The canal water was cold enough to stop her heart.
Xuanji plunged into the darkness of the Lotus Canal without hesitation, without thought, without any calculation beyond the immediate certainty that capture meant death. The water closed over her head like a fist, black and icy and thick with the silt of a thousand rainy seasons. She sank to the bottom, her lungs already burning, her robes dragging her down like stones tied to her ankles.
Above her, torchlight flickered on the surface of the water, and she heard the muffled shouts of the general's soldiers as they searched the banks. She pressed herself against the canal wall, hidden in the shadow of a stone bridge, and waited. The edict was still clutched against her chest, wrapped in oiled silk that she prayed would hold. If the water reached the paper, if the ink dissolved, if the vermillion seal bled into illegibility—then everything she had done, everything Su'e had done, everything the dead woman had died for, would be lost.
The soldiers searched for an hour. Xuanji stayed beneath the bridge, her teeth chattering, her fingers numb, her mind retreating into a cold and distant place where fear could not reach her. She thought of the imperial library, of the warm quiet of the reading rooms, of the smell of ink and camphor and old paper. She thought of her father, executed for protesting the princess's death, his name erased from the family register like a stain scrubbed from silk. She thought of the dead woman in the garden, her peaceful face, her half-burned message, her hand that had held the compass like a promise.
When the soldiers finally moved on, Xuanji dragged herself out of the canal and collapsed on the muddy bank, gasping for breath. The edict was dry. The oiled silk had held. She unwrapped it just enough to confirm that the ink was intact, that the princess's seal was still sharp and clear, that the words Su'e had written thirty-two years ago had survived their journey through the water.
She was alive. She had the edict. And General Wei Zhongda knew exactly who she was.
The rendezvous point was a abandoned temple in the southwestern corner of the city, a crumbling shrine dedicated to a minor deity of forgotten rivers. Chen had chosen it because it was far from the patrol routes, far from the markets, far from anywhere that respectable citizens might wander after dark. The roof had collapsed in three places, and the altar was covered with bird droppings and dead leaves, but the walls still stood, and the shadows were deep enough to hide an army.
Li Xuande and Chen were already there when Xuanji arrived, huddled around a small fire that Chen had built in a cracked bronze brazier. The old astrologer looked up when she entered, and the relief on his face was so naked, so unguarded, that she had to look away.
"You are alive," he said. "When we saw the soldiers chasing someone through the streets, we feared the worst."
"The general was waiting for me." Xuanji sat down by the fire, her wet robes steaming in the heat. "He knew about the fire. He knew about the plan. He let me enter the mansion, let me find the edict, let me think I had succeeded. The whole thing was a trap."
Chen's face remained impassive, but his hands tightened around the stick he was using to stir the fire. "How did he know?"
"I do not know. But his journal said he recognized your handiwork in the fire. He called you 'the boy.' He knew about you, about your mistress, about everything."
Li Xuande's trembling grew worse. "Then we are doomed. If the general knows who we are, he will hunt us until we are dead. There is no place in the capital where we can hide from him. No place in the empire."
"There is one place." Xuanji reached into her sash and withdrew the edict, still wrapped in its protective silk. "We take this to the emperor."
The silence that followed her words was absolute. Even the fire seemed to dim, as if the flames themselves were shocked by what she had proposed.
"The emperor," Li Xuande repeated, his voice barely a whisper. "You want to walk into the Daming Palace, past the guards and the eunuchs and the ministers, and present the Son of Heaven with a document that proves his entire reign was built on a lie? A document that shows his aunt was not a traitor but a woman begging for peace, a peace that he denied her?"
"The emperor was young when the coup happened. He was barely twenty years old. He was surrounded by advisors who told him the princess was a threat, who urged him to strike first, who made him believe that his only choice was to kill or be killed. Perhaps he did not know the truth. Perhaps he still does not know."
"Or perhaps he knew all along," Chen said quietly. "Perhaps he ordered the edict stolen. Perhaps he was the one who told General Wei to kill Su'e and Zhang and everyone else who knew about it. Have you considered that possibility?"
Xuanji had. She had considered it during every step of her flight through the dark streets, every moment she had spent hiding in the cold water of the canal. The possibility that the emperor himself was complicit in the murders, that the edict would not clear the princess's name but instead condemn the throne itself, was a possibility she could not dismiss.
But it did not change what she had to do.
"The dead woman hired me to find the truth," she said. "I have found it. The edict exists. The princess sought peace. Su'e wrote the words that could have saved her, and she died because someone did not want those words to be read. If I bury the edict now, if I hide it or destroy it, then I am no better than the men who killed her. I become another person who chose convenience over justice."
"And if presenting the edict gets us all executed?" Li Xuande asked.
"Then at least we will die for something real. At least our names will mean something, even if only to each other." Xuanji looked at the old astrologer, at the boy with the cold fire in his eyes, at the crumbling walls of the temple and the dying flames of the brazier. "I cannot force either of you to come with me. You have already risked more than anyone should have to risk. If you want to leave, leave now. I will not blame you."
Li Xuande was silent for a long moment. His hands had stopped trembling—the first time Xuanji had seen them still since they left the mountain village. When he spoke, his voice was steadier than she had ever heard it.
"I have been running for thirty-two years," he said. "I ran from the men who killed Zhang. I ran from the truth of what happened. I ran from my own failure to speak out, to testify, to do anything except hide in a hut in the mountains and wait to die. I am tired of running. If presenting this edict means my death, then at least I will die facing the men I have feared for so long. At least I will die with my eyes open."
Chen said nothing, but he did not leave. He simply nodded, once, and turned his attention back to the fire.
The plan took shape slowly, over the course of three days spent hiding in the abandoned temple while the general's soldiers scoured the city for any sign of them. Chen slipped out each morning to gather food and information, returning at dusk with bread and dried meat and the latest rumors from the streets.
The general had posted guards at every gate. He had distributed descriptions of Xuanji—a woman of medium height, late thirties, with calloused fingers and the bearing of a scholar—to every patrol in the city. He had offered a reward of fifty taels for information leading to her capture, a fortune that would tempt even the most loyal citizens to betrayal. The net was closing, and it would not be long before someone recognized her and sold her location to the general's men.
But Chen had also learned something else. Something that changed everything.
"The emperor is not in the palace," he reported on the third evening, his voice low and urgent. "He left three days ago for the hot springs at Huaqing Palace, in the mountains east of the city. He will be there for another week at least, accompanied by his favorite concubine and a reduced retinue of guards. The palace in the city is nearly empty."
Xuanji felt a surge of hope, followed immediately by a colder calculation. Getting into the Daming Palace was impossible—it was the most heavily guarded fortress in the empire, with walls that were sixty feet high and guards who would cut down any intruder without hesitation. But Huaqing Palace was different. It was a pleasure retreat, a place of gardens and pavilions and hot springs, designed for relaxation rather than defense. Its security would be lighter, its guards more complacent, its walls lower and easier to breach.
"If we can reach Huaqing before the emperor returns to the capital," she said, "we might be able to present the edict directly to him. Not through ministers or eunuchs or officials who might be loyal to General Wei. Directly to the Son of Heaven himself."
"The journey takes two days on foot," Chen said. "Three, if we avoid the main roads to stay hidden from patrols. The general will have men watching the eastern gate and the mountain passes. It will be dangerous."
"Everything is dangerous now. But this is the only path that leads to anything other than death."
They left before dawn on the fourth day, dressed as pilgrims making a journey to a mountain shrine. Xuanji had cut her hair short and darkened her face with walnut stain, disguising herself as a lay sister from a Buddhist convent. Li Xuande played the role of her elderly father, too frail to travel alone, while Chen posed as their servant, a boy hired to carry their bundles and guide them through the mountain passes.
The eastern gate was guarded, but the guards were bored and sleepy in the pre-dawn cold, and a family of pilgrims was too common a sight to merit close inspection. They passed through without incident and began the long climb into the mountains, following a road that wound through pine forests and rocky gorges, the air growing colder and cleaner with every mile they traveled.
On the second day, they saw the smoke.
It rose from a valley below the road, a thick black column that stained the pale winter sky. Chen scrambled up a rocky outcropping to get a better view, and when he returned, his face was grim.
"Soldiers," he said. "At least twenty of them. They are burning a farmhouse in the valley—I think they are searching for someone. For us."
"The general's men," Li Xuande said. "They have followed us from the capital."
"Or they are searching every valley along the route to Huaqing," Xuanji said. "He knows where we are going. He knows the only person who can protect us now is the emperor, and he will do everything in his power to stop us from reaching him."
They abandoned the road and struck out through the forest, climbing higher into the mountains where the trees grew thick and the paths were known only to hunters and wild animals. The going was slow and treacherous—the ground was slick with frost, and the wind cut through their thin robes like a knife—but they pushed on through the day and into the night, stopping only when their legs would carry them no further.
On the morning of the third day, they crested a ridge and saw Huaqing Palace spread out in the valley below.
It was beautiful, even from a distance—a complex of red-walled pavilions and golden-tiled roofs built around a series of natural hot springs that steamed gently in the cold mountain air. Gardens surrounded the buildings, their ponds and rock formations dusted with snow, their bare plum trees waiting for the spring that would soon arrive. The emperor's personal banner flew from the tallest tower, a golden dragon on a field of imperial yellow, indicating that the Son of Heaven was in residence.
Xuanji stood on the ridge and looked down at the palace, and for the first time since she had taken the dead woman's silver, she felt something that might have been hope.
"We are almost there," she said. "Tonight, we find a way inside. Tomorrow, we present the edict to the emperor. And whatever happens after that, at least the truth will be spoken."
But even as she spoke the words, she noticed something that made her heart sink. The main gate of the palace was guarded not by the usual ceremonial soldiers in their polished armor, but by men in the grey uniforms of the imperial guard—the same uniforms worn by General Wei Zhongda's soldiers in the capital.
And standing at the gate, leaning on his ironwood cane, his face turned toward the mountains as if he knew exactly where she was and exactly when she would arrive, was the general himself.
He had reached Huaqing before them. He was waiting. And the last door in the labyrinth had just slammed shut.
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