The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis-Chapter 360: The Last Loose End

Rain that had acted as a soundtrack to the night before had continued to fall well past noon the next day.

It was straight and thin, like threads pulled through silk. By evening the palace tiles shone black as lacquer, and the gutters along the inner court murmured like low voices refusing to rise.

In Mingyu’s study the lamps were trimmed small, their wicks careful and obedient.

The room wore quiet the way a sword wore polish. Shadow slept by the door, his chin on his paws, tail making a slow half-arc whenever thunder walked the roofs.

Deming leaned against the bookcase to the left of the desk, his arms folded in front of him, the habit of a soldier who had learned to stand comfortably through hours of other men’s talk.

Yizhen had claimed the chair with the loose leg and made it look deliberate; he spun a small fan on his palm as if testing the ceiling’s patience.

Yaozu kept to the windows, not for the view but for the angles; he had already measured the stretch of shadow from sill to floor and the places where a man might stand invisible if the door crashed open.

Finally, Longzi took the strip of carpet nearest the threshold and did not bother to pretend he had come as anything but a guard.

Mingyu wrote the last line of a memorial and dried the brush with a cloth.

He set the paper aside to cure and capped the ink without looking away from the grain of the desk. When he finally spoke, the words dropped into the room without ceremony.

"He still lives."

Four heads turned, not in surprise so much as recollection. It took their minds a breath to find the shape of what he meant, the thing so long buried that even anger had forgotten where it lay.

"Ah," Yizhen said, the corner of his mouth bending even as he nodded his head. "The old man."

Deming did not move his shoulders from the bookcase. "Then end it," he grunted, not really caring one way or another.

Longzi’s gaze slid once to Mingyu’s hands and back to the door. "We are naming dead leaves," he murmured. "Sweep them away so they don’t come back and make us slip."

Yaozu gave the windows a last, dispassionate glance and left them to the rain. "People talk when emperors die in chains," he advised, voice low enough that the wicks did not tremble. "If they see mercy, they keep their mouths for soup."

"He never kept anyone’s mouth for anything but praise," Yizhen chuckled. He turned the fan on its spine and caught it without looking, then let it turn again. "Let them call it mercy. They will sleep better."

Mingyu’s eyes were calm, the calm of a man whose decisions had already been made in a darker room on a worse night.

He did not say the word he would not use. He had never put that name in his mouth even as a boy unless duty forced it.

To him the old Emperor had been the throne with eyes, an order with a pulse attached, a shadow that cut men at the waist and called the fall justice.

"What is the cleanest path?" asked Mingyu, looking around the room at each one of the men.

Deming’s answer came with the firmness of footsteps on stone. "Poison."

Yaozu nodded. "A fever that takes quickly and does not return the next day to mock us. He has been starved of air and light. His body will accept a story the court already believes."

Longzi watched the door as if it might decide to have its own opinion. "A man in a cage earns no blade," he said. "Let him drink his last sentence. Quiet."

Yizhen’s smile thinned, not with pity but with appetite for neatness. "The underworld has made widows out of worse men with less fuss. I can arrange the cup and the hand that carries it. No one loyal to him is left in these halls."

He considered Mingyu’s face the way gamblers considered a dice cup. "Or if you want a story for the corridors—bring him upstairs two levels, let a physician shake his head into the right ears, and let the lamps burn low. Your enemies will grant you piety to sting themselves with it later."

Mingyu drew the cloth along the brush again though it was already dry. "No lamps," he grunted with a shake of his head. "No tents of silence. No procession. The empire will not be asked to perform grief."

Deming’s arms unfolded and refolded. "He didn’t care when the third prince put his hands on her," he reminded the room that had not forgotten. The lamp nearest the desk answered with a sound so soft it could have been breath. "If you want a blade, no one will stay my hand."

"You would stain the floor I read in," Mingyu smirked, without heat.

"I would mop," offered Longzi, a ghost of a smile on his face as he felt himself relax. The longer he spent with Mingyu and his brother, the more his old personality was coming back.

For a heartbeat Yizhen’s fan did not turn, and then it moved again, a circle that made no mark on the air.

Mingyu looked past them once, through the door that led to the narrow stairs and the dark under his study where the stones sweated in every season.

The keys lay in a shallow dish lined with silk.

Years ago the same dish had held jade pendants a boy was not permitted to wear because they were for sons who obeyed. He had kept the dish and discarded the story.

"He is not a blade anymore," Mingyu sighed. "He is a rumor. Rumors breed if you feed them a stage. We will not feed them."

Deming inclined his head. After all, this was his father, too.

Yaozu’s eyes had already left the men and moved into the work. He spoke without looking, as if describing a landscape he had walked in to someone who carried the right map.

"Two days without heavy food. Water kept short enough that thirst is a habit by then. The cup at second bell of the dog. There will be no struggle. We wait the length of three sticks. We go down with a physician, not the palace one, an old man without a court tongue, and let him write the word the court expects to hear. You do not go."

"I will go," announced Mingyu, and the words landed like a seal pressed to wax.