Chapter 9 · free to read
Every poison in the palace passes through one room, and one frightened old man writes down every grain of it.
The Dowager had owned him with fear for ten years. It had never occurred to her to offer him anything, because she had never in her life needed to.
The seal was crooked. He had pressed it again. For ten years the most dangerous document in the empire had been a piece of paper an anxious man could not bear to stamp badly.
It was not the Dowager's phoenix. It was not the Guard's token, or the Inner Bureau's, or any household mark I had scrubbed floors beneath for two years.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.