Chapter 12 · free to read
If Pei was to be talked out of the impossible, then Su Wanqing had to become unmistakably, tediously herself. So I read the diary again, and I began to practise cruelty.
Every bruise I gave that child bought me a week of Pei believing I was only what I had always been. I would repay her in a currency she could not spend yet: her life.
The Empress Dowager had not been murdered. She had been murdered twice over, by two different hands, and only one of those hands had ever needed a healer's daughter to hang for it.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.