The lock on the little chest turns out to be more stubborn than either of us anticipated, which is how, on the eleventh night since I woke up in this borrowed body, I end up handing a hairpin to a prince and asking him to pick a lock with it like this is the most reasonable request in the world.
“You want me to what?,” Casimir says, staring at the hairpin like it might bite him.
“Pick the lock.
You’ve got long, careful fingers, you strike me as the kind of person who was forced to learn at least one useless, precise skill as a child out of boredom, and I’ve been trying for two days with nothing to show for it but a bent nail and several new curse words.” I nudge the chest toward him.
“Humor me.”
He looks at me for a long moment, the way he does when he’s deciding whether an argument’s worth having, then sighs and crouches down in front of the chest, turning the hairpin over in his hands with an expression that suggests I’ve correctly identified a very specific childhood trauma.
“My tutor believed a prince should understand how every lock in the palace worked,” he says, working the pin into the mechanism with more familiarity than I expected, “in case he was ever locked somewhere he shouldn’t be.”
“Did that ever happen?”
“Once.
My brother’s doing.
I was nine.
I’ve never fully forgiven him.”
“That’s the most human thing you’ve told me yet.”
He almost smiles, focus still bent on the lock, and I watch his shoulders do the small, careful thing they do whenever I catch him being unguarded, like he’s cataloguing it as a mistake even while he’s still mid mistake.
The lock gives with a soft click that feels entirely too dramatic for the amount of effort it took him, maybe four minutes total, and he sits back on his heels looking faintly smug about it in a way I decide not to comment on, mostly because I’m too busy staring at the now unlocked chest like it might do something.
“Well,” I say.
“Moment of truth.”
I lift the lid.
Inside, nestled in cloth gone soft and grey with age, there’s a small bundle of documents, brittle at the edges but mostly intact, a jade token carved with a symbol I don’t recognize, and, tucked at the very bottom, a folded letter with a wax seal that’s long since cracked and lost whatever shape it used to hold.
Casimir goes very still beside me.
“What,” I say, watching his face.
“That seal,” he says slowly, reaching for the letter with the kind of care usually reserved for something that might explode.
“I know that seal.
It belonged to Minister Zhuo.”
“Should I know who that is?”
“He was Minister of Rites, until he died six years ago.
Officially, a hunting accident.” Casimir unfolds the letter with careful fingers, eyes moving fast over the faded ink, and whatever he’s reading makes something in his expression harden into a look I haven’t seen from him before, cold and focused in a way that reminds me, suddenly and sharply, that beneath all the careful manners, this is a man who’s spent his whole life surrounded by people who’d happily see him gone.
“Unofficially, there were always rumors he’d uncovered something he shouldn’t have, and that the hunting accident was considerably less accidental than reported.”
“And you think this letter is what got him killed.”
“I think,” he says, refolding it with hands that aren’t quite steady, “that this letter is a record of payments.
Land grants and coin, moved through several names to obscure the trail, all of it converging on one person.” He hands it to me, and I scan the names, most of them meaningless to me, until I hit the last line, where a single name is written plainly, no obfuscation at all, like whoever wrote this wanted it findable by exactly the right person eventually. Find the original chapter at NovelPing.
“The Dowager Consort,” I read aloud.
“This is a payment record showing the Dowager Consort bribed half the ministry to look the other way on something.”
“On what, though, is the question the letter doesn’t answer.” He takes it back, studying it again, jaw tight.
“Minister Zhuo clearly knew, or suspected.
Whatever it was, it was enough to get him killed and quietly buried under a hunting accident nobody questioned too closely.”
I think about the engraving on the chest’s lid, the character I didn’t recognize, and something clicks into uncomfortable place.
“This wasn’t Liora’s chest to begin with, was it.
It was already here when she got exiled.
Which means either she found it and hid it back before anyone caught her looking, or—”
“Or she never knew it existed,” Casimir finishes, “and whoever framed her for whatever crime got her sent here did it on purpose, to a wing that already had evidence buried in it.
Which would mean either an extraordinary coincidence, or the person who framed her knew exactly what was sitting in this cellar, and wanted it forgotten along with her.”
We look at each other for a long moment in the low light of the brazier, and I feel the shape of the whole thing shift under me, from a personal inconvenience, disgraced empress banished to a crumbling wing, into something with actual weight and actual danger attached, a conspiracy that’s already killed at least one person and is apparently still very interested in keeping its secrets buried.
“Well,” I say eventually, because someone has to say something and it’s clearly not going to be him right now, “this got a lot less funny very fast.”
“I told you it would be dangerous.”
“You told me you were looking for evidence.
You didn’t tell me it involved a dead minister and enough bribery to make my head spin.” I set the letter down carefully, like it might still hurt someone from a distance.
“So what happens now?
You take this to your brother?”
“Not yet.” He shakes his head, already thinking several moves ahead in the way that’s clearly second nature to him.
“This letter alone isn’t proof of anything provable in a court that the Dowager Consort effectively controls half of.
It’s a thread.
We need more before pulling it does anything but get us both killed.”
“Us,” I repeat.
He looks up at that, something flickering across his face like he’s surprised the word slipped out, and doesn’t take it back.
“Us,” he confirms, quieter.
“Unless you’d rather not be involved in something that’s already cost one man his life.”
I think about it, actually think about it, weigh the very real danger against the very real fact that whoever’s behind this already tried to erase one inconvenient woman by shipping her here to fade away quietly, and I have absolutely no intention of doing them that favor twice.
“I already survived getting buried under an avalanche,” I say.
“I think I can survive a court conspiracy.
Besides, somebody already tried to make me disappear once this lifetime.
I take that kind of thing personally.”
Something in his expression eases, relief mixed with something warmer that he covers quickly by turning his attention back to the documents, sorting them carefully by age, and I let him have the cover, because I recognize the instinct, the need to busy your hands so your face doesn’t have to say the rest of it out loud. Read this novel at novelping . com for the best experience.
We work in near silence for a while after that, cataloguing what’s in the chest, cross referencing names against what little Casimir knows of court factions, and it’s well past midnight before either of us thinks to stop.
“You should rest,” he says eventually, watching me rub my eyes for the third time in as many minutes.
“This isn’t going anywhere tonight.”
“Neither are you, apparently, since you’re still here.”
“I find I’m reluctant to leave you alone with this information,” he admits, and there’s something almost sheepish in the way he says it, like the admission surprised him on the way out.
“Not because I doubt your capability.
You’ve made that abundantly clear over the past week.
Just—”
“Just?”
“Just that I’ve learned recently what it costs to lose people I’ve let myself care about,” he says, quieter now, looking at the letter instead of at me.
“I’d rather not test that particular lesson again so soon.”
It’s the most he’s given me at once since the night I found him dangling from a rope trap, and I sit with it for a moment, feeling the weight of it land somewhere unexpectedly soft in my chest.
“Who did you lose?” I ask, gentle, giving him room to say no.
He’s quiet for a long moment, turning the jade token over in his hands, and when he finally speaks his voice has gone rougher around the edges than I’ve heard it before.
“My mother,” he says.
“Officially, illness.
I’ve never believed that, and I’ve spent six years trying to prove it without ever getting close enough to something solid until tonight.”
I don’t say anything clever.
There’s nothing clever to say to that.
I just reach over and put my hand over his, steady and quiet, and he doesn’t pull away, which from a man who’s spent this whole conversation carefully guarding every inch of himself, feels like the loudest thing he’s said all night.
“Then we find out what really happened,” I say.
“Both of them.
Your mother, and whatever Liora stumbled onto that got her sent here.
I’ve got a feeling they’re the same thread anyway.”
He looks up at me, something unguarded and grateful and a little disbelieving in his expression, like he’s still not quite used to anyone offering to carry a weight like this alongside him instead of around him.
“Thank you,” he says simply, and it lands heavier than any of the careful, formal words he’s used with me before.
Outside, Duchess makes a low clucking noise from her perch on the trellis, entirely unbothered by conspiracies or dead ministers or any of it, and something about the ordinary, ridiculous normalcy of that sound breaks the tension just enough for both of us to breathe again.
“Get some sleep,” I tell him.
“We’ll figure out the next move tomorrow.
Preferably somewhere that isn’t the floor of my cellar chest inventory.”
He almost laughs, packing the documents carefully back into the chest, and when he leaves that night, climbing back over the wall instead of using the gate out of old habit, I stand in the doorway a while longer, thinking about dead ministers and locked chests and the particular, dangerous shape of a secret that’s finally started looking for daylight.