Under the amused scrutiny of Li Fei's gaze, Nie Yunyi found the words lodged in his throat. He started to speak, stopped, started again.
At last he sighed.
"Before His Majesty took the throne, Lu Qianfan was his personal attendant. He was at His Majesty's side from childhood, the two of them scarcely ever apart… Even now, Lu Qianfan requests audience again and again, and when he hasn't the leisure to come, His Majesty will go to his residence in person and stay the whole night through.
"And in all these years, His Majesty has never once spent a single night in the inner palace."
"You might say Lu Qianfan is the man His Majesty trusts most, holds closest — closer even than Her Majesty the Empress."
Nie Yunyi watched Li Fei intently as he delivered that last line, his tone very near a warning.
Li Fei: "…"
She had been expecting to hear that somebody had put horns on the Emperor's head, or the reverse — some messy love-triangle scandal.
What Nie Yunyi actually handed her was nothing she had anticipated.
Explosive, certainly. Also an enormous headache.
With that kind of bond between Lu Qianfan and the Song Emperor, the man's position was solid as a mountain. How was she supposed to work her way up through the court now?
"Which is why I said it — climbing to the top in a single step isn't realistic."
There was something bitter in Nie Yunyi's smile.
However fast his sword, it could not sever the tangled threads of the heart. However formidable his martial skill, it could not free the woman he had loved at first sight from the high walls of the deep palace.
And the man who kept her caged there kept his distance from her besides.
"Don't rush me. Let me think."
Li Fei fished out a cigarette, drew on it, and fixed her eyes on the pond.
Going back to Loxibrook to fetch reinforcements would strip wealth out of this place with brutal efficiency, but Li Fei did not want to do it unless there was no other choice at all. To her mind, the most precious thing on the Demon-Sealing Continent was not its heavenly treasures, not its gold and silver, and certainly not its vast supply of cheap labor.
It was experience points.
What would happen if she developed the Demon-Sealing Continent in partnership with City Hall, or the Magic Academy, or some power of that sort?
Done with a measure of decorum, it would look like immortals and buddhas descending to the mortal world, coming down with their awe-inspiring celestial legions to overthrow tyranny and subdue demons — after which they would enjoy the offerings of every living soul, and of their children's children, made to the "Heavenly Court."
Done without decorum, one need only look at Turtle Island: kill the ones who won't obey, and leave the surviving natives bent-backed and gasping, slaves for generation after generation, with no day of deliverance ever coming.
Either way, the demons would be purged on a massive scale — they might even trace the source that spawned demons and settle the matter once and for all. And when allies slaughtered demons for their own profit, not one point of experience was credited to Li Fei's account.
So she had filed that option away as the last resort.
Her plan was to find some way into the Demon Suppression Bureau and take command of it, turning its men into her own subordinates. When underlings slew demons on Li Fei's orders, the "merit" was still logged under Li Fei's name — magical realism, that was what it was.
The Bureau would become her merit-manufacturing machine. She'd be back to the golden days when the Viranean ecological restoration project was contracted out to the Medith family: she lay flat and never moved a muscle, and Miss System did all the moving for her.
Nie Yunyi, however, had just brought her very bad news. If it was true, then with Lu Qianfan's unbreakable bond to the Song Emperor, wresting the Commander's seat away from him would be as hard as climbing to heaven.
Still, misfortune is what fortune leans upon. Better to learn the bad news now than to be kept in the dark; the sunk cost was still low, and there was time yet to revise the plan.
Ash dropped. The ember crept down toward the filter, and Li Fei never noticed, letting the heat scorch her fingers.
"His Majesty is a good man. A kind man."
Nie Yunyi seemed to have caught the flicker of killing intent that crossed Li Fei's eyes. "A pity," he went on lazily, "that he isn't suited to being emperor."
"Oh? Hero Nie…"
Li Fei turned her head, her gaze gone deep and dark.
Rebellion? Not the best option. But maybe not out of the question either.
"Putting an enlightened ruler on the throne — I've thought about it."
Nie Yunyi admitted the treasonous notion without flinching. "But His Majesty has no son, and Prince Rong is likely a far worse prospect. And the Great Song, riddled with rot as it is, can't survive that kind of upheaval."
His voice carried a thick weight of sorrow and helplessness.
The Great Song was long past saving, frail to the bone. Tear out Lu Qianfan's whole faction by force, set off internal bloodletting on that scale, and this rotting ship would likely capsize under its own weight.
Had the Song Emperor been an enlightened ruler, there might have been hope of reform — of breaking the old to build the new. But plainly the man on the throne was not equal to the burden.
More hopeless still: the Song Emperor had no heir, and his elder brother Prince Rong, the only other claimant to the throne, was headstrong, brutal and venomous — a man without a tyrant's destiny but with a tyrant's heart.
Beyond the two of them, there was no one left who could inherit the line.
Li Fei let her eyelids fall halfway. "If the Song Emperor is such a kind man, how did he bring down Prince Rong and take the dragon throne in the first place?"
"Chancellor Liu."
The glint of old blades and battles passed through Nie Yunyi's eyes. "During the struggle for the succession, Prince Rong did a great deal of killing among his own kin. Add to that natural disasters and man-made calamities, and several of the imperial bloodline withered away… Of that vast royal house, only two princes were left standing at the end."
"His Majesty kept his edge hidden in those days, so Prince Rong paid him little attention. And he had fortune on his side — he survived several disasters that should have killed him, until he and Prince Rong were the last surviving fruit on the imperial tree."
"The pity of it is that for all Prince Rong's ruthlessness, for all the rivals he swept away, it came to nothing in the end. One step short of the throne, he was taken alive inside the imperial city by the Imperial Guard, who came in like a rising tide."
"Because under Chancellor Liu's careful maneuvering, the hundred officials had secretly gone over to His Majesty. That service — shielding the dragon — is something His Majesty is grateful for to this day. And since Chancellor Liu understands the art of keeping one's own skin whole, Lu Qianfan never troubled him even after he came to power."
"Why did Chancellor Liu choose His Majesty?"
Li Fei asked with real interest.
"Prince Rong was too poisonous. He chilled the hearts of every official at court. Would a tyrant who killed his brothers and his father without a flicker of hesitation ever cherish his ministers, or his people?"
"Set beside him, His Majesty was benevolent, loyal to those who were loyal to him."
Nie Yunyi's smile was not quite a smile. "Chancellor Liu's view was that the most important quality in a good emperor is kindness. As for the actual business of governing, there are civil and military officials by the hundred to handle that."
So the useless prince survived to the end and got the throne lying down, because the bureaucratic bloc decided a useless emperor would be easy to handle, while his rival was too demanding a master and too fond of taking heads.
Li Fei summed the whole business up in seconds, and through that one word — grateful — she came to a deeper understanding of the Song Emperor.
The sovereign of an entire nation, the Son of Heaven himself, harboring that sort of sentiment toward his own officials?
It was as ridiculous as Miss Philanthropist pitying the workers down in the mines. Except the Song Emperor apparently meant it.
In that moment, Li Fei dropped every scheme of sowing discord she had just been sketching out.
A soft persimmon like that, she realized, had probably been squeezed into the shape of Nine Thousand Years long ago, inside and out. Even if the Song Emperor took a special liking to her, she could forget about using him to pry the Demon Suppression Bureau's Commander seat out of Lu Qianfan's hands.
And when one road closed, another opened wide.
With a soft plop, Li Fei flicked the cigarette butt into the pond and watched a big fish rise and swallow it.
"Thank you for the guidance, Hero Nie. I know what to do now."
Li Fei flashed a brilliant smile, brushed off her skirt, and rose to take her leave.
She had an idea already?
Nie Yunyi blinked, startled, then let out a helpless laugh and unhooked the wine gourd at his waist.
He was genuinely curious what sort of vitality this immortal maiden — descended to the mortal world in search of merit — would inject into the failing, twilight body of the Great Song.
…
Qiao'er had finally found the place where her parents were buried.
The girl stood staring at the spotless gravestones, saying nothing.
She understood that these graves must have been raised by the same benefactor who had once pulled strings to move her father out of a small provincial town and into Lin'an, the very center of power.
After all, Lu Qianfan had led the raid on the Zhang household in person. Everyone else had given the place a wide berth, terrified of drawing the eye of those demons in human skin at the Demon Suppression Bureau.
So for all Lin'an's size, the number of people who would dare gather the bones of the Zhang family and their servants — thirteen souls — and build them graves could be counted on ten fingers. It was not hard for Qiao'er to guess the answer.
The ground before the stones had been swept clean and tidy. Qiao'er stepped forward and ran her fingertips lightly over the rough stone. Then her mouth opened, and she screamed — a hysterical, soundless scream.
Lord Zhang, who had spoken up for the common people and risen in impeachment against Nine Thousand Years' adopted son, had been scoured away by the long river of time into so much historical dust, forgotten by the world.
Apart from that benefactor and herself, there was probably no one left who spared him a thought.
Had any of it been worth it?
The blood-colored memories she had struggled to forget, and which had only ever sealed themselves deeper inside her, rose before Qiao'er's eyes exactly as they had been.
That day, the crimson python robe had snapped and cracked in the wind, drowning out her father's dying roar.
The Zhang manor, once a happy and contented home, had run with rolling heads and the stink of blood rising to the sky.
But there was no pity in the eyes of that viper of a beautiful man. Only when the scarlet blood came flowing toward his feet did he step back half a pace, distaste and disgust on his face, as though her father's blood were filthy.
Qiao'er lowered her lashes. Her small frame trembled, and her nails came near to piercing her palms.
Li Fei had brought new sunlight into her life. She had also woken her desires — and her hatred.
The black silt churned in her chest again, and this time what came out of it was the roll of thunder.
Qiao'er, who had gone from bondservant back to a human being, knew that there was no way on earth she could bury this hatred a second time.
"Even if I owe her more than I can repay, even if I spend the rest of my life repaying her, I will still—"
Standing before the gravestone, Qiao'er swore her oath of vengeance, and the silent stone took her words and kept them.
Her fingertips split her palm, and scattered red roses bloomed across the ground.
After a long while she turned to go — and caught the faint, elegant scent of plum blossoms.
Her steps halted. She raised her head as if something had come clear to her, and a young woman holding a white cat came into view.
The woman looked twenty-five or six, with a face lovely enough to sink fish and shame geese. Her black hair was coiled at the back of her head, setting off skin like porcelain. Her eyes, clear as autumn water, held a cold and sorrowful quality that was painfully affecting.
The purple dress looked plain at first glance, yet on her it carried an air of stately grace, and the fine satin could not disguise the maternal fullness of her bosom or the willowy height of her figure.
She merely stood there, and from her radiated the dignified, self-possessed presence of a mature married woman — something no girl in the first bloom of youth could ever imitate.
Qiao'er stopped and studied her, and the woman looked back at her without a word, her eyes full of searching and unease.
It was only when she glimpsed the blood between Qiao'er's fingers that she came slowly toward her. The ornaments at her ears swayed in perfect rhythm without making the slightest sound, and every movement she made was grace itself.
"Little one, why are you here?"
The young woman's voice was warm and pleasant, like water over stones under a small bridge.
She took Qiao'er's hand and turned it to examine the wound on her palm, unhurried, yet with an authority all her own that made refusal impossible.
Seeing that the cut was not deep, she produced a handkerchief of no ordinary make and pressed it into Qiao'er's palm to stop the bleeding.
The white cat cradled in her other arm slept soundly through all of it, still as something dead.
"I came to pay respects to my parents."
Having guessed the young woman's identity in the space of a breath, Qiao'er answered honestly, hiding nothing.
In truth, from the instant she laid eyes on her, Qiao'er had understood: setting Li Fei aside, there was likely no more beautiful creature in this world.
Who else but that fabled beauty who outshone every flower and stood as mother to the realm — Her Majesty the Empress — could possess a face of such surpassing loveliness?
"Are you… Zhang Qiaoqiao?"
There was a note of hope in the woman's voice.
"Mm."
Qiao'er nodded.
Before the benefactor who had lifted her father from obscurity to high office, and who after his fall had built his grave and tended it with care, Qiao'er saw no reason to conceal who she was.
"Good child. You've come back at last…"
The next second Qiao'er found herself pressed into the bosom of the mother of the realm.
If she hadn't grown used to Li Fei's teasing, that soft, full, yielding warmth and its plum-blossom scent might well have suffocated her.
So she's saved my life again, it seems.
For reasons she couldn't name, Qiao'er felt utterly calm, calm enough that an irreverent little joke floated up in her.
Several breaths passed before Su Wen let her go, her eyes brimming with tenderness and joy.
The moment she had seen the quiet, delicate girl standing before the gravestones, Su Wen had felt a stirring and half formed her guess. But only when Qiao'er said it aloud did her heart settle, and relief welled up in her.
Lu Qianfan's power ran deep. Empress of the realm though she was, once her attempts to talk Lord Zhang out of his rashness had failed, Su Wen had been powerless to shield her benefactor's family. All she could do was wait for the storm to pass, then send people to gather the dead and raise their graves.
She had wanted to save Lord Zhang's daughter as well, but the Imperial Entertainment Bureau was wholly in the grip of the Demon Suppression Bureau, and the times were in chaos. Though Su Wen sent people out privately to search for her benefactor's daughter, nothing ever came of it.
After all these years she had given up hoping, and swept Lord Zhang's grave now and then out of habit alone. Who could have imagined that Zhang Qiaoqiao, of whom there had been no word for so long, would come back on her own!
"Do you still know me?"
Su Wen steadied herself and asked gently.
"Of course I do, Your Majesty."
Qiao'er nodded.
"I've been looking for you all these years… Have you been well?"
"Well enough. I served as a maid in a great house, with food and clothing enough. Later my benefactor bought out my indenture, and she brought me back to Lin'an."
At that the Empress's brows drew together, tenderness and pain crossing her face.
She knew perfectly well what the habits of noble households were, and how well or badly the maids in them fared.
As for why a lord or nobleman would pay to buy out the indenture of a beautiful serving girl — that purpose was not hard to guess either.
"Qiaoqiao, you've suffered so much these years…"
Su Wen was blaming herself, and the headache that years of physicians had failed to cure chose that moment to flare. She rubbed her temple, brows knit, and comforted Qiao'er: "But that's over now. I'll buy out your indenture as soon as I can… though…"
"There's no need, Your Majesty. The one who bought me out is a woman too, and she treats me very well."
Qiao'er shook her head.
Anyone else, hearing that a woman had paid the price, would have assumed Qiao'er had struck extraordinary luck — some kindhearted young lady of good family buying her home to keep her company.
But Su Wen's chest tightened.
In all these years, this empress in name only had seen more than her share of the palace's filthier goings-on.
So she understood: woman with woman, that too was…
"Qiao'er, you're still young. There are things you don't yet understand."
Su Wen's counsel came out tense and worried.
As she saw it, those consorts had no other road open to them; only then did they resort to comforting one another.
But since ancient times, the joining of yin and yang, husband and wife weathering life together — that was the proper way. Qiao'er should not go astray. She should marry into a good family and live a good life, the wife singing along with her husband's tune.
"?"
Qiao'er blinked her clear, bright, nearsighted eyes, looking rather puzzled.
And faced with that innocent, lovely little face, Su Wen found certain words impossible to get out.
She hesitated a moment, then took Qiao'er's hand.
"Come with me… let's find somewhere quiet to talk."
"Mm."
Qiao'er lowered her lashes and let her gaze slide over the snow-white cat sleeping so peacefully. Something dark and unreadable moved in her eyes — she looked, in that moment, unmistakably like Li Fei.
…
The sky was darkening when Qiao'er walked straight up to Li Fei, who appeared to be glued to Miss Stepdaughter.
"I met Her Majesty the Empress."
"Nani?"
Li Fei was so startled the word came out in her mother tongue.
But she recovered fast. Without a moment's hesitation she abandoned Miss Stepdaughter — whose face was rapidly darkening — seized Qiao'er's wrist, hauled her indoors, and slammed the door shut. In the dim room her eyes shone bright.
"Details. Now!"
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