Lian told her mother she would not marry the Emperor, and her mother slapped her.
It was the first time in either life, and the dresser had to powder the mark twice before the paint would sit.
So she would go. The only question left was what she would do once the gates shut behind her.
The red dress weighed exactly what it had weighed the first time.
Lian stood with her arms held out while two maids and her mother's dresser fed her into it, layer after layer, the crimson outer robe last, its phoenixes worked in gold thread, wings spreading from her shoulders to the hem. Forty phoenixes. She had counted them on her first wedding morning to keep from being sick.
She counted them again. Forty.
"Breathe in, my lady," said the dresser, and hauled on the sash.
Her mother sat by the window with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, watching. Lady Shen had been dead six years when Lian knelt on that platform. Now here she was, forty-four, irritable and lovely, tapping one long lacquered nail against the porcelain.
"You're very quiet," her mother said.
"I'm thinking."
"Don't. Brides who think look sulky in the procession." Lady Shen got up and fixed the collar herself, though it didn't need fixing. Her fingers were cool and smelled of orange peel. "He's a decent young man. Shy. You'll manage him."
Lian had believed that for nine years.
The pin was hidden in the lining of her inner sleeve, lying along her wrist like a sleeping animal, still faintly warm. She had washed the blood off in Tao's basin and watched it thread pink through the water.
Nine names. She went through them while the dresser painted her mouth. Luo and Pan. The Duke of Rong and his daughter. Hu, Qin, Yan, Bai.
And a plum blossom with no name at all.
Ten years from now each of them would press a seal onto a scroll and watch her kneel in the rain. Today most of them could not have picked her out of a crowd.
Quick footsteps in the corridor. Her brother leaned around the door frame without knocking, court cap under his arm, grinning.
"Let me see the sacrifice," Qiao said.
"Out," their mother snapped. "It's bad luck."
"That's for the groom." He came in anyway and stood in front of Lian with a mock-solemn face. He was twenty-four. In this life he was still a junior secretary at the Ministry of Rites, still years from his first promotion, and he still pushed his hair back with his left hand when he was nervous.
He pushed it back now. His left palm was wrapped in a strip of clean linen.
"What did you do to your hand?" Lian asked.
"Hm? Oh." He glanced at it as if he'd forgotten. "Teacup broke on me at breakfast. Bled all over the rice. Very heroic." With his good hand he straightened the gold tassel hanging at her ear. "You look like an empress, little sister. Honestly terrifying."
Then his face went soft. He bent and kissed her forehead, careful of the paint.
"If he's ever unkind to you," he said quietly, "write to me. I'll come and set fire to the palace."
The last time she had seen him he was kneeling in the mud with his hands around hers.
Lian smiled up at him and found she couldn't say a word.
The sedan came at the hour of the snake. Sixteen bearers in red, a canopy fringed with gold bells, a road swept so clean she could hear the bells over the crowd. She sat behind the curtain with her hands folded on the pin and let the city sway past. Every detail matched her memory so precisely she wanted to scream.
The palace swallowed her at the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
In the Hall of Radiant Order the court stood in ranks between the red pillars, ministers in purple at the front, lesser men in blue and green fading back toward the doors. At the far end, on a dais of nine steps, sat two people.
The Dowager Empress Wen, small and upright in black brocade, a woman who looked as if she had been carved from the same wood as her chair.
And beside her, the Emperor.
Lian walked the long red carpet with her eyes lowered as custom required, and used every step. Just inside the doors, among the green robes of men who did not matter yet, stood a thin junior secretary of thirty with a clever face and very clean fingernails.
Luo Pingshan.
If the pin had brought her back, it might have brought others. As she drew level she let her step falter, the way a bride's might under forty phoenixes, and said, barely above a breath, "Forty thousand measures."
His face showed polite surprise, nothing more. Then the surprise went out of it, and he began to watch her the way a merchant watches a cargo come in, adding things up.
In the first life he had never noticed her until it was too late. Now he had. Ahead, in the fourth rank of purple, Censor Hu had turned his plump face to see why the bride had faltered.
Four hundred men had watched the stupidest thing she had done in two lives.
She reached the foot of the steps and knelt. Three bows to Heaven. Three to the Dowager. The officiant chanted. Her forehead touched cold stone, and she thought of rain.
"Rise, Empress," said the Dowager.
Lian rose. By the rite, the Emperor now came down the nine steps to lead his bride up to stand at his side. Saw, under the edge of her lowered gaze, a pair of black boots embroidered with clouds and a long hand held out to her, palm up, with an ink stain on the second finger.
He had always had that ink stain. She used to scrub it off with a damp cloth when he fell asleep over his papers.
He coughed softly before he spoke. The same cough.
Her hand did not want to move. She made it move. She laid her fingers on his palm, and his hand closed around hers, warm and dry, and began to lead her up.
On the third step he stopped.
The whole court stopped with him. Lian lifted her eyes, which was a breach of custom, and found Zhao Heng looking down at her. Twenty-three years old. Narrow face, a mouth too serious for his age. Dark eyes that she had watched go cold in a courtroom ten years from now.
They weren't cold now. They were puzzled, and a little frightened, like a man who has walked into a room and forgotten why.
"Forgive me," the Emperor said, too low for anyone else to hear. His grip tightened. "Have we met before?"