Chapter 15 · free to read
They held it in the Hall of Withered Lotus itself. Guo chose the room. He wanted the flowers where everybody could see them.
We did not defend her from the floor. We defended her from behind a curtain, one question at a time, in another man's mouth.
He went out through the west gate that night on the Bureau's own cart, with his own keys in somebody else's hand. Jinghua walked out of the hall on her own feet and did not look at me once, which was the cleverest thing she has ever done.
She did not dissolve us. She did the far worse thing: she wrote us down. From that morning the Hall of Withered Lotus was the throne's own record office — warranted, sealed, impossible to deny and therefore impossible to leave. And when I came back to the alcove that night, Ah Xue had already sewn something nobody had set her: a cup, a crown, and a date eleven years old, the year the Dowager's own son died in his bed. Under the floorboard beneath it lay a white lotus with one black thread drawn through it, in a sixteen-year-old hand. 'Before the mourning year ends.'
Artwork and narration generated with AI.