The Treasury annex smelled of mice and lamp oil, and Clerk Bai nearly fell off his stool when the Empress walked in.
Lian had come at midday, when the senior clerks were out eating, in a plain gray robe over her court silk, by the servants' passage. She had brought Tao and nobody else.
Bai was twenty-six, sallow, ink to the wrists. He went to his knees among his rolls and pressed his forehead to the floor.
"Get up," Lian said. "Sit. Tao, the door."
Tao shut it and stood against it with her arms folded, glaring like a temple guardian.
Bai sat. His knees knocked audibly under the desk.
Lian laid the half-burned practice sheets in front of him and said nothing. His eyes went to the door Tao was blocking, then to the window, which was barred.
"I can explain," he whispered.
"Good. Do."
"I didn't write the words. I swear on my mother. They came under my door, written out, with silver. Twenty taels. Twenty more when I could copy it so a magistrate couldn't tell." He swallowed. "They sent a sample of your hand. A letter you wrote your brother when you were a girl, about a kite. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I have three sisters and no dowry for any of them."
In the first life he had apologized to her in a corridor with tears on his face. Now she understood what he'd been apologizing for.
"Who sent it?"
"I never saw. The packet was sealed." He fumbled in his sleeve and drew out a square of folded oilcloth, and inside it a scrap of wax, broken. Five tiny petals pressed into the red.
A plum blossom.
Lian looked at it for a long time. Then she wrapped it back in its oilcloth and put it inside her sleeve, beside the pin.
"You'll keep practicing," she said.
Bai stared at her.
"You'll keep practicing, and you'll take their silver, and when they ask for the finished letter you'll give it to them. But first you'll make me a copy. Every word, every stroke, every smudge. And you'll make one small change in theirs." She leaned over the desk and touched the character for heart. "My heart has a hook here. Leave it off. Exactly once."
Understanding moved slowly across his face. "Then it won't match."
"It'll match well enough to fool anyone who isn't looking. I'll be looking." She straightened. "Do this and your sisters get dowries from the privy purse. Fail me and I'll know before the ink dries."
He bowed so low his forehead hit the desk.
Outside in the passage, Tao let out a long breath. "Miss. That was the most frightening thing I've ever seen."
"I've seen worse," Lian said, and walked faster.
The tailor's workshop occupied three rooms over the eastern silk storehouse, and the head tailor was a stout woman named Mother Gou who had dressed two empresses and thought very little of either.
"Eleven pockets," Mother Gou repeated. She had a mouthful of pins and spoke around them. "Hidden. In a court robe."
"Inside the sleeve linings, four. Along the inner seams of the skirt, four. Two in the sash. One under the collar." Lian had drawn it out on a sheet of paper. "Reinforce the seams. Weight the hem with a little lead shot so it hangs straight if I have to move quickly."
"Move quickly where, Majesty? To the privy?"
"Wherever I like."
Mother Gou took the pins out of her mouth one at a time and stuck them in the cushion on her wrist.
"It'll cost triple."
"Then it costs triple. And nobody asks me why."
"Majesty, in this palace nobody ever asks anyone why. They just find out." Mother Gou rolled up the drawing and tucked it into her apron. "Ten days. You'll want it for the Mid-Autumn banquet, I suppose. Everyone wants something for the Mid-Autumn banquet."
The banquet was twelve days off. Luo Pingshan had taken charge of it with a zeal that made the Household Office grumble. He had replaced the wine steward. He had personally chosen the servants who would carry cups to the high table, and every one of them, Tao reported, had come up through Chief Eunuch Pan's household.
In the first life Lian had drunk from one of those cups, felt the room tilt, and woken in the Pavilion of Listening Rain with her robe disordered and a palace guard sprawled unconscious beside her. Luo had been the one to find her. He'd brought half the banquet with him.
The rumors never died. Four years later, when Rong Xiu lost her child, everyone already knew what kind of woman the Empress was.
The robe was ready on the tenth day.
Deep crimson silk, gold phoenixes across the shoulders, a collar stiff with embroidery. Mother Gou dressed her in it herself in front of the tall bronze mirror and stepped back with her arms folded.
"Find them," the tailor said.
Lian found them. Four in the sleeves, so cunningly sewn into the lining that the silk lay flat even with something inside. Four along the skirt seams. Two in the sash, one under the collar. She walked the length of the room and the weighted hem swung and settled without a whisper.
"Eleven," she said.
"Eleven." Mother Gou nodded, satisfied, and went to fetch the matching shoes.
Alone at the mirror, Lian smoothed the bodice down over her ribs. Under her right hand, over her heart, the silk crinkled.
She went still.
She pressed again. Something flat and stiff lay between the lining and the outer silk, right over her breastbone, in a place she had not drawn on any plan. She felt along the seam with her fingernail until she found the opening, a slit no longer than her little finger, stitched so finely it was almost invisible.
A twelfth pocket.
She worked two fingers inside and drew out a small square packet of folded paper. It was dusted with fine white powder at the creases.
She knew the smell before she opened it. Bitter, faintly like almonds, with something sweet underneath. She had smelled it once before, nine years from now, in a courtroom, when Physician Qin held up a packet just like this one and told the Emperor it had been found in the Empress's own robe.
"Mother Gou," she called, and her voice came out perfectly calm. "Which of your girls sewed the bodice?"
The tailor came back with the shoes, frowning. "Little Fen. Why?"
"Bring her here."
Mother Gou went to the door and shouted the name down the stairs. Behind her back, Lian took a pair of thread scissors from the cutting table and slid them under her collar.
Nobody answered. A spool of red thread lay unwinding on the workroom floor where someone had dropped it and run.