Chapter 15 · free to read
It began four days later. Numb fingertips at dusk. A blur at the edge of the lamp. Ash-of-pearl, in a dose too small to kill and exactly large enough to be patient — the same death the Empress Dowager died.
Dilute it, neutralise it, and let my hands shake where they could be seen shaking. For eleven days I played a dying woman for the only audience that mattered.
Pei went to the cold palace before dawn, and her uncle to the Board of Punishments, and at the sixth hour a herald read out that the healer's daughter Bai Lianyi had been wrongly hanged. I stood in my murderer's robes and listened to my own name cleared. It should have been the end of it. But Pei had never seen the crane, and Pei had not been lying.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.