The gossip rippled all the way to the furthest, darkest sector of the inner court, slipping through even the heavy iron sentries guarding the sealed Palace of Virtuous Grace.
Eunuch Qin slid into the stripped, bare stone room where Consort Xian was confined to her forced scripture copying.
Qin was breathing heavily, and dropped to his knees to deliver the harvest of the morning’s whispers.
“Mistress…
the trap with the Treasury Consort has shattered.
The Emperor, he did not touch her.
He fled her bedchamber in the dead of night.
And this morning, he issued an imperial decree allowing her house an adoption right to silence the Grand Secretary.”
Xian didn’t stop writing.
Her fingers, heavily stained with black ink, guided the brush across the cheap scrap paper.
Her voice was a chilly, terrifying purr.
“A logical compromise.
Wenzong always pays his administrative debts.”
Eunuch gulped, hesitating slightly before continuing.
“There is more, Your Highness.
The spies near the main sector report…
the foreign woman is no longer in her pavilion during the day.
This morning, Bixia personally held her bandaged hand and escorted her into the forbidden Imperial Study.
She will now spend her days reading beside his throne.
A place…
a place you were never permitted to enter.”
The brush snapped completely in Xian’s grip.
A heavy, jagged splurt of black ink ruined the lines of the scripture, but she didn’t look at the paper.
If she still possessed her fine porcelain, her jade ornaments, or her gold-leafed screens, she would have smashed them to absolute dust.
The image of her husband—the cold, hyper-efficient machine she had served perfectly for forty-five years—openly holding a barbarian’s hand in broad daylight and bringing her into his innermost sanctum of his Imperial Study shattered the final remnants of her mind.
He had locked her in a bare stone tomb for this woman.
Her jealousy hardened into something absolute, primal, and entirely murderous.
She rose from her desk, her eyes narrowing into slits of pure, frozen steel as she looked down at her loyal steward.
“He thinks he can protect her behind the laws of his study?
He thinks he has bought peace with an adoption decree?
Qin…
contact the humiliated girl in the Palace of Harmony.
She is ripe for a reckoning.
If the Emperor will not let us touch her during the day, then we will end this wild storm while the palace sleeps.”
Lady Xian arranged a meeting with Lady Shu in the dead of night within the stripped, damp stone walls of Consort Xian’s sealed estate.
Eunuch Qin smuggled the heavily veiled Consort Shu through the dark shadow paths of the inner court.
The air in the room was freezing.
Consort Shu was weeping, her young face twisted with the fresh, poisonous humiliation of the Emperor’s flight from her bed.
Consort Xian sat on a cold wooden stool, her ink-stained fingers resting on her knees like a spider waiting in its web.
She immediately weaponized Shu’s wounded pride.
“Look at this room, Meifeng.
Look at these bare stones.
This is the reward for forty years of flawless, dignified loyalty to the Zhao bloodline.
The Emperor has turned us into ghosts for a pale-skinned barbarian.
If you do not strike now, your family’s adoption decree will be a death warrant.
The moment she gives him a son, your father’s treasury will be stripped, and you will join me in the dirt.”
Consort Shu’s voice shook, “The guards…
the Emperor has ringed her pavilion with steel.
No one can cross the threshold without his personal seal.
How do we reach her?”
Consort Xian leaned forward, her eyes narrowing into slits of frozen, lethal steel.
She knew the ancient structural secrets of the palace better than anyone.
Every palace compound features stone drainage grates and narrow tunnels to carry away rainwater and waste.
Because Katya’s days are spent in the Imperial Study and her evenings were with the Emperor, her bedroom is only occupied at night.
Wenzong’s guards were watching the gates, the walls, and the roofs—but they were not watching the ground beneath their feet.
If Consort Shu uses her family’s wealth to bribe the Imperial Nightsoil Cleaners—low-level, invisible servants who have legitimate, unchallenged access to the subterranean tunnels under the cover of darkness, they will slide two professional, shadow-dwelling assassins into the narrow stone shafts directly beneath Katya’s bedchamber floorboards.
Before the blades are drawn, the assassins would slide a hollow bamboo tube up through the gaps in the floorboards.
They would blow Soporific Incense (迷魂香 — Mihun Xiang) into her room.
The sweet, odorless smoke ensures her young maids and any indoor attendants fell into an unbreakable, unnatural sleep, preventing them from raising an alarm.
“At the third watch, when the moon is high, the smoke will rise from the floorboards.
Her maids will sleep.
The guards at the gate will see nothing.
The assassins will slide the floorboards aside, step into her shadow, and slit her throat in her blankets.
By dawn, the Siberian whirlwind will be nothing but cold flesh, and the Emperor will have no choice but to return to the logic of his state.” Lady Xian explained.
Consort Shu gripped her silk handkerchief, her fear completely evaporating, replaced by a dark, vengeful resolve.
She nods to Eunuch Qin.
The coins were paid.
The blades sharpened in the dark.