Lady Yun sees the smoke first.
She was looking for it, well not really, just passing along the outer wall of the palace grounds on her way to somewhere far more important, when she happens to glance toward the wing everyone’s been calling the Cold Palace for years now, mostly out of habit, the way you keep calling a dead pet’s favorite chair “the dog’s chair” long after the dog’s gone.
Except the chimney’s smoking.
Properly smoking, the kind that means someone’s cooking a real meal, not the thin, apologetic wisp you’d expect from a woman meant to be quietly starving to death for the crime of existing near a scandal.
She stops and peeks in.
Over the crumbling wall, she can just make out neat rows of green where there should be nothing but weeds, and something that might be, impossibly, chickens?!
By dinner, everyone at her end of the palace has heard some version of the story.
By the next morning, it’s reached the one set of ears it was always going to end up in eventually.
The Dowager Consort takes the news the way she takes most things, with a small, pleasant smile that gives away absolutely nothing about what’s happening underneath it.
“Chickens,” she repeats, setting down her tea with the careful precision of a woman who has spent decades making sure her hands never betray what her face is doing.
“How resourceful.”
Her attendant, a nervous woman named Fen who has learned the hard way that the Dowager’s calm moods are frequently the most dangerous ones, does not relax at the pleasant tone.
“There’s more, my lady.
A prince has been seen leaving the wing at dawn on several occasions.”
The teacup goes down slightly harder than before.
“Which prince.”
“Prince Casimir, my lady.”
The pleasant smile doesn’t vanish, exactly, but something behind it goes very still and very sharp, the way water goes still right before something underneath it decides to move.
“I see,” the Dowager says softly.
“Send someone to check on her welfare.
We wouldn’t want the poor woman suffering unattended, would we.
Choose someone observant.”
Word reaches Wren the way most useful things do these days, through Tan, the young guard who’s become an unofficial early warning system in exchange for scallions and the occasional decent conversation.
“Steward Bao’s being sent tomorrow,” he reports, hovering by the gate like he’s not sure he’s allowed all the way in yet, even after two weeks of vegetable bribes.
“Officially to check on your welfare.
Unofficially, everyone knows it’s because the Dowager Consort heard the wing’s doing better than expected.”
“Okay.
New project.
We need to look pathetic.”
Mei, elbow deep in weeding the third bed, pauses.
“We need to look what?”
“Pathetic.
Struggling.
Barely scraping by.
Not thriving, not threatening, definitely not the kind of situation that makes a powerful woman start wondering if she made a mistake letting me live.” Wren paces the garden, hands on hips, already mentally storyboarding the whole performance like she’s back on set for the world’s highest stakes lifestyle video.
“Best tools go in the shed, buried under something boring.
Grain gets spread thin instead of stacked neat.
And Duchess.”
The chicken in question looks up from her dirt bath with the deep suspicion of a creature who knows she’s about to be discussed.
“Duchess stays visible,” Wren continues.
“One scrappy chicken reads as charming resilience.
A whole flock reads as an operation.
We’re doing charming resilience tomorrow, not operation.”
“You want us to hide how well we’re doing,” Mei says slowly, “by making it look like we’re not doing well.”
“Exactly.
Nature documentary logic, Mei.
You don’t want the predator to clock you as a threat, you want it to clock you as harmless and mildly interesting, so it moves on to easier prey elsewhere.” Wren grabs an armful of the good tools and starts hauling them toward the shed’s least obvious corner.
“We’re a small, sad, sympathetic garden being tended by a small, sad, sympathetic woman who got dealt a bad hand and is coping as best she can.
Understand?”
“I don’t know if I can act sad,” Mei admits.
“I’m actually pretty happy right now.”
“You don’t act sad, you act tired.
There’s a difference.
Tired reads as authentic, sad reads as performance, and this woman is going to be looking for performance.” Wren pauses her frantic tidying long enough to look at Mei properly. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
“You’ve been good at this whole thing longer than you think.
Trust it.”
Casimir, who arrives that evening for what’s become a fairly reliable routine of thatching and information trading, finds the two of them mid rehearsal, Mei practicing a convincingly exhausted slump against the doorframe while Wren critiques her posture like a director who takes her craft very seriously.
“What,” he says, taking in the scene, “is happening here.”
“We’re preparing a performance,” Wren explains, without looking away from Mei.
“More tired.
Good.
Now add a little hopelessness around the eyes.”
“I don’t understand why hopelessness needs rehearsal.”
“Because genuine hopelessness looks different from performed hopelessness, and the woman coming tomorrow has spent decades reading faces for a living, so we need this to be good.” Wren finally turns to him, sizing him up with the same critical eye.
“You, meanwhile, need to not be here tomorrow.
At all.
If they so much as smell a prince in this garden, the whole pathetic act falls apart instantly.”
“I wasn’t planning on announcing myself to the Dowager’s steward, no.”
“Good.
Stay away for two days, minimum.
Let the visit happen, let it settle, then come back once we know how it landed.” She pats his arm, brisk and businesslike in the way that always seems to leave him slightly off balance, like he’s not used to being handled with such casual confidence by anyone.
“Besides, it’ll be good for you.
Absence makes the prince grow fonder, or however that saying’s supposed to go.”
Something flickers across his face, quick and almost fond despite himself, before he catches it and smooths it back into careful neutrality.
“I’ll stay away,” he says.
“For strategic reasons.”
“Sure,” Wren says, grinning.
“Strategic reasons.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, Your Highness.”
“Showtime tomorrow,” she murmurs, and goes inside to get what little sleep she can before the curtain rises.