Chapter 12: The Audience

At the eleventh hour Linyuan went into the Regent's study with his spoon.

He had said he would not be the Regent's taster, and he had lied.

Duan Shiyan stood at the brazier with his back to the door.

On the desk beside him sat a jug of warm milk and two small celadon jars.

"You came," he said, without turning.

"Don't flatter yourself. I came to make sure you weren't doing something stupid."

"I am doing something stupid. Watch."

The Regent took the first jar, pulled the cork, and tipped the whole thing into the coals.

A thin grey smoke rose, smelling of cold tea on a windowsill.

He poured the milk in after it, and the coals hissed.

Then he took the second jar from behind the lamp, the one he had called a spare, and emptied that too.

"That is all of it," the Regent said. "There is no more sleepwort in this palace."

"I have burned my last stock, and I have told the physician not to prepare any more."

Linyuan could not speak.

"I once made you a promise and kept the wrong one," the Regent said. "This is the other."

"Why now?"

"Because the boy knew." His mouth twisted. "And because you walked out."

"I found I would rather be a man you would come back to than a man who was never wrong."

Linyuan put the spoon down.

He did not say that he forgave the Regent, because he did not.

He said, "Come here," and the Regent came, and Linyuan held on to him for a long time with his face against the violet robe.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony held two hundred ministers in rows, and none of them spoke.

Linyuan stood at the Emperor's left hand in his grey-green robe, with his tin cup and his needle.

The Regent stood at the Emperor's right.

In front of them, under the gold pillars, the Hu brothers waited with a hundred men at their backs.

They looked like a pair of fat cats in a fish market.

The boy sat on the dragon throne in yellow, too thin for it.

His hands were folded in his lap, and they shook only a little.

"You may read the Autumn Edict, Majesty," the Master of Ceremonies said.

Zhao Yunhe stood.

He unrolled the scroll, cleared his throat, and read the whole thing aloud in a clear boy's voice, without a single yawn.

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