Chapter 5: Nine Days Awake

Gu Chengxiao had been awake for nine days, and no one in the house knew.

He could hear.

That was all, at first.

Voices came to him from far off and muffled, and he could not make his mouth answer them.

He had lain in the dark and learned the house by its footsteps.

The Empress's maid walked flat and quick, and always arrived at the same hour.

After she came, there was a bitter taste at the back of his throat, and then the dark grew heavier.

On the fourth day he understood what the taste was.

He had spent six years on the northern border and knew poison when it was in his own mouth.

He could not lift a finger to spit it out.

So he did the only thing a locked man can do.

He lay still, enduring the silence, and he waited for someone to come who was not part of it.

Last night, someone did.

She had a plain, low voice, and he had listened to it harder than he liked.

She had told the room she was sorry.

She had told it she only wanted a door the Marquis could not open.

She had told his sleeping face that she meant to take his nephew's brush away.

Chengxiao had heard every word, and for the first time in nine days he had wanted to laugh.

Then the needles.

He still did not understand what she had done, only that it was precise and that it hurt.

Three points in his right arm, and the feeling came back into his hand, hot and prickling.

When the carriage came for her at noon, he lay still while she changed into court dress, humming under her breath, a thin tune he did not know.

The door closed.

The room was empty.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was exactly as he remembered it, a dark beam with a crack in it shaped like a river.