Chapter 1: Slippers Lost at Dice

In the ninth year of the Jingning reign, on the sixth day of the third month, Princess Zhao Lingyue lost a pair of embroidered slippers at dice to the wife of the Vice Minister of Revenue, and walked home across the Grand Chancellor's garden in her stockings.

The court diarist wrote down the slippers. He had been recording Zhao Lingyue for six years: the forty-one songbirds she had bought in the market and let go over the palace wall, the suitor she had refused because his ears stuck out, the winter she would wear nothing but yellow. He had a whole drawer for her.

He did not have a column for what she won.

· · ·

"Again," Lingyue said, and held out her hand for the dice cup.

The pear trees in Grand Chancellor Wei's garden were in full bloom, and whenever the wind moved, petals came down over the gaming table. They stuck to the lacquer and to Lady Fan's sleeve. One stuck to the side of the dice cup, and Lingyue left it there, because she was the kind of woman who would think a petal on a dice cup was lucky, and she was being that woman very carefully this afternoon.

"Your Highness has lost three times," said Lady Fan.

She was forty, round-faced and flushed, with the bright eyes of someone who had never been allowed to beat a princess at anything and was finding she liked it. "The jade cicada, the pearl pin, and the little silver fish."

"And my good temper. Again."

The ladies around the table laughed. Lingyue laughed with them, shook the cup until the dice rattled like loose teeth, and brought it down hard.

A two and a three.

"Oh, no," said Lingyue, delighted.

Low throws were harder than people thought. You had to tip the cup on the last shake so the dice ran along the wall, and do it without looking at your hand. She had practiced on her bedroom floor for most of a winter. The jade cicada had bought her eleven sentences about the Revenue Ministry's spring accounts. The pearl pin had bought the name of a grain merchant in the northern prefectures who was building himself a second house with a moon gate. The silver fish had bought nothing yet, but Lady Fan always felt she owed you something after she took your things.

"My husband says I'll ruin him with all these presents," Lady Fan said, tucking the fish into her sleeve. "He says the Ministry is stretched to the bone this year. Which is nonsense, because the northern granaries have never been fuller. Nine hundred and twelve thousand shi. He showed me the ledger. I said, then why is the Chancellor asking for a new levy, and he told me to mind my embroidery."

"How dull of him," said Lingyue. "Your turn."

Nine hundred and twelve thousand. She put it next to the other number she had been carrying around since winter, which was the number of letters the Fenghe garrison had sent to the capital asking for grain. Seven. Every one of them stamped received. None of them answered.

Full granaries in the north. A hungry garrison in the north. Somewhere between the two, grain was turning into silver and a moon gate.

The last time the Fenghe garrison had gone hungry, twenty-one years ago, the pass had fallen, and the general who held it had been executed for treason along with every adult in his house. Lingyue had been three. She knew about it from a document someone had forgotten to burn.

Lady Fan threw a six and a five and squealed. "Highness, I'm so sorry. That's the slippers, isn't it?"

"I said slippers." Lingyue was already bending to unlace them. They were peach silk stitched with cranes, and she had worn them today for exactly this. "Take them. They pinch."

Around the table, the ladies made the small gasping noise that well-bred women made instead of saying she's actually doing it.

A shadow fell across the dice.

"Your Highness is generous," said Lady Wei, the Grand Chancellor's wife, "as always."

She was tall and beautiful in an arranged way, like a dish meant for display, and she had come out of the pavilion without anyone hearing her. She smiled at Lingyue's stockinged feet and did not look surprised. Lady Wei had stopped looking surprised by Lingyue four years ago. Lingyue had not yet decided whether that was a compliment or a danger.

"My son was asking after you this morning," said Lady Wei. "Zhaolin has been copying the Diamond Sutra for your father's birthday. He writes a very fine hand."

"Does he?" Lingyue stood up in her stockings. The flagstones in the shade were cold through the silk. "I can never read men's handwriting. It all leans."

"Perhaps Your Highness could learn."

"Perhaps." Lingyue smiled at her with all her teeth. "Or perhaps he could learn to stand up straight."

The diarist, at his little table by the wisteria, dipped his brush.

Lady Wei's smile didn't move at all. "His Majesty is considering the match."

"His Majesty considers a great many things," said Lingyue. "He's still considering whether I may keep a peacock."

She curtsied, sloppily, like a girl who had drunk too much plum wine, and walked off across the garden in her stockings with the petals coming down on her hair.

Considering the match. So the Chancellor had put it in writing. She was twenty-four and unmarried, and he had run out of patience.

She kept her walk a little unsteady. Behind her face, she was doing sums. A princess married into the Wei house would live with Wei servants and Wei food and a Wei physician. Within a year she'd be ill. Within two she'd be dead of something with an elegant name, and the Chancellor's grandson would be the Emperor's grandson, and that would be that.

She did not intend to be that.

· · ·

Seventeen was on the roof of the east gallery, flat in the strip of shadow under the upturned eave, and had been since the hour of the Snake.

The princess had lost the slippers.

The princess was walking on the flagstones in white stockings. The flagstones on the shaded side of the garden were cold. Seventeen had put her palm on one at dawn when she checked the grounds. The princess would be cold.

That was not Seventeen's concern. Seventeen's concern was the servant who had passed the gaming table twice without pouring, and the gardener whose hands were too clean.

The servant went into the kitchen court. The gardener knelt by a peony and began, badly, to weed it.

Seventeen watched the gardener.

She was twenty-eight years old. She had been Seventeen since she was seven. The Bureau of the Unlit Lamp had taken her in the tenth month of a year she did not remember and taught her what it taught all of them: to stand where the lamplight did not fall; to say this one and never I; to read numbers and the names of nineteen poisons and four characters only. Guard. Kill. Yes. No. Everything else was other people's business.

Eleven months ago, the Bureau had sent her to the princess, because Nine had died of a fever.

Every ten days she wrote a report. She had written one last night, with the brush held the way the Bureau taught, every stroke the same weight.

Third month, fifth day. The princess ate four plums. The princess released one sparrow from the east wall. The princess slept.

All of it was true. Seventeen did not write things that were not true.

She did not write everything that was true, either.

Below, the princess passed under the gallery. She did not look up. Her hem was dark at the bottom where it had dragged on the damp stone, and there was a pear petal caught in the knot of her hair. As she went beneath the eave she said, to no one, in an ordinary voice, "My feet are freezing."

Seventeen stayed where she was.

It had not been an order. She was fairly sure it had not been an order.

She watched the stockings until they were gone through the moon gate. Then she went back to the gardener.

· · ·

The Hall of Clear Rain stood on the western edge of the Inner City, close enough to the Emperor's apartments to be a favor and far enough to be forgotten. By the second watch of the night, all the maids had been sent to bed. Two lamps burned. The bed curtains were tied back.

Princess Zhao Lingyue sat at her writing table in an undershift with her hair down, entirely sober, grinding ink.

Seventeen lay along the crossbeam above the door and watched her do it.

She had watched this for eleven months. The princess came home drunk, or appeared to, and complained about her head while the maids undressed her. Then the maids left, and the princess sat up, and her face went quiet and narrow, like a knife being put back into its sheath, and she wrote.

Seventeen could not read what she wrote. She knew the numbers in it, because numbers were permitted. Tonight there were a great many numbers. 912,000 appeared three times. 7 appeared once, with a circle around it.

When the princess finished, she read it over, held the paper to the lamp, and watched it burn in the brass basin.

Seventeen had not been told what to call that. So she had not written it.

"Seventeen," said the princess, without looking up. "Come down."

Seventeen came down.

She dropped from the beam with no more sound than a cat jumping off a chair, and knelt with her eyes on the floor. It was the first time in eleven months the princess had called her by name inside the bedchamber. She looked at the floorboards. There was a scorch mark on one from a dropped coal.

"You can look at me," the princess said. "I'm not the sun."

Seventeen looked at the princess's hands. Ink on the right middle finger. A small burn on the left thumb, from the paper.

"Higher."

The princess's chin.

The princess sighed. It was a theatrical sigh, the kind she used in the garden, but there was something under it that Seventeen could not sort into a category, so she left it alone.

"Did you eat today?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

"What?"

"Rice."

"And?"

"Rice, Your Highness. Twice."

"There were forty dishes at the Chancellor's table. There was duck with sour plum. There was carp in that sweet sauce that makes Lady Fan cry."

"They were not for this one."

The princess put down her brush.

From the floor, Seventeen could see the princess's bare feet under the hem of the undershift. They had gone pink again since the afternoon. Seventeen noted this.

"Eleven months on my beams, and that's the longest conversation we've had. Nine used to snore on the roof, you know. Like a bear in a cave. At least I always knew where he was." She tilted her head. "Nobody ever knows where you are."

"That is correct, Your Highness."

"Is it." The princess's voice changed. It got lighter, which Seventeen had learned meant the opposite. "Then tell me. When you write your little reports, every ten days, what do you say I do at night?"

Seventeen opened her mouth.

She did not hear the bowstring. Nobody would have heard the bowstring. What she heard was the paper of the window lattice go tight, a very small sound like a fingernail drawn across a drum, and she was already moving. She caught the princess's wrist and pulled, hard, off the stool and down. The princess hit the floor on her hip and made a noise. Something went thock into the lacquered pillar behind the table, at the height where the princess's throat had been, and stood there humming.

Seventeen pinched out the nearest lamp. Rolled. Knocked the second off its stand and smothered it with her sleeve.

Dark.

She lay half across the princess, one arm over the princess's head, her face turned toward the window. Moonlight came through the torn lattice in a thin gray line. Nothing else came through.

She counted heartbeats. Hers, slow. The princess's, under her forearm, very fast.

No second arrow.

"Stay," Seventeen said, and began to rise.

A hand closed on her sleeve.

"No."

"The archer—"

"Is already gone. Or is a decoy." The princess's voice came out of the dark low and steady and with no lightness in it at all. "If you go out that window, the next one comes through the door. Stay where you are."

Seventeen stayed where she was.

After a while, the hand let go. Seventeen heard the princess cross the room by touch and work the arrow free of the pillar with a short word princesses were not supposed to know.

She carried it to the window and held it up in the line of moonlight.

It was an ordinary arrow, except that it was not. The shaft was straight-grained mulberry. The fletching was crane feather, and the tips of the feathers had been dipped in black.

Seventeen knew that black. So, apparently, did the princess.

"Palace armory," the princess said quietly. "Inner Guard issue." She turned the arrow in her fingers. "So it's not from outside the walls."

Seventeen said nothing. There was nothing to say that the princess had not already said.

The princess stood in the moonlight for a long time with the arrow in her hands. Her face, what Seventeen could see of it, had gone narrow and quiet again, the way it did over the writing table.

Six years, Lingyue was thinking. Six years of songbirds and dice and yellow dresses and a drawer full of the diarist's little notes, and someone has looked at all of it and decided I'm worth an arrow.

Someone had seen through her. You did not waste Inner Guard arrows on a girl who lost her slippers at dice.

So someone knew.

And the arrow had come through the window on the one night, in eleven months, that she had called her shadow down off the beam. With her guard on the floor, kneeling, looking at Lingyue's chin, instead of up there, looking at the window.

Either that was luck.

Or someone had wanted the guard to come down.

She looked at Seventeen, still on one knee in the dark, face turned up for orders, patient as a stone in a riverbed. Twenty-eight years old, and Lingyue had never once seen her eat, or sleep, or say the word I. A shadow guard belonged to whoever held her leash. Lingyue had never been allowed to hold it.

She had no idea whose this one was.

"Seventeen."

"Your Highness."

"Where do you sleep?"

"This one does not sleep on duty."

"And when you're not on duty?"

"This one is always on duty."

Lingyue laughed. It came out short and a little cracked, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stop it, because it sounded too much like the real thing.

Then she lowered the hand. She pointed with the black-tipped arrow at the floor beside her bed, at the stretch of polished boards between the bed curtains and the cold brazier.

"From tonight," said Princess Zhao Lingyue, "you sleep in my chamber."