The first day of winter brought a holiday. Wineries across the city began brewing their cold-season wine, families pounded their cakes, and the old custom of boiling honeysuckle and wild chrysanthemum into herbal baths was observed in nearly every household — said to ward off skin ailments through the dark months ahead.
The Pei family, soldiers by blood for generations, kept their own formula. It was older than most written records, particularly effective on bone injuries, and they shared it with no one. On this day Pei Xian called for Pei Yuan and said: "Send some to His Highness. The journey will cool it — wrap the bucket thick."
Pei Yuan hesitated. "His Highness has been in the palace since morning. He hasn't come out."
Pei Xian said nothing for a moment. Outside, the sky pressed down like hammered lead, and by afternoon a fine rain had started, silver threads weaving earth and heaven together into a cold grey fabric. His old injuries ached in the damp. He had a stove burning in the room and still felt the chill behind his joints.
The court had been deadlocked for weeks. Cui Yi — Lulong Jiedushi, commander of the Dingsheng Army, the most powerful regional force in the north — had been intercepted on the road, turned back, and placed under house arrest in the Pinglu residence along with his daughter. The charge was treason: collusion with Jieshuo, the enemy beyond the northern passes. The only evidence was the testimony of a man named Liu Chengfeng, who had been wounded near to death, and the confession of a Jieshuo envoy who was now conveniently dead, unable to be questioned.
The emperor wanted to convict. The ministers wanted to convict. The opportunity was rare: the Dingsheng Army, long regarded as a threat no dynasty could fully absorb, might finally be dismantled. The Crown Prince Li Yi stood alone on the other side, insisting Cui Yi was framed, that Liu Chengfeng's statement was full of holes, that without a confrontation with the Jieshuo side the charge could not be proven.
Neither side would move.
Pei Xian shook his head slowly. "The trap was perfectly set," he said. "It doesn't matter whether Cui Yi is actually guilty. What matters is that the emperor and his ministers have decided to use this to break the Cui family army. They are united on this — which almost never happens. The man who designed this scheme understood human nature at the very highest levels of court. It's not the work of someone like Liu Chengfeng."
Pei Yuan was quiet for a moment. Then: "His Highness believes that even if Jieshuo was defeated, they haven't been broken. Disbanding the Dingsheng Army now would leave the northern border empty. He won't let it go."
"He's right about the army," Pei Xian said. "And wrong to think he can hold the line alone."
At the Pinglu residence, Cui Yi received the herbal soup. Wrapped in heavy straw, it had stayed hot. He soaked in it, dressed in his padded winter jacket, and came out to find his daughter Cui Lin — whom he called Aying — making tea by the stove while the servant girl Taozi roasted chestnuts and taro.
Cui Lin smiled and asked why he hadn't soaked longer.
"Too long makes you dizzy," he said, and settled into his chair. He watched the cold rain moving outside and said, almost to himself: "This kind of rain is worse than snow. It'll freeze by tonight." He was thinking of Yingzhou, she knew. It would be snowing there by now.
She reached across the table to pass him a cup of fried tea — and caught her sleeve on something. The cup went over. Tea spread across the book in front of her. Cui Lin sat very still, staring at the wet pages, saying nothing. The stain spread quietly and didn't stop.
In the study of the Pei residence, Pei Xian's teacup hit the floor. He was already standing, coat half-on, shouting for horses.
When he and Pei Yuan arrived at the palace, Li Yi had been kneeling in the rain for most of the afternoon.
It had started earlier as another argument. The emperor had lost patience and told him to get out of the Nanxun Hall. Li Yi had walked out without a word and knelt in the courtyard. The emperor, furious, had refused to call him back in. Then the rain started.
Chief Eunuch Yuan — Yuan Changshi — watched the rain grow heavier and grew quietly desperate. He tried the emperor directly: "Your Majesty, it's raining quite hard. Perhaps let His Highness rise—"
"I told him to kneel until I gave the order," the emperor snapped. "If it rains, let him kneel in the rain."
So Yuan Changshi found a servant boy, made the hand signal, and sent him at a run for the empress.
The empress came in the rain herself, her sleeves soaked through before she reached the hall. When she saw Li Yi kneeling in front of the steps, already drenched to the skin, something shifted in her face. She went inside and said nothing dramatic. She only reminded the emperor that the crown prince had recently recovered from serious wounds, that he had ridden out in wind and weather to intercept Cui Yi on the emperor's orders, that even if there was no credit to be claimed, the hardship alone deserved acknowledgment. She asked him to let his son stand up and change his clothes before he caught cold.
The emperor wasn't ready to yield. He muttered about hard bones and stubbornness and knowing better and the infernal Cui Yi and why couldn't Li Yi just once admit he was wrong—
Then the empress said, very quietly: "Your Majesty. You only have this one son."
The emperor stopped.
Li Yi had stopped counting time. He knew it by the cold: first a sharp bite, then a stabbing pain, then — after long enough — a spreading numbness, almost peaceful.
He had knelt in the rain before. The memory came to him now, indistinct and very old. He was four or five years old. He had shot a sparrow with a clay-ball slingshot. His older half-brothers Li Jun and Li Rong had come around the wall with their gilded toys, insisting the bird was theirs. He had argued — pointed to the clay smeared on the feathers, proof of what had brought it down. Li Rong had shoved him to the ground. Li Yi had gotten up and wrestled him down in return.
Li Rong had gone crying to the King of Liang. The King hadn't asked questions. Li Yi had been made to kneel in the yard for half a day, in the rain, without food.
He had knelt until dark. His wet nurse had finally, quietly, brought him in. His knees were bruised the size of bowls. She had been given twenty cane strokes for it.
He had touched the welts on her arm and asked her if she was hurt. She had said no. She had told him not to provoke the princes of the east court.
He hadn't provoked them. They had come to take what was his.
He hadn't said it then. He didn't say it now. He knelt in the rain in front of the Nanxun Hall and thought: more than ten years, and it's just the same as it always was.
Yuan Changshi came running with an umbrella. The emperor had issued the edict. Rise. Come inside and change.
Li Yi looked at him without quite focusing. Then the corners of his mouth turned up — a faint, cold smile. "Go back," he said, "and tell His Majesty exactly what I say. If he doesn't clear Cui Yi's name and agree to make Cui Yi's daughter Crown Princess, I won't rise. By my old temper I'd have gone straight back to prison by now. I haven't, because there's still something I can't abandon. His Majesty should think carefully — whether it's Cui Yi he's falsely accusing, or Li Yi's life he's wagering."
Yuan Changshi wept openly and begged. Li Yi held his back straight as a pine, water streaming from his hair, and said nothing further.
The sky darkened. Lamps were lit. The light from distant halls blurred and floated behind the curtain of rain like lanterns underwater. Li Yi felt the blood before he tasted it — warm on his lips, metallic. He raised a hand and wiped his nose.
Yuan Changshi came back with a sheep-horn lamp in one hand and an umbrella in the other, trotting through the rain, falling to his knees beside Li Yi, begging. "Your Highness — please — why gamble like this with His Majesty, what if something goes wrong—"
Li Yi looked up at him slowly, as if recognizing him from a great distance. Then he spoke, and each word was clear and strange in the open rain-soaked courtyard: "It is not the mark of a benevolent ruler to make ministers wrong and persecute loyal men. General Cui saved His Majesty's life. I am not gambling. I cannot watch His Majesty walk into the enemy's trap and let a loyal servant be destroyed for it." His voice cracked on the last line — cracked and rose: "How could he be such a king. How could he be such a king—"
He stopped. Something was wrong in his chest, a pressure behind his ribs too large for his body. He breathed and felt it surge.
Blood came out of his mouth — dark, heavy, shocking against the pale stone.
Pei Xian and Pei Yuan were already there. Pei Xian knelt beside Li Yi without a word. Pei Yuan followed. Yuan Changshi's face had gone white. Li Yi shook once — and vomited blood again, onto the wet ground, and Pei Xian caught him before he went down.
His face was the color of wax. His lips had no color at all. Pei Xian held him and called his name twice and then gave up holding back his tears.
The winter rain lasted seven or eight days before it stopped, and the sky didn't clear after — it simply turned from wet grey to dry grey, flat and close. Then scattered snowflakes fell. Then real snow.
On the day it snowed properly, the flakes began small as millet and grew until they drifted like willow down. The world outside the Pinglu residence turned white — roof tiles, well-rails, the stones of the courtyard. Cui Yi, in good spirits for once, sent the guard to buy meat and spent the noon hour eating roasted slices with Cui Lin and Taozi. He drank a few cups of wine and went to take a nap.
He was asleep when Li Yi came.
Li Yi didn't come alone — Pei Yuan was with him, who steered Taozi toward the gate the moment they arrived with a cheerful word about Xie Chang'er waiting outside, and Taozi, entirely willing, followed him out. Then it was just the two of them.
He stood still in the doorway for a moment. She hadn't seen him in weeks. He was thin — thinner than she remembered — and despite the heavy cotton coat and the white fox collar that gave a little warmth to his face, he looked like a man who had been sick and not yet fully returned. She watched him for a long beat. Then she turned and closed the door, shutting out the wind and the snow, and stood with her back to him, her hand on the door.
He was the one who spoke first. "Aying."
She turned and walked back toward him. Looked at his face close. "Are you sick? Are your injuries recurring? You look terrible."
"No," he said simply.
She picked up the small tongs and put a piece of charcoal into the stove. The room was warm. The charcoal clicked and breathed in the burner. Outside, snow fell in silence against the window.
He said: "Aying. I came to tell you — His Majesty and the court have agreed that General Cui is innocent. His Majesty has also agreed to let me take you as Crown Princess." He paused. "There is one condition. The Dingsheng Army must be disbanded."
She didn't hesitate. "I don't agree."
He kept going as if he hadn't heard her. "Even if it's disbanded, the Ministry of War will arrange proper severance — I will personally ensure none of the soldiers are wronged—"
"You're wronging me right now." She looked at him directly. He flinched from her gaze and looked somewhere to the side of her face. She had eyes like still water — clear and cold and seeing everything — and today he wasn't strong enough to meet them.
She breathed. "If the court feels the army is too large, some can be released. Not all. The Dingsheng Army is my father's life's work. The Cui family's blood is in every rank. I won't agree to dissolve it entirely."
He said: "Aying. There is no other way."
She looked up at him. He was tall, always had been — she'd always had to tilt her head back to see his face. But his eyes were drifting. She felt a cold sadness settle in her chest. "Shiqilang. Forget it. If this is what you need to do, I won't marry you."
The words landed. He had prepared himself for them. He was still unprepared. He said, with difficulty: "At this point, you must marry me as Crown Princess. Otherwise I can't save your father's life. Or yours."
The sentence hung between them — a blade that had finally cut through the pretense they'd both been maintaining, the pretense that some good option still existed somewhere if they were just patient enough.
"Then why did you bring him back?" she said. Her voice didn't shake but her eyes went fierce. "If you hadn't gone after him, he'd be in Yingzhou by now. He'd be home. We wouldn't be birds in a cage waiting to be slaughtered, and you wouldn't need to save anyone."
"Aying." His voice dropped. "If your father had returned to Yingzhou, the court's suspicion would have doubled. It would have looked like flight. What came next would have been war — the court versus the Cui family. I was trying to prevent that."
"Jieshuo is watching the border. You want to disband the Dingsheng Army — the only force that has kept them back. What happens to the people of Yingzhou? What happens to one hundred thousand soldiers? Does the court care about none of this, only about fearing the Cui family?"
He said, very quietly: "There are other armies."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she said: "I see." And after a moment: "Crossing the river and demolishing the bridge."
He started to speak again — the words about the Ministry of War, the resettlement plan, the twenty acres per soldier in Lingnan — and she cut across him with a short, humorless sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"So our family is the one with ulterior motives. The ones who can't see the bigger picture."
He sagged slightly, one hand on the table, steadying himself. His voice went quieter still: "I told you once — when we spoke that long night — that there was no room in the court for a Crown Princess who held an army. I meant it. I tried everything I could think of to preserve both you and your father. What the court agreed to is this: the army disbands, Cui Yi's name is cleared, you become Crown Princess, and from that day forward no one can touch either of you. I know it's not what you want. I know exactly what I'm asking."
She blinked and her eyes went bright. "If I were to disband the army and leave my father like this — I would rather not marry you."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Then go ask your father. Let him decide. If the army disbands, you become Crown Princess. If you refuse — both conditions together — I can't save the Jiedushi's life."
The room held only the sound of the stove and the snow.
She held back the tears and just looked at him. He had made himself stone for this. He must have rehearsed this conversation a hundred times. His face gave nothing. She opened her mouth — and closed it. Whatever she'd been about to say didn't come.
He turned, opened the door, and walked out into the snow. His dark fox-fur coat caught the wind and vanished.
She stood in the open doorway until the cold reached her bones. Then she walked through the west yard to her father's room.
Cui Yi was sitting in his chair, looking at the snow through the window. When he heard her come in he turned and smiled.
She said: "Dad."
"I already know," he said. "Old Pei just left. He explained everything." He paused. In the first sentence he had called Pei Xian by his formal title. In the second he called him Old Pei. Something in the shift between the two names carried years of history — campaigns, shared meals, old battles, the particular melancholy of men who had been young together.
"Dad, there's always a way." She was lying and she knew it. "Li Yi would bend for me — if I got him alone again in a day or two, held him, used him as a hostage — we could still get out of the capital. The two of us, far away."
She hadn't said it only as a lie. She had looked at him when he stood in the room — sick, thin, obviously still healing — and she had seen that if she'd wanted to take him hostage, she could have. He'd given her every opportunity. He had walked into the room knowing it. One move, one silver needle to the right point, and the outer guards would have been helpless. She hadn't done it. She couldn't make herself. She remembered sitting at his bedside when he was at his worst after the Rebellion of the Two Kings — thinking: as long as he lives, I can give up anything. And now, standing here, she understood that something about that was still true.
If she took him hostage they would never see each other again. She would become the enemy of the court, an outlaw. The path would have no way back.
Thinking it felt like arrows in her chest.
Cui Yi listened to all of this and shook his head. "No, Aying. In this life, I only want what your mother wanted, which was for you to be happy. You love this man. Why would I be the one to break you apart?"
She couldn't hold the tears back any longer, but she held her chin up. "Dad — I'd rather not marry. The Dingsheng Army is generations of our family. Ah Niang used to tell me — our ancestors built it with their own bodies, their own children, to protect people no one else would protect. The word 'Dingsheng' was given by the late emperor himself. It was built with the blood of our entire family. Ah Niang died on the city wall defending it. It is the pride of your life. It is the pride of her life—"
"Aying." He interrupted her, gently. "You are the greatest pride of your mother and mine."
She crossed the room and threw herself down in front of his chair, pressed her face against his knee like she was five years old, and said into the fabric: "Dad. Let's run. I don't want to marry anyone."
His hand came down and stroked her hair, slow and steady.
"Silly child. Dad is old. Even if he made it back to Yingzhou, how many good years would be left? I had the ambition once to finish Jieshuo for good — but Li Yi is the one who will do it. He's younger than I was at his best, sharper, and he will do more than I managed. Why should I be in his way?" He paused. "I always planned to leave the Dingsheng Army to you. If you married, it would be your dowry. If you didn't, it would be your freedom. But as Crown Princess, it can't be either. So let the hundred thousand soldiers take off their armor and go home."
She wept quietly. Two warm tears fell on the top of her head. They weren't hers.
Cui Yi was crying too. He had never cried in front of her. He thought: this is fate, then. I always thought I would die on a battlefield. It seems I'll die old in the capital instead. He thought of his wife, her boudoir name, Amin, spoken silently in his heart. Amin. If you were alive, you would choose the same.
The wedding ceremony was everything the Ministry of Rites knew how to make it — magnificent, exhausting, and perfectly arranged. The palace was in full celebration for the first time in years.
Cui Lin felt the entire thing happen to her like a story she was reading while the pages turned on their own. Accepting gifts. Asking for names. The formal exchange of betrothal items. The procession. Li Yi, because he insisted on the old customs, came in person with the full ceremonial guard. He rode. She rode in the chariot, a hinged fan held up to hide her face, as was proper.
She had dressed for six hours. Lady Xu Guo, the most blessed woman in the capital — all her parents living, all her children, a harmonious household — had been specially selected to accompany the future Crown Princess for good luck. The Crown Princess's robes were spectacular. When she finally looked in the mirror, she didn't recognize the face looking back. Gorgeous, noble, completely unfamiliar. Like wearing someone else's skin. She decided that was fine.
At the Xuanzheng Hall, they walked up the long main steps side by side as drums and cymbals filled the air. The ceremonial officer's voice rang through the hall. The hibiscus wine was poured. They each drank a cup.
He had imagined this moment so many times, in so many different versions. In one of them he had been on horseback in front of the army, laughing, shouting her name, saying he was going to marry her — and three armies had cheered.
This was not that.
Her hand still held the fan in front of her face. She wasn't shy. She wasn't herself. She had become someone else — exact, correct, beautifully composed, utterly foreign to him. When he'd caught a glimpse of her during the wine ceremony he had seen only the rouge on her mouth, the flawless formal mask. His Aying didn't look like that. His Aying was more beautiful than that, more alive than that, and liked herself more than that. The thought of it made him so sad he couldn't locate where in his chest the sadness lived.
The Kunde Hall — the Crown Princess's quarters — had been prepared by the Ministry of Works with great thoroughness. Red candles, wedding hangings, embroidered curtains, gilded everything. Perfectly appropriate. Completely loveless. He thought: she won't like this room. He was right.
When the last formality of the evening was complete and the attendants finally withdrew and closed the hall doors behind them — the moment the latch clicked — Cui Lin threw the ceremonial fan aside, drew the sword she had hidden under her robes, and stabbed him.
Almost at the same moment he drew his own sword and blocked. They exchanged seven or eight moves. She went for vital points every pass. He was better with a blade than she was and he knew it — within a minute he had a sword at her throat.
She didn't flinch. Her eyes, beautifully painted, held a flash of real fury. "Kill me then. If you can."
"I promised you three chances," he said. "This is the first."
"I don't need you to spare me." Her voice was sharp and level. "Kill me."
He sheathed his sword. He pulled a quilt from the bed, spread it on the floor, lay down with his clothes on, and turned his back to the room.
She stood looking at him for a moment. Then she put away her sword, lay down on the bed with her clothes on, and turned her back to the floor.
The red candles burned. Wax dripped. The embroidered ceiling above her was intricate — golden thread, a hundred motifs of blessing and abundance. She stared at it with open eyes and could not sleep.
She knew he wasn't sleeping either. His breathing was shallow. Neither of them moved. She lay and thought of everything that had been, how good it was, how real — a past life now, a dream she had woken from too early.
Eventually a grey light came through the window lattice. Li Yi got up from the floor without a word, took the quilt to the bed, and lay down. She was awake and listening to him and did not stir. The bed was wide enough that two people could sleep in it with a long distance between them.
It was a strange kind of winter after that.
Li Yi was sick for many days after the rain vigil. The court went quiet. Even the emperor stopped pressing. His master Wu reminded him: "Children and grandchildren have their own fate. Let him go, Your Majesty. The Crown Prince has suffered enough." The emperor, who had only one son and knew it, made good on every promise Li Yi had extracted. Every Dingsheng soldier released from service was granted twenty acres in Lingnan Road, or Jiannan if they preferred — not prime land, but enough to feed a family.
Li Yi was too ill to witness the final disbandment. But he was told what happened. Cui Yi had taken an axe and cut down the flagpole himself. He had rolled up the great banner embroidered with the word Dingsheng — given by the late emperor's own hand — and handed it to the men of the Ministry of War. Not a single soldier present kept dry eyes. Cui Yi himself wept.
By the time Li Yi recovered, it was deep into winter. And Cui Yi had broken.
The morning after the flag was surrendered, Cui Lin came to his room early and found it empty. She found him at the edge of the Imperial Ditch, sitting alone on the bank, watching water run. Overnight his hair and beard had gone entirely white. He looked ten years older than he had the day before, and his eyes were blank when they looked at the river.
When she called to him he looked up and said: "Aying. Dad is old. Useless. He couldn't save you or Ah Niang. Can't even remember the way home."
She reached out to touch his hair and couldn't make herself do it.
He spoke of mustering rolls. He picked up a branch and used it as a cane, limping forward. "Old Dad almost missed the roll call. The victorious army, no one can miss a roll call. Where is the camp..."
He was gone from that moment. Not dead — breathing, eating, walking — but gone. He lived in some past decade. He didn't remember the Dingsheng Army was disbanded. He didn't remember where he lived. He would wander out of the house and Taozi had to keep helpers posted through all twelve hours of the day so he wouldn't get lost.
At first it broke Cui Lin's heart to see it. Then, gradually, she began to understand: her father's mind had done the only merciful thing it could. He didn't have to face the loss of everything he'd built. He was living somewhere the Dingsheng Army still rode and Amin was still alive. She stopped fighting the grief and let it soften into something quieter.
Before the wedding, she asked to see Li Yi. Against etiquette. He came anyway, alone, no servants, slipping into the Pinglu residence like he wasn't a crown prince.
She had thought of a dozen things to say. Let's disappear together. Let's go somewhere no one knows us and be nobody. Or: I don't want to marry you. Look what you did to my father. I hate you for it.
When she actually saw him she smiled at him, just slightly, and he smiled back. They looked at each other like people who hadn't drunk anything in a very long time and had finally found water.
She said: "Shiqilang. This might be the last time I call you that. Once we're married — the East Palace is not a place where a woman marries a man she loves. She marries the Crown Prince. She becomes the Crown Princess. My husband is gone. I'm just marrying the title."
She took out the parrot — the one he had won for her in the willow-shooting contest — and set the cage on the windowsill.
"I spent so much effort teaching this bird to talk," she said. "Too smart. Too stubborn. Months and it never said a word." She opened the cage door. "Fly away."
The parrot saw the open door, stepped out, spread its wings, and was gone over the high wall without a backward look.
She watched where it had disappeared and said: "Shiqilang. Will you go to Leyouyuan again?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Not alone. I won't go to Leyouyuan alone again."
"Me neither." She looked at him. "That's not a place for a crown prince. It's not a place for a crown princess."
"Aying—"
She looked at him quietly, memorizing his face as if storing it somewhere no one else could reach. After a long silence she said: "Your Highness. You can go."
Their wedding night ended with two people sleeping back to back in full court dress, separated by the width of a large bed and a small sword.
It could have stayed that way.
It didn't.
He had come back late from helping Cui Yi eat dinner — the old man's hands shook too much to hold chopsticks, had to be fed spoonful by spoonful. When Li Yi finally returned to the Kunde Hall, he found Aying had already bathed and changed, her hair loose and dark across her shoulder, wearing the usual clothes of the Crown Princess, all the hairpins gone. He had never seen her like that. He stopped in the doorway.
She greeted him correctly. Called him Your Highness. Told him, in a calm and reasonable tone, that since he'd been so late she had invited Gu Liangdi — a concubine, technically his — to share the evening meal with her. She also suggested that he really ought to spend more time with Gu Liangdi; it would be inconsiderate not to.
He stared at her. "On the first day of our marriage you're asking me to go visit another woman?"
She sat down on the couch and said, serenely: "In a few days, then."
He held onto his temper with some effort and told her: he had a plan for Gu Liangdi — a scheme involving a fictitious illness, a quiet removal to an imperial villa outside the city, a Taoist temple, a change of name, and eventually a properly matched marriage. He had thought it through.
She smiled. "That's a fine plan. Are you sure you're the right man for it?"
He sighed. "Aying. Why does it have to be like this between us?"
"Yes, why," she said pleasantly, and covered her mouth and yawned, and lay down against a pillow, and was asleep almost immediately.
He hadn't eaten dinner. He stood in the warm room and thought of Cui Yi eating by the river and Zhang 㓽 who had asked to visit a dead man's grave with a pot of good wine, and he felt an immense and specific loneliness. He went looking for the extra quilt and found it stacked at the far end of the bed, just out of reach. He leaned over to get it — too far — got one knee up on the edge — stretched — and his hand just touched the fabric when she woke up.
Half-asleep, still not entirely here, she raised her hand and touched his face. Her fingers were cool. He had lost so much weight this year that his face felt wrong to her. She felt it and her eyes welled.
He lowered his head and stayed very still. He didn't speak. He was afraid if he said anything she'd remember where they were.
But the warmth behind her eyes was already melting into something real. She looked at him and he looked at her and it had been so long — so long without this — and she pulled him down and kissed him before either of them could think better of it. The salt of her tears was on both their mouths.
He held her like he was afraid she'd turn to smoke.
She kissed him like she'd run out of chances.
They were very tired after and she kept almost falling asleep and then opening her eyes to look at him again, afraid he'd be gone. He held her until she felt him still there.
Outside, the winter night ran long and silent. The candles burned down. Snow lay on every roof in the Eastern Palace. Somewhere a wind chime rang once and stopped.
Weeks later, he came home to find her eating hotpot with Gu Liangdi in the Kunde Hall, laughing at something. He repressed the entirely irrational feeling this produced in his chest, sent Gu Liangdi home, and found himself alone with Aying who sat with her chopsticks and did not look up and said, conversationally: "As Crown Princess, keeping harmony in the household is actually part of my official duties."
He picked her up.
She had not finished eating and said so, loudly, and then couldn't finish the sentence. He was particularly committed to his position that evening. Later, when she'd almost fallen asleep twice and been woken both times, she sat up, found a silver needle on the table, and threw it at him. It missed. She grabbed his face. "Shiqilang, shut up."
The Kunde Hall went silent.
She rolled over into his arms with an expression of profound satisfaction and fell immediately asleep. He lay there, too awake to follow her, not wanting to sleep anyway. He kissed her eyelashes very gently, once, and pressed his chin to the corner of her forehead.
She was small and warm and entirely herself, and she was asleep in about thirty seconds.
He stayed awake a little longer, just to be sure she was real.
The parrot he had bought back from the willow farm — the same bird she'd released; it had flown back to its original owner and he'd paid full price to retrieve it — sat in its cage in the corner of the warm study off the Linhua Hall. It had never said a word to him. He had tried for weeks.
On the night they came back together from the market stalls in the western quarter — where they had drunk turbid wine and eaten mutton soup at a crowded table while a man named Chai Liulang bragged about killing wolves until his very small wife walked in and took him home by the ear — Li Yi brought the cage back to the Kunde Hall and stood looking at the bird.
"Aying. Name it."
She was in the back room and didn't answer. He fell into the trap he had made for himself and said, addressing the parrot directly: "Fine. Little Liar, then."
The parrot looked at him and then looked away with an expression of deep personal offense.
When Aying came out and heard the name she laughed in spite of herself. Then she remembered something and turned to him and said: "Where is that abacus?"
He made a rapid decision. "I don't need an abacus to kneel. I can kneel without one."
She went looking for a very small abacus first thing the next morning. She was going to make sure his knees hurt.
Spring examinations. The Yongji Canal reconstruction. Drought relief for Jiangnan Road. The court accumulated work like snow accumulates on a roof — silently, constantly, until suddenly the weight is enormous. Li Yi handled it. He had always had a particular quality of stillness at the center of disorder, a steadiness that didn't look like calm so much as deep competence, and it still held.
Outside the Duke of Yan's mansion, on a sunny winter afternoon with snow still on the shadowed banks, Li Yi came to sit with Cui Yi by the river. Cui Yi didn't recognize him. He never recognized him anymore. But he was happy to talk — about the Cui family army's founding under Emperor Wenzong, about campaigns and ambushes, about the snow that fell so thickly at Qinshui Spring that tens of thousands of soldiers lay hidden in it without making a sound, and the Jieshuo forces walked right into the trap, and the victory was so complete that the enemy never came near those mountains again.
He told Li Yi — this young man he didn't recognize — that he was good, that he'd make an excellent team leader, that he should give his name so it could be recorded.
Li Yi said: "Jiedushi. My name is Li Yi."
Cui Yi repeated the name and frowned slightly. Something flickered in his face, some almost-recognition. Then it was gone. He smiled with friendly confusion: "Familiar name. I must have heard it somewhere. But I can't place you." He leaned on his cane and looked at the river. "Strange that I know the name and not the face."
Li Yi sat beside him and adjusted his coat and said: "Tell me more about the Cui family army, Jiedushi."
And Cui Yi's eyes lit up, and he began again.
The sun moved across the water. Pei Yuan waited at a distance and didn't interrupt. Zhang 㓽 — who had left the army the day it disbanded, who had said simply I was brought out by the Jiedushi and I go where the Jiedushi goes — stood a little way off, brushing his beard, watching.
Li Yi had gone to enormous lengths to find a miracle doctor named Mu Xianhe — a man said to have met an immortal somewhere in Shu, who could diagnose what no one else could diagnose, who had a temperament so particular that no amount of money or status could move him. It had taken Li Yi weeks to find the man and longer to convince him to come. The doctor had brought Cui Yi into a small farmyard at the foot of a mountain and burned a single stick of incense, and whatever he had done there — Cui Yi would not say, and Mu Xianhe was already gone by the time anyone thought to ask — Cui Yi had walked out of that courtyard clear-eyed for the first time in months. He had looked at Cui Lin and said: Aying, when did you get so thin?
It hadn't lasted. The clarity came and went like winter light. But he had good days now and bad days, and on the good days he was something close to himself.
On those days Li Yi came and sat with him and listened.
Late on a snowy evening, after everyone else had gone ahead, Li Yi and Cui Lin walked back to the Eastern Palace together. Pei Yuan and Taozi had been successfully separated from them by some collaborative management involving Xie Chang'er. They had drunk wine in the western quarter and eaten mutton soup at a noisy table. Now the snow was falling again and the streets were going white and quiet.
They climbed over the wall rather than go through the gate, because the gate meant attendants and formality and neither of them wanted that. He took her hand when they came down on the other side of the wall and didn't let go.
In the warm study off the Linhua Hall, the parrot was pacing the room — no cage, no chain, not flying away, simply existing in the palace like a small senior official with strong opinions. When they came in it regarded them both with its particular expression of measured suspicion.
She tapped the cage gently out of old habit. The parrot tilted its head and looked at her.
"Maybe without a cage," she said.
"Tried that. It stayed. Still didn't talk."
He looked at her with that specific hopeful expression she had come to recognize. "Keep it a while longer? See if it'll come around?"
She was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded.
He picked up the birdcage and walked with her back to the Kunde Hall through the snow. It was deep in winter now. A wind chime rang somewhere in the dark above them and went still. The snow covered everything equally — the rooftiles and the steps and the places where one thing ended and another began.
She was warm beside him. He didn't think about the court or the morning or the weight of things undone. He just walked.