Chapter 26: Fat Sheep at the Inn

With the city gates shut, the Empress Dowager's party settled into a guest house outside the walls, borrowed from a friend of the Marquis of Zhennanjun.

The Empress Dowager had enjoyed the lake outing well enough, but the missed tea party sat with her. She turned on her steward with some feeling. "You're usually perfectly reliable. How did you manage to lead us on a detour to the wrong ferry crossing today of all days, and cost us the entire gathering?"

The steward kept his expression carefully composed and his eyes carefully away from the prince standing nearby. He could hardly confess that the wrong turn had been arranged to order.

Lan Shuilan stepped in with graceful timing. "Empress Dowager, looking at it another way, it may have been fortunate. I've heard that things in the city grew quite frightening. Several officials who passed through after the tea party were badly shaken."

The ladies from Zhenzhou took up the thread readily, agreeing that the Empress Dowager's good fortune had spared them all from something unpleasant. This eventually produced a smile.

Cui Xingzhou smiled along with the room. His thoughts were elsewhere entirely.

He had given the steward those instructions deliberately — sending the procession on a wrong route to keep his family well clear of whatever was going to happen in Qingzhou. If the Huaiyang household had not appeared at all, the absence would have looked suspicious. Being genuinely lost was the kind of verifiable misfortune that dock attendants and post station staff could confirm, leaving no opening for criticism.

He had expected his men to finish the job cleanly. The rebel would be removed, the Emperor's plan to diminish Zhenzhou's power would be disrupted before it properly began, and the matter would be closed.

What he had not expected were the guards.

In the end, the assassin had only managed to open a wound across Ziyu's back. Not a killing blow. The young man had survived.

The report that came back afterward described Ziyu's guards fighting with a specific method — suicidal in its intensity, each man throwing himself into the path of harm to cover the one behind him. The technique bore the unmistakable stamp of the secret guard corps trained during the previous emperor's reign.

That detail gave Cui Xingzhou pause. He put a stop to any further immediate action and told his men to hold, and watch, and find out more. Whoever Ziyu actually was, it warranted knowing before anything else was attempted.

It was, he thought with something approaching genuine regret, unfortunate that Lu Wen's companion had lost her memory. Liu Niang Zi would have been a natural source of information, had she any recollection left to draw from.

The image came to him unbidden — Miantang at the market stall, throwing tea at a man's attendants, sweeping them away from her stall with a shop boy and a broom, telling Ziyu to his face that he was nothing to her and she never wanted to see him again in this lifetime.

He felt, privately, a faint flicker of something close to amusement.

"Xingzhou." The Empress Dowager's voice drew him back. She was looking between her son and Lan Shuilan with the particular expression of a woman who has decided to be helpful. "You're always so occupied that we barely catch sight of you. Tonight you have a rare free evening. We old ladies must be dull company. Take your cousin Silan for a walk in the side garden — I noticed the flowers were quite lovely when we arrived."

Cui Xingzhou complied without argument. He gestured for the servants to follow at a distance and invited Lan Shuilan to walk with him.

Lan Shuilan, observing his easy smile and the way he looked in the moonlight, felt her composure flutter slightly. She fell into step a half-pace behind him as they entered the garden where the night-blooming cereus had opened.

Since the occasion of the crab roe buns, she had visited the military camp several times on the pretext of bringing food to her cousin. On two of those visits, she had noticed complete meal sets arranged on his desk — clearly not from any camp kitchen or restaurant, the dishes too particular, too carefully considered.

She had sent her maid Lianxiang to try her luck with Mo Ru. Mo Ru had been entirely impenetrable, producing nothing of use regardless of how many angles Lianxiang tried.

His silence was its own answer. Lan Shuilan had drawn the obvious conclusion: the meal boxes came from North Street in Lingquan Town.

Lianxiang had been furious on her mistress's behalf, delivering a private verdict that the woman from North Street had clearly learned in the bandit camp how to make herself indispensable to a man through his appetite, and was now applying that education to the Prince of Huaiyang.

Lan Shuilan's mother Chu Lian had wanted to take the matter directly to the Empress Dowager and expose the whole affair.

Lan Shuilan had discouraged her from this. Her cousin was a particular kind of man — the sort who, when pushed, pushed back harder and with more patience than the person pushing had anticipated. Force was the wrong instrument entirely. Firmness and warmth, applied consistently over time, had already produced results: her father's family letter had received a response, and several of the Lan family's sons and nephews had been placed in suitable positions. Quiet attentiveness was clearly the more effective approach.

As for objecting to a kept woman — she wasn't married into the household yet. She had no standing to object to anything openly, and she was wise enough to know it. She had also firmly restrained her mother from any dramatic moves in that direction.

Chu Lian, who generally listened to her daughter, had held back. But she had advised Lan Shuilan firmly that while she needn't make herself obvious or forward, she also shouldn't be so restrained that she became invisible. A woman who inspired no feeling at all left room for outside attractions to fill the space.

Lan Shuilan understood. The moonlit walk was rare. She gathered herself, waited for what felt like the right moment, and said, "Cousin, I've written a poem recently that doesn't quite satisfy me in the rhyme. I wonder if you might have time to look at it?"

Cui Xingzhou raised an eyebrow and accepted the folded paper she drew from her sleeve.

He opened it.

It was a love poem — the feeling in it unmistakable, expressed with some courage. The wording was precise, the rhyme worked, and Lan Shuilan's handwriting was exactly what it should be: clear and composed, elegant without effort.

The difficulty was that Cui Xingzhou had entirely outgrown the age of exchanging tender poems with young ladies in moonlit gardens. His mind these days ran on different tracks — troop movements, political arrangements, the geography of power and the people who contested it. When he wanted to simply rest, he preferred conversation that went wherever it felt like going, without destination or performance. It was why he valued Zhao Quan's company; the man said exactly what he thought and expected nothing in return.

Looking at this poem, with its carefully expressed sentiment and the clear hope embedded in the gesture, Cui Xingzhou found himself in the position of a man who must be appreciative without being encouraging. He read it once, then read it again slowly, giving the matter the appearance of serious consideration.

Then he looked up and told her, with every appearance of sincerity, that her literary gifts were among the finest he had encountered in any woman of his acquaintance.

Lan Shuilan's cheeks colored. She smiled and said, "I am showing off before a true expert, cousin. Everyone knows you should have been that year's top graduate. If the late emperor hadn't withdrawn your examination papers—"

Cui Xingzhou smiled and interrupted gently. "That was foolishness on my part. I took the examination anonymously on a wager, out of competitive vanity. The late emperor was right to handle it as he did — he said that sons of noble families had no business taking places from scholars who had nothing else to rely on. He withdrew the papers and sent me home. My father dealt with the rest. When I look back now I can only feel gratitude for the leniency I was shown. Cousin, let's not revisit that particular piece of my youth."

Lan Shuilan apologized quickly for the slip. Cui Xingzhou waved it away. They continued walking, one ahead of the other, the cereus flowers pale and open in the moonlight, the silence between them carrying the particular quality of two people who are not quite finding their way to each other.

In Lan Shuilan's understanding of how these evenings were supposed to unfold, a love poem offered under moonlight should call forth a poem in return — an acknowledgment, a reciprocation, something that confirmed the feeling had landed. Instead she had received several measured words of praise and a broad back to follow around the garden path.

She walked the full circle behind him in quiet disappointment.

They bid each other goodnight and retired.

Lan Shuilan rose early the following morning. Her cousin kept to a habit of morning exercise, and she positioned herself where an accidental meeting in the garden would be natural and unremarkable.

He had already left.

By the time the household gathered for breakfast, the servants explained: the situation in Qingzhou had destabilized sharply overnight. The rebel leader had been wounded by an assassin and was now questioning the emperor's good faith. His people had rallied and were escorting him back toward Yangshan. Troops from Zhenzhou were needed to sweep the surrounding countryside and restore order. The prince had ridden out before dawn.

The Empress Dowager and her companions remained by Yingri Cai Lake for two more days, enjoying the water and the distance from the trouble, before making their way back to Zhenzhou.

---

The assassination attempt had thrown Qingzhou into a state of considerable agitation. General Shi was furious. The amnesty arrangement he had spent considerable effort constructing had been shaken to its foundations.

Lu Wen, to the general's relief, proved steadier than the situation warranted. He recovered consciousness after his injury and, from his sickbed, made it clearly known that he did not hold General Shi responsible, that his trust in the sincerity of the emperor's offer remained intact, and that his intention to surrender was unchanged.

The investigation into the assassin proceeded for several days and produced nothing useful. Eventually the restrictions were eased, the curfew lifted, and the city gates opened again.

When Miantang finally passed through the gates with the departing crowd, the feeling that moved through her was profound relief, clean and simple as fresh air. Her first coherent thought was that she ought to find a temple somewhere in the hills and light incense in gratitude — including, she decided, a stick or two on behalf of whoever had done the stabbing, who had inadvertently arranged things so that she came home with more money than she had brought.

Because while the curfew had trapped the city, it had also done something rather useful.

The authorities had required all non-local residents renting private houses in Qingzhou to vacate those properties and relocate to registered inns for investigation. Wealthy families who had taken comfortable private residences for the season found themselves suddenly moving their households — luggage, servants, refined tastes, and all — into the same inn courtyards where everyone else was waiting out the restrictions.

Miantang had watched them arrive from an upper-floor window and felt her eyes light up.

These were, viewed from a business perspective, captive customers.

She had not been able to attend the poetry and painting tea party. But the tea party had now effectively come to her, in the form of calligraphers and painters and literary masters scattered across the inn's floors with nothing to occupy them and nowhere to go.

The idea arrived fully formed. She had Mr. Chen's paintings hung in the inn's main hall for the detainees to look at while they waited.

Several of the guests knew exactly what they were looking at.

The calligraphers and painters, finding an unexpected source of interest in enforced idleness, pushed tables together in the hall and began an impromptu exchange — brushes out, ink ground, the Henbiju Master's work spread among them as a point of shared reference and debate.

Miantang stood on the edge of it, watching. She herself had no particular feeling for scholarly pursuits or art theory, but the atmosphere of it settled over her in a way she found unexpectedly moving — the smell of ink, the quiet intensity of people doing what they loved under inconvenient circumstances.

She decided to add something to the occasion.

She went upstairs and dressed with care. Her hair went up in a smooth cloud-shaped bun. A touch of red on her lips, not heavy. A flowing white dress, simply cut. She gathered the two finest plates in their brocade presentation box, carried them in both hands, and came down the stairs.

The hall noticed.

A woman of that face and bearing, moving with that kind of unhurried composure, carrying something as though it were precious — it did not particularly matter what was in the box. Every pair of eyes in the room followed her down.