It was less that any one person had done this to him than that heaven itself seemed determined to drive him mad step by step.
The foul air churned in Xiahou Dan's chest, rattling through every organ, and when it finally left him, all that came out was a faint, tired mutter. "Unlucky bastard."
Something in Yu Wanyin's expression shifted. She took his hand. "His luck won't stay bad forever. He ran into us."
For a moment Xiahou Dan wasn't even sure who she meant by "us."
His confusion must have shown on his face, because she added, "You and me."
They still hadn't gotten anything out of the former crown prince.
He seemed to know his life was already ruined. Whenever anyone looked at him, he only smiled that thin, sinister smile, one that sometimes looked exactly like the Empress Dowager's.
Xiahou Dan had issued the decree stripping him of his title and confining him to reflect on his wrongs, but he hadn't had him killed the way he'd announced to the Empress Dowager he would. Instead, under the pretense of imprisonment, he'd quietly assigned people to protect him.
Mostly to spite Prince Duan.
As long as the deposed prince lived, Prince Duan couldn't inherit the throne with any legitimacy even if he succeeded in killing the emperor. A faction loyal to the former crown prince would inevitably rise up and give him a few more rounds of trouble. And if Xiahou Dan and Yu Wanyin managed to eliminate Prince Duan first, there would be plenty of time later to settle accounts with the prince.
Yu Wanyin's other question was answered soon enough, the news brought back by Xie Yong'er.
"They all think you're pregnant," Xie Yong'er reported. "The rumor started the day you were made empress. As proof, people point to how you moved around a little that day and the emperor rushed to pull you away. Not many believed it at first, but then he suddenly stripped the only crown prince of his title, and everyone said it was to clear the way for the child in your belly."
Yu Wanyin had nothing to say to that.
She could only manage, "Wasn't the crown prince deposed because he lacked virtue?"
"People believe what they want to believe," Xie Yong'er said, laying it out with practiced clarity. "The old habit of thinking is that a mother's worth rises with her son's rank. But I suspect someone is using that old habit to spread the rumor on purpose. It's part of the war of public opinion."
"Prince Duan?" Yu Wanyin frowned. "What would he gain from it?"
"Can't say yet. Just be careful."
Easy to say, but Yu Wanyin could hardly announce to the whole palace that she wasn't pregnant. With no chance to set the record straight, she let it be.
They already knew Prince Duan's reinforcements were on the way, which meant they couldn't afford to sit back and let him finish his preparations.
So the Imperial Astronomical Bureau abruptly calculated that a burial date so auspicious it came once in a thousand years fell just three days away. Xiahou Dan stood before the assembled officials, brow furrowed, torn in every direction, and after a long pause announced, "By custom the body should lie in state for seven days, but with Mother's boundless fortune landing on such a rare and blessed date, we will make an exception. Three days of mourning, and then we bury her early."
Not one official from the former Empress Dowager's faction dared object. They fell over themselves praising his filial devotion instead.
All the condolence visits were compressed into three days. Xiahou Dan wore the coarse mourning robes and kept vigil in person.
On the day the Empress Dowager died, rumors had spread that the emperor had collapsed from illness. Now that the officials saw him kneeling properly and solemnly in the mourning hall, those rumors died on their own.
After seeing off one wave of imperial relatives, Yu Wanyin came back inside covered in snow and immediately started stamping her feet to warm them. "It's freezing. How can it be this cold? Is this cold snap another one of Prince Duan's schemes too?"
Xiahou Dan knocked his knees and stood up. "That's a fair theory. He probably invented localized refrigeration."
"Or maybe the Empress Dowager's resentment runs that deep. Doesn't it feel like there's a chill wind circling this place? I just realized something. The last night her body lies in state falls right on New Year's Eve. If she's going to drag the whole country into skipping the New Year because she died, that's a serious grudge." Yu Wanyin kept muttering to herself.
"Come here," Xiahou Dan said. "I have something for you."
"What?"
He reached into the folds of his loose mourning robe and pressed something into her hand. "Hold onto this."
A hand warmer.
Yu Wanyin laughed. "No wonder you can kneel that long without a fuss."
Xiahou Dan lowered his voice. "Any movement outside?"
She shook her head.
The mourning hall looked empty, but countless hidden guards were stationed all around it.
According to what Xu Yao had recorded, Prince Duan had two possible plans.
The first was to send an assassin to kill Xiahou Dan while he kept vigil, leaving no visible wound, staging it to look like some kind of supernatural death.
The second followed the funeral procession itself. By custom, the last stretch of road before the tomb had to be walked with the emperor supporting the coffin. That stretch passed through a gorge at the foot of Mount Bei. If men hidden on the mountain rolled boulders down and made it look like a landslide, no one caught in that gorge would have anywhere to run.
Both plans shared one convenient feature: they could be blamed on the Empress Dowager's vengeful spirit, which would neatly echo the rumor already circulating that a tyrant without virtue draws heaven's punishment.
Xiahou Dan's own plan was to lay ambushes both in the mourning hall and around Mount Bei. If they could catch the enemy in the act before he struck, that was the best outcome, since it would let them remove Prince Duan openly and with full justification. If the prince proved too cunning and slipped past the ambush, or if he was caught but they couldn't trace it back to him, they would still get rid of him regardless. As for public opinion and popular support, those could be repaired slowly, once they were alive to do it.
So for the past few days, any sign of trouble at all would be reported to the hidden guards immediately.
But perhaps because the defenses were laid too tightly, they'd put Prince Duan on guard, because for two full days the guards waited in the mourning hall and didn't see so much as a shadow.
Outside the perimeter, a few eunuchs and palace maids had been spotted poking around and peering in. If these were also Prince Duan's people, it seemed far too clumsy for a real plot, more like someone putting on a show of preparing to act rather than actually preparing. Worried that this was a diversion meant to draw attention away from a real strike elsewhere, the hidden guards kept watch on the mourning hall while sending even more men to search the area around Mount Bei.
It was the most suffocating New Year Yu Wanyin had ever lived through. Music was forbidden during mourning, the palace sat in dead silence, and everyone from top to bottom stayed shut behind closed doors. The sense that disaster was about to fall pressed down like a mountain, so heavy that even the snowflakes seemed to fall more slowly.
The one comfort was that Xiahou Dan's condition seemed to be improving.
Xiao Tiancai slipped in every day to examine him, checking his pulse and complexion with care and filling pages of notes as he tried to work out exactly what the poison in his body was made of. Xiahou Dan kept his expression easy and only said the headaches hadn't gotten any worse. Strangely enough, the wound on his chest was healing fast. He could now turn and raise his arm without any trouble.
"I have a bold theory," Yu Wanyin said.
"What is it?"
"Think about it. Tu Er swore this wound could never heal, and yet on you, it healed anyway, for no clear reason." She spoke slowly, working it through. "And this last time your headaches flared up, the wound healed even faster than before. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"
Xiao Tiancai cut in from the side. "Now that you mention it, that is unusual."
Yu Wanyin, a veteran reader of web novels, pressed on. "In the medical texts you've studied, is there a concept of using poison to counter poison?"
Xiao Tiancai blinked. "Ah."
He thought it over for a moment, then nodded. "If both poisons came from the Qiang people, it's possible their properties counteract each other."
Yu Wanyin brightened considerably. "Go look into it. My instinct says that's the answer."
Xiao Tiancai agreed, but he lingered instead of taking his leave. "Your Highness, might I have a word in private?"
Yu Wanyin blinked, and her stomach sank a little. When a doctor wanted a word in private, it was rarely good news.
But Xiahou Dan just smiled and patted her shoulder. "Go on."
Yu Wanyin had no choice but to step out. She had no eyes in the back of her head, so she never saw the warning look Xiahou Dan gave Xiao Tiancai behind her back.
The two of them walked to a side hall. Xiao Tiancai turned and got straight to the point. "Your Highness still remembers the promise you made before?"
Yu Wanyin had been braced to hear about the emperor's condition, and the question caught her off guard for a moment before she came back to life. "Oh, letting Consort Xie go, you mean? I thought it was something serious. No problem at all. Once things are settled with Prince Duan, I'll see to it myself. I'll send her safely out of the capital."
But Xiao Tiancai hesitated, as if there was more he wanted to say and couldn't.
Yu Wanyin waited.
Xiao Tiancai seemed to be searching hard for the right words. "Naturally His Majesty's fortune runs high, but Prince Duan is cunning."
Yu Wanyin understood.
What he was really trying to say was this: if Prince Duan won, wouldn't Xie Yong'er be trapped and unable to leave at all?
Yu Wanyin hadn't thought that far ahead before. The old version of her might have nodded on the spot and let Xie Yong'er go early. But she wasn't who she used to be. She'd seen enough of the world's dangers now that she couldn't help but wonder: what if Xie Yong'er left and went straight to Prince Duan afterward? And even if Xie Yong'er truly meant to retire from all of it, would Prince Duan really let go of such a valuable source of information that easily?
"Here's what we'll do," she said slowly. "On the day of the Empress Dowager's burial, once Prince Duan follows the funeral procession out of the city, I'll have someone escort Consort Xie out in the opposite direction." By then it would be too late for Prince Duan to come looking for her.
She'd expected Xiao Tiancai to argue the point further, but the young man proved surprisingly reasonable. He dropped to his knees at once in a full bow. "Your Highness's kindness. This one will remember it always."
Yu Wanyin hurried to pull him up. "Don't do that, I don't deserve it. I already promised you could leave with her, but with His Majesty's poison still uncured, we still need you here."
Xiao Tiancai was quiet for a moment, then said gently, "This one never intended to leave. As long as Consort Xie lives out the rest of her days in peace, I want for nothing else."
Yu Wanyin couldn't help giving him a look of pure admiration, the kind reserved for true romantics. "You know, you don't have to want for nothing. Nobody here would mind if you did."
Xiao Tiancai froze, then dropped his gaze, plainly uncomfortable. "This one knows he could never win her eye, let alone her heart. Better to send her away than have her come to resent the sight of him. Someday, wherever she travels, whatever mountains or rivers she sees, perhaps she'll think of an old friend."
A true romantic. This was the real thing.
Yu Wanyin looked at him with new respect. "Don't worry. I'll see to the arrangements."
With her word secured, Xiao Tiancai thanked her many times over before he left, bowing as he backed out of the room, careful not to let her see the guilt on his face.
His hurry to send Xie Yong'er away wasn't only fear of Prince Duan. It was also fear that Yu Wanyin might realize that even if he stayed, he had little value left to offer.
The warning look the emperor had given him earlier had been a reminder to keep his mouth shut about things better left unsaid.
For instance, the poison buried in his body, planted before he was even born, had by now built up past any hope of a cure. The handful the deposed crown prince had slipped into him during that attack had simply been the final straw.
And for instance, the Empress Dowager's last words before she died had actually been four words: this poison has no cure.
Back in the mourning hall, Xiahou Dan watched the two of them walk off, then immediately found a chair and sat down, pressing both hands against his forehead hard enough to look as if he meant to crush his own skull.
Through the relentless pain, memories long since blurred surfaced again before his eyes. He saw his grandmother once more, years ago, gasping for breath on her sickbed, waiting to die. In the month before she finally stopped breathing, the poor woman had screamed through the nights in delirium. No one had known back then what she was screaming about.
If the same fate was waiting for him too...
Xiahou Dan let out a short, dry laugh.
That was not a sight he wanted her to see.