After watching Junsai go, Zhisen straightened his sleeve and walked in the direction of his quarters. It was about five minutes’ walk from his gardens, beneath a walkway enshrouded with maple trees, that he encountered Xiaobo, who was carrying a stack of books. As soon as their eyes met, Xiaobo smiled and inclined his head, stopping. They were alone on the path, except for one guard at a significant distance up ahead. Zhisen stopped and greeted him with the same smile. “How are you today?”

“How could I be faring poorly, given the fine weather?” Xiaobo asked, and gestured with his gaze at the flourishing gardens, the bright sun, the refreshing breeze. “And you, my prince?”

Zhisen rubbed the back of his neck and sighed, feeling tired. “Expect news of war with the Erdeni.”

“Wasn’t the market ban lifted? What inspired this now?” Xiaobo asked.

“Bloodthirst, I suppose,” Zhisen said. “I’ll deal with it before it turns into a disaster for civilians.”

He wet his lips and glanced over his shoulder at the guard before saying, “Be careful, please. I don’t believe that he would hesitate to do to you what he did to Ziying if he finds out your plans.”

“He won’t know who is holding the sword until his eyes see from where his head has struck the floor.”

Xiaobo’s smile was bitter. “And may that be how it ends.”

For a moment, Zhisen could not find the right thing to say. Xiaobo’s gaze had darkened, as it rarely ever did, and his expression was colder than usual— he looked older, exhausted. Zhisen felt that exhaustion, too, after so many years of stewing in hatred but making little progress in revenge. He wet his lips, looked into the garden, and changed the subject. “I’m riding out to the steppe the day after tomorrow.” He felt Xiaobo’s gaze on his face and turned back, looking Xiaobo in the eye. “I trust you’ve made some progress?”

Hefting the documents and books he was carrying, Xiaobo told him, “Not as much as I’d like, so I’ve gathered some more material. I’ll check in with Xiuying and the others to see if they have insight into any of the leads I’ve gathered so far, though. Any progress on their side with Xiangshi?”

Zhisen shook his head. “No, none. But I’m meeting Junsai again about the battlefield tomorrow.”

“Best of luck,” Xiaobo said. “The monthly tax is coming in only after you leave.”

“I suppose I’ll have to resort to guesswork,” Zhisen said, chuckling. “I should go, now.”

Xiaobo inclined his head again. “Have a pleasant evening, my prince.” There had been a time when Xiaobo had called Zhisen by ‘A-sen,’ and Ziying by ‘my prince.’ As Xiaobo walked past, the single bone-carved earring he wore caught the light. It was a curled-up dragon he had pried off the hilt of Ziying’s hunting knife, which matched the one Xiaobo concealed beneath his outer robe.

Zhisen remembered the way Xiaobo’s face had drained of colour on that bloody day, the way he’d fallen to his knees and retched. Zhisen could still recall the look in Xiaobo’s eyes when he wore that earring the first time and looked Ziying’s killer in the eyes with a polite smile on his face. Zhisen would never forget his terror thinking he would fail to protect his tutor, his brother’s dearest friend.

That fear and hatred fuelled him almost as much as his love for Ziying.

When Zhisen reached Feiyan’s quarters, the maidservants all bowed to him deeply, and he greeted them before knocking on the door to the room where she had her bed and study. Her voice came through like fine silk, smooth and light. “Please come in, Your Highness. Need you knock before entering the chambers of your own wife?” It was a subtle jab, not that anyone other than the two of them knew that.

He knew where he stood with her, but in any case he had no intention to lose this little game they’d been playing ever since their wedding night. She would give him an opportunity to show himself as some kind of imperious conqueror, and he would thoroughly deny her the pleasure of having more than one reason to hate him. He was not truly acting or playing around, though— it was appropriate to knock. She did not love him, so how could he intrude on her abruptly as if she would always be pleased to see him?

But now that she had invited him, he opened the door and stepped inside, shutting it as softly as he could behind himself. She was writing something; it seemed as if she was copying a book. Her calligraphy was beautiful every time he saw it, every stroke full of serenity, precision, and elegance. Her lips were unpainted, unlike those of the concubines. Her hair was unbound every time they met in private, and she was wearing a remarkably plain gown. Yet again, unlike his concubines, she never dolled herself up unless in public. She had no desire to impress him, and he admired her strong will.

After all, he respected her reason for keeping him at an arm’s length.

While Zhisen waited for her to invite him to sit, Feiyan finished the row she was writing. When she finished, she looked up from where she was kneeling behind her desk and met his eyes. Hers were the colour of ice, perhaps the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. “A man who asks his wife’s permission is no man at all, my father would say.” She turned back to her calligraphy. “But he always asked my mother.”

“You’re rather talkative today," Zhisen observed. "Have I pleased you somehow?”

She raised an eyebrow without looking away from her work. “I am pleased because my maids tell me that you are making an effort to avoid war with the Erdeni. I confess that I admire your pacifism.”

“Ah, and she follows her sweetness with sarcasm.”

With a sigh, Feiyan said, “I am not being sarcastic, Zhisen.”

He pushed down his urge to make a joke. “May I sit?”

“Please,” she said, and kept on working without a single tremor of her hand despite the loose hold she had on her brush. Her wrist moved beyond the hem of her sleeve, delicate and pale. “How is Xiuying?”

Zhisen chuckled and picked up the teapot, pouring for her and then overturning an unused cup for himself. “It will never cease to amuse me that you deign to ask after the health of my concubines.”

“She is not just your concubine.”

“True, she is my dear friend.”

“Are you in the habit of making love to your dear friends?”

“Friends... Xiaobo is a eunuch, and nearly twenty years my senior. I am not sure what you are implying.”

Feiyan finally set down her brush, with laughter only in her eyes. “Your sense of humour is deplorable.”

“Isn’t yours equally so, if you’re entertained?” She rolled her eyes. “But me? My humour is perfectly refined, it is just that I am willing to go to extreme lengths to see an exquisite woman smiling.”

“Whether you are flirting or joking, it will get you nowhere,” she said more somberly, sipping tea.

Zhisen smiled. “I know that. But I don’t wager anyone else makes the time to joke with you.”

Feiyan’s gaze softened infinitesimally, and as she set down her cup of tea, she asked, “Do I have the right to ask you why you have no children yet?” While he drank some more tea, she expanded, “You have had concubines for several years now, and you visit them each week at a perfect schedule. And yet…”

“No,” Zhisen said, maintaining his smile. “You do not have the right to a truthful answer.”

“Surely the Emperor is putting pressure on you. What are you telling him?”

“That it is less fun and more difficult to make love to a woman heavily with child. More politely.”

Feiyan looked at him without amusement. “You have twelve concubines.”

“Yes,” he said, and drank more tea.

“How could you possibly make use of twelve women at once?”

“I thought you had no interest in my sexual habits, dear wife.”

Feiyan looked him in the eye for one moment longer, then gave up on that strand of conversation and instead asked him, “What is the real reason that you are going in person to the steppe?”

Just how quickly does she get news of things? he wondered, while she tugged on the tasseled string which would summon a servant with food. He thought about telling her the truth— after all, her question implied that she suspected something deeper than what he had said at court.

Even Xiaobo did not know everything about his plans. Zhisen was faintly guilty about that, and the fact that Xiuying and the others were helping him without knowing even half of what Xiaobo did. Feiyan knew nothing about the cause of Ziying’s death and Zhisen’s plans, though. It was not because Zhisen did not think he could make use of her intelligence and her political connections outside of the palace. It was not because he did not trust that she would support him if she knew what he was doing, either.

As he looked at her, he wondered why he could not even trust Xiaobo and Xiuying with everything. He wondered how he had established even a thin friendship like this with Feiyan, who should have hated him to her core, and why given that fact he still could not trust her enough to ask her assistance.

Most of all, Zhisen wondered whether he was right to tell himself that nobody’s arm was strong enough to accept his trust, or whether the truth was that his arm that was too weak to extend it properly.

Feiyan’s voice interjected. “Are you going to tell me I don’t have a right to that answer, either?”

What answer? he wondered, and tried to recall what exactly she had asked him to make him wonder about revealing some of his plan. When he remembered, he thought back to the sunlight glancing off the sharpened arrowhead, and the sliver of clear blue sky beyond it. The cut of Khojin's knife was nothing like the strange nostalgia of that moment, that recollection of Ziying’s pulse against his left shoulder blade. He wasn’t sure why he had thought of Ziying, but he told her, “I have a feeling that I am not the only one who wants to build a bridge, no matter how precarious to cross.”

 At that, she met his eyes with a faint, amused smile. “Is that your way of saying you have an ally?”

Zhisen looked out of the window. A swallow overtook the moon. “I hope so.”