Chapter 3: The Third Watch

On the twelfth day of the third month, the Bureau of the Unlit Lamp sent for Seventeen.

The summons came at midday, in the hand of a runner who did not give his name: a lacquer tablet the length of a finger, black, with a lamp painted on it in gold. The lamp had no flame. On the back, in numbers, because numbers were what the Bureau's guards could read, was the hour.

The third watch. Tonight.

Seventeen took it from the runner, bowed, and put it inside her collar next to the silver lock. Then she went back into the bedchamber and began, without hurry, to put her things in order.

There were not many things. The sword. A whetstone. A second pair of cloth shoes. A comb with three teeth missing. She rewrapped the sword hilt with fresh cord, tight, overlapping each turn by half its width. She rolled the sleeping mat and tied it. She set it against the wall by the brazier, square to the corner, where the next guard would find it.

The Bureau sent for a guard in two cases. Reassignment. Or the other thing.

Nine had been sent for in the eleventh month. Afterward he had a fever.

Seventeen tied the last knot on the mat and stood up. The princess was in the doorway.

· · ·

Lingyue had seen the runner from the garden. She had watched him cross the courtyard with his eyes down and his hands in his sleeves, the walk of a man who carries things he would rather not know about, and she had stood among the peonies with a pair of shears and felt her stomach drop the way it did on the palace stairs in the dark when she missed a step.

Now she looked at the rolled mat against the wall.

"You've tidied."

"Yes, Your Highness."

"Show me."

Seventeen took the tablet out of her collar and held it out on both palms.

Lingyue didn't touch it. She looked at the painted lamp with no flame and the numbers on the back, and then at Seventeen's face, which was doing what it always did, which was nothing.

"Nine was sent for last winter," Lingyue said.

"Yes."

"And then he had a fever."

"Yes."

"Did you see him with a fever?"

Seventeen's eyes moved, very slightly, to the left. Toward the wall. Toward the mat.

"No, Your Highness."

"Then you're not going."

"The token—"

"Is a bit of lacquer on a stick. I have hairpins worth more." Lingyue took it out of her hands and dropped it into the sleeve of her own robe. "If they want it back, they can come and ask."

"If this one does not go," said Seventeen, "they will come."

"Good. Then I'll know who they are."

She was already turning away, already calling for Chunlan, already thinking. The summons had come three days after a box of sesame candy. It had come the day before Seventeen's next report was due, the first report that would have to say an arrow came through the window, or else say nothing, and saying nothing was not permitted. Either the Bureau wanted to know what was in that report before anyone else read it. Or someone wanted the guard who caught the arrow taken off the board.

It came to the same thing. Seventeen would walk through the Bureau's gate at the third watch and Lingyue would get a polite note in the morning about a fever.

"Chunlan. The yellow robe. The one Father hates."

"Highness, it's the middle of the day."

"I know. Do my eyes. Make them look like I've been crying."

· · ·

The Jingning Emperor was fifty-eight years old and had been tired for most of the last ten of them. He sat in the Hall of Abiding Calm behind a desk stacked with memorials, and on the other side of the desk, with another stack, sat Grand Chancellor Wei Hong: gray-bearded, soft-voiced, his hands folded in his sleeves like a scholar's.

They both looked up when the princess came in weeping.

"Father, they're taking her away."

The chief eunuch, who had tried to announce her, gave up and closed the doors.

Lingyue threw herself down on the cushion beside the desk in a heap of yellow silk. She had made Chunlan rub her eyes with a little onion, and they were streaming most satisfactorily. "My Seventeen. The Bureau sent a horrid little stick with a lamp on it, and they're taking her tonight, and they'll give me some new one who snores. Nine snored. You remember, I told you, he was like a bear."

The Emperor's face did the thing it had done since she was a child, a sort of exhausted softening, as if she were a pet who had knocked over an inkstone. "Lingyue. The guards are the Bureau's business."

"She's my business. She doesn't snore. She doesn't even breathe. I've checked." Lingyue wiped her nose on her sleeve, which made the Chancellor look briefly at the ceiling. "She's the only good thing I've got. You let me keep the gray bird."

"The gray bird came back by itself."

"So would she, if they'd let her."

Chancellor Wei cleared his throat, very gently. "If I may, Majesty. The Bureau rotates its guards for a reason. A guard who stays too long with one charge grows attached. Attachment clouds judgment." He smiled at Lingyue, kindly. "It's for Her Highness's own safety."

"Then I'll be horrible to her," said Lingyue, "and she won't get attached. Anyway, she's the only one who can catch these."

She reached into her sleeve, past the lacquer token, and took out the arrow, and laid it on top of the Emperor's memorials.

Crane feathers. Black tips.

"Isn't it pretty?" Lingyue said. "It came through my window on the sixth. She caught it before it caught me. I'm going to have the feathers made into a fan."

Nobody said anything.

The chief eunuch, by the door, made a short sound, breath going in and not coming out. The Emperor's tired face had gone entirely still. He was looking at the black on the feathers, and Lingyue watched him understand what it meant, the way she'd understood it in the moonlight six nights ago. Inner Guard. Inside the walls. My daughter's window.

Across the desk, Chancellor Wei's folded hands had come apart. One of them lay flat on his stack of papers. It was the only thing about him that had moved.

"Father?" said Lingyue, in a small, puzzled voice. "Is it a bad fan?"

The Emperor picked up his brush.

He wrote for some time. When he was done, he pressed his private seal to the paper with more force than the seal needed, and held it out to her himself.

The guard called Seventeen is released from the Bureau of the Unlit Lamp and transferred to the household of the Hall of Clear Rain, to serve the Princess Lingyue alone, at her sole command, for as long as she pleases.

"Keep the arrow," the Emperor said. His voice sounded old. "Don't make a fan of it."

"Thank you, Father." She clapped her hands, and kissed his cheek, and took the edict, and skipped to the door. Actually skipped. The diarist would have needed a new drawer.

"Your Highness," said Chancellor Wei behind her, mildly. "Arrows are not toys."

Lingyue turned in the doorway and smiled at him.

"Neither are slippers, Lord Chancellor. Do thank Zhaolin for me."

· · ·

Seventeen had waited in the corridor outside the Hall of Abiding Calm, in the shadow of a pillar, and she had heard everything through the doors.

The princess had said my Seventeen.

The princess had said she's the only good thing I've got.

Seventeen did not know which category to put those in. She did not think there was a category. She stood behind the pillar with her hands at her sides and repeated them to herself, exactly, the way she repeated poison names, so they would not be lost.

· · ·

The Lampkeeper came anyway, at the third watch.

He came with two Bureau guards and a lantern that was not lit, and he stood in the courtyard of the Hall of Clear Rain with the moon on the flagstones and his black bamboo cane planted in front of him. He was a small old man with a pleasant voice. Seventeen had been afraid of him since she was seven.

Lingyue met him on the steps in a dark cloak, with the edict open in her hands.

He read it by moonlight, all the way through, and bowed very low.

"His Majesty's will, of course, Highness. The Bureau obeys." He straightened. "But the Bureau must close its accounts. She owes a report."

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

"Seventeen. Kneel."

Seventeen knelt.

She did not decide to. Her knees were on the stones before anything in her had been consulted. Lingyue saw it happen, saw the body go down like a puppet whose string had been pulled from very far away, and something in her chest went cold and furious and perfectly clear.

"Eleven months of reports," the Lampkeeper said, "and you leave out the one thing that mattered. An arrow. Inside the walls. And the Bureau learns of it from the Emperor's own desk."

The cane came up.

This one knows the cane, Seventeen thought. Kneel. Do not lift the hands. It ends faster.

It came down across her face. The tip split the skin over her cheekbone and her head went sideways with it and came back. She did not lift her hands. Blood ran warm down to her jaw.

The cane came up again.

Lingyue stepped in front of her.

It struck Lingyue across the forearm she put up, a flat, ugly crack, and the sound of it in the quiet courtyard was very loud.

Nobody moved.

Then the two Bureau guards were on their knees, foreheads to the flagstones. The Lampkeeper's cane hung in the air. His pleasant old face had gone the color of wet paper.

"Highness. This servant did not— Highness, this servant—"

"You struck an imperial princess, Lampkeeper," said Lingyue. Her voice was gentle, almost bored. Her arm throbbed from wrist to elbow. She did not look at it. "Under the code, that's the slicing. Or is it strangling? I always forget which."

"Highness—"

"I'll forget it. You forget her." She held out the lacquer token with its unlit lamp. "We'll both have terrible memories. I'm known for mine."

He took the token in a shaking hand. He went.

Seventeen was still kneeling on the stones behind her.

She had not been told what to do when someone stood between her and the cane. There was no order for it. She looked at the hem of the princess's cloak, an arm's length from her face, and could not think of a single thing.

· · ·

Inside, Lingyue sat her on the edge of the bed and would not let her get up.

"Your Highness is injured. This one should—"

"Sit."

She had a basin of warm water and a jug of strong wine and a stack of clean cloths, and she knelt on the floor in front of Seventeen and tipped her chin up toward the lamp with two fingers. The cut was long and clean and would scar. Lingyue wet the cloth with wine and pressed it to it.

Seventeen did not flinch. Her eyes went to Lingyue's arm instead, where the sleeve had fallen back and a dark welt was rising across the inside of her forearm.

"Don't," said Lingyue. "I'll live. I've had worse from a dancing master."

She wiped the blood from Seventeen's jaw, slowly, following it down to the hinge of the bone and under the ear. She could feel the pulse there under the cloth. She kept her own hand very steady.

"I'm going to tell you something," she said, "and you don't have to do anything about it. You don't have to remember it. I just want it said in this room once."

Seventeen waited.

"Twenty-one years ago, the Fenghe garrison went hungry, and the pass fell. The general who held it was called Shen Ruhai. He wrote to the capital for grain eleven times. The grain was in the granaries. It never came. They executed him for treason, and every adult in his house, and they confiscated the rest." Lingyue rinsed the cloth. The water in the basin went pink. "The household register is still in the archive. Somebody forgot to burn it. It lists a fourth daughter. Seven years old."

The lamp hissed. Seventeen's face did nothing.

"Her name was Qi." Lingyue looked up at her. "And the Bureau numbered you Shiqi. Seventeen. Somebody at that table, twenty-one years ago, heard what you were called and couldn't quite throw it away."

"This one does not remember," Seventeen said.

"I know."

"This one does not remember a father. Or Fenghe. Or—"

"I know. You don't have to." Lingyue put down the cloth. She laid the flat of her hand against Seventeen's cheek, the unhurt one, very lightly, the way you'd set a cup on a table you weren't sure was level. "Someone sold his grain. Someone's selling it again. That part's mine to worry about. This part is just yours."

She waited until Seventeen's eyes, which had been on the welt on her arm, came all the way up to her face.

"Shen Qi," Lingyue said.

Nothing in the Bureau had taught Seventeen what to do with that.

She sat very still on the edge of the princess's bed with the lamp hissing and the wine stinging in the cut. Then, without being told to, without anything in her being consulted at all, her face turned a little way into the princess's hand, and stayed there.