out in the country, and she was dressed in an outfit that looked plain but durable.

"I'd like to see the chief, if I may. Tell him the disciple of Luomen the apothecary is here," Maomao said, identifying herself not by her own name, but by her father's. Most people would hardly believe her if she claimed to be an apothecary. Getting a few years older might help with that, but Maomao felt she had no reason to boast of being an apothecary, so she stuck with a name the chief was more likely to recognize.

The young woman called into the house and a middle-aged man emerged—the chief's son, as Maomao remembered. He must have remembered her too, for he said, "Ah, yes," and nodded.

"I'm afraid my father caught a severe cold last year..." And had died of it, sadly.

"I see," Maomao said. Far be it from her to ridicule him, to say it was only a cold. Left unchecked, a cold could quickly get worse and become pneumonia. Her recollection was that the former village chief never took medicine—he was a gregarious personality who was fond of saying that anything could be cured with a good drink and a good sleep. His philosophy had made him a bad customer, but Maomao nonetheless had never disliked him.

"I insisted he should see a doctor, but—well, it's a moot point now," the son said. Then: "Sorry. That's enough sentiment. You're here to go into the woods?"

"Yes, sir." Maomao gave him the amount she always paid, but he shook his head.

"Keep it. You'd better get in there before the sun goes down."

"I'm certainly grateful, sir..." Maomao couldn't help wondering, though, what had inspired this change of heart.

She was about to put the coins back in the folds of her robe, but Chou-u stuck out his hand. "Freckles! You should use that to buy me candy instead! C'mon, do it!"

"You've got your own income," she said, stashing the coins safely where they belonged and turning toward the forest.

"Lots of snakes this time of year. Be careful," the new chief said.

"Of course, I know that. And they make excellent ingredients."

"Not these snakes," the chief replied, pinching the rope that dangled from the eaves between his fingers. When Maomao looked closer, she saw that each end of the rope was shaped a little differently. It narrowed at one end, while at the other it got thicker and the end was split. It almost reminded her of a snake. In fact, it looked very familiar. "If you kill a snake, the villagers might attack you," the chief said.

"Attack me? What in the world for?" The idea was virtually incomprehensible to Maomao, whose first thought on seeing a snake was usually how tasty it would be grilled up with a nice soy sauce glaze. For that matter, once before when she had captured several snakes here, they'd actually thanked her for taking care of the pests.

The new chief gave her a tired smile. "It was my father's last will, you see. Just before he died, when he was very weak, he summoned a shaman."

He should've just called a doctor!

This shaman had given the former chief an incense that would ease his pain, but in exchange he was instructed to disseminate a teaching in the village. That, Maomao realized, was where the unusual "sacred" ropes must have come from.

"See, long ago, a snake god used to be worshipped around here. That was the reasoning," the current chief said, still smiling sheepishly. His expression suggested that you couldn't argue with an old faith, but his smile was strained.

"What do you do with the venomous snakes, then?" Maomao asked. Vipers were the farmer's natural enemy. If one of them bit a person, they were all but done for.

Still smiling that strained smile, the chief whispered, "I've been killing them, secretly. I know some of the faithful wouldn't approve, but what am I supposed to do?" The chief had appearances to maintain. The young woman, probably his wife, was eyeballing the visitors. It couldn't feel good to watch her husband have a private conversation right in front of her.

Maomao had the permission she wanted, though, so she had no further business here. She decided it was time to make herself scarce.

"Come on, let's go," she said.

"Yep!" Chou-u said.

"Ah, there's one more thing you should know," the chief said. "It's not just snakes—apparently, birds are off-limits too. Not that you could probably catch one without a bow and arrow."

"This shaman sounds pretty demanding. You couldn't even slaughter a chicken with a rule like that."

"The prohibition is only on flying birds."

Maomao spread her hands and shrugged—it made no sense to her. Instead she headed for the woods, with Chou-u right behind her.

"Aren't you done yet, Freckles?" Chou-u asked, sitting on a stump with his legs dangling.

This is why I didn't want him here.

Brats like him got bored so quickly. The trip over was all well and good, but it had been obvious that Chou-u would be dead weight sooner rather than later. Maomao felt sure that the old lady had forced her to take him with her so the little rat wouldn't get in the way of the menservants doing their work. Lonely, her ass!

Maomao ignored Chou-u's chattering, instead clipping some grass growing by the root of a tree—these were unusual, and she couldn't resist grabbing them. She only needed the fresh buds, but she would worry about the details later.

"Heeey! Freckles!"

"Pipe down. You're the one who wanted to tag along," Maomao said as she shoved some herbs into her bag.

Chou-u braced himself on his hands and leaned forward, looking at Maomao in annoyance. "But I'm tired!"

They hadn't walked far, but with the overgrown grass and fallen leaves, the footing was difficult. It would be fatiguing for Chou-u, who was still partially paralyzed. Fair enough—but Maomao wasn't about to cut him any slack for it. If she took it easy on him now, he would expect her to do it all the time.

"Just wait there, then," she said. "I'm going farther in."

"What? No way!" Chou-u let his mouth hang open to show his annoyance. "You're just gonna leave me here?"

"You said you were tired."

"Ukyou would give me a piggyback ride!"

"Sorry, but you're too heavy for me. See you." Maomao promptly started off. Chou-u grimaced, then jumped down off his stump. He did prefer to be with people, like the madam described. When he was in the pleasure district, he could frequently be found with the menservants or the girl children.

The forest was gloomy on account of the dense growth, and he heard a fluttering sound like flapping wings. It was accompanied by a hoo, hoo—maybe it was a pigeon?

"I'm coming! I'm coming, already, just don't leave me here!" Chou-u called, and started after Maomao, dragging his leg.

Maomao, keeping one cold eye on him, continued into the woods.

The place was full of different trees. Many were broadleafs; the place must be rife with nuts and berries in the fall. Conifer forests were better for making paper, but in Li, most such places were located in the north.

As she went along, Maomao spotted a raspberry and popped it in her mouth. Chou-u found another and copied her, which was fine, except that it left his mouth sticky and red. Maomao swallowed her annoyance and wiped his lips, knowing that if he wiped them on his sleeve, the color would never come out.

With each raspberry he ate, Chou-u smiled ruefully. "These are sour," he announced.

"That's because they're not ripe yet," Maomao said.

It evidently wasn't going to stop him from eating them. "Hey, Freckles! Can you eat these mushrooms?" he asked, pointing to some small fungi growing on a desiccated tree trunk. "Are they, like, eat-able?"

"They're not very good, I'm afraid. And they're not even poisonous." In other words, they were of no interest to Maomao.

Chou-u's shoulders slumped disappointedly.

They sounded lighthearted, but Maomao hadn't forgotten why she was here. Eventually she found a marsh (along the way to which she'd discovered some bracket fungus, which made her very happy). Cattails grew along the banks. The pollen of these plants, known as puhuang, had medicinal properties and could be used to aid clotting and as a diuretic.

There was an island in the middle of the marsh, and meanwhile a series of the sacred poles and ropes were set up at the border between the trees and the marsh, for places with water had long been said to be gateways to the other world. That might also explain why there was a small shrine on the island in the lake. The lord of the lake lived there; Maomao had heard that it took the form of a large snake.

There was a hut on the edge of the marsh for the person tasked with tending to the shrine, and that was where Maomao and Chou-u headed. The hut was built on stilts, to keep it clear of the water when there was a heavy rain—but in recent years, the marsh had begun to recede; marks could be seen on the stilts where the water had been. Maomao had heard that even the spot where this small house stood had once been part of the marsh, which might have explained why the ground was soft and muddy and difficult to traverse. They took advantage of a succession of stepping stones to make the journey easier.

Beside the shack was an even smaller structure from which cooing could be heard—pigeons, Maomao suspected. At first she thought maybe they were being kept for food, but then she remembered what the chief had said—if his words were to be believed, it was forbidden to eat them. In which case, maybe they were pets.

Chou-u was inspecting the high-water marks with interest.

Maomao went up the stairs that led to the hut and peeked inside.

The person inside noticed her, too, for a hirsute old man shortly emerged from the house. Maomao had dealt with him before, and he seemed to remember her as well.

"Haven't seen you for ages. Thought maybe you'd gone off somewhere and got married," the old man said.

"Sorry, not yet."

"And yet that's quite the young lad you've got there!"

The old man hadn't grown any more delicate or civil while she was away, Maomao saw. He was an old acquaintance of Maomao's adoptive father Luomen; they had been doctors together once in the capital, long ago. This man was supposed to be quite skilled, but his somewhat unorthodox personality, combined with a misanthropic streak, now saw him living a hermit's life out here in the boondocks. He claimed to spend his time picking herbs and looking after the shrine, but his duties didn't seem to extend very far. There was no boat in the water, suggesting he didn't get over to the island much.

They went inside, where the old man took some dried herbs down off the wall and laid them on his crude table. "Here. Take what you need—but what you see is what I've got."

When Maomao needed an herb that was out of season, or some unusual plant, it was quickest to buy it from this old man. He even had puhuang, laid out on a mat made of cattail leaves.

The man settled himself into a chair with a "Hup!" and leaned forward. Maomao had heard that he was more than ten years older than Luomen—and he hadn't gotten any younger in the three years since she'd seen him last. He still knew how to dry herbs, though, and to a good quality. In good quantities too, despite his dotage.

"I'm impressed you were able to gather so much," Maomao said. "Here I was glad just to find you hadn't gone senile."

"Ahh, spinsters always have the sharpest tongues."

"No worse than yours," Maomao replied, earning a guffaw from Chou-u. She glared at him as she wrapped the herbs she needed in a cloth.

"It's not all that surprising. I've had help lately," the old man said.

"What, one of the village brats? Pretty good work for a kid." Maomao deliberately looked at Chou-u as she said it; he stuck out his lip at her in a What? gesture.

"Naw, naw. Someone I picked up in the capital a bit back. Very capable. Look, speak of the devil..."

They heard footsteps coming up the stairs. "Hey, Gramps! I got the stuff you wanted! Huh? Guests?"

The newcomer's voice was cheerful—and familiar. In walked a young man with a sack swinging in one hand and a scarf wrapped as a bandage around one eye.

That's why I recognize that voice!

It was Kokuyou, the pockmarked man who, last Maomao knew, had been looking for work in the capital.

"But wouldn't you know it, everyone said they didn't want a doctor with such a creepy face!" Kokuyou said, sounding, as ever, as if the cascade of his misfortunes simply rolled right off his back. No sooner had he seen Maomao than the voluble man had started in chatting.

"Do they know each other?" Gramps had asked, to which

Chou-u had replied, "She practically collects weird guys like him."

In brief, after arriving at the capital, Kokuyou had gone from clinic to clinic, looking for somewhere to begin his practice as a physician. Each time, they would ask him about the patch over his eye, and like an idiot, he would give them a straight answer and show them his scars. The ignorant doctors chased him out, admonishing him never to come back lest he give them his illness. The less ignorant doctors understood the disease was no longer contagious, but even a physician was ultimately running a business. They had no compelling reason to hire a shifty-looking man with an eyepatch.

Gramps had been whipping his old bones into town to deliver some herbs a doctor had ordered from him, and it just so happened that at that very moment, Kokuyou was being chased out of the same clinic. Gramps might have been a misanthrope, but he had an eye for medical talent. As age gradually slowed him down, he'd been thinking about finding a helper. He quizzed Kokuyou on his medical knowledge, and was surprised to discover the man knew more than Gramps would have expected—and so here he was. A man with an eyepatch would be less conspicuous here than in the capital, and anyway, the elderly physician had explained things to the village chief.

"Ha ha ha! Life can sure be tough, huh? But anyway, at least I get to eat!"

Gramps got a good helper, and Kokuyou—well, he was Kokuyou. Both of them seemed happy enough.

If I'd realized, maybe I would have asked him to join me, Maomao thought with a twinge of regret, but she couldn't go back in time. Even if she had brought him to the shop with her, the madam would only have worked him like a dog, the way she had Luomen. Maybe Kokuyou was better off here. Besides, Sazen was finally starting to get his feet under him, and Maomao didn't want to dent his confidence.

Kokuyou put his herbs on the table. "Fresh from the forest!" He grinned.

Chou-u peered up at him, then made a face like a particularly dumb-looking squirrel and stuck out his hand. "What's under the eyepatch, mister?"

"You want to see?" Kokuyou said, and then with a word of warning ("It's pretty gross!"), he lifted the eyepatch.

"Oh, yuck!" Chou-u exclaimed (politeness was not his strong suit) and pounded Kokuyou on the shoulder. "Too bad for you, mister. You could've been pretty popular with customers, if it weren't for...that."

"You said it! And here I like to think I'm good with people," Kokuyou replied.

"Our girls might've liked your face, too! Darn shame."

Our girls. Nice, Maomao thought, but otherwise she ignored their chatter, instead taking an appraising look at the herbs. She squinted at one of them, a large leaf she didn't recognize. "What's this?" she asked.

Kokuyou broke away from bantering with Chou-u long enough to say, "That's an 'incense' leaf."

An incense leaf—in other words, tobacco. The madam and the prostitutes loved to smoke, but somewhat surprisingly, the practice hadn't caught on among the common people for the most part. Once, Maomao had repaired a damaged smoking pipe and had tried to return it to its owner, for she simply assumed it must be important to him.

Tobacco was a luxury item; it was addiction that kept the otherwise stingy madam smoking. Luomen informed Maomao that too much smoking was bad for your health. In any case, as far as Maomao knew, the leaves were usually imported, and she'd only ever seen them in a pulverized state, so she hadn't recognized the plant when she saw it.

"They're not actually that hard to grow," the old man interjected.

"Oh?" Maomao asked, studying the leaf with great interest. She was thinking that if she could get this to grow in their garden, it might prove a profitable side business. She doubted, though, that these two would simply cough up some seeds for her. She might at least be able to get them to share some of the leaves, but she questioned the wisdom of further entrenching the smoking habit among the courtesans by providing them with a cheap source of tobacco.

It couldn't hurt just to float the idea, she figured. She asked,

"How much would you sell these for?"

"They're not for sale," the old man said, picking up the leaves and bundling several of them together before hanging them under the eaves.

For his own use? Maomao wondered. But she hadn't seen any smoking paraphernalia in the house, and she'd never seen the old man smoking.

As if in response to Maomao's unspoken question, the old man picked a jar up off the floor and set it on the table. He opened the lid and a distinctive odor came wafting out.

"Jeez, Gramps, that stinks!" Chou-u said, dramatically holding his nose. It didn't stop him from peeking inside, though, where he discovered a brown liquid. "You're not gonna ask us to...drink this, are you?"

"No, and you'd better not. It'd kill you dead. It's got incense leaves steeped in it."

"Ugh! Why would you have something like that around?" Chouu asked, sitting back down on a wooden box on the floor.

"We use it to keep the snakes away," the old man said.

Maomao clapped her hands: tobacco leaves were poisonous if eaten, and she knew the toxin affected insects. For the first time, it occurred to her that it might also work on snakes. Bugs were one thing, but snakes she always tried to catch—she never would have thought of trying to drive them away.

"It's the best we can do with all this nonsense about not killing snakes. We have to be careful—wouldn't want to cause any

problems. But we also don't want to get bit while we're out

picking vegetables, and I keep pigeons to boot."

The old man was practically frothing; Kokuyou maintained a smile as he made tea. Chou-u's eyes sparkled as he saw steamed buns emerge from the cupboard.

"Nobody gave two shits about this shrine for decades! Now they won't shut up about some messenger of the snake god appearing. It's a little late for them—the bridge to the island is good and broken," the old man said.

"Ha ha ha! Shamans are the worst, aren't they?" Kokuyou agreed cheerfully. Was there, perhaps, just a hint of personal animus in his jollity?

Maomao, meanwhile, found herself wondering about something. Last will and testament of the previous village chief or no, she questioned whether anyone in a small village like this would actually be so hesitant to kill a snake. Was it actually because a snake deity was once worshipped here?

"Was this shaman really that persuasive?" she asked coolly.

Gramps snorted. "Hah! Funny you should ask. The truly faithful say she changed form."

"Changed form?" Maomao had heard of foxes transforming, but a snake?

Isn't it enough that foxes can do it?

She gave them a confused look. Kokuyou opened the window of the hut, and Maomao found she could see the marsh and the shrine. Gramps looked out the window and rubbed his scraggly beard. "I didn't see it myself. But they claim the shaman..."

They claimed the shaman had danced across the surface of the water to reach the shrine.

That's got to be...

"It was said that proved the shaman was the god's messenger." And there you had it.

...the shadiest thing I've ever heard!

Shady it might have been, but if it were true, then the "pale woman" the painter had witnessed could have been real as well.

"This shaman didn't happen to be a young woman with white hair and red eyes, did she?"

"No, no. She was a young woman, all right, but nobody said a word about her looking anything like that."

Chou-u was agog. "That's amazing! How did she walk on the water?"

"It's easy," Kokuyou said. "You just have to take the next step before your foot starts to sink. Then you do it again, and again. One step at a time." The lie seemed to come very easily to him. "Awesome!"

Maomao bapped Chou-u on the head as a warning not to be so gullible, at the same time glowering at Kokuyou. She had just been starting to think of him as friendly and harmless when it turned out he was capable of something like this.

"Don't tell me you really believe she could do that," Maomao said.

"Hell, of course not. But...ahem." The old doctor continued scratching his chin and looking outside. He seemed conflicted.

"Once, when I was a young man, I saw that very thing."

"You saw someone dancing across the surface of the water?" Maomao cocked her head. Chou-u copied her, as did Kokuyou, for some reason.

"Yeah. Back before I left the village. You know, it used to be the duty of the shrine maiden to serve the snake god." The old man's family were in fact distant relations of the village chief, and the young women who served at the shrine were of the same bloodline. Gramps had just said that the shrine had been all but abandoned for decades—but there was an explanation for that. "They came hunting for girls for the rear palace, and then there weren't any young women around here anymore."

What could one say? It was as simple as that. With that, rituals that had been passed down by word of mouth for generations disappeared, and the shrine fell into disuse. It was just about then that the previous village chief had taken over. Since the chief before him had been a man of scant faith, he allowed the shrine to sit unused, until it became decrepit, and even the bridge to the shrine's island rotted and collapsed. Then Gramps returned to the village and became the keeper of the shrine, even if only nominally, living here in this hut.

"Didn't the shrine maiden come back to the village after completing her tenure at the rear palace?" Maomao asked.

"Heh. She always was a good-natured girl. Why should she come back to a place like this?"

Fair enough, Maomao thought, picturing Xiaolan, who had been her friend at the rear palace. Xiaolan's parents had sold her into service so as to have one less mouth to feed. She'd understood the reality—and had known that even if she went home, there would be no place for her. Instead, after leaving the rear palace, she had found work to support herself. A young woman with a half-decent head on her shoulders could probably have found any number of ways to earn a better living than the one she'd had in a village like this. There was more than one way in which the rear palace could be said to give its women a leg up in life.

"The former chief was all laments before he died, but my feeling was that if he was going to complain so much, he should have asked a doctor for help," Gramps said.

"Ha ha ha! That's funny. Yeah, some people are that way, huh?" Kokuyou chortled, but the old man gave him a gentle jab to the head. It wasn't that funny.

Maomao gazed outside. "I don't see a boat. How do you get across? I assume you have to check the condition of the shrine periodically."

Gramps drew a circle on the table. "Boats anger the deity, evidently. There's even one particular area set aside for fishing— although all you'll ever catch is loach, so it's not exactly worth the effort. So the shrine just goes unattended. You're welcome to go see it if you're interested—just not by boat."

"What is this, some kind of riddle?" Maomao asked. How was she supposed to get to the island without using a boat? Did he think she could walk on water?

"What, you thought it would be easy to get to a sacred place?" Nonsense-spouting old man. "Kokuyou, you take them. There should be a better view of the island on the far bank than here.

And weed the fields while you're at it."

"Aw, what a chore," Kokuyou said, but he grabbed a hand scythe nonetheless.

"The tobacco grows over there. You can't have any leaves, but if there are some seeds, you can take a few. Your payment for doing the weeding."

Maomao scowled at the old man, who seemed intent on turning the screw at every opportunity—but she also picked up a scythe.

Maomao's little band headed around to the far side of the marsh. Something that looked like lotus leaves floated on the surface of the water. Chou-u had been scared of Kokuyou's scars at first, but demonstrating that he had considerable adaptability if nothing else, he and Kokuyou were already fast friends. Chou-u was even wheedling piggyback rides out of the young doctor, although unlike the menservants, Kokuyou swayed a little under Chou-u's weight and it looked dangerous. Maybe only being able to see out of one eye threw off his sense of balance.

"There it is, over there," Kokuyou said, as a bridge connecting the bank to the back side of the small island came into view. The bridge was rotten, though, and there wasn't much of it left. Maomao looked at it in disbelief: even the foundation was coming apart; it hardly looked like it could support a wooden board.

Kokuyou, evidently much on the same page as Maomao, produced a wooden board from somewhere. "Here we go," he said, placing it across the rickety foundation.

"Is that safe?" Maomao asked, feeling a growing sense of unease as she watched him.

"Ha ha ha, sure it is. You'd be surprised how sturdy this thing is." To demonstrate, he jumped up onto the board—which promptly gave way, dumping him into the marsh with an "Oops!"

"What are you doing, man?" Chou-u said, reaching out to help pull Kokuyou to his feet. With a glorp, though, Kokuyou sank deeper. A thrill of fear ran through the group.

"I don't suppose this is one of those b-bottomless swamps, do you?" Kokuyou asked, still smiling.

For a second, neither Maomao nor Chou-u said anything, but after the instant of silence, everyone burst into activity. The more Kokuyou struggled, however, the deeper he sank. Just as he was up to his neck in marsh water, Maomao managed to find a robustlooking vine in the woods and drag it out, so the man could use it to pull himself free.

"You're gonna give me a heart attack, mister," Chou-u said.

"Ha ha ha! Sorry about that," Kokuyou replied, scratching the back of his head with a muddy hand. (Thus the one remaining clean part of him got as dirty as the rest.)

Maomao grabbed a bucket of irrigation water from the nearby field and brought it over—after which she took the path of least resistance, namely, dumping it over his head. Kokuyou shook himself off like a wet dog.

"Oh yeah... The old guy told me that it was around this marsh where they say kids get spirited away," Kokuyou said.

"Yikes," Chou-u said, not looking pleased. There was no telling how many people were buried down in the muck.

Maomao looked at the decaying bridge. "They really didn't take any care of it."

"Maintenance costs money. I guess there's something about the composition of the mud here that does more damage than ordinary water."

The marsh might not be bottomless, strictly speaking, but it was certainly deeper than Kokuyou was tall. Replacing the foundation regularly would have been nothing short of a problem. Elements of the foundation could be seen extending well beyond the marsh, implying that the marsh had once occupied that entire area.

A panoply of wild plants grew all around the shrine on the small island. They were bright and colorful, suggesting that they might be flowers, but it was hard to tell from this distance—the one thing that was certain was that it was a color one rarely saw in this area. Birds flew over frequently enough; maybe the seeds had made it down here in some poop.

"All right, let's get down to business," Kokuyou said, sounding energetic despite still being speckled with mud in places. He was suddenly wearing a reed hat. (Where had he gotten that from?)

The field was bristling with weeds; Maomao was about to say exactly what she thought of that, but Chou-u beat her to the punch: "Ugh!" he exclaimed, his shoulders slumping. After that, she felt she couldn't say anything. Instead, she dutifully went about weeding, keeping her eyes open for any tobacco seeds. But there weren't any.

Wily old bastard, she thought, resolving to be sure she wrung some seeds out of him before she went home.

Kokuyou hummed cheerily as he went about the job, and Maomao felt compelled to help out. Chou-u, who seemed not to have had any intention of helping to begin with, went around collecting pebbles and drawing in the dirt.

For a while, they focused on their work. The humidity was high in the marsh. The muddy soil looked rich in nutrients, but by the same token, they would cause roots to rot in a hurry. That might have explained the dash of sand mixed into the soil of the field.

Thankfully, it made the weeds easy to pull out.

"Hey, did you know?" Kokuyou said. He had stopped humming, but he almost sounded like he was talking to himself.

"What?" Maomao said.

"About the shrine maidens they used to have in this village."

Maomao gave him a perplexed look. How would she know anything about that?

"Gramps told me that their job was to placate the great snake spirit. But the maidens were originally slave girls."

Maomao didn't say anything. Chou-u was still drawing, oblivious to their conversation. Kokuyou continued, whispering so only Maomao could hear, "I guess the river used to flood here a lot. Until they developed flood control, the fields used to get inundated every year. Even the houses were underwater sometimes."

What did people do in those olden times when they were powerless in the face of catastrophic natural disasters? They engaged in meaningless behaviors.

"It's said they bought slaves to use as sacrifices. That was when there was money to spare, of course—when there wasn't, they probably chose some poor village girl."

So "shrine maiden" was just a pleasant epithet for a human sacrifice.

"But then..."

One day, a shrine maiden possessed of spiritual powers appeared. She even, so it was said, danced across the water in the sight of all the villagers.

"Gramps" has really opened up to this guy, Maomao thought. All these stories were new to her. The old man must have been privy to this lore because of his family's connection to the shrine maidens. It seemed strange that at the same time, he was also distantly related to the village chief.

"I guess that meant that if you didn't possess those powers, you could expect to be sacrificed sooner or later," Kokuyou said. Whether you were sacrificed to the god of this or the lord of that probably didn't matter much to the person suffering the ritual. "But then just when she thought she'd escaped, she gets sent to the rear palace instead!"

Thus, given not to the master of the lake, but the master of the land.

No wonder she didn't want to come back. Maomao saw now why the young woman had never returned, as the old man had told her. Who could blame her if, indeed, she felt some anger at her hometown?

Maomao gazed distantly at the water. The surface rippled, but to judge by Kokuyou's state after falling in, it was mostly mud down there. She picked up a stick lying nearby and jabbed it into the water. Once it sank into the muck, it was hard to pull back out.

"Less of a marsh and more of a bog. The flood measures might have dispersed the water flowing into it, but maybe the shrinking marsh has made it muddier," Maomao said. She stood up from where she had been crouching. "Do you know when the marsh started shrinking?"

"I guess I don't. You could try asking Gramps," Kokuyou said.

Maomao scratched her chin and stirred the mud as best she was able. She suddenly discovered Chou-u was standing beside her, also stirring. "You drop something?" he asked.

"No," Maomao said.

It rained a lot at this time of year—the water level probably wasn't at its peak yet. That meant the marsh would only be even more muddy during the dry season.

Suddenly, Maomao jumped to her feet.

"What's the matter, Freckles?" Chou-u asked, looking at her, but she ignored him and ran off. "Hey, Freckles!"

"Huh? What's going on?" Kokuyou asked. Maomao didn't answer him; she made a beeline for the hut where the old man lived. She didn't want to stand and chat with the two of them— she was desperate to test the idea she'd had as soon as possible. Even as she ran, a smile came over Maomao's face.

"Boy, where'd that come from? What's she think she's doing?" Chou-u grumbled, but he and Kokuyou followed along just the same. Chou-u must have gotten tired of running partway there, because when they arrived at the shack, Kokuyou was carrying him on his back.

Maomao vaulted up the stairs and knocked on the door. No sooner had the old man opened it than she burst out, "Give me some tobacco seeds!"

Gramps was slurping some noodles, looking almost as if he were eating his own beard. "Is that what you're here about? If there weren't any seeds in the field, too bad." He began to chew his mouthful of noodles noisily.

Maomao had been expecting something like this, but she had an idea. "What if I told you I could identify the notorious shaman?" she whispered.

The man's unpleasant chewing stopped and he set down his chopsticks. "Kokuyou, c'mere. Take this and go entertain the kid." He pulled a ball off the shelf and tossed it to Kokuyou, who failed to catch it and had to run outside after it, Chou-u trotting behind him.

With the interlopers cleared out, the old man motioned Maomao to sit. She seated herself in a chair and looked out the window at the marsh. "Let me venture a guess: when this shaman appeared, it was the time of year when the water level was dropping."

The painter had seen the white-haired, red-eyed woman about

six months ago, give or take—that would be the season of little rain. Less water in the marsh would mean more bog.

"That's right," Gramps said.

"And the shrine maiden did her dance at roughly the same time of year, am I right?"

"I don't see what that has to do with anything."

Maomao moistened her finger in the water jug, then started sketching a map on the tabletop: a circle representing the lake, after which she added the little island and the bridge. Gramps must have found it hard to see the water map, because he offered her a brush and paper. Crude materials, but still easier to see.

Maomao started writing.

She pointed to the bank nearest the island, the farthest point from the river that fed into the marsh. "Was that about where the rain dance was performed?"

"Yes, that's right," the physician said. The place could be seen from the window of the hut they were now in.

"This shrine maiden or shaman or whatever she was invoked the blessing of the great snake god and walked across the water. What if I told you I could do the same thing?" asked Maomao.

The old man squinted at her, clearly skeptical. "That's enough silliness out of you. If I might say so, I don't think you have the figure to attract the snake god."

"Gee, old man, I didn't realize you were such a devout believer." Their eyes met. Maomao smiled, trying to provoke him. If she was right, this old man knew something, something he wasn't telling her.

It was almost as if he could read her mind. "Luomen would never operate on an assumption that way," he said.

"That's exactly why I want to investigate the marsh: to substantiate that assumption."

Gramps gave her a glare, but got up as if inviting her to follow him. "You're not one for having a little mystery in life, are you? Not that I'm one to talk. The thing to do at a moment like this is just to believe that immortals and shrine maidens really exist." The old man almost spat the words out, but then he called to the pair playing with the ball outside, "Go buy somethin' that'll pass for dinner!"

He gave Kokuyou some change. Evidently he didn't think the ball would distract them for long enough. "Now, listen, kid; this schlub is always getting ripped off. Sorry, but do you think you could go with and keep an eye on him?"

"Sure! Just leave it to me," Chou-u said, and went after Kokuyou again. Maomao and the old physician stayed where they were until the other two were out of sight. Then the doctor said,

"Let's go."

He brought her to an area of the marsh that had been fenced off. Floating plants grew on the surface of the water. Maomao frowned at the boggy ground, taking off her shoes and holding up her skirt as they went. Gramps, for his part, hiked up the legs of his trousers.

The water was dark and cloudy.

"The shrine maiden walked from here to the island. If you can manage the same thing, I'll tell you whatever you want to know." Then he dropped his voice to a menacing whisper and said, "Before the shrine maiden, the young women who were brought here were called sacrifices, and they were drowned in this marsh. Tied to weights and sunk into the fathomless depths alive. My great-grandmother told me how she tried to cover her ears as the girls cried and sobbed their last, every attempt at struggle dragging them closer to their doom. No guarantees you won't end up the same way."

It may have been a revered custom, yet it must also have been a terrifying sight for the villagers who witnessed it. And then they felt remorse for what they had done and begged forgiveness, though it meant nothing by that point.

Stone pillars stood around the marsh, constructed of similarly sized rocks piled one atop the other, with the largest of all standing on top. Cairns of some type, perhaps.

"So, how exactly did the maiden cross the marsh?" the old man asked.

Maomao took out some rope she'd brought from the house along with a couple of thin wooden boards. "All right if I borrow these?"

"Suit yourself."

"Thank you."

She punched three holes in each board and ran the rope through them to create what looked like crude sandals. They weren't very impressive, but she put them on, thinking, Paddy

sandals would be perfect right about now. Paddy sandals were footwear used by people planting rice fields—but wishing wouldn't get her anywhere.

The old man was watching her curiously now, but for the time being she kept quiet. She rolled up her robe to keep it clear of the ground, then wrapped a rope around her body, tying the other end to one of the stone pillars. Then she began.

"Hey, what are you doing?" Gramps asked.

"Substantiating."

Maomao put a foot in the marsh—or more properly, she almost kicked against it, the impact causing her foot to bounce back. The old man was startled, but Maomao was already taking her next step, kicking forcefully. She did this again and again, working her way across the bog.

She was, indeed, walking on water. It wasn't quite the way Kokuyou had suggested, but she took each step before her foot could sink, then repeated the process. It was enough to keep her on the surface.

"How's that? I can walk on the water." Maomao grinned, full of confidence.

The old man touched his beard, astonished. "That's something special, I'll give you that." He picked up a long stick lying nearby, took a step into the marsh, and plunged it into the water. There was a hard, sharp sound. "But you don't have to go to all that work. There are more of those cairns in the marsh." He struck the large stone pillar again.

"What?" Maomao said, flabbergasted. In her amazement, she stopped moving her feet—which promptly sank into the bog. Gramps ended up having to pull her out.

"How'd you do that, anyway?" Gramps asked the mud-covered Maomao after he'd extricated her.

Maomao took off her "shoes" and looked at the marsh, tired. "When you've got something that's not quite liquid and not quite solid, it has some special properties," she said. It might have been easiest to demonstrate if she'd had some potato starch on hand. Mix that into water at a specific ratio, and you could pick it up with your hand—but it would soon flow out between your fingers.

This marsh was very similar. That was why Maomao had asked Gramps what time of year it had been when the maiden danced across the water. And Maomao had put on her improvised footwear because she'd judged there was a little too much water in the mix to do otherwise.

She'd figured that some of the "sacrifices" had noticed that when the marsh shrank and the ratio of mud to water changed, you could walk over it. But she hadn't been quite right.

"A gimmick like this? That's not very fair," she said.

"The stone pillars sunk in the marsh are grave markers for the dead sacrifices," the old man replied firmly. They were buried such that even in the dry season, they weren't visible. Ten of them, or maybe a little more—intimating the number of women who had been drowned.

"Long ago, when the time for the next sacrifice was decided, the son of the village chief told the unfortunate girl about the grave markers." Then it was the young woman who had the "lord of the lake" on her side, and she became the shrine maiden.

"That was more than fifty years ago now."

The previous village chief evidently hadn't known about the stones. It looked to Maomao as if the only one who was aware of them was this man here. She glared at him: he'd known all along, and he'd kept quiet about it. Why would he do that, except perhaps if there was something he felt guilty about?

"Was the shaman a woman with white hair?" Maomao asked again.

But again, the doctor shook his head. "Haven't had anyone like that around here." However, he did have something else to add. He began speaking, telling Maomao about how by sheer chance, in the capital he'd run into the former shrine maiden who had been sent to the rear palace. She'd had a granddaughter by then.

The former shrine maiden had asked him, what was the state of the great snake god today? The physician explained that even without a shrine maiden, improvements in flood-control technology meant that the river and the marsh no longer overflowed their banks. The snake god became simple superstition, his shrine went to ruin, and no one now visited it.

"I can't help thinking maybe it would have been better if I'd told her the shrine was doing well, that thanks to the great snake, we were safe from floods. Even if it wasn't true," he said.

The former shrine maiden had been incredulous at what the old man told her. It was as if all the shrine maidens who had gone down to the depths had died in vain. The thought enraged the woman.

"Not long after, she and her granddaughter came to the village. The former shrine maiden said she served a new snake god, and that was when she had her granddaughter cross the marsh."

A new snake god? Maomao thought of the white sacred ropes, the snake deity, and the white-haired woman the painter had seen. She picked up the pole and plunged it into the marsh, seeking out the cairns as she worked her way toward the little island. The old man was right; this was a more reliable method than the one Maomao had tried. As long as your feet were steady, you could make it.

She hopped over to the island. It was home to the dilapidated shrine, rampant wild grasses—and flowers with small, red petals blowing in the wind. These flowers didn't live long; some of the petals were already dropping, leaving bald plants behind. Had they been planted here, or had some seeds just happened to drop in the area? All Maomao knew was that the plants should not have been here.

"Poppies?" she heard the old man say, and from his tone, she could tell he was discovering them for the first time. Maybe he hadn't been over to the island before, even though he knew how to get there.

"May I ask you another question?" Maomao said. "Go ahead. I'll tell you anything now."

"How is it you know about the grave markers?"

Gramps smiled. "You know I'm related to the shrine maidens— which means I'm a slave's son. It's not unusual for the powerful in a village to get involved with the slaves."

He'd said it was the village chief's son who had told the former shrine maiden about the existence of the burial pillars. That would seem to imply the chief had gotten a slave woman with child—and that child was Gramps.

"When the chieftain tired of this slave, she was passed on to the next villager, until finally, when starvation threatened, she was used as a sacrifice."

For there to be grave markers, there had to be someone to put them up—to cut the rock and pile stone upon stone over the course of years. Not to mention, to then carry the stones to their location across the other markers already in place.

"This marker just in front of the island is the last one. It saved my little sister from drowning..." the doctor said.

Then instead, she had been sent to the rear palace. It was not the village chief's daughter who had gone, but the offspring of the slave woman and whomever she had been "passed on to." When the child came back decades later, she discovered that the villagers who had murdered her mother and used her own life for their ends had forgotten all about the local deity and the women who had been sacrificed as shrine maidens to it.

Maomao looked at the tobacco leaves on the far shore. "Did you, perchance, get those from the former shrine maiden?"

"I did. But not the poppy seeds. She gave the tobacco to me as a sort of souvenir, asking two favors in return."

"And will you tell me about those too?"

"Yes—it's time I told someone. The water level's still high right now, so they've stayed hidden, but when the autumn comes, the tops of the grave markers will peek out. I was able to keep

everyone off the trail until last year, but I don't think I can manage it anymore."

The shaman would be revealed as a fraud.

"The first favor was this: that I stay quiet, even knowing what

I knew."

The injunctions against the villagers killing snakes or birds were probably the shaman's small form of revenge. This old man might object to her methods, but he chose to look the other way.

"The other..." The elderly physician looked at his stilt hut. "The other was that I give her free use of my pigeon coop."

"Pigeon coop? What in the world did she want with that?"

Maomao asked, tilting her head in confusion. Come to think of it, she'd heard pigeons cooing in the village too. Did they normally keep free-range birds?

"Don't kill flying birds"...

Compared to the rule about snakes, this admonition almost seemed like an afterthought.

Maomao worked her way back across the grave markers toward the hut. Several times she almost slipped on the slick stone, but she was in a hurry to get to the pigeon coop.

As she approached, her nose prickled at its distinctive odor. Inside, there were several dozen birds with dark-greenish feathers. They flapped excitedly, surprised by Maomao's sudden arrival, but she ignored their reaction. Instead, she grabbed each one and tossed it aside in turn.

"Hey! Leave the poor birds alone!" Gramps sputtered. So he thought of them as something more than food—but that was also immaterial to Maomao at that moment. Finally she found what she was looking for. She grabbed one bird around the back and flipped it over, plucking off the thing attached to its leg: a piece of twisted white string. It was grimy in places; she guessed it had gotten dirty while the animal was outside.

Maomao left the pigeon coop and undid the string. It turned out to be a single piece of cloth, embroidered with characters that really did look like a scribbled snake.

I know I've seen these before, Maomao thought. They looked much like the embroidery on the fire-rat cloak she'd seen at the used clothing store. If you knew what you were looking at, you could tell it wasn't just a random pattern—it was a code, based on characters from the western reaches.

Maomao thought back to the fortune-teller from the western capital—how she had used a pigeon feather instead of a brush to write with. For some time now, Maomao had been grappling with the fact that the White Lady somehow seemed to be everywhere at once in this country. Surely the young woman couldn't actually travel so widely? Her albino appearance might make her seem uncanny, but she couldn't actually use magic like the immortals were said to do. Practically the reverse, in fact—with skin so sensitive to sunlight, she wouldn't be able to spend much time outside in bright regions.

So it wouldn't be the White Lady herself who moved about; Maomao assumed she directed confederates instead. The problem with that hypothesis was information: in order to release the lion from its cage or make contact with Consort Lishu's half-sister, the White Lady would need a way to exchange information quickly between the western capital and the Imperial capital in the central region. Even the fastest horse would take more than ten days to reach the west from the capital, and coming back would take nearly as long, even if one went by boat.

How had she solved that conundrum? These pigeons.

"Hey, Gramps, does the former shrine maiden herself come to visit the pigeon coop?"

"Her granddaughter does. She took a few of them with her, said she was going to use them for a curse or something."

"Aren't you eventually going to run out of pigeons?"

"No, they come right back to this coop when I release them.

Unless an animal—or a human—gets them first."

In other words, she could communicate, taking advantage of these pigeons' aptitude. Maomao closed her eyes, thought for a second about what she should do, and then looked at the old man. It was possible harm would come to the former shrine maiden and her granddaughter. They seemed like they might be connected to the White Lady.

Maomao clicked her tongue. "Want to work with me this time,

Gramps?"

"What? What are you talking about?"

Maomao wasn't entirely bereft of decency. She could just go straight to Jinshi without saying another word to the old man, but she chose not to. Instead she began to negotiate, feeling out how far he would go, where in the middle he would meet her.

Chapter 12: The Trials of Consort Lishu

Jinshi got a letter from Maomao the day after his informal meeting with the messenger from the west: I found a clue about

the White Lady in a village called Golden Lake. It was most convenient for him—or perhaps most inconvenient.

The "messenger from the west" was one of the emissaries from Shaoh who had visited Li the year before, a woman named Aylin. She and her companion had looked so much alike that they might have been twins, but the other woman, Ayla—well, matters turned out to be complicated.

When last she had visited, Ayla wore a red hairband and Aylin a blue one; this time, Aylin's entire garment was blue. Because of the covert nature of her mission, she wore nothing conspicuous, but rather a quju shenyi, a robe with a curved hem that was quite common in Li.

In truth, she was not someone with whom Jinshi ought to have been meeting too personally. The last time she'd seen him, he'd been dressed up as a woman and she had, embarrassingly, taken him for the moon spirit.

Besides, he was busy. He wondered what she would talk about at this moment, whose guidance she was under; but it turned out to be Lahan's. Jinshi had thought he'd seemed to be up to something in the western capital, but he felt certain Lahan of all people wouldn't be doing anything sketchy, and had let the matter slide. It wasn't that he trusted Lahan so much as that he had a certain understanding of the other man's psychology. Lahan had some sort of fixation on "beautiful numbers" and "unbeautiful numbers," and although Jinshi couldn't claim to quite understand it, he gathered that Lahan wouldn't do anything that violated his standards of "beauty."

Jinshi had expected about half of what Aylin said to him; the other half had been unexpected, but none of it was completely unreasonable. Lahan was already privy to the two points Aylin had brought up, and he hadn't shown any particular reaction.

One thing she said did make Jinshi's head hurt: food exports or political asylum.

Lahan had already talked to Jinshi about exports in the form of a root vegetable called sweet potatoes. It was a promising crop, one that could be grown even in poor soil and yielded a harvest many times that of rice. The fact that Lahan could come to him with such an idea immediately upon his return to the capital reminded him afresh that the La clan was nothing to sneeze at.

The result was that Jinshi had spent the two weeks since his return working virtually without sleep. Just catching up was bad enough, but now there was even more to be done. His concerns at the rear palace were not over either—another headacheinducing situation had arisen.

He would have to find a way to justify exports to Shaoh to the bureaucracy, and it was unlikely that claiming they were a hedge against insect plague would do it. All the various measures Jinshi had already taken against the plague had seemed like enough. Any preventative moves the members of the bureaucracy made would be to forestall a catastrophe they foresaw falling upon their own heads. They didn't want to give themselves more work to do because of some groundless anxiety.

That was the reality of it, so Jinshi had come up with a pretext: the forced labor to which the criminals captured during the Shi clan rebellion would be put would be agricultural work. No one would object to the opening of new lands for that purpose. And when it came to land, there was plenty of it in the former Shi clan domain of Shihoku-shu. With the Shi stranglehold over the region broken, negotiations were likely to be easier than before. And there were lots of former farmers among the criminals. Their livelihoods would have gone back to how they had been before the clan had hired them—it might even be a little harder than it had been before.

Jinshi wouldn't even have to put the plan into motion himself; he had somebody to handle things on his behalf. Specifically, a high official put in charge of Shihoku-shu after the destruction of the Shi clan. Someone who had been born and raised in the area, in fact, and had worked their way up the ranks as a regional official. They had experienced famine in the past, and when Jinshi had explained how growing sweet potatoes would prevent further starvation in the future, his case had been eagerly heard.

Any necessary personnel could be recruited in Shihoku-shu. There was a ready supply of third sons of farmers, men who weren't entitled to any fields. If the rear palace could be considered public service under the empress regnant, then so could this.

That was as far as Jinshi's planning had gone—he was quite capable, but he was no genius. There were still kinks to smooth out in the idea, but he would leave the details to those carrying it out. There would be pressure, yes, but they would just have to rise to the occasion. Jinshi didn't love to simply delegate matters, but he had other things to do. He was always slightly overworked, but he liked to think he had a sense of the scope of his duties.

Jinshi lacked many truly trustworthy subordinates, but he did have a few. Each had their strengths, roles to which they were best suited. He picked up his cup as he considered what he would do about this letter. His ever-attentive lady, Suiren, saw the cup was empty, and with a "Well, now," poured him more juice.

Jinshi watched her, then spontaneously decided to show her Maomao's letter. "Do we have anyone available right now?" he asked.

"Yes, several who just came back."

"Pick someone suitable, then."

"All right." Suiren put her hand to her cheek, thinking. "Why don't we try somebody new? It should be interesting." "Are you sure that's safe?" Jinshi asked uneasily.

Suiren, though, continued to smile broadly. "Have I been wrong yet?"

Jinshi could only offer a rueful smile in response to this display of confidence. Suiren had once attended upon the Empress Dowager herself—even Maomao couldn't get the better of her.

Suiren was one of those who had helped see to the safety of the

Empress Dowager in that den of iniquity, the rear palace—the

Empress Dowager, who had become pregnant with the current

Emperor at barely more than ten years old. Jinshi was convinced that the fact that Suiren had been assigned to attend him was a show of motherly concern on the part of the Empress Dowager.

"If you still don't believe me, then let me tell you a little secret," Suiren said, and then she whispered in Jinshi's ear.

His eyes went wide. "Is that true?"

"Yes. I was administering a bit of punishment when I discovered..."

Suiren's "secret" had no bearing whatsoever on Jinshi's work— but it was very useful information to him personally. He wondered, though: what was this punishment she was talking about? He decided that for the moment, some questions were better left unasked.

"I'm sure you'd like to emerge victorious from time to time, Young Master," Suiren said, with a gesture that was girlish and charming despite her years. No sooner had Jinshi registered that, though, than she had returned to the prim, capable lady-inwaiting. "I'll see to it immediately," she said. She bowed, and exited the room without so much as the sound of a footstep.

Jinshi knew Suiren would take care of things. He could focus on other work.

The other problem brought to him by Special Envoy Aylin, for example. Something that appeared to be news even to Lahan. Jinshi hadn't wanted to hear it; he would have preferred to plug his ears. It was enough to threaten to shatter his impenetrable smile.

What kind of problem was it? It had to do with the White Lady.

And because of it, he would miss another chance to visit the apothecary shop in the pleasure district.

"The White Lady has been apprehended."

She was informed two days after the events at the village and its marsh. Considering that it would have taken her letter a day to arrive, things had happened about as quickly as humanly possible.

It was Basen who brought the message, and Ukyou who brought Basen to the shop when he'd spotted the young man standing uncomfortably in the foyer of the Verdigris House. Basen had visibly relaxed when Maomao had told him that her sister Pairin was with someone that day and wasn't in.

The shop was rather cramped, so Maomao asked the madam to ready a room for them. The brothel had many chambers that were excellent for private conversations—but only assuming Chou-u didn't find them. The overcurious brat would inject himself directly into any conversation. Thankfully, Ukyou volunteered to distract him.

Maomao took a sip of the tea that had been served to them.

"Is that right?"

"I expected more enthusiasm," Basen said.

"I assure you, I'm quite shocked."

Basen, it seemed, still wasn't accustomed to reading Maomao's expressions. Jinshi or Gaoshun would certainly have registered the slight furrow in her brow.

After the discovery that the White Lady was using pigeons to facilitate her information network, they had quickly turned the setup against her. Maomao had assumed they could read one of the letters, snatch the person who came to get it, and probably learn something—but she'd never imagined it would go quite so easily.

What had really made the difference was that she was able to bring in help.

With that help, Maomao had gone to the old man who worshipped the great snake. She believed he had the interests of his somewhat duplicitous sister and her granddaughter at heart, and she knew that somehow or other, to a greater extent or a lesser, they were connected with the White Lady. The man could stay quiet, but it wouldn't save the women from punishment. So, Maomao urged him, he should defect. (Call it blackmail if you must.)

"We staked out the pigeon coop, and when we detained the person who visited it, they led us to the villa of a particular bureaucrat," Basen said.

They had asked the old man's younger sister and her granddaughter whether they could identify the official in question, and the women said they knew him; they also identified several other bureaucrats who were friends with this man. One of them, it transpired, was harboring the White Lady.

"Kind of anticlimactic. I can't help wondering, though—why would anyone go so far to protect her?" Maomao said.

"The bureaucrats were passionate cannabis smokers, and traces of what's thought to be opium were also found in the house."

"Ah." But of course: once someone was hooked on narcotics, they might do anything to get them. Getting such a drug out of your life took considerable resolve as well. "Just goes to show one shouldn't fool around with dangerous drugs, I guess."

"You're one to talk!" Basen said. She ignored his profoundly doubtful look, instead thinking about what medicine she would mix up today. Basen had presumably come just to tell her about what had happened, so his business was finished. His hand was better now; the bandage was off. Really, though, Maomao wasn't sure why they couldn't have sent her a letter, or at least some other messenger. No reason for Basen to come here and be terrified by the courtesans.

Despite having delivered his message, however, Basen showed no sign of getting up to leave. Instead he kept stealing glances at Maomao, his mouth almost opening and then shutting again.

At length she asked, "Is something the matter, sir?"

"Ahem. No, I..."

Maomao was curious, but didn't actually want to get involved. Whatever it was, it probably meant trouble—and worse, it probably meant Jinshi. Yes, definitely better to steer clear.

She hadn't seen Jinshi since they'd parted ways at the western capital. The extent of their contact had been her letter about the White Lady, to which his reply had been businesslike.

I hope he'll just pretend nothing happened. That would be the most harmonious thing, in her opinion. Unfortunately, the world wasn't a decent enough place to give you harmony just because you wanted it.

Basen finally stopped flapping his mouth and looked her square in the eye, clearly resolved to say what he had to say. "I have a question for you. If a woman's menstrual period doesn't come, is it fair to assume that she's pregnant?"

Maomao greeted this with silence—she never did know what this man was going to say next! Basen scowled at the disdainful look she gave him, but his face grew steadily redder. Frankly, Maomao wasn't sure what to make of such a hopelessly virginal response. He wanted to know how to tell if a woman was pregnant? Could it be he'd fallen in with some bad girl who'd taken advantage of him?

I guess I could see it, she thought. Basen always did seem to come up a little short, man-wise. There was no end of people in the world who, under the influence of a bit too much to drink, made a night's mistake. And considering Basen's status, there must be any number of women eager to share a drink with him.

She knew this was something she couldn't tease him about; she had to be serious. "Master Basen," she began. "I know you may feel you were duped, but a real man takes responsibility for his actions."

Basen looked at her incredulously.

"If it really is your child, then you have to do what's right. Not that that makes it okay that she took advantage of you, but—"

"Hold on. What are you talking about?"

"The poor girl you got pregnant, Master Basen."

"I didn't get anyone pregnant!" Basen slammed a fist against the floor, the impact so powerful it made Maomao feel like she might be flung into the air. It was his right fist—wasn't he afraid he would injure it again?

"Why are you asking, then?"

"W-Well, it's..." His mouth started opening and closing again, but he managed to lean in and whisper into Maomao's ear: "It's about Consort Lishu."

Maomao looked at him, thunderstruck. No way. No way...

Yes, there had seemed to be a certain something between them; if you could only disregard their respective stations, Basen

and Lishu could have made a pretty nice—

Hold on. When the hell would they have had the time?

Surely there hadn't been a free moment. Then again, Maomao had hardly been watching them twenty-four seven, so she couldn't be sure. Then again again, had they ever looked like they'd—? She tried to remember.

She seemed to be confused, in her own way. As she thought, she rifled through her medicine cabinet and produced a packet of something that she placed in front of Basen. "This is a relatively harmless abortifacient," she said—something she kept on hand for the courtesans.

"I'm not certain I can control my strength—but may I hit you?" Basen asked with uncharacteristic politeness. The touch of civility, in fact, indicated how angry he was. Maomao knew she'd never survive a blow from someone with his absurd strength, and she delicately put the medicine away.

Basen cleared his throat, drinking some of the cold tea in an effort to bring down the flush that had come into his face, a combination of frustration and embarrassment. "Ahem. What I'm saying is, a certain august personage is in a difficult position." Apparently desperate to avoid using so much as a personal pronoun, he resorted to extremely circuitous locutions. "When one has been away from a certain place for quite a long time, and then returns to this certain place, one is subject to the same strictures as if one were entering it for the first time." A certain place was no doubt the rear palace.

"Ah, so that's what's going on," Maomao said, slapping her knees.

There were stipulations when entering the rear palace: just as any men were expected to be eunuchs, there were certain things that a woman had to do as well. Nothing as difficult as what was demanded of the men, but the last thing they wanted was for a woman to enter the rear palace with a child already in her belly. Thus, a woman was only allowed entry after she had been confirmed to be menstruating.

There were occasional exceptions for temporary leave, but these were typically in order to pay one's respects to a groom's family on the occasion of a woman's marriage—the name of her partner was recorded, so if she did get pregnant, they knew who to blame. Most women then left before the child was even born.

A woman who had been away from the rear palace for almost two months, and a high consort at that, couldn't expect to simply walk back in. Lishu's problem was that it had now been more than a month since she'd returned from the western capital.

"So her period is late?" Maomao asked. Basen nodded miserably. "Well, Consort Lishu is young, so they might be irregular, and when you consider the toll that traveling must have taken on her, it can't be that surprising if she's a little late."

That, though, was speaking purely from a health perspective. The fact that Basen was talking to her, and that he knew such personal information, meant there was something else going on.

What might happen to a woman who was suspected of getting pregnant outside the confines of the rear palace—one of His Majesty's highest consorts, at that? Especially when the reason she'd left the rear palace on this occasion was that she might be given to the Emperor's younger brother, Jinshi, in marriage? If Basen was aware of this situation, it was likely Jinshi was too. If that girl didn't have bad luck, she'd have no luck at all,

Maomao thought. She had to sympathize with all the tribulations Lishu had been subject to, considering they were no fault of her own. She was already bullied and ridiculed; if people thought she was engaged to Jinshi, jealous stares would start coming her way.

Pregnant, though? Consort Lishu hardly seemed qualified to get pregnant. She'd never even been "visited" by the Emperor. In light of which, Maomao was starting to think she saw what Basen was driving at.

"You want me to prove that nothing untoward happened with

Consort Lishu."

That brought an undisguised look of relief to Basen's face.

"You'll do it?"

"I will. I'll need to be able to go to the palace, though, and I'm not sure they'll let me in. A doctor maybe, but a random apothecary?"

"Don't worry about that. I've already spoken to the head of the medical office. And Sir Luomen has kindly agreed to come as well."

That made things easy. So Basen had already had everything in place when he arrived. As for why Luomen was involved, it was likely Basen didn't trust the quack to handle this, but knew that not just any (male) doctor could attend on the consort. Maomao's adoptive father was the perfect compromise.

Maomao was excited at the prospect of seeing her old man again—it had been a while. She felt bad for Lishu, but she personally was downright happy.

Basen, by contrast, continued to look grim. Maybe she should have pursued the matter with him—but she wasn't thinking about it that deeply at the time.

The next day, a messenger from the palace arrived. Maomao left Sazen in charge of the shop, as usual.

"Please don't be long!" he said. What was he, her pet dog? He was always like this. Maomao had made sure Chou-u would be out shopping with Ukyou when she left, and she was glad she had. She'd talked to the madam, and even the old lady understood the boy couldn't possibly go with her to the palace.

Chou-u might have been gone, but Maomao the cat nuzzled at her persistently, until she picked her up by the scruff of the neck and put her on Sazen's head.

"Hey, I'm hot..." he said, but he didn't look especially unhappy as he savored the white fur of the cat's belly against his face.

It seemed to be a perk of these outings that they felt she needed to be presentable, and so gave her new clothes whenever she was summoned on these errands. They never asked for them back, so Maomao always either sold the outfits to the used clothing store or put them up for auction among the courtesans. In addition to the usual robe, this time there was a white overrobe. Something to serve as a doctor's apron in this warm season.

If they were summoning Maomao, it implied that the consort's period still hadn't come. She decided to prepare some wenjing

tang, a concoction that aided blood flow, just in case. There were several other remedies that might help, but Maomao picked one with minimal side effects. She assumed Luomen would have some ready as well—how could he not, being so much more experienced than she was?—but she thought the consort might be less intimidated to receive the medicine from a fellow woman rather than a eunuch.

The carriage rolled through the palace grounds, stopping somewhere near the rear palace. They were in fact quite close to the pavilion where Anshi, the Empress Dowager, had once invited them.

Maomao put on the white overrobe, ignoring the heat, and got

out of the carriage. She found herself facing a relatively small pavilion smack in the middle between the Empress Dowager's residence and that of the current Empress. It must have been put up long ago as a place for a royal consort to live, back before the rear palace had been established. As for the building in which the former emperor had spent so much of his time, which Maomao had visited the year before, it was long gone. She had to admit the place looked a little more barren without it.

Waiting in front of the pavilion was a physician with a benign look on his face and a cane in his hand. It was Luomen. "Ah, you're here," he said, dragging one leg as he came toward Maomao. They'd sent letters, but it had been nearly six months since they'd last seen each other.

Luomen was accompanied by two other men who appeared to be medical officials. Both were small and elderly, not at all threatening—perhaps that was simply how doctors tended to be, or maybe it was a gesture of consideration for Consort Lishu.

"This way, please," a woman said. It was one of Lishu's ladiesin-waiting from the rear palace. Maomao recognized her, but didn't know her name. The woman, though, clearly knew Maomao; one could catch an audible tsk from her. Apparently, attitudes among Lishu's women hadn't improved—maybe they had even gotten worse.

"This way," the woman reiterated and then led them on what seemed to Maomao to be a very long, very circuitous route. They went up to the second floor, then the third, then to the innermost room on the floor, before the woman said, "I'm ever so sorry. I forgot the mistress changed rooms."

Is she that eager to make our lives difficult? Maomao wondered. The three physicians with her were all old men; maybe their mild looks caused the woman to take them lightly.

At length, Maomao and her companions were shown to the innermost chamber on the first floor of the pavilion, which looked like a perfectly typical room for a consort. Emphasis on for a

consort: the furnishings were of a quality that your average

commoner might never see in their whole lives.

Consort Lishu lay on a canopied bed, with her chief lady-inwaiting (who was also familiar) standing by her side looking quite distressed. Lishu briefly quailed at the sight of the male doctors (aged though they were), but seeing Maomao with them relaxed her—for a brief second, before she quailed again, for altogether different reasons.

Luomen said simply, "We assumed there might be concerns about us, so we brought a proxy," and looked at Maomao.

Lishu was suspected of being pregnant—and even if she wasn't, if anything had happened between her, a high consort, and a man who was not the Emperor, her life would be forfeit.

Not that I think that's remotely likely. For one thing, she didn't think anyone as transparent as Lishu could keep a secret like that for very long. Probably not from Maomao, and almost certainly not from Ah-Duo, who had been with her the entire trip. It was impossible to be absolutely positive, of course—but it seemed unlikely.

So it was that Maomao found herself standing in front of the terrified consort, flexing her fingers. The quickest and simplest solution would be to check whether Consort Lishu was intact—a task for which Maomao, raised in the pleasure quarter, was uniquely suited. She had all kinds of ways to know.

"Let's hurry up and get this over with. That'll be easiest for everyone," Maomao said.

"What? Wait... N-No! Noooo!" Lishu wailed.

"You're all right. I'll be done before you can count the wood grains in your bed."

"Done with wh—ahh! Eek!" The consort reached out desperately for her chief lady-in-waiting, but Maomao closed the curtain around the bed. As for the elderly physicians, they stood discreetly in a corner of the room with their backs turned. For a while, the only sound was Lishu's whimpering.

"She's pure. Of course," Maomao announced flatly, wiping her hands with a cloth. Lishu lay on the bed, completely drained, provoking consternation from her chief lady-in-waiting. It should have been fine—Maomao was a fellow woman; she'd even done something similar when assessing whether Empress Gyokuyou's child was in breech; but evidently Maomao had been wrong to think a complete virgin would take the exam the same way as a woman who had already given birth. Lishu looked even more exhausted than the time they'd plucked out her hair in the bath.

"Maomao, you could stand to be more gentle," Luomen said, although it was a little late for that. The other two physicians wore strained expressions as well.

Just when Maomao was thinking the job was over and she could relax and write up the paperwork, a woman's voice said, "Excuse me." The door opened, and three of Lishu's ladies-inwaiting came in, flanking the consort's former chief lady-inwaiting, the one who had been reprimanded by Jinshi. She looked like trouble, as usual, but today she seemed to have taken it to another level.

"Yes? Can we help you?" the current chief lady-in-waiting asked. She was technically the superior in this situation, but she'd started life as nothing more than a food taster, and she felt an understandable shock of fear when confronted by the woman who had previously held her position.

The former chief lady-in-waiting simply ignored her, turning instead to Maomao and the elderly physicians. "Were you able to ascertain the consort's chastity?" she asked.

"Yes, we've just finished the examination," Luomen said, whereupon the woman glanced toward Maomao.

"But you didn't perform the examination, did you? It was that woman there. A known acquaintance of the consort. Don't you see a problem here?" She seemed to be suggesting that Maomao might lie to protect Lishu—an attitude Maomao rightfully found irritating.

"Perhaps you'd like to join me in conducting a reexamination, then?" she said. "Maybe we should call a midwife too, just to be extra safe."

Her idea provoked looks of distress—from Lishu and her chief lady-in-waiting. The consort looked like she might die of embarrassment if she were subjected to any more such humiliations.

The former chief lady-in-waiting, for her part, simply shook her head. It was almost like she thought she was the one in charge here—she'd certainly gotten more self-important since Maomao had seen her last. Before, at least she'd been willing to pretend to be deferential to the consort.

The reason for her arrogance soon became clear—she was holding it in her hand. "I must say, I dearly hoped it wouldn't come to this—but I found this, and felt honor bound to bring it to your collective attention." She put a piece of paper on the table. (Maomao couldn't help noticing how crumpled it was.) "I confess, I couldn't believe the consort would write such a thing!" The woman leaned dramatically—almost theatrically—against the table.

When Maomao saw what was written on the page, she could only frown.

"A love letter!" the former chief lady-in-waiting announced. "To someone who is not His Majesty!"

The page was covered in pretty, girlish characters—and a plenitude of sweet nothings and proclamations of love.

So that's why she took us on the scenic route, Maomao thought, finally understanding why the attendant had led them to the wrong room before finally bringing them to Consort Lishu. She hadn't been playing a nasty little joke—she'd been buying time.

The former chief lady-in-waiting called for an official who was outside the room. Maomao wasn't sure why she would be so eager to do that—the consort's infidelity would have consequences for her ladies-in-waiting as well. Above all, the question of whether the letter was really Lishu's bothered Maomao, but the handwriting had already been examined and determined to be hers.

Maomao and the doctors were shooed out of the building before they had a chance to question the consort. It seemed the former chief lady had wanted to act before Maomao could do her examination, but the delaying tactic hadn't gained enough time for that. Instead, one might say, she'd resorted to force.

Maomao and her companions decided to go back to the palace medical office. Maomao was an outsider, while Luomen and his two fellow physicians were none of them forceful personalities. If they were ordered to leave, there was little they could do but leave. Maomao was determined to at least write up a report on her findings. The former chief lady-in-waiting had insisted that Maomao's word wasn't trustworthy, but that wasn't hers to judge. If nothing else, the doctors with her had seen Lishu's face, and they seemed to believe that Maomao was right.

"That was rather brazen," remarked Elderly Physician No. 1. He had a lanky frame that made one think of a barren tree.

"Yes! It was almost too much to watch," responded Elderly Physician No. 2, a portly man with fingers like sausages.

Luomen was hardly younger than the two other doctors, but as the newest member of the office, it was he who served the tea. Maomao got up to help him, but he sat her back down, insisting that she focus on writing.

"The rear palace has always had people like her, but it's always disappointing to realize that kind is still alive and well," said the first doctor.

"You said it!" said the second. "I'm not saying women are evil, just that some of them make a room a darker place. It's the same in the palace at large..."

Maomao cocked her head, surprised: they talked as if they'd been to the rear palace. "You're not eunuchs, are you, sirs?" "No, we're not. We were in the rear palace, but we're not castrated—we got out of there before they got us."

"Back in the day, a doctor didn't have to be a eunuch to go to the rear palace. Although they did make you take a strange drug any time you visited."

Ah... Maomao remembered: the most notorious scandal in the rear palace had taken place decades ago when a doctor had gotten involved with a woman serving there and made her pregnant. Or at least, that was the story—it had in fact been the doing of the former emperor, but the deed was pinned on the unfortunate physician, who was banished along with the child. Problem solved, as far as the bureaucracy was concerned.

These days, the old quack was the only doctor in the rear palace, but at the time of that incident, there had been many physicians serving there—naturally enough, as it hadn't been necessary to give up one's manhood in order to do it.

"Well and good for them. I was a little late making my exit, and here I am," Luomen said blandly as he placed teacups on a tray.

"It's your own fault, Xiaomen. You never think anything is urgent enough to rush about!" Elderly Physician No. 1 chuckled.

"That's right, but you sure helped us!" No. 2 chortled. They both seemed to be having a good time, while Luomen simply looked a bit bemused. What else could he do? From their attitudes to the affectionate nickname, it was clear they were old friends.

Elderly Physician No. 2 turned to Maomao. "So you're

Xiaomen's adopted daughter, miss? So is that eccentric, L—"

Maomao's face began to contort until it took on an unabashed glare. The portly doctor quickly shut his mouth.

"Young ladies always have a few subjects they'd prefer to avoid. Let's respect that," the lanky doctor said astutely. Clearly, age had brought him wisdom. Most helpful.

"Getting back to the subject—so the rear palace has always had plenty of people like her?" Maomao asked.

"Yes. Chaotic elements." When the empress regnant had been in power, the women in the rear palace had been engaged in kicking each other down. Officials were selected, and selected frequently, on the basis of ability, and so the rear palace became a microcosm of the tension that pervaded the entire court. "And people say there were lots of spies too."

"Spies?"

Evidently, the endless battles amongst the consorts inspired them to start using maids in hopes of scrounging up inside information.

"Once in a while, even ladies-in-waiting would turn traitor," the physician said. A lady dissatisfied with her situation could easily be talked around, turned into a pawn in someone else's game. Or again, one might lean on the power of one's parents to exploit a weakness of the target's parents—and so the pecking order in the rear palace could change with dizzying speed.

"It got exceptionally bad when the current Empress Dowager became pregnant. Women driven mad with jealousy even attempted to kill her."

"That's true! I don't know how she survived until the empress regnant took her under her protection," the other doctor said.

"It was all thanks to the astounding lady-in-waiting she had. She really knew how to handle herself—they say she even got the assassins to turn on their mistresses!"

What is this, a novel? Maomao thought, sipping her tea and looking unimpressed.

"Anyway, I haven't seen something so distasteful for a long time," the first doctor said.

This brought a question to Maomao's mind; she said, "From the way you're talking, it sounds like you think someone else in the rear palace is conspiring to bring down Consort Lishu."

"You think not? Why else would a person turn so spectacularly against the great lady she serves?"

It was a fair point—until now, the former chief lady-in-waiting had never gone beyond garden-variety harassment. This time, though, she was clearly bent on destroying the consort. If she was successful, Lishu would be banished from the rear palace, and her ladies-in-waiting would be out of a job. In fact, they would be lucky not to suffer the same punishment as their mistress.

"That almost seems too superficial," Maomao said.

Elderly Physicians Nos. 1 & 2 looked at each other. "If you're Xiaomen's daughter, I'm sure you're a very smart young woman. But not everyone is as careful and thoughtful as you," the lanky doctor said patiently.

"I understand that," Maomao said—but this was too much.

"People like that aren't thinking about the future—only about their pride. They might start by nettling someone they happen to dislike, but when there's pushback, it only makes them angrier."

"You don't think she would hesitate even a little? She's dealing with a high consort and she's only a lady-in-waiting."

"That's exactly it. If a person feels trampled on, it only takes someone to give them the smallest push, and they go tumbling— humans are funny that way." It was a simple way to make a spy.

"Ha ha ha, you do like those kinds of stories, don't you?" the pudgy doctor said, stuffing a bun into his face. "It's just like how you said that 'White Immortal' everyone was talking about was an intelligence agent from another country."

Luomen sipped tea with a reserved smile on his face, but there was unmistakable sympathy for Consort Lishu in his eyes.

"Hey, don't worry about it. Once your girl submits the paperwork, the consort will be free and clear," the portly physician said, obviously able to tell exactly how Luomen was feeling.

"But that love letter," Luomen said, his worry not assuaged.

"Oh, that. Girls her age write letters like that all the time. What's the problem with letting a little fancy take you? I know, I know—it's embarrassing, for sure, and it's a problem coming from a high consort. But you just say she was practicing writing to His Majesty, and the trouble goes away. Maybe she did write that letter—but she didn't send it, did she? All the consorts' letters are supposed to be checked by the censor, anyway."

"Yes, they're supposed to be..." Maomao said. But she was concerned by just how confident the former chief lady-in-waiting had acted.

"Say, Maomao," Luomen began, glancing outside.

"Yes?"

"There's a certain someone who always shows up about this hour, claiming it's snack time. Are you sure you should be here?"

At that, Maomao promptly drained her tea. At the very same moment, she heard a weird old man whistling outside. She lost not a second getting her things together and opening the window opposite the entrance. "I'll see myself out, then," she said.

"You're an odd one," said one of the two Elderly Physicians, but neither of them tried to stop her; they were too busy preparing for the storm that was about to hit.

The exact same moment Maomao landed on the ground outside, there was a great slam as the door flew open. "Uncle!

I've brought some ji dan gao! You'll join me, won't you?"

The man announcing his snack was none other than the monocled freak, and his entrance left Maomao with absolutely no reason to stick around any longer.

I'm still not sure, though...

Would Lishu's trouble really be over now? The question made her uneasy. She hoped there was nothing bigger going on—but Maomao's bad feelings had a tendency to be right.

Chapter 13: Scandal (Part One)

Some days later, Sazen came to her with an unsettling story. He appeared at the shop, his face drawn, saying he wanted to talk. Maomao wondered what he could want to talk about, but it turned out to be none other than Consort Lishu.

"If a rear palace consort had been meeting secretly with a man, would she be put to death?"

The question came completely out of the blue, and Maomao could only muster a befuddled "Huh?"

Sazen seemed to take her response as vaguely insulting; he stomped on the floor and said, "Would she or wouldn't she? I'm an ignorant bumpkin; just tell me!" His gaze was piercing. Maomao realized her reaction hadn't been ideal. Sazen, she knew, had once served the Shi clan, and while he had no loyalty to his former masters, she suspected he had some attachment to Loulan.

"I guess that would be sort of unavoidable in cases of infidelity, wouldn't it? An ordinary palace lady might be one thing, but this is a consort you're talking about. Why are you talking about it, though? What brought this on?"

Sazen pursed his lips and wouldn't quite look at her. "I heard about it at the market—they say the Emperor is preparing to subdue another clan."

"Is it the U clan, by any chance?"

"No idea. But I heard it was because of a high consort who's only sixteen years old."

Maomao didn't say anything to that, but she wished she could put her head in her hands. If even Sazen had heard about this situation, probably everyone in the capital had. She'd been sure to be explicit in her report that Consort Lishu was innocent. Whatever the consort's former chief lady-in-waiting might be pulling, Maomao had tried to tell herself that it wouldn't amount to much. But it sounded like she'd been wrong.

Normally, she might send a letter to Jinshi and simply wait for him to do something about it, but there wasn't time for that now.

"H-Hey!" Sazen cried when she jumped up.

"I'm going to need you to watch the shop for a bit."

"What, again?!"

Maomao hurried out and toward the northern side of the capital. That was where the palace was—along with a whole district of high-class homes. One of them was one of His Majesty's villas, home to Ah-Duo, herself a former high consort.

"Is Lady Ah-Duo in?" Maomao asked the guard, even though she knew he wouldn't simply grant her admittance.

"Do you have an official appointment, miss?" the guard asked. The fact that he was willing to speak so politely to a mere apothecary—and not a particularly well-dressed one at that—was probably because he remembered Maomao from her other visits here. But that wouldn't be enough to gain her admission.

"I'm afraid I don't, sir, but I simply must see Lady Ah-Duo."

"Sorry, rules are rules. I can't just let you in," the guard said, looking genuinely apologetic. It briefly occurred to Maomao to try to force her way past him while he was busy feeling sorry for her, but she knew all too well that it would only end with her under arrest.

"Might I at least ask you to take her a message for me?"

"I'm afraid she's not here right now..."

Maomao made a face like she had bitten down on something particularly bitter. If she was just going to let herself be sent home, she might as well not have come at all.

I wonder if Suirei's here, she thought, but then dismissed the idea. Suirei wasn't officially supposed to exist. She wouldn't meet Maomao alone, and even if she did, she probably lacked any authority to summon Ah-Duo.

"Might I be allowed to wait?" Maomao asked, determined to stay there until Ah-Duo returned.

It was something like an hour later that a carriage arrived at the villa. The guard was kind enough to alert Maomao, who was sitting in the shade of a tree as she waited. She jumped to her feet and ran over to the vehicle; Ah-Duo's face appeared in the window.

"Well, this is a surprise. I always took you to be a bit coolerheaded than this," Ah-Duo said—and it was true that a few years ago, Maomao probably wouldn't have come personally to Ah-Duo like this. She would have borne in mind that the palace had its own ways of maintaining its equilibrium, and that the Emperor seemed especially considerate toward Lishu such that nothing too terrible could happen to her.

At that moment, though, in her mind's eye, Lishu seemed to overlap with the lady of the annihilated Shi clan. Maybe that was what had made her uncommonly emotional about this.

"Let's talk inside," Ah-Duo said. "I'm sure you must be thirsty after such a long wait out in this heat."

"Thank you, milady," Maomao said, bowing deeply, and then they entered the villa.

"So there are already rumors in the marketplace. News traveled faster than I expected." Ah-Duo sat with her legs and arms both crossed. On anyone else, the posture might have looked imperious, but for her it seemed oddly fitting and not at all offensive. A lady-in-waiting had served them tea, yet she had disappeared almost without Maomao noticing. Maomao had thought Suirei, at least, might be present, but there was no sign of her.

Hesitantly, she said, "May I take it from your tone, milady, that the rumors are true?"

"What's true is that at the moment she's confined to a separate pavilion," Ah-Duo said. The consort was not, strictly speaking, being treated as a criminal, but she was still effectively under arrest.

"Have you had an opportunity to speak with Consort Lishu?"

"I have," Ah-Duo replied. She told Maomao that Lishu insisted she hadn't written any love letter—but also, Ah-Duo added, the letter in question clearly was written by Lishu.

That gave Maomao pause. "Don't those things contradict each other?"

"They don't. It seems the text in question was copied out of a novel."

So that's it. The novels the palace women loved so much were full of tales of romance—parts of which might happen to look just like a love letter if one found them in isolation.

"The consort was quite shocked. She says she was copying the story for a palace woman she'd recently become friends with."

Maomao cast her eyes to the ground. Lishu had believed that, slowly but surely, she was gaining some allies.

A woman who couldn't write was likely a woman of low rank. By writing out the story, Lishu had been trying, in her own somewhat awkward way, to make friends. Copying out a text might seem a mundane enough thing, but it would have taken considerable time and effort—and because Lishu was doing it and asking nothing in return, she might well have imagined it would deepen the friendship between her and this other woman. She must have been very happy with the idea.

Only to find herself betrayed, Maomao thought. Or had the other woman approached the consort with that in mind all along?

Whichever, it was all very underhanded.

"Couldn't you provide a copy of the book she was working from?"

"The thing about that is...every book that enters the rear palace goes through the censors, who keep a copy on hand for reference. But nothing they have matches this text."

"You mean it didn't go through their office?"

"Mmhm. Someone smuggled it in."

Well, now. That was a problem. Still something nagged at Maomao. "What happened to the woman who asked the consort to copy the book? Where is she? For that matter, how did a woman who can't read get her hands on a book that had bypassed the censors, anyway?"

"Supposing the woman is already gone?" Ah-Duo said. While Consort Lishu had been on her trip, about a hundred women had reached the end of their terms of service and left the rear palace.

This mystery woman had been one of them.

"And after she left?"

"We looked, naturally. But we never found her. It's not like she was officially attending upon the consort, anyway. They seem to have gotten to know each other when the woman did odd jobs at the consort's request. Even if we found her, she could just play dumb. She may have been doing everything with one eye on the end of her contract."

If this was, in fact, a premeditated crime, it would have been difficult for the woman to pull off on her own. Maomao tried to think over what she knew. One thing was certain: if a high consort like Lishu had started getting friendly with a menial maid, her critics wouldn't have stayed silent about it—least of all her former chief lady-in-waiting.

So a palace lady nearing the end of her term of service had approached Consort Lishu to copy out a romantic text from a book. That book happened to be one the censors hadn't seen or approved. Something a lowly, illiterate maid would never normally possess.

"I'm thinking that some other person used the maid to convince the consort to write out the passage, but what's your opinion, Lady Ah-Duo?" Maomao asked. She didn't like to work based entirely on her own assumptions; she hoped Ah-Duo could back up her intuition.

"I agree," Ah-Duo said—but then she added, "Consort Lishu's lady claimed she found the 'letter' in the consort's room, but it was actually found somewhere else—somewhere outside the rear palace."

"Had it actually been sent to some lordling somewhere?"

If it had still been in Lishu's chambers, then it would be easy enough to claim she was going to send it to the Emperor:

problem solved. But if it was already in the possession of some other man, then it was hard to blame them for treating her as unfaithful.

"Yes, unfortunately. That's why it's such a big issue and why she's under lock and key now. The man in question is the son of a servant, someone who's met the consort several times throughout her life. He denies any involvement, but the letter was found at his house."

The man could protest his innocence all he wanted; finding evidence like that at his own estate was pretty damning. Apparently the former chief lady-in-waiting had claimed that there had been something between this man and the consort when she had returned from the nunnery to the rear palace, and she had been most insistent the man be investigated. She had Consort Lishu all tied up with a pretty bow.

But that doesn't make any sense!

"How did she even send the letter? I thought the censors checked everything, even letters home," Maomao said. That was why on one occasion, someone had tried to use chemicals infused in the wooden writing strips as a code, and why Empress Gyokuyou's letters to her family were so roundabout in communicating the information they contained.

"The letter was folded very small. It must have been tucked among some items she was sending home, for the boy to get it first."

It wasn't impossible. But something felt off.

Maybe Maomao felt so muddled and confused because it was Ah-Duo telling her all this. What she really wanted was to hear the story firsthand.

"Do you think anyone could possibly get me an interview with Consort Lishu, or even with this young man?" she asked.

At that exact moment, someone knocked on the door, and a servant hesitantly showed his face.

"What is it?" Ah-Duo asked, and the servant looked at Maomao as if he was unsure what to do.

"A Master Basen is here asking after Lady Maomao." It was as if he'd been waiting for his cue.

Basen offered only the most perfunctory of greetings to AhDuo before he dragged Maomao off.

"If I may ask, sir, what in the world do you think you're doing?" Maomao inquired. Basen had come on horseback, begrudging even a carriage, and the two of them stood out like a sore thumb as they worked their way through the city, Maomao clinging on behind him. She did at least have a cloth to cover her face.

"You heard about Consort Lishu?" he said.

"Yes..."

"Then you must have figured it out. You must have some way to show her innocence." Maomao thought she understood what Basen was saying, but something still bothered her. "I can't meet her myself. I was told to find a proxy," he said.

A woman under suspicion of infidelity would certainly find it difficult to meet with a man, true enough. Much as Basen couldn't have been more of a lifesaver for her, Maomao decided to tweak the headstrong man. "You were told. By Jinshi?" she asked.

"I'm...using my own judgment."

"Oh, I see."

Yes, something did bother Maomao—but as she didn't wish to upset the person in control of the horse, she kept it to herself for the time being.

Consort Lishu had been relocated from the pavilion she'd occupied a few days before. That building had been not unlike the one she had in the rear palace, showing that she was still being treated as her station merited—but now she had been moved to the western part of the city, and her residence was less a palace than a tower. It looked something like a pagoda one might see at a temple, but on a larger scale, six stories tall with several overlapping roofs, and although it was somewhat lacking in color, that only made it look all the more imposing. The impression was reinforced by the ring of gigantic trees surrounding the place. Truly impressive, as buildings went—yet rather poor quarters for a royal consort. The burly men standing guard at the entrance didn't make it any more inviting.

"During the time of the empress regnant, a powerful courtier who turned against her was brought here, on the pretext of having an incurable illness," Basen informed Maomao. "They claimed they'd brought him here to attempt a new medical procedure. It's the same place the former emperor's brothers were brought when they contracted the illness that killed them.

All of them met their ends in this tower."

So this place has a history. Maomao was about to say it out loud, but she refrained. The sad tale somehow robbed the place of its gravity, turning it instead into nothing more than a gloomy prison. Did His Majesty order this? she wondered. She'd always believed he was partial to Lishu, in his own way.

"If we can just find a way to undermine their evidence, she could get out of here," Basen said. What he meant was, he wanted Maomao to talk to the consort and find the truth.

Luckily for him, Maomao wanted the same thing.

There was, however, one thing she had to be sure of first. She pulled aside the cloth over her head so that she could look him square in the eye and said, "I'm going to do what you ask, Master Basen, because I share your objection to Consort Lishu's treatment."

Maomao did feel compassion, once in a while. She'd originally taken Lishu for nothing more than an unpleasant little princess, but as she saw misfortune befall the young woman again and again, she had come to sympathize with her. Surely no one could blame Maomao for trying to do a little something to help the consort. At the rear palace, Maomao had been then-Consort Gyokyou's woman, and so she couldn't be too vociferous in support of Lishu—but now she didn't have that concern.

What about Basen, though?

"Do I understand correctly that we're doing this not on Master Jinshi's orders, but at your own discretion?" she asked.

"You do."

"And what motivates this behavior, sir?" It was the obvious thing to ask. So obvious, in fact, that she hadn't been able to ask it even though it was on her mind.

"Who wouldn't want to help an innocent consort in trouble?" Basen said.

"How do you know she's innocent?" Maomao said flatly. Lishu and Basen had only just met on their recent trip. They'd seen each other at the banquet, true enough, but they hadn't had a chance to talk. And otherwise there had been few opportunities for them to even see each other's faces during the journey—the only time they were face-to-face was when the lion attacked. Again, they had hardly spoken to each other even then; for the most part, Basen simply peppered Maomao with questions about Lishu. Now he was acting to help this young woman with no official orders, entirely on his own. Why?

I wish he wouldn't.

There were people in the world who did something extraordinarily tiresome: fall in love at first sight. They would completely ignore personality and social status, feeling love well up, as it were, at nothing more than a person's appearance.

Maomao was quite certain: at that moment, Basen was operating under the influence of exactly such irksome feelings. True, she'd known him to get a little emotional from time to time, but for the most part Basen was quite aware of his place as Jinshi's attendant. A place of which acting on his own volition to prove Lishu's innocence was emphatically not a part.

All this being the case, Maomao wished to be very clear about one thing: "Even if we establish the consort's innocence, the best you can hope for is that she returns to the rear palace."

"Yes... I know that."

She was a flower blooming on a peak so high he would never reach it as long as he lived. Would recognizing that be enough to put the matter to rest for him?

"If you mean that, sir, then very well." There were still many things Maomao wished she could say, but she decided to stop there. She was no more eager than anyone to stick her nose into such subjects.

It happened with customers sometimes: they'd go head over heels for a courtesan the first time they saw her, and come to the brothel constantly, spending every coin they had on the woman. But when the money dried up, so did the love, and men who didn't understand that would vilify the suddenly distant and uninterested courtesan, ridicule her, sometimes even become enraged and try to kill her. There's little more unsettling than a man laughing uproariously over a blood-soaked bedroom.

If they were going to fall in love with a woman hiding the bags under her eyes with makeup, bags inflicted by a lack of sleep from entertaining customers all night long, you would hope they could at least be true to that love. If they didn't realize what they were getting, then it was their own fault for being so ready to give their hearts.

Maomao looked at Basen, silently begging him not to be one of those men.

"I know," Basen said, as much to himself as to her. The words sounded heavy in his mouth, and Maomao continued to fix him with a severe look as they entered the prison.

"Are you well, milady?" Maomao asked Consort Lishu, though

she knew she couldn't possibly be very well. When they had been admitted to the tower, they'd been given a wooden strip with the time written on it and told they were free to speak with Lishu until the next bell tolled.

The tower was of rather unusual construction, with a staircase and hallways winding around the outside while the interior was entirely devoted to individual rooms. Lishu's quarters occupied two simple, adjoining rooms on the third floor; Maomao wondered if there might be people on the floors above, but it seemed not.

Lishu nodded, her face pale. Her chief lady-in-waiting was beside her, but as far as Maomao could see, she had no other attendants. The room itself was well appointed for a criminal's cell, but for a member of the nobility, it must have been an acute embarrassment.

I wonder how many people have gone mad and died in this room, Maomao thought, but she knew better than to say it out loud—she would only cause even more blood to drain from Lishu's face. Instead she asked, "May I inquire whether your monthly visitor has come?"

"Yes...finally," Lishu said, glancing at the ground in embarrassment. That didn't necessarily mean she would be feeling physically better, but it did offer the consolation that she wouldn't have to be subject to further examinations by anyone else on the grounds that Maomao's work was suspect. It at least demonstrated conclusively that she wasn't pregnant.

"Would you tell me what kind of relationship you have with the man who had the letter?"

"It's not a letter. It's just something I copied," the consort said. Maomao chose to take this as a denial of any involvement with the man, however weak the terms might have been. "He's the son of a servant. All he did was babysit me a few times when I was little. The last time I saw him was at the mansion when I came back from the nunnery. My nursemaid told me he was a very serious, grown-up person."

None of this sounded like Lishu was lying; Maomao was inclined to believe the consort.

"I never sent him any letters, and the only reason I sent anything home at all was because they sent His Majesty a gift, and he thought they should be sent something in return. I wouldn't send them anything myself. The closest thing I get to a letter from them is when word comes from my father via my nursemaid."

The irony of the situation was that it had made Lishu far more talkative than usual. Each time her eyes met Maomao's, however, she would look away again. That was normal enough for her, and Maomao paid it no mind. "I've heard the letter was tucked among a delivery to your family. Do you think such a thing is possible?" she asked.

"It's impossible to say," answered, not Lishu, but her chief ladyin-waiting. "Most of what Lady Lishu sends home to her family are gifts from His Majesty. Someone from her household is supposed to come pick them up immediately after the rear palace has finished processing the goods."

There was no stipulation about who would come to pick them up—but it seemed to have been this servant's son. In other words, nothing could be proven, but nothing could be disproven either. If Lishu's former chief lady were intent on discrediting her, it would be natural to look into the matter.

"And there's no sign that the former chief lady-in-waiting herself sent anything to anyone?" Maomao asked, but Lishu and her current chief lady both shook their heads.

"I know at least that she didn't send anything after I wrote out that copy," Lishu said. If the imperious former chief lady hadn't sent anything, her lackeys wouldn't have been able to either. Records were kept of such things in the rear palace, anyway, and so would have been easy enough to check. How, then, had Lishu's handwritten copy gotten into the young man's house?

"She claims this 'letter' was packed with the shipment, but I'm having trouble imagining how it actually got in there," Maomao said. It wouldn't have been possible to physically wrap anything with that paper. Maybe it had been put in among the packing material used to prevent breakage?

"Apparently it was rolled up tightly, almost like a string. The paper we saw was very dirty and awfully tattered," the chief lady replied.

"Is that right..."

That would make the whole job easier for the culprit. Even if the wrong person got the letter, they wouldn't know what was inside it; they would think it was a piece of string and treat it accordingly. So what if they threw it away? It would be simple enough to retrieve. In fact, anyone in Consort Lishu's household could reasonably be expected to do so.

"Did anything change after you wrote that text out?"

The consort and her chief lady looked at each other. Both cocked their heads quizzically, as if to say—well, yes and no. They couldn't quite remember.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the former chief ladyin-waiting really was the criminal here (the evidence certainly seemed to be mounting). Even if so, it would be a difficult ploy to pull off solo. She must have had an accomplice outside the rear palace. How had they communicated with each other?

We can worry about that later, Maomao told herself. They were running out of time, and there was something else she wanted to ask. "One more thing, then," she said, and pulled out some paper and a portable writing set. "This novel the maid asked you to copy. Would you write down as much about it as you remember?" She immediately began grinding the ink.

"Wouldn't you like some tea, Lady Lishu?" the consort's chief lady-in-waiting, Kanan, asked. As she had been asking. As she kept asking. But Lishu shook her head. She had nothing to do but drink tea, but she felt like if she drank any more, her belly would turn to mush.

Kanan was the only lady-in-waiting there with Lishu. One lady was enough, under the circumstances; but the humiliating thing was that Lishu had never specifically been told not to bring her other women. Only Kanan had been willing to follow her here.

Lishu had been starting to think she was finally getting a little closer to some of her other ladies-in-waiting, but apparently that had been a delusion. Particularly so when it came to the maid for whom Lishu had copied out a novel because the girl couldn't read herself—and on whose account Lishu was now considered a criminal. It was enough to make her want to cry, but crying would do nothing but make life harder for Kanan, the one person who had actually stayed with her.

Here in her tower Lishu had no particular amusements, not even any windows; no way to pass the time. Her two choices were eating or sleeping. Virtually no light made it into her room, such that even in the middle of the day it was necessary to light candles to see by, and the constant clinging gloom only made her depression worse.

The only people who had come to visit her were the apothecary (the one who had once served in the rear palace herself), and Lishu's father Uryuu, one solitary time. Lishu had been sent to this tower immediately after Ah-Duo had come, so she didn't expect to see the former consort for a while. As for her father, his only question had been, "So you really didn't pull that ridiculous stunt?"

"No, sir," Lishu had answered weakly. It had been all she was able to muster. The apothecary had proven that Uryuu was in fact her real father, but such long-standing grudges didn't instantly dissipate in real life the way they did in plays. Her father might finally believe she was his daughter, but he had other children. He'd rejected her mother; why should he suddenly feel any warmth for the daughter he'd had with her? Lishu had known perfectly well that things had been unlikely to change, yet it grieved her to be confronted with the reality.

"I'm going to clean these up, then, milady," Kanan said, collecting the tea implements and taking them out of the room. There was nowhere to get water in Lishu's chambers, so any washing had to be done on a lower floor. Kanan was allowed some mobility, but Lishu was required to stay on the third floor. If she ever went downstairs, it was only with the permission of her guard.

Lishu sighed and stretched out across her table. The old building creaked and cracked every time she moved. The upper levels seemed to be in an even worse state, and Lishu sometimes worried that one day the ceiling might come clean off.

It seemed to her that there was someone else locked up here besides her. Because the staircase wound around the outside of the building, getting to the upper levels required passing the rooms on the lower floors, and several times each day, someone— someone who wasn't Lishu or Kanan—took the stairs going up. Kanan reported that this person would be carrying food or changes of clothes, so there must have been someone up there in the same situation as Lishu.

She had no way of finding out who it was, though—and even if she did, it was possible she would discover she had been better off not knowing.

With nothing else really to do, Lishu thought she might try to sleep a little, but then she heard a noise from above her. She looked at the ceiling in surprise. It was an old building; there must be some mice around. But one does grow anxious when one is in a dimly lit room by oneself. Lishu was so frightened, in fact, that she thought she might try to step outside.

Tump, tump, tump. Mice didn't have footsteps like that. Lishu was still frightened, but now she was also strangely intrigued. The sounds seemed to be coming from above the next room, so Lishu took the cover from her bed and, draping it over her head, peeked cautiously through the door.

"Y-You're just a little mouse, right? Say 'squeak'!"

It was a silly request. Before, back when Lishu had been ignorant of the mockery of her ladies-in-waiting, she had taken an imperious attitude with maids who came to her pavilion, frequently issuing just such childish demands. She'd been told that you had to assert yourself with these lowly types so that they knew their place, and she had believed it uncritically. No wonder the maids hadn't liked her—she couldn't do anything for herself, yet she went around giving orders.

The muffled thumping stopped, but just as Lishu was letting out a sigh of relief, there was a tremendous crash, accompanied by a tinkling sound of something breaking. Lishu was so startled she fell flat on her behind.

And then she heard much more than a squeak. "Hello?" a voice said. "Is someone there?"

Chapter 14: Scandal (Part Two)

"Do you recall any books like this?" Maomao asked, showing the summary Lishu had written to the old man who ran the bookstore. She'd tried to get Lishu to write down the gist of the story and some of her impressions of it; they hadn't had time for more. Unfortunately, among the things Lishu hadn't been able to remember about the book had been the title. She had only been copying out the part the maid had asked for, and she'd given the rest of the book only a cursory read.

There wasn't much Maomao could do. To prove that the incriminating "letter" was actually a manuscript of a book, they would have to find the book it had been copied from. Lishu told them that the book she'd been given was handwritten, not printed, but it had had an attractive cover, suggesting that perhaps it was a product for sale, just one with a small distribution.

"Hrm... Looks like your average love story to me, not that I pay much attention to that sort of thing."

"I have to think you at least flip through whatever you stock."

"Ahh, there are so many books these days. And my eyes aren't what they used to be." The bookseller yawned. He was virtually retired now; his son handled the bulk of the business. He obviously wanted Maomao to hurry up and go home so he could take a nap.

He wasn't wrong that the story sounded like a bog-standard romance, but it had a political edge to it, the sort of thing that would have gotten the attention of the censors. The story went that a young man and a young woman from rival noble families fell in love with each other at first sight, and then yadda yadda yadda it ended in tragedy.

Maomao pressed a hand to her forehead—this wasn't getting her anywhere. There were two other bookstores in the capital, both smaller than this one. She might even end up having to go to booksellers in other cities.

Her fretting was interrupted by a man who came in bearing a sizable load on his back. "Hullo," he said to Maomao.

"Ah, you're back," the old man said—this must be his son.

"What are you doing, Dad?" the younger man asked, setting down his load and giving the elder a dubious look. "You're not acting like the customers are just a nuisance again, are you?" The man knew his father well.

"She was pestering me about whether I recognized this one book. I don't read every damn page that comes through here, you know!"

"Let me see," the shopkeeper's son said, taking Lishu's summary and squinting at it. "Oh, this one..."

He knelt down and rifled through the bundle he'd brought, coming up with one particular book. The cover depicted a young man and a young woman, but something seemed a little odd about the picture.

He passed the book to Maomao, and she immediately began reading. Even just skimming the pages, it was obvious that it resembled the story Lishu had described. Then she stopped on one particular page. "This here..." she said. It was very similar to a passage Lishu had written from memory. Similar—but some of the details were different, the exact words were different. The meaning was almost identical, however.

"Yeah, there are some odd things in there, huh? They say it's a translation of a play that's real popular in the west."

"A play? The west?"

"Sure. Some of the descriptions sound a little funny, right? Whoever translated it didn't know what the world looked like to nobles all the way over there, so they changed names and customs and stuff to sound like ones we have here. Then each person who copied it made more changes to suit themselves."

That prompted Maomao to look again at the consort's summary. Lishu had included the name of one of the main characters, and it had nagged at Maomao, because it didn't sound like a normal name. Now she realized it was a western name, transliterated directly into their language using arbitrary characters.

She flipped the pages of the book again, searching for that unusual name, but she couldn't find it. She did, though, find another very similar passage—albeit one that used perfectly ordinary names.

"Huh. I wonder if she was reading some earlier copy of this book. This one is supposed to be pretty old, though," the son said.

"Where can I get a copy of this?" Maomao asked.

"I bought it from the copyist. I think they said they got it in last summer. We're hoping to print it, though, so if you're going to go try to buy one now, we'll chase you out."

In other words, Consort Lishu had most likely used a copy that had been in circulation prior to the previous summer. Maomao stopped cold: hadn't something else happened in the rear palace right about then?

"The caravan..."

"Hm? What's that?"

"The girl does like to talk to herself, doesn't she?" the old bookseller remarked. He and his son both peered at Maomao, but she had other things on her mind.

The caravan would have been able to bring translated books from the west. And the cargo wouldn't have been inspected very

closely, as they had discovered from the trouble with the abortifacients just after the caravan's visit. It would have been easy to procure a book or two while the upper consorts' ladies-inwaiting did their shopping.

"So, what?" Maomao said. "Someone just happens to stumble on this book in the caravan's wares, buys it, and then tries to use it to bring her down? What about the letter, then? Was there someone on the inside?"

"I don't have the faintest idea what you're babbling about.

You're a strange one..."

"Dad, be nice."

Maomao thought hard, ignoring the conversation, but she couldn't put the pieces together, not now.

"Give me this," she said, thrusting the book at the shopkeeper. "Ten silver pieces," the old man wheezed, looking at his feet.

"That's robbery! This isn't some fancy picture scroll. It's got a crappy cover, mistakes everywhere—it's like the copyist turned it out overnight!" Maomao wasn't stupid enough to just pay what he asked.

"No, Dad, it's not for sale at all! We're going to use that to print from!" the son said, stepping between Maomao and his father.

"Two silver pieces! Fair compromise?" Maomao said.

"Nine silver. And a half."

"I'm telling you, it's not for sale!"

Some thirty minutes of squabbling later, Maomao obtained the book for six silver pieces and left the store with the son looking balefully after her.

Another day was starting. Another day of nothing but eating and sleeping.

"How about this robe today, Lady Lishu?" Kanan asked, holding up a blue outfit. It was one of Lishu's favorites, but she was so depressed, she couldn't muster the enthusiasm to pick out clothes.

"Okay. That's fine," she said. She was too tired to tell Kanan to bring something different. Once she was changed, Kanan got breakfast ready. Water was on the floor below Lishu's, but food was prepared in an entirely separate location. Kanan appeared to make every effort to hurry back with Lishu's meals, but they had always gone cold by the time she arrived, and Lishu would find herself sipping lukewarm soup.

"I'm going out for a moment, then," Kanan said. She left the room, and Lishu could hear her going down the stairs. There would be nothing to do until she got back—but these past few days, those moments hadn't felt empty.

"Lishu, are you there?" asked the voice from the next room. Lishu, clutching her pillow, went into the other room and sat down, leaning against a chest of drawers. Still holding her pillow, she gazed up at the ceiling. There was a funny little pipe poking through one of the various holes that had developed in the dilapidated woodwork. The halls and stairways, through which everyone had to pass, were kept in decent condition, but it didn't seem time had been taken to check over every room carefully. "I'm here, Sotei," Lishu called. In response, an aroma wafted down through the ceiling—at once sweet and bitter, it was most unusual. At first it had seemed very strange to Lishu, but it had become a source of comfort. No doubt it was some perfume the person above her wore.

That person was a young woman, like Lishu, and like Lishu, she was trapped in this tower for reasons beyond her control. She said her name was Sotei, and she had first spoken to Lishu a few days earlier. Her voice was wispy and frail, but she'd succeeded in pulling away a rotten part of the floor, breaking through the weakened ceiling, and pushing that pipe into Lishu's room. She was obviously a far, far stronger person than Lishu.

The consort had been surprised—in fact, terrified—the first time she'd heard the voice from overhead, but once she realized the speaker was neither a mouse nor a ghost, but a young woman her own age, Lishu opened up to her with surprising speed. If there was one thing Lishu had plenty of, it was time to kill. Before she knew what she was doing, she had told Sotei her name—but to her relief, there had been no particular reaction.

Maybe Sotei didn't know who Lishu was.

"I wonder what they'll serve today," Sotei said.

"Yesterday was five-flavor congee, so I hope we get chicken and egg today. I wish they would stop with all the shellfish..."

It was so strange how, lacking anything else to do, simply eating became an entertainment in its own right.

"That's right, you can't have seafood, can you? But it's so good!"

"There's some I can have. But I always feel funny about it..."

Almost equally odd to Consort Lishu was how she never felt lost for words with Sotei. Maybe it was because they couldn't actually see each other.

Lishu had never specifically asked why Sotei was here in the pagoda, but when Lishu said she'd been locked up on vague charges, Sotei volunteered that she was in much the same situation.

"There's really nothing to do around here, is there? All free time and nothing to fill it," Sotei said.

"You're telling me. I've never been more sensitive to the sound

of footsteps in my life."

"I know what you mean! You know who it has to be—it's the sound of your meal arriving, and you act like it!"

"What gluttons!" Lishu said, and she heard giggling in response. "You have very good ears, Sotei. You must have heard me down here—that's why you talked to me." Notwithstanding the aging structure, catching a voice from the floor below would have demanded pretty decent hearing. Lishu hardly even heard anything that was going on above her.

"That's true, I guess my hearing is pretty good. For example, I can tell someone is coming up the stairs right now."

Lishu focused and listened, and indeed, she heard footsteps approaching. She was sure it must be Kanan, but the steps went straight by her chambers, continuing upward.

"Hold on a second," Sotei said. She left for a moment, and there was some clattering as she came back. "Ooh, that's hot!

Sorry to break it to you, but it's seafood congee today."

"Ugh. What's in it?"

"I think this is dried shrimp. And this might be a little bit of pork, here..."

"I guess I can eat that stuff..." They were hardly her favorites, but she could either eat them or starve to death. If she pitched a fit about the food, she would only make life harder for Kanan.

Speaking of Kanan, Lishu thought, she was late. How long did it take to get breakfast? Sotei's was already here. In fact, Kanan had seemed to be taking her time the past several days, Lishu had noticed—but when Kanan got back, Lishu's conversations with Sotei had to stop, so the consort had been willing to overlook the delays.

From the little pipe in the ceiling, Lishu could hear Sotei eating. She claimed she didn't have any ladies-in-waiting to speak of with her, but someone must have brought the food in a hurry if the congee was still hot.

"Hey, Lishu, want to know something?"

"What?"

"It's about this floor." Lishu was on the third floor of the pagoda, with Sotei above her on the fourth. From the outside, it had looked as if the tower might be ten stories or more. "They

say nothing above the fourth floor has been used in decades, so it's even more broken down than our levels. You have to go by guards on the way down, but because no one uses those higher

floors, there's no one to stop you from going up."

"Wow, really?"

"Really. Maybe it's because you can't escape from the upper levels."

There were windows around the outside of the tower, but even if one could break them and go through, there was still the height to consider. Lishu, at least, didn't think she could get a ladder to help her climb down, nor did she wish to try. Such a conspicuous breakout attempt would never escape the attention of the guards.

The bigger problem, though, was that even if Lishu managed to get out, there was nowhere she could go. She kept waiting and hoping that Lady Ah-Duo might visit her, but the former consort had never come to the tower. It had hardly been a full ten days since their last meeting, though, and Lishu knew it would be petulant to speak of the issue.

Neither had there been any contact from the apothecary or Lishu's father. It was easy enough to say that it hadn't been that long, but every day that passed heightened Lishu's anxiety. If she hadn't had Sotei to talk to, she thought she might have lost it already.

"I've got an idea. Want to try going to the upper floors?"

That suggestion, at that particular moment, sent a shock through Lishu's heart. "What? What do you mean, the upper floors?"

"The guard between the third and fourth floors is changed three times every day. The guard on duty goes down to summon the next person, and for those few minutes, there's no one there. They don't change all the guards at once, of course, so you can't go downstairs—but you could go up. Me, I could do it any time.

There's no one above the fourth floor." She could go upstairs.

"We could see the whole capital from up there. Why not take a look? What's the harm?"

Lishu didn't say anything right away. As Sotei's words drifted down to her, they were accompanied by that almost-sweet, almost-bitter smell. Lishu felt she would very much like to see the capital, but as yet she didn't take a single step. "I have a lady-inwaiting with me," she said. "If I disappeared, she would notice right away."

"You haven't told her about me. Why's that?"

Lishu found that question hard to answer. A voice from the ceiling seemed like a tricky thing to explain, and she was afraid Kanan would try to make her stop talking to Sotei.

"Are you worried what she'd think about it? Her, an attendant who leaves you alone while she enjoys being free of this tower?"

Lishu felt a chill run down her spine, but she couldn't deny what Sotei was saying. Lishu knew perfectly well that there was only one of Kanan, her chief lady-in-waiting, and she couldn't be with Lishu constantly all day, every day. And yet, even at this very moment, wasn't she out there, savoring the open air, while Lishu languished here?

The consort shook her head vigorously, as if she could shake the thought away. "That's not what she's doing!"

"No. No, of course not. She's much too nice a lady to leave you here and forget about you, Lishu." Sotei seemed to be trying to walk back her words a little, perhaps out of kindness to Lishu. "I

just wish you could see the view from up here. I wish I could share it with you. If you ever change your mind, just come on up. Tell your lady-in-waiting to take half a day off—that should be plenty. They change the guards at..."

Lishu stared at the ground and listened to Sotei describe the timing of the changes of guard. Then Sotei left to clean up her meal, withdrawing the pipe from the ceiling so Kanan wouldn't notice it.

Footsteps came again, and this time it was Kanan, who entered the room saying, "I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long, Lady Lishu." There appeared to be some perspiration on her face, but at some point she'd found time to change clothes, including a new sash.

Kanan set Lishu's breakfast on the table and the consort picked up the bowl, taking a lotus leaf and starting in on the loathed seafood congee. It was stone cold, the gruel like glue in her mouth, thick and sticky and flavorless.

Chapter 15: Scandal (Part Three)

"I don't understand it!"

That was the only appraisal Maomao could offer of the book on which she had spent so much money. She'd read it twice through, thinking maybe she had missed the interesting part the first time. Still flummoxed, she copied the entire thing out. And this was where it had gotten her.

"I just don't understand."

This was something deeper than whether or not she found the book interesting. The problem came down to a matter of emotions. As an experiment, she showed the book to the courtesans at the Verdigris House, and a struggle promptly broke out among the women to read it, all of their eyes glittering. It didn't seem to matter to them that the text was riddled with incorrect characters, or that parts of it had clearly been mistranslated. It seemed to be just that appealing.

A boy and a girl from rival houses meet at a banquet and fall in love at first sight. All well and good, until the boy gets in an argument with someone from the girl's family and kills him. That only makes relations between the two households even worse— but it doesn't stop the young lovers, burning with passion, from getting married.

Notwithstanding the stiffness of the translation, it was the behavior of the main characters that really left Maomao befuddled, both of them driven by the passions of youth. At the end of the story, both protagonists wound up dead because of a bit of miscommunication. They could have avoided the whole problem, Maomao thought, if they had been a little more methodical in keeping in touch with each other and explaining what they were going to do.

When she offered this opinion to the enraptured courtesans, however, it was greeted with some fist shaking and the pronouncement: "That just goes to show how fiery and passionate their love was!"

Someone else took her by the shoulders and explained, "You see, it's precisely those hiccups of destiny that make tragedy shine so brightly!"

Maomao did not understand the first damn thing about it.

So this was what Consort Lishu had been copying out? Had she seen anything especially attractive in it?

Maomao had already sent Jinshi word about the book; the text she had with her now was a copy she'd made in the course of a single night. It had no illustrations, but when tied with a simple string, it did bear a certain resemblance to a real book. She'd had Chou-u help her, though, so the paper wasn't exactly even, and the entire product had—well, let's call it character.

"I told you I would do pictures!" Chou-u had said.

"Maybe next time. Just try to cut the paper straight, will you?"

She'd spent all her time in arguments of that sort. Meanwhile, no matter how long she waited, matters surrounding Consort Lishu didn't seem to progress. In fact, nothing much seemed to be happening at all.

She did, however, receive word from Lahan. He said he would be "meeting with the west" soon, and asked if she wanted to be a part of it.

"The west" was presumably the golden-haired envoy—the one who had faced them with the audacious choice between material aid and political asylum. Lahan and the envoy had already had one discussion, but he claimed nothing had yet been resolved. Maomao had been there, but with all the talk of politics and business, she hadn't been able to contribute much besides warming an additional chair.

Hence she declined this new invitation. What if the eccentric strategist heard and tried to poke his head in? Granted, rumor had it he was keeping busy these days making some kind of book about Go. When he needed a breather, he went and made trouble at the medical office instead.

He should do his damn job, Maomao thought. It did occur to her that, at least during peacetime, work might actually go better for the freak's people if he wasn't present—but when he was at his office, Maomao knew she was safe, so she wished he would stay there. Besides, she felt bad for the medical staff having to suffer his regular incursions.

"Haven't had any real work to speak of recently," Maomao said with a great big sigh. She sometimes busied herself making stocks of the medicines she needed regularly, but recently there had been a dearth of opportunities to try unusual drugs or make up new concoctions. She frequently had to leave the shop in other hands as she was summoned away to tasks that were frankly outside her job description, and it had left her main vocation growing a bit stagnant. It didn't help that she still had to teach Sazen as she made most of her drugs.

She just wanted to get a taste of some unusual draught once in a while. To mix up some fresh new pharmaceutical and find out what it did. She had been working her way through the medicines she'd purchased in the western capital, but they left her wondering if there wasn't anything more unusual out there, more

interesting.

On the top of her medicine cabinet were three small pots for plants, one of which had a fingertip-sized green bud sprouting from it. These were where she had planted the cactus seeds. They came from a dry climate, so she didn't water them much. She had the sense that when they got bigger, they might have all kinds of uses—but the thought that it could be years before she had the opportunity to find out what they were was enough to make her feel faint.

Maybe I'll get lucky and find a blowfish liver on the ground or something, she thought idly, gazing at the pots.

The door clattered and she looked up, wondering who it was, to find that the visitor had dropped something at their feet. Something wrapped in cloth—it looked like a branch. Maomao reached out, her eyes glowing. It was a deer's antler! And not just that—it was still soft. An antler that had been in the process of growing, not one that had simply calcified and fallen away when the deer grew a new one. It was nearly one shaku long, and she knew exactly what it was.

"A velvet antler!" she exclaimed.

It was the newly grown antler of a deer. That freshness, that was the important thing when you were selling them—they were harvested first thing in spring, and the very tips were a particularly prized and particularly expensive form of the product. Yes, the tip was attached to this one. It was quite long, but judging from the softness and the way it was covered in fuzz, it would still possess plenty of medicinal potency.

The sparkle in Maomao's eyes was accompanied by a thread of drool dangling from her mouth. Hawkers occasionally tried to sell velvet antler, but it was always powdered, and despite their insistence that they sold "only the finest products," it was obvious that stuff other than the tip had been mixed in. Even so, there was no end of customers who, figuring the stuff still had some medicinal properties, wanted a dose before visiting the courtesans. The medicine was alleged to be very effective for male customers.

Just imagine how much medicine she could make with an antler this size!

First I'm going to need some boiling water, to kill any insects and coagulate the blood, she thought, looking lovingly at her prize —when a large hand reached in from the side and wrapped the cloth back around the antler, stealing it away from her.

Hey, hands off! Maomao looked up, her displeasure plain on her face, to discover someone she hadn't seen in a long time. They wore a smile one could have easily taken for that of a gentle celestial nymph, but the scar that ran down their right cheek showed that this was more than just an idealized beauty.

"It's been quite a while, Master Jinshi," she said.

Almost two months had passed since their return from the western capital, during which they hadn't seen each other. They'd exchanged some letters, but always about business matters, and it was always either Basen or some anonymous messenger who brought word from Jinshi to the pleasure district.

She thought he looked a little more angular than before. Maybe he'd lost some weight, what with it being so hot these days. "Are you sleeping properly?" she asked. For all his inordinate beauty, this nobleman was surprisingly given to overworking himself, and frequently appeared to be stumbling around from fatigue.

"That's the first thing you say to me? And what are you

reaching out for?" Jinshi was looking at Maomao's hand and sounding rather exasperated. Her fingers refused to let go of the velvet antler; she had a firm grip on the package and was trying to pull it toward her.

"I thought perhaps it might be for me, sir."

"I daresay that's why I brought it."

"Then if you would give it to me. Please."

"Somehow I'm not sure I want to anymore..."

A death sentence! Maomao grabbed the cloth with both hands and pulled. Jinshi held the antler above his head mockingly; Maomao bounced up and down swiping at it, but he was a good shaku taller than her and she was never going to reach it.

Son of a—!

In spite of her imprecatory internal monologue, she was actually somewhat reassured, for this was the same kind of reward Jinshi had always offered her.

Suddenly, however, she felt herself tilting in mid-jump. For a second, she was treated to a view of the ceiling, until Jinshi's face appeared above her. His gentle smile of a moment before was gone; instead, a hard light in his eyes pierced Maomao like a blade. He had swept her feet out from under her as she jumped for the antler, and caught her with his free hand.

"Master Jinshi. The antler, please." Somehow, it was the only thing that would come out of her mouth. One might even say that if she'd said anything else, she wouldn't be Maomao.

"Listen to what I have to say, and then I'll think about it."

"Please change 'I'll think about it' to 'I'll give it to you.'"

Just "thinking about it" was too ambiguous a commitment when it came to a social superior, and that concerned her. She didn't want an offer he might renege on at any moment; she wanted an assurance.

"Fine... I'll give it to you, but listen to what I have to say." "If all I have to do is listen, then okay."

He narrowed his eyes at her, but didn't protest, which she (somewhat unilaterally) took as agreement.

"While we're at it, might I ask you to let me go?" she said.

"I refuse."

No dice there. So she was going to end up hearing him out on

an incline, with her back leaned against his knee. She considered trying to look for help, but the door and windows were shut. Even if they'd been open, the other residents of the Verdigris House would probably have just looked on grinning, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered.

Maybe Chou-u will walk in on us, Maomao thought hopefully, but her wonderful, lovable little brat was out today, learning to sketch with his teacher. Ukyou or Sazen, whoever was free, would have taken him there and would pick him up again. The fact that the madam allowed this seemed proof positive that she believed there would be a way to put Chou-u's pictures to good use in the future.

Jinshi continued to look at Maomao with an expression like a wild beast who might bite at any moment, but at least he got right to the point. "Are you ready to take me up on...what I proposed?"

To be fair, he had never actually proposed anything. But even Maomao wasn't dense enough to miss what he was referring to.

The night of the banquet in the western capital, Jinshi had told Maomao the true reason he'd brought her along. Well, all right, he hadn't actually told her in so many words—but she felt it was correct to understand that he sought to marry her.

Life wasn't like those stories—in real life, you didn't have to be madly in love with someone to marry them. Powerful people often got married as a play in their power games; and even commoners might wed in order to support themselves, like a farmer who simply needed more hands to help in the fields. If both parties stood to gain something from the union, or at least if one partner was to the other's liking, then they didn't necessarily both have to have feelings for each other. So long as the proposed match wasn't completely distasteful, it might be best simply to accept.

He's got strange tastes, though...

Surely Jinshi could have had his pick of beautiful, noble women. Who would choose a weed like wood sorrel when he was surrounded by peonies and roses? There must have been someone better suited to him than Maomao.

Like Consort Lishu! Sure, she was currently under arrest on suspicions of infidelity, but as long as Jinshi knew she was innocent, then where was the problem? People would say whatever nasty things they wanted, but Jinshi surely wasn't the kind to believe them.

Yet here he was, urging his suit on her again, the next act of their little drama. She desperately hoped he wouldn't strangle her again. This time, he might finish the job.

"Do you hate me so much?" he asked, his face now less like a wild dog and more like a puppy. Love, hate—some people wanted the world to be so black and white. Why wouldn't he give her the choice of a gray area?

"I suppose I don't hate you as such," she said. She might even think of him favorably. Certainly, she regarded this noble more positively than she had back when they'd first met.

Jinshi pursed his lips, not very pleased with this evasive answer. Maybe he was hoping she would come right out and say she loved him, but quite frankly, Maomao wasn't at a point where she could bring those words to her lips. The best she could manage was that she wasn't without a certain affection for him.

Instead she said, "The caterpillar fungus made me very happy."

"Is that all you're going to say?"

"Also, the ox bezoars were most helpful."

"And what else?"

"And I want that velvet antler."

She reached out for the package, which Jinshi had put behind his back, but he planted a palm on her belly to keep her from sitting up, and she couldn't reach it. She kicked her legs from sheer frustration, and this time he grabbed her ankle. She was just trying to decide what he might be planning when he brushed the tip of his pinky finger along the back of her foot.

"Hrk?!" Maomao choked, squirming. The many experiments she'd conducted throughout her life had made her far less sensitive to pain, and the instruction of her various older sisters had numbed her to matters sexual as well, but even Maomao had her weak points. The back of her foot, and her back as well, were hopelessly vulnerable to a gentle brush of the fingers.

"M-Master Jinshi... That's...not...fair!"

"Fair? I don't know what you mean," he said, and sliiide went his fingers again. How did he know to do that? When had her secret gotten out? Why did Jinshi know Maomao's weak point?

"Let me go. Y-You're dirty."

"You're the only one here who seems worried about it."

She hated the way he pretended indifference. Seriously, how did he know? Only a few people were privy to Maomao's vulnerability. The madam, Pairin, and...

Then she thought of the always-in-control lady-in-waiting in her first flush of old age, and her eyes went wide. Suiren had punished her once by tickling her with a feather duster—but she had just been joking around and had stopped right away; Maomao didn't think she had given away what a vulnerable spot that was.

To think, Suiren had figured it out from that brief encounter— she was truly terrifying.

The tickling had moved down her foot now; she gritted her teeth and twisted, pressing her lips together and trying not to make so much as a sound. She wasn't quite successful.

The long fingers worked their way to the arch of her foot, inducing a thrash from her, whereupon they went to her other heel. The tickling kept moving before she could become accustomed to it in any one place, landing on her toes, the top of her foot, her ankle, and even her calf.

Jinshi looked down at her with a smile, totally in control of things. He seemed to be savoring the sight of Maomao flopping like a fish despite her best efforts to control herself. Teasingly, he brushed the top of her foot, which was by now arched like a bow.

She'd never imagined he might get even for last time quite like this. Finally, unable to hold it in any longer, laughter burst out of her. The book on the desk, the one Maomao had been copying, tumbled to the floor. At last thinking, perhaps, that he had gone too far, Jinshi let her go.

Maomao got her breathing under control, straightened her robe, and wiped the tears that had welled up in her eyes. At that, Jinshi swallowed audibly; he looked conflicted and wouldn't meet her eyes. His gaze landed instead on the book, which he picked up.

"Have you ever read that, Master Jinshi?" "I have."

"What did you think of it?"

There was a wry smile on Jinshi's face—he seemed to feel about the same way Maomao did about the book. He understood exactly what it would mean for someone of noble birth to let their actions be dictated by their own romantic impulses. If he didn't, he couldn't have worked in the rear palace all those years.

"I think there must have been some other way."

"Talk like that could see you scorned by all the world's women."

"Not including yourself, I suppose."

Impatient youth gave rise to burning passion, and love that ended in grief was counted beautiful because it was so tragic. The text stated that the young woman at the center of the story was thirteen years old, but given that this was a translation from the west, that would probably make her fourteen or fifteen by the count used in Li, where a person became a year older at the start of each year. That was still young, though—young enough that she might still be ruled by her passions, making it impossible to dismiss the story out of hand.

Maomao would never have done such a thing—by that age, she had already been thoroughly indoctrinated into the thinking of the pleasure district. And Jinshi would have been established in the rear palace by then. They had spent that most impressionable age in environments that were, in their own way, very similar.

"I wonder if I might have been capable of such things had I grown up somewhere else," Jinshi said, and Maomao could tell that he was speaking from the heart. She couldn't deny that it might be true. But it was, ultimately, just a possibility.

Hypothetical.

Instead of answering, she murmured, "I don't want to be an enemy." Jinshi gave her a sidelong look as if to ask whose enemy she meant. "To Empress Gyokuyou," she said.

Would Jinshi understand what she was saying? If not, that was fine, Maomao thought. There were things even he didn't know.

"You—"

He seemed about to ask her something else when a horse whinnied outside. There was a sound of rushing footsteps, and then someone shouted, "Master Jinka!" It was a name he had used before when visiting the pleasure district, and often assumed.

Jinshi frowned, wondering what it was this time, and opened the door. A man stood there, out of breath—one of the servants who often accompanied Jinshi and Basen. "Pardon me, sir!" he said, kneeling once and then taking a step closer. He glanced around. It seemed he didn't want Maomao to hear what he had to say. "It's about the matter of the white flower."

"Then she's more than welcome to hear about it," Jinshi said.

Maomao looked quizzical at the code word, but the servant promptly dispelled her confusion. "Consort Lishu has escaped her room in the tower and is on the highest floor," he said, his face a mask of horror.

Let's take a quick trip back in time.

The sweet-bitter scent wafted through the room. Lishu sat in the corner, leaning against her chest, wrapped in her blanket.

"Has it smelled a little funny around here recently?" Kanan asked, but Lishu shook her head. The pipe wasn't protruding from the ceiling; Sotei, with whom Lishu had been speaking until moments before, had withdrawn when she heard Kanan's footsteps. Kanan had taken a look at the decaying ceiling and said she would call someone to repair it, but Lishu had urged her not to. She didn't want some stranger coming into the room, and anyway, the whole place was falling apart; fixing that one bit of the ceiling wouldn't change anything. Thankfully, Kanan relented.

"Lady Lishu, your meal is ready." Lishu could hear the clatter of the tray being set down. But she knew it was just cold congee and soup on the table. Sometimes the portion of the side dish was stingy too. At first, she even looked forward to this poor fare, but these days she just didn't care anymore. She would force herself to eat half of it, because Kanan was watching, but even that was a struggle. Maybe it was because she spent all day, every day, cooped up in this room, with even less to do than she'd had in the rear palace.

"Don't huddle in a corner. Come out where there's light," Kanan said. There was no light here. There was a window in the other room that looked out onto the hallway, which was arguably a tiny bit better than the room Lishu was in right now, but that was all. She could go out in the hallway and walk from one staircase to the other, but that didn't amount to much.

Lishu stood unsteadily. The fatigue was awful. She heaved herself into her chair and dipped her spoon into the viscous, gluey congee. It was just plain today, with a vanishingly faint sprinkle of salt. She thought a bit of black vinegar might help, but there wasn't any.

"I'm so sorry, milady. I must have forgotten it," Kanan said with a deep bow. Her apology seemed heartfelt, but Lishu couldn't help noticing that she was wearing a different robe from when she'd left. How long had it taken Lishu since she got here to notice that Kanan changed clothes each time she went to get Lishu's food? The new robe had a similar look and pattern to the old one, as if Kanan hoped Lishu wouldn't notice the difference.

More and more, though, Lishu mistrusted her. Lishu was in this situation because of a book a maid had given to her to copy. She strongly suspected it was her former chief lady-in-waiting who had put the woman up to it. Both people she had once believed were serving her faithfully.

Kanan herself had once been among the ladies making fun of Lishu, but she had had a change of heart after someone had attempted to poison Lishu at a garden party. And it was true that she'd been far kinder to her mistress since then—so much so that Lishu had insisted Kanan become her chief lady-in-waiting, not a mere food taster.

But had Kanan really done all this for Lishu's benefit? When she had first assumed the position of chief lady, Kanan had had minimal authority; the other ladies-in-waiting often simply ignored her. She had soldiered on and done her best, though, or so Lishu had believed. But was that true? Might she not still be laughing at Lishu with the other ladies behind her back? Might she not be pretending to be sympathetic, only to go back and report what she heard in confidence for the entertainment of the others?

It couldn't be true, could it? If it were, she would never have followed Lishu all the way to this tower.

She tried desperately to push such thoughts away, but they wouldn't leave her alone. Instead of shaking her head, she brought the spoon to her mouth—and bit down on something hard.

She spat into her handkerchief, coming up with rice, traces of blood—and a fingertip-sized pebble.

"Lady Lishu!" Kanan said, looking at her with concern. Maybe some sand had gotten into the food by accident—but this was much too large to be a grain of sand.

Unable to focus her eyes, Lishu stirred her spoon through the congee. Two, three, four—there were too many stones at the bottom of the bowl to dismiss as an accident.

"I'll go get a new bowl right away!" Kanan said and reached for the congee, but Lishu stopped her.

"I don't want it."

She didn't even have an appetite. She didn't want to choke down more cold, disgusting congee.

"Lady Lishu..."

"I don't want it! I don't want it! I don't want it!" Lishu shook her head furiously and swept the food off the table. The bowl and tray hit the floor with a crash, soup and side dish flying everywhere. Lishu tore at her hair and her nose started to run.

She began to weep piteously. "Why?! Why is it always me?!"

Despised by her father, tormented by her half-sister, twice sent to the rear palace as a political tool. All of that had been awful, but she had borne it. She'd thought that maybe if she kept quiet and did as she was told, her father might be nice to her. That hope had been dashed by the rumors that she was an illegitimate child. It had turned out she was her father's blood, but his attitude hadn't changed at all. That's right—it ate at him. He couldn't stand the fact that he was from a branch house, while Lishu's mother had been from the main family. That was why he sent her only the cruelest ladies-in-waiting. Maybe he had been behind all of the trouble she'd endured to this point.

Lishu wasn't cut out to be a high consort, but there she was, and she had to either stand up and let herself be compared with the other consorts, or try to shrink down so small as to be invisible. Those were her only options. At the garden party, her father hadn't even tried to talk to her.

If he hadn't wanted her, why had he had her? Did he enjoy watching Lishu suffer in her limbo? Maybe all of them did. Her father, her half-sister, her ladies-in-waiting, the maid, Kanan, everyone... All of them...

With a start, Lishu realized everything around her was a mess. The congee bowl was broken, the table was overturned, and her chair had hit the floor. Everything that wasn't nailed down was on the ground, and Kanan was in a corner, hiding her face with hands covered in grains of rice. A dish lay shattered at her feet. Had Lishu thrown it at her? There was a thin red line on Kanan's cheek and her expression as she tried to gauge Lishu was one of terror.

Lishu felt her blood run cold. She'd never meant to do this. Yet she was the only one who could have turned the room upside down this way. Her mind went blank, and she started to perspire heavily.

"Go..."

"Lady Lishu..."

"Get out of here, please. And don't come back!" She hit the wall, hard, and stamped her feet and shouted. She didn't want to do this. But it was the only thing that would come out of her mouth.

"I'm so sorry," Kanan said. "I'll go change..." She looked sadly around the upturned room, and then she left.

When Kanan's footsteps had vanished, Lishu sank down onto the floor. Her eyes as she looked up at the ceiling were clouded with tears. She didn't want to do this, so why had she? She'd felt like she needed to attack someone, lest she be attacked again, and in her anxiety she had lashed out at Kanan.

Lishu's face must have been a mess. She wanted to cry great gasping sobs, but if she started weeping, someone might come.

She hugged her knees tight instead.

"Lishu? Lishu!" came the voice from the next room. The pipe was poking through the ceiling, and Sotei was talking to her. With her ears, she must have heard the entire humiliating exchange.

"What's going on? It sounds like your lady-in-waiting left."

"It's nothing," Lishu said, moving to sit once more by the chest of drawers. The sweet-bitter smell calmed her down, and Sotei's muffled voice soothed her anxiety.

She wondered who Sotei was.

"I've got an idea, Lishu."

"What's that, Sotei?"

"They'll change the guard soon. Won't you come upstairs?"

Her voice was sweet, pleasant. Any other time, Lishu might have dithered about the decision and then turned her down. But now, now she didn't have it in her.

She had no reason not to accept Sotei's suggestion.

Lishu pressed her ear to the door and listened for the footsteps. She listened as they came down from above, went by, and continued downward. She heard the pounding of her own heart, so loud she was afraid the passing guard might notice it. She tried not to breathe. It wasn't as if the guard would think anything was unusual should he hear a sound at that moment, but what Lishu was about to attempt had her in a state of absolute anxiety.

She heard the footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs; heard a door open and shut. Trying to slow her racing heart, Lishu stepped out the door.

She took a slow step into the hallway. She was holding her shoes in her hand so they wouldn't give her away. She worked her way up the stairs, step by step, and opened the door—ever so slowly, so that it wouldn't make a sound.

The next floor up was in even worse repair than the one Lishu lived on. At least her chambers had been swept, but this level seemed rife with dust. She put on her shoes and looked around. There were several rooms on this floor, but only one of them had the door cracked open. Still fighting her pounding pulse, Lishu knocked on it. "Sotei?"

There seemed to be no answer. Lishu had just turned around, thinking she must have the wrong room, when something wrapped around her from behind.

"Ha ha! Welcome to my humble abode." A young woman's voice, no longer muffled, sounded in Lishu's ear. The hand that had grabbed her was delicate and pale, laced with blue veins. "I can't tell you how long I've been waiting." She had that same unique smell, sweet and bitter at the same time. The same one that had been wafting down to Lishu through the ceiling.

"Sotei?" Lishu asked again, feeling goosebumps on her neck. Sotei seemed to be resting her chin on Lishu's head, and something was tickling her nape. It was a white bundle—the best silken threads. A tassel to something, maybe.

"You have such nice skin, Lishu. A good, healthy color, but not tanned by the sun." The tip of Sotei's finger slid along Lishu's cheek. "And this lovely black hair. You have someone who cares enough to comb it for you even in a place like this. I'm jealous! Ooh, but a messy eater, are we? You've got a grain of rice here."

Her delicate fingers plucked away the grain of rice that was stuck to Lishu's hair, slowly, almost as if she were scraping it away, and then she dropped it on the floor. Her fingers were red in places—they looked like burns that were just now healing.

"I feel so sorry for you," Sotei said. "Mommy dead when you were still a baby, used as a political tool practically since you could walk. Rejected by your family, mocked by your own ladies-inwaiting..."

Yes! Yes, that was Lishu's story.

"Truly, it's a shame. No one understands you. Why do you suppose you're always the victim?"

The gentle voice and the aroma enveloped Lishu. She could feel the body heat from the pale skin. It had been so long since she'd last felt another person so close to her. She felt like she might simply melt away.

"They're all terrible to you. You're nothing but sweet and kind, and all they do is bully you and make your life a living nightmare."

Lishu, nearly melting into the sweet odor, nodded at Sotei's words. Yes, that's right. They were always bullying her. Ignoring her. Using her.

What had Lishu ever done wrong?

For the longest time now...

For the longest time...

A half-formed question drifted through Lishu's hazy mind. When, she wondered, had she told Sotei about her father?

"They all leave you alone to eat cold food by yourself in a gloomy room. Unbelievable."

When had she mentioned the food being cold? The question occurred to her, but she couldn't seem to make her brain work. She felt Sotei's embrace slacken, though, and she managed to turn around, to finally face someone whom she had only known as a voice until this moment.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that? Is there something on my face?"

The smiling girl before Lishu was a color she'd never seen before. She was beautiful, in her way. Her figure was peach-like, her lips full and red like cherries. But her skin seemed...colorless. People from the west had pale skin, but this was far, far paler than that. Lishu could never have made her skin this white, no matter how copiously she applied white makeup powder. Sotei's hair, too, was like an old woman's. It was her hair that Lishu had taken for a tassel, hair that ran straight and true down her back.

"Do I look strange to you?" Sotei asked. Her eyebrows, slowly furrowing, were white too. And her eyes, they were as red as rubies.

On the way to the western capital, Lishu had heard the rumors —that there was a woman like one of the mythical immortals stirring up trouble in every region and making the powerful people of the capital dance in the palm of her hand.

"It's you. The White Lady..."

"So you know about me. That makes us two of a kind, then." Sotei twirled Lishu's hair around the end of her finger. "Because I know about you too. I just never thought we would find ourselves in the same place together." She smiled—then tugged on Lishu's

hair. "This black hair—I'm jealous of it!" Lishu couldn't speak.

"And your healthy skin! You can go out in the sun and it doesn't get inflamed and burn." Still Lishu was silent.

"I can't even stand the light from a window. You complained about the gloom, Lishu? The darkness? Those gloomy corners are the only ones where I can survive!"

Sotei's eyes were narrow and she was staring fixedly at Lishu.

"I have something to tell you. All the torment that's been inflicted upon you? You can't blame anyone for it. It's your own fault!" Slim fingers danced across Lishu's cheek, rough fingertips scratching her skin. "You never had to starve growing up, and you put on all their pretty clothes without question. But you just sit around doing nothing, don't you, Lishu? You ought to know that if you can't protect yourself, you're going to be a target."

Now the fingers pinched at her cheek, digging into her skin, until the nails left scratches behind.

"It sickens me to look at you." A tremendous frown came over Sotei's face, a look of contempt every bit as brutal as her words.

Lishu shrank into herself. "It's disgusting just seeing you there."

Sotei's chilly stare made Lishu's heart skip a beat. It reminded her of so many stares she'd seen before. Her father's, her halfsister's, her ladies'...

Lishu's teeth started to chatter. She felt like she might be sucked into those red eyes. Overhead, she heard scurrying, like bugs. It sounded to her like the voices of the maids and servants, spreading their tales about her and condemning her behind her back.

"No... Stop..." Lishu shook her head; she pressed a hand to her cheek, which must have had red scratch marks on it, and looked at Sotei with fear in her eyes.

Sotei's lips twisted. "Sickening... It's like looking at my old self."

Lishu had no hope anymore of understanding what Sotei was talking about. She began to run, just desperate to get out of there. She dashed through the decaying hallway, ran up the stairs. As Sotei had told her, the door to the next floor wasn't locked. Lishu kept running, higher and higher. She lost count of how many floors she had gone up. The hem of her robe was filthy, and the creaking of the floorboards had become deafening.

She saw a door that wasn't like the others. For one thing, it had a lock, but the lock was rotting away. Lishu grabbed the handle. The door was somewhat heavy, but she opened it, to find herself confronted with a leaden sky. No doubt the rulers of the past, looking out over the entire capital from this vantage point with a cup of wine in hand, had believed their glory would last forever.

It was a balcony, albeit one ravaged by exposure to the elements. Lishu took an experimental step and found the wood groaned weakly underfoot.

Normally she would have been frozen by fear, but now she walked forward, one unsteady step at a time. The railing was equally dilapidated; all the paint had flaked off. The wind was blowing, whipping over her cheeks and sending her hair everywhere.

Lishu could see birds flying. They looked so free. She reached out toward them, but of course, she couldn't reach them.

She looked at her hand, which grasped uselessly at the sky.

Chapter 16: Basen and Lishu

When Maomao and Jinshi got word, they rushed to the tower by horse. There was no time to arrange a carriage; instead, they commandeered the mount the messenger had come on, with

Jinshi at the reins. Maomao didn't bother to ask for his permission as she jumped up behind him. He only said, "We'll be going fast. Don't fall off." She took that as an okay. She pressed her face into his back, which smelled of perfume, and braced herself, trying to remain upright.

When they arrived at the palace, Jinshi removed his mask, begrudging even the time to show his insignia of office. The horse didn't even slow down as they made for the tower where Consort Lishu was confined.

A crowd had already gathered in front of the pagoda. In addition to the guards, there were gawking bureaucrats and court ladies, faced by soldiers insisting they stay back. No sooner had the court ladies noticed Jinshi than they blushed furiously—until they spotted Maomao and looked incensed instead. But Maomao and Jinshi both ignored them; there was no time to pander to the likes of them.

They could see a woman on the uppermost story of the pagoda, a young woman gazing into the distance, her hair disheveled—it was Consort Lishu. Maomao couldn't tell what she was doing; she seemed to be trying to grab hold of something, reaching out with one hand toward the sky.

What's she doing up there? Maomao thought. The building was so old, it creaked under your feet; Maomao couldn't believe the timid consort had gone all the way to the top floor of her own volition. She was too far away to make out her expression, though, or guess what exactly she was trying to do.

"Let me through! Let me through!" cried a familiar voice. Maomao realized that the woman being restrained by the guards was Lishu's chief lady-in-waiting. She was stretching out her arms as far as she could, as if she might be able to reach the door of the tower, but the guards wouldn't let her. "Lady Lishu—!"

The woman's clothes were covered in mud. It was strange; it didn't look like it had gotten there when the guards had stopped her. It almost looked like someone had thrown a mud pie at her.

But the chief lady-in-waiting wasn't the only familiar face.

"What's going on?! What is Consort Lishu doing all the way up there?!" Basen rushed up, out of breath. He must have heard the news too. Maybe he'd been exercising when it reached him, because he was dressed in what seemed to be a martial arts training uniform rather than his usual official attire.

The addition of a shouting young man to the panicked lady-inwaiting only increased the general confusion. Now the guards had to deal with Basen, who was bent on getting into the pagoda. They tried to push him back, but only found themselves dragged along instead.

Ah, the infamous strength. Maomao had learned about it firsthand in the western capital—but she sensed there was something more than simple physical power at work here. She couldn't think about it now, though; they needed to figure out what to do about Consort Lishu.

"Calm down!" A clear, beautiful voice rang out. Basen and the chief lady-in-waiting both stopped and looked at its owner—Jinshi. He passed his horse's reins to one of the soldiers, then strode over to the two of them. "I will go."

"B-But..." the lady-in-waiting stuttered.

"I said, I'll do it." Jinshi's expression brooked no argument. The lady-in-waiting sank to the ground. There was a red line on her face and grains of rice in her hair.

Was somebody harassing her? Maomao wondered. It wasn't impossible. You didn't have to be in the rear palace to find plenty of unpleasant people. With word going around that her lady was under arrest on suspicions of infidelity, it would hardly be surprising if the chief lady-in-waiting suffered some reprisals as well.

As far as Maomao could tell, this woman was the only lady to accompany Lishu, so she must have been tending to the consort all this time, all by herself, with no one to help her. At first, Maomao had taken her for nothing more than a particularly nasty food taster—she was struck by how much people could change.

"Why did you leave the consort alone? Were you going to get her meal?" Jinshi asked. There was no kindness in his voice, but neither was his tone cold.

His even demeanor seemed to help the lady-in-waiting get herself under control as well. She said, "My lady has been most depressed recently. She's seemed weak, maybe because she can't leave her chambers and has no way of getting fresh air. I think today she reached her limit. She expelled me from her room—she doesn't appear to trust anyone."

"So you left until she got a hold of herself?"

"Yes, sir. I needed to change, anyway... Although now it seems I'll need to do it again." She looked at her filthy skirt.

Jinshi nodded and headed toward the door.

"I'm coming with you," Basen said, and started to go after him, but the other man only looked at him.

"There's no need for you to come. It's not your job." Basen scowled, clenching his fists.

He's not wrong, Maomao thought. Unlike Jinshi, who was personally acquainted with Consort Lishu from working in the rear palace, Basen had merely accompanied her on their trip west. Whatever feelings he might have for her, dealing with her was not his business.

"But—" he started, a pained look on his face.

"You are my adjutant. You understand what that means, yes?" Basen didn't say anything.

"Consider the worst-case scenario and prepare for it. You're the only one who can." With that, Jinshi disappeared into the tower.

He really trusts this guy. She didn't know whether Jinshi was making the best choice or not, but she knew it was a difficult decision—and she also saw that she needed to do what she could to help.

Basen looked deeply pensive for a moment, then called one of the officials over and began giving instructions. She thought he said something about getting together every blanket and mattress they could find, but Lishu was too high up for that to help.

Meanwhile, Maomao did what only Maomao could. "Did Consort Lishu display any other unusual behavior?" she asked, rubbing the lady-in-waiting's back. Maomao had observed the scratch on the woman's cheek and wondered if Lishu had had some kind of fit. She was usually so docile, but if she was feeling that paranoid, it wouldn't have been surprising.

"I don't know if I would say unusual, but she's seemed especially interested in the ceiling lately. I think she was bothered by some hole in the woodwork."

Was something on the floor above on her mind? Would that explain why she had gone up to the top story?

"I think there was someone on the level above us. There was a strange smell in our room sometimes, and I think it came from up there."

"A strange smell?"

"Yes... It was like perfume, but it was nothing I'd ever smelled before. I didn't like it very much, but it seemed to please the consort. She spent a lot of time sitting where it was most noticeable."

Maomao cocked her head, and this time turned to one of the guards. "Was there anyone else in that tower?" she asked.

The guards glanced at each other, looking stricken. Their faces communicated that they knew something, but couldn't say what.

"Was there anyone else?!" Maomao demanded—but the answer came from an unexpected source.

"Not was. Is." A man with spectacles, an abacus, and tousled hair came trotting up to the conversation. "Although I requested that if anyone else were put in that tower, they be kept as far away from them as possible." It was Lahan, with an implicit rebuke for the guards.

"Apologies, sir. The tower is old... The upper floors didn't seem to be in a usable state."

"Well, I didn't think anyone else would end up in there, anyway. Certainly not a consort."

"What are you talking about?" Maomao said.

"Only what I asked to be done. Lest it become a diplomatic incident, you see."

"Diplomatic incident?" Maomao didn't see at all. What did that have to do with anything?

"I told you you should have come to my meeting with that western beauty. She asked me for this."

"This western beauty of yours—you mean the special envoy?!"

"Keep your voice down," Lahan said, slapping a hand over Maomao's mouth.

The guards didn't appear to have heard, but Lishu's chief ladyin-waiting reacted. "The special envoy... Yes, that reminds me!" "What is it?" Maomao asked.

"You asked me if anything unusual had happened with Lady

Lishu. And I just remembered..."

"Yes?! What?!" Maomao grabbed the woman by the shoulders, all but shaking her.

"One of the ladies-in-waiting released a bird. A white bird we got from the envoy."

"A bird? What happened to the mirror?" Maomao had been under the impression that the envoys had gifted large mirrors to each of the high consorts—had Lishu not gotten one?

"We did receive a mirror, but Consort Lishu was given a pair of mating birds as well, on the grounds that she was the youngest. The envoys thought perhaps she might be lonely, so far from her parents."

"And they thought birds would help?"

"I suppose so. But Lady Lishu starts sneezing anytime she touches an animal's fur or feathers, so she didn't see much of them. She felt bad not being able to care properly for them, and gave them to one of the maids. A bit back, while Lady Lishu was away, the woman let the bird go. In fact...she seemed to have let them both go, I'm afraid."

The birds... She let them go? Maomao felt like the pieces were just about to fall into place. She searched her memory desperately, trying to figure out why this seemed so important.

Could it be...

"These birds didn't happen to be pigeons, did they?"

"They might have been. I never actually saw them, so I'm not sure, but I did hear them cooing, I think."

Pigeons knew how to get back to their homes. The page Lishu had copied from the novel had been rolled up like a string. What if it had been tied to a pigeon's leg?

There was something else too. "At the banquet for the envoys last summer, wasn't there somebody talking to you? Not one of the envoys themselves, but one of their servants."

"Now that you mention it..."

Among the ladies-in-waiting, there had been someone saying something to the effect of: "The gentlemen of the west are

generous and so very handsome!"

I can't believe I missed it, Maomao thought. She'd been so sure that the book must have been sold by the visiting caravan. It made sense—someone from the west would have been able to get a hold of the translation sooner than those in the capital.

But the envoys had come to the banquet specifically to market themselves to the Emperor and his younger brother. Of course they would sound out the palace women first, trying to get whatever information they could. And they would naturally go after the person who looked most vulnerable. If they had decided, during their reconnaissance, that Lishu would be the easiest consort to manipulate, it would certainly explain why they had targeted her after that.

They played us! She should have realized, especially after one of the envoys had turned out to be involved with the Shi clan— and had managed to look perfectly innocent about it.

Now wasn't the time for regret, though. "All right, Lahan. Who is it in that tower?"

In response, Lahan leaned toward Maomao and whispered a name. When she heard it, she immediately broke out in a clammy sweat.

The White Immortal.

Of all the people it could have been... That made Maomao all the more curious about the strange smell that had been drifting into the consort's chambers. With as much as the White Lady knew about drugs, it was entirely possible she'd mixed something into some incense that would dull Lishu's judgment.

Maomao shoved past Lahan and made for the tower. She saw no sign of Basen. He must have taken to heart Jinshi's admonition to prepare for the worst. Anyway, she didn't have time to worry about him now. She needed to go see exactly what was happening with Consort Lishu.

She slipped past the startled guards and into the tower. Hallway, stairs, hallway, stairs. It was enough to make her head spin. She only knew she'd arrived at the top floor because she found several men there.

Jinshi was standing in front of an open door, beyond which was a balcony where Lishu stood, her eyes unfocused. Jinshi was speaking to her calmly. The balcony was falling apart; Lishu was light enough that it could support her, but if Jinshi tried to go out there, his foot might go clean through the floor. He obviously hoped he could talk her back into the building, but it didn't look like it was going very well.

"Don't move... Stay away..." Lishu was saying. What was she looking at? She was giving little shakes of her head, her face contorted with fear. A beautiful, much-beloved gentleman was standing before her, yet she looked as agonized as if she beheld a monster. Her eyes were utterly blind to his beauty. She was seeing something else, something fantastic.

"Consort..." Jinshi said gently, still trying not to upset her further. He had the right idea—if he could just keep talking to her until she came back to her senses, he might yet succeed.

Maomao stood quietly behind Jinshi. It would be risky for the young man to go out on the balcony; if they wanted to get any closer to Lishu, Maomao would be the better choice.

"I'll go," she said.

"Hey, wait!" Jinshi said, but she brushed his hand away. Quite frankly, she didn't want to do this. What if her foot punched a hole through the floor? What was the consort even doing way the hell up here?

That was only one of many bitter questions that occurred to Maomao, but like an idiot, she pressed ahead, consequences be damned. She had boarded this boat, and she was going to ride it until the end. She found one thought growing irresistibly in her mind: now that she'd come this far, she was going to help Consort Lishu.

"Consort," she said. "Lady Ah-Duo is waiting for you."

It was a judicious choice: mentioning her family here and now would almost certainly have had the opposite of the desired effect, and even Jinshi's presence hadn't brought Lishu back to them. Instead, Maomao invoked the name of the person the consort trusted most at this moment.

Her choice earned a twitch from the consort. "Lady...AhDuo...?" She seemed to show no fear of that name.

"Yes. She'll be here soon. You need to change before she arrives."

Maomao was careful not to specifically tell Lishu to come back to them. She just needed the consort to move toward her on the balcony. Just stay calm and move...

But it's never that simple.

A sweet-bitter aroma wafted to Maomao's nose. Something went by her without so much as a sound of footsteps, seeming so much a part of the natural world that no one reacted at first. The White Lady passed them by as unnoticed as a breeze.

Jinshi was the first to register her presence; he moved to intercept her, but—

"Gah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

There was a shrill, piercing laugh. That was all she did—she laughed. Her red eyes almost closed, her voice was like a wild animal's. It raised goosebumps on Maomao's skin. She reached out reflexively toward Consort Lishu—but she was too late.

In her current state, the laughter was enough to agitate Lishu. Her face twisted, and she fell back against the railing. The woman's cackling must have terrified her.

The rotten railing wasn't even able to support Lishu's modest weight, and she pitched backward into the empty air.

Maomao rushed across the balcony, but the floorboards gave way and she too began to fall. Just when she was expecting to feel a rush of wind against her body, she felt a pressure against her belly instead.

"Noooo!" Jinshi caught her at the last second.

He caught her, but she was unable to catch Lishu. Maomao's hand was empty, and Lishu was gone.

So this was how it all ended.

Lishu smiled. Her body was dropping through space. Soon she would strike the ground and enter into a sleep from which she would never awaken.

Her surroundings, which had seemed so hazy, were suddenly sharp and clear. She could see the collapsing balcony, and the apothecary, the one who usually acted so indifferent. Ah... She'd thought it felt like someone had been talking to her. It must have been the apothecary.

Lishu fell, unloved by anybody, unneeded. She was only ever in the way, so maybe it would be better if she wasn't there at all. She wouldn't be ridiculed anymore, or laughed at, or ignored. No one would leer at her with cruelty in their smile. But the journey to the ground did seem to be taking such a long time, so long that she wondered if maybe she really had grown wings and flown away like a bird. No, better to dispense with such fantasies. They only made it harder to bear when you came back to reality.

She closed her eyes, preparing to welcome the end, when she heard a voice.

"Consort!"

It sounded familiar. Whose was it? Without really meaning to, she looked toward the voice.

She saw a man standing on the multitiered roofs. He was grown, but not old enough yet to have acquired a beard or mustache. The sensitive lines of his face stirred something in her memory.

It was the young man who had saved her from the lion at the banquet in the western capital. She'd never had a chance to thank him. She'd thought about it several times, but had never quite managed, so she had meant to send him a letter eventually. Now that she thought about it, she was glad she hadn't. She would have felt bad if the ugly suspicions surrounding her had engulfed him as well.

She wished, though—now, now it was too late—she wished she could have at least told him how grateful she was. She opened her mouth. He would never be able to hear her, but she thought she could at least communicate those two simple words:

"Thank you."

Before she could so much as move her lips, though, the young man did something unbelievable. He began running along the roof, old tiles breaking under his feet, chunks of them flying loose. Despite the footing, or lack thereof, the young man jumped. He flew through the air and grabbed Lishu.

What was he doing?

Maybe he was just a little touched in the head. After all, no one could survive a fall from this height. Not even a trained soldier—certainly not one holding an additional person's worth of weight. Yet he held Lishu tightly in his arms.

Why would he embrace her, hold fast to a worthless young woman? It was pointless; it would only lead to both their deaths.

She wished he wouldn't do this. Why was he doing this?

Tears poured from her eyes. But the young man, seemingly oblivious to how Lishu felt, smiled awkwardly.

And then there was a tremendous thump. The young man's left leg caught the roof below them, but only for a second, and then they were falling again, his leg twisted at a bizarre angle.

"St—" Lishu said, but before she could get the word Stop out of her mouth, the young man had kicked off the next roof with his still-functioning right leg. The force of the kick must have been immense, for Lishu saw some roof tiles come loose.

Leaves rustled as they plummeted into the branches. Lishu caught the smell of fresh foliage. They had dropped among the huge trees that surrounded the tower. The young man kept hold of Lishu with one hand and grabbed a branch with the other. Their combined momentum, however, thwarted him, and he lost his grip. He tsk'ed as his fingernails dragged down the side of the trunk.

Their fall stopped with another big bump. There was an impact, but no pain. Lishu hadn't actually hit the ground; instead, the young man was beneath her, protecting her—and beneath him was a pile of mattresses. When she looked around, in fact, she realized there seemed to be mattresses everywhere.

Both the young man's legs were broken, while the nails on his left hand had been torn out and his fingers were bleeding. And while they may have landed on some mattresses, it couldn't have been enough to keep the young man from hurting his back in the landing.

He was an absolute wreck—but he was still wearing that same awkward smile.

"Why?" Lishu said. She wasn't able to voice the complete question: Why had he saved her? Why had he not simply left her to die? She didn't know what to do with someone who had battered his own body in order to protect her.

The young man's right hand, the only uninjured part of him, was shaking for some reason. He slowly moved away, releasing her. "Are you hurt, my lady?" he asked.

"Why?"

She still couldn't muster any further words. Tears clouded her eyes, and her vision was full of the young man's blurry, smiling face.

"Does anything hurt?" he asked.

No! No, that wasn't why she was crying. She shook her head.

"I must apologize for presenting myself before you in such a filthy state. It was an emergency." No! She didn't care about that.

"I tried to be careful not to use too much strength. If you nonetheless find yourself with bruises, however, please don't hesitate to punish me."

Lishu was speechless. How could he say such things? His arm around her had been powerful and yet gentle. How could she ever punish him for that?

A moan escaped her, provoking a look of alarm from the young man. No, no—he shouldn't be worrying about her. He should be thinking about his own broken body.

"Why would you bother to rescue me?" Lishu asked finally. The Emperor would surely cast aside a consort who was suspected of infidelity. It was pointless for the young man to risk his own life to save her.

"You mustn't belittle yourself so. Saving you was worth everything. That's why I did it." He reached up with his one good hand and shyly wiped away Lishu's cascading tears. "I wanted you to be happy. That's all. Perhaps even that wish was too much ambition for a simple soldier." That smile again.

Lishu's mouth twisted and untwisted. She was wearing hardly any makeup, her eyes were swollen, and her face must have been bright red. She was embarrassed for the young man to see her this way—and her embarrassment only made what she did next even more embarrassing.

She buried her face in his chest.

"Lishu?! I mean, Consort?!"

The young man was practically panicking; she could hear his heart pounding with agitation in his chest. This went beyond embarrassment—she had to get away from him before anyone saw them, or this time she would be suspected of being unfaithful with this young man. Normally, doing something this crazy would have caused her heart to race and sent blood rushing to her head.

And indeed, her pulse was going very fast. But at the same time, she was calm, here with her face against the young man's chest, which smelled faintly of sweat but just as much of fresh leaves, new growth.

Lishu wished fervently that this brief moment might be even one second longer.

Epilogue

"It's a downright ridiculous story, isn't it?" Maomao said, flipping through the romantic tragedy that had come to them from some far country. Jinshi had only just given her back her original copy. (Well, her copy of the original copy.)

"I agree." Jinshi, who had come to return the book, leaned against a shelf, staring out the window at the sky.

The atmosphere between them was difficult to describe. Though they were alone now, Jinshi had none of his recent forcefulness. Maomao knew he understood that this wasn't the moment for it.

Consort Lishu—or rather, former Consort Lishu—was going to become a nun again, on the orders of the Emperor himself.

"I suspect His Majesty has had this in mind for some time," Jinshi said.

Lishu's mother was an old acquaintance of both the Emperor and Ah-Duo. His Majesty must have viewed Lishu as something akin to a daughter. That was why he had called her back to the rear palace—in hopes that she might, somehow, be happy.

The world was never so generous, though, and his attempt to make her happy backfired. Lishu found herself bullied by her halfsister and her own ladies-in-waiting, and ultimately, thanks to her position as a high consort, even found her life threatened. Locking her up in the prison tower had been an act of mercy on the Emperor's part, an attempt to protect her from the very real danger of an assassination attempt. Lishu's former chief lady-inwaiting had been, in simple terms, trying to get herself a new mistress. Most likely, she'd already been in touch with the emissary from the west—via the pigeons—because she felt she couldn't hope to rise any further in the world under Lishu. The "love letter" had been among their communications.

The fact that Lishu had ended up imprisoned with the White

Lady could only be called bad luck. Maybe she really had been born under a bad star.

In the tower, Lishu had seen strange things, caused by that sweet, bitter incense—the same smell that had come from the White Lady. It hadn't drawn attention when the Lady had been searched before being put in the tower, but when Maomao examined her personally, she found a string tied to one of the woman's teeth. The White Lady tried to bite it off, but this only made everyone more curious about what was attached to it. When they pulled it up, they discovered a small sachet of incense. This was a woman who would willingly drink quicksilver; why wouldn't she hide incense in her stomach?

The stuff might have been dangerous had Lishu continued to be subjected to it, but Luomen (a medical officer!) said that since it had stopped at this stage, there was nothing to worry about. The fact that Lishu happened to be built in such a way that such drugs were especially effective on her was just another stroke of misfortune.

"A consort can't be allowed to cause such commotion." No consort could be the cause of such trouble and go entirely without consequences—hence, the nunnery. However, before rendering his judgment, the Emperor had summoned Maomao and asked her two questions:

"What is the life span of a rumor?"

She had answered that it was seventy-five days, although he shook his head and insisted that would not be enough to save face. Then he asked:

"If there were to be a man suitable for Lishu, what kind of man would he be?"

He practically sounded like a father seeking a good match for his daughter. This was how he acted with Lishu, another man's child—Maomao could only imagine how he would be when it came time to find a match for his own offspring, Princess Lingli.

Maomao knew the girl was the apple of his eye.

For just a second, she thought of the man with a scar on his right cheek, but she decided not to say so aloud. Forget strangling; it might get her head lopped clean off.

"I'm afraid that's not a question I can answer, sir—but perhaps you might consider that the man who broke both his legs, tore out all the fingernails on one hand, and dislocated his shoulder to save her merits a reward."

It was, indeed, Basen who had suffered more than any other in the present incident. Without him, Lishu would probably have ended up like a burst persimmon. Basen, understanding that a few mattresses weren't going to be enough to help the plummeting young lady, had improvised a different approach. Instead of putting all the mattresses in one place, he'd had them spread out across the area where she was likely to land, and then he had taken all of the impact the mattresses couldn't absorb upon himself. And Maomao had thought Jinshi was a masochist! Jinshi claimed Basen didn't feel pain as acutely as other people, but even so...

The one thing she could say for certain was that she could imagine no one else who could have saved Lishu at that moment. She could just picture the reaction if she told the courtesans in the pleasure district about this: "It's destiny!" they would exclaim, eyes shining.

And then there was Lishu whom Maomao had always taken to be shy and retiring around men, yet who had buried her face in Basen's chest and cried. Maomao wasn't so uncultivated as to not understand what that meant. Jinshi had quickly cleared everyone away and kindly waited until Lishu was done weeping. That had delayed Maomao in treating Basen, but the young man probably hadn't been entirely unhappy about the situation.

Lishu, it was declared, would spend one year in the nunnery, whereupon she would return to her home and family, stripped of her title of consort. However, her family would not be punished.

As for Basen, he would be granted anything (it was emphasized) he might wish. Be it an object or a person, so long as it was within the Emperor's power to grant, he would have it. Nor need he decide hastily, the Emperor advised. Basen could wait to say what he wanted—up to a year.

Maomao smiled with a touch of bitterness: this young man and woman had fallen for each other at first sight, yet they discovered true love never did run as smooth as it did in the stories. But still, this wasn't a bad outcome at all.

After all this, Maomao reread the tragic romance again—but it

still didn't make any sense to her.

Not everything was wrapped up so neatly, however. The emissary from the west requested custody of the White Lady, who had been arrested as a criminal. Her reasoning? "Because she was one of Ayla's agents."

Ayla: the other emissary, the one who had been involved with selling feifa firearms to the Shi clan. The woman who somehow still seemed to be causing problems for them even now.

That wasn't all, for the emissary requested something even bolder: she had cornered Lahan about lending aid or giving her asylum earlier, and now, amazingly, she pressed for the latter. This must have come as a shock to Lahan, who had been busy with his potato cultivation. What's more, the emissary had a stunning idea as to how the asylum should be effected: she requested to enter the rear palace. "I need not be a high consort," she had said. "Even the status of a middle consort would be enough."

Admittedly, it would be a less conspicuous way of getting her into the country than specifically stating that she was being granted asylum.

One thing I don't know is how much of what she said is true, Maomao thought. She wanted to just forget about it and take a nap, but as long as Jinshi was there, she couldn't do that. She wished he would hurry up and go home.

For his part, Jinshi didn't seem particularly interested in leaving. He might not be much of a straight shooter, but he did seem to have a lot on his mind.

"What's this?" he asked, picking up a rather sorry excuse for a book. It appeared to flummox even him, with its pages of characters that looked like dried earthworms.

"What do you think?" Maomao said.

"Is it...Go?" he said, peering at the untidy rows of black and white circles. "Don't tell me...the honorable strategist?"

"Yes, sir."

Lahan had foisted it upon her in exchange for the information about the emissary, on the assumption that she must know someone at the printing house.

No idea if they'd want any part of it, though. Not after she'd bought up the book they had been planning to use as a printing source. Even if they did take the job, they would have to be able to read the text first—that seemed like the biggest hurdle. Normally, she would have simply shoved the thing back in Lahan's face, but to her own surprise she found herself accepting the sad little book.

Jinshi looked rather taken aback as well. Maomao snorted as if to say Pay it no mind and gazed at her laundry, which refused to dry here in the rainy season.

How long could this conversation go on? She wished it could stay this way. Also, she hoped he wouldn't tickle the back of her foot again. She was careful to sit on her feet so Jinshi couldn't see them.

He seemed to sense what she was thinking, for he smiled indulgently. He really knew how to piss her off. She was just giving him her fiercest Go home! stare when the door opened.

"Oh, hey, mister." It was Chou-u. Jinshi simply nodded and raised a hand in greeting.

Chou-u trotted into the shop, ignoring how cramped it was with three people inside. Maomao was just wondering what he could be up to—when he ran a finger along her back, raising gooseflesh all over her body. "Wanna know something, mister? Freckles here can't stand it if you swipe your finger along her back. It's a hoot!"

Maomao, wondering why the hell Chou-u would bring up something like that at a moment like this, raised a hand to knuckle him in the head.

Jinshi, however, said, "Is that so?" and grinned. Then he pulled out his purse and put a fat silver piece in Chou-u's hand, far more than any kid needed for pocket change.

"Huh? What's this about, mister? What's going on?" Chou-u asked.

"Oh, I'd just like you to run a little errand for me. Take your time about it."

Maomao's eyes became dots.

"Wow! You're the best, mister!"

"Yes...take all the time you like."

"Chou-u!" Maomao exclaimed, but the little brat walked out of the shop as if to say his work here was done. She jumped up to follow him, but she felt a tingling along her spine.

"M-Master Jinshi..."

"Well, I'll be! It really works." He was smiling triumphantly.

"And I'm not done paying you back."

No young man had ever looked more mischievous than he did at that moment.