Chapter 15 · free to read
It named the Ministry of Rites and it named the Minister. The capital read it by lantern light and went home pleased, which lasted until the drum tower sounded.
BY IMPERIAL INSTRUCTION. It was not the Minister's name on it, and it was not the Minister who had sealed it.
The throne filled the vacancy the same morning. It gave the Ministry of Rites to a seventeen-year-old examination candidate with no household of his own — a minister who would owe everything to whoever had raised him to it.
Her father was in a cell by the hour of the dragon. The man who put him there had been made a minister at dawn, and he had not wanted it, and that was going to make him harder to beat, not easier.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.