Chapter 9: The Witness

The elder Hu brother received Linyuan in the side hall of the Hall of Everlasting Spring, over a pot of tea.

He was a large, soft, smiling man of fifty-five, with a fur collar and a ring on every finger.

His younger brother stood behind his chair, thin and twitchy, picking at a thumbnail.

"Sit, Taster Su," the elder Hu said. "You have had a hard morning."

"I've had a worse night."

"I'm sure." He poured a cup and pushed it across, and Linyuan looked at it, and the elder Hu laughed. "Taste it, by all means."

Linyuan tasted it.

It was clean, and a good tea, and he put the cup down.

"You have been very clever," the elder Hu said. "Four months in the Emperor's service, and you have saved him from forty-one bowls of something."

"Soup."

"Yes. I think we both know it was not only soup."

Linyuan said nothing.

"I have a friend in the kitchens," the elder Hu went on, kindly, "who has been very helpful."

"He tells me the Regent has been dosing His Majesty for two years."

Linyuan's stomach turned over.

"Who is your friend?"

"A friend." The elder Hu smiled. "What matters, Taster, is that you saw it, and you can swear to it."

"Swear where?"

"At the Audience, in four days, before every minister in the Hall. One sentence. I saw the Regent put poison in the Emperor's food."

He leaned forward.

"In return, we will make you Master of the Imperial Table, with five hundred taels a year and a house in the inner city."

"And His Majesty will be returned to his own family, away from that man."

"And the Regent?"

"The Regent hangs."

The younger Hu brother giggled.

Linyuan looked at the elder Hu's smooth face.

He saw the boy at that man's table, signing a war, with a niece in a bridal veil beside him.

"And if I don't swear?" Linyuan said.

"Then someone else will," the elder Hu said comfortably. "But it is so much better coming from you. You are the one the Emperor loves."

Linyuan stood.

"I'll think about it."

"Of course," the elder Hu said. "Think quickly."

Linyuan found Duan Shiyan in his study, bent over his letters, and told him all of it.

The Regent listened with his brush in the air.

When Linyuan was done, he set it down very carefully.

"Do it," he said.

"What?"

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