The Register of Seals

The Chief Steward's list came at noon, as the Empress had ordered, and it had four names on it, and the fourth name was not a eunuch's.

Three eunuchs had walked the planks above the pond between dusk and dawn on the night the Keeper died: the two who had carried Gao Fu to the outer court and back, and Pei Rong himself, who had gone, he said, to collect the Minister's letter for the morning's reading. The fourth name on the list was the Attendant Shen Yuling, who had been seen on the walk with a basin before first light, and who was, the list noted in the Chief Steward's careful hand, the cousin of Concubine Shen.

"He has written it so," said Shen Yuelan, "so that whoever reads it will read the two names together."

She was standing in her own eastern courtyard, which she had held for six days, with the list in her hand and the taste of iron in her mouth. The Consort Dowager Zhou sat on the gallery bench above her with her daughter beside her; Concubine Zhou had come without being asked, which in the inner court was a kind of speech.

"The Attendant found the body," said Xinyi. "Of course she is on the list. That is not the trap. The trap is what they will find in her room."

Yuelan was moving before the sentence was finished.

Yuling's room was the small one off the laundry gate, where the Attendants of the Western Pavilion slept four to a mat. It had a chest, a hook, a basin, and nothing else, and the chest was open when Yuelan reached it, because Yuling was kneeling in front of it with her hands pressed flat on the lid as though she could keep something inside by weight alone.

"I did not," Yuling said. "Yuelan, I did not. I never opened the box. I never touched it."

Inside the chest, under the one grey robe that was not on her back, wrapped in a square of second-grade silk that had no business in an Attendant's chest at all, lay the lotus seal. White jade, the size of a child's fist, the carved flower uppermost.

Yuelan did not touch it either. She looked at it the way Gao Fu had taught her to look at a ledger: not at what it said, but at the order in which things had been done.

"Second-grade silk," she said. "The grade of the robes. Three hundred bolts of it went missing and were found in a warehouse by the southern lock, and the Ministry considered the matter closed. And here is a square of it in an Attendant's chest, wrapped around the Empress's seal, in a room that four women share and a Chief Steward can enter whenever he likes." She stood. "They did not take the seal to use it. A seal that is known to be stolen cannot stamp anything. They took it to put it here. They took it so that the cousin of the Concubine who read the roll aloud in Still Water would be found with it, and the Concubine would fall with her, and the Keeper would be dead and could not say whose hand had been in the box."

"Then who..."

"I do not know whose hand put the wolfsbane in the Keeper's cup," Yuelan said. "I know it was not yours. And I know that if I leave this here until the Chief Steward comes, I will never be allowed to know."

She picked up the seal in the square of silk and carried it, uncovered, in both hands, across the Western Pavilion and along the planks above the pond and into the Hall of Still Water, where the Empress sat alone at the dead man's desk with the register of seals open in front of her.

Yuelan knelt and held it up. "Your Majesty. The lotus seal. It was in my cousin's chest, wrapped in second-grade silk. She did not put it there. I am returning it to you because it is yours and because the Autumn Rites are eighteen days away and the rolls cannot be stamped without it, and because if I had let the Chief Steward find it, it would have gone into a ledger, and the Keeper taught me what happens to things in ledgers."

The Empress took it. Her hands, Yuelan saw, were not entirely steady, and she set the jade down on the register of seals and laid one palm over it.

"He wrote every time it left this box," she said. "Thirty-four years. The last line is his own hand, the fifteenth, carried to the outer court. I have written the next line myself. Returned on the twenty-second, by Concubine Shen, from the Western Pavilion." She looked up. "Your cousin will not be questioned further. I have told the Chief Steward so, and he has gone to tell the Minister, because the Minister of Rites has been at the Gate of Returning Clouds since dawn asking why the rolls of the rites are not yet stamped. My brother does not enter the inner court. He stands at its gate and sends his voice in."

"Does he know the seal was missing?"

"He knows everything the Chief Steward knows." The Empress's palm did not move from the jade. "Which is why, Concubine Shen, I am going to ask you to think very carefully about the two questions we have, and whether they are one. Someone poisoned the Keeper of Seals and carried the seal to the laundry gate. And someone in the Hall of Lasting Autumn wrote a letter with blank wax to the street behind my brother's Ministry, and the Keeper carried it, and the Keeper is dead."

Yuelan thought of the Consort Dowager on the gallery bench with her daughter beside her, the captain's widow and the captain's child, and of an old woman who knew Wei Zhengde's climb from the ninth grade to the second better than his own sister did. She thought of silver powder on cheekbones and a blank seal of red wax.

"I do not know what was in the letter," she said. "I asked the Keeper. He told me not to ask. He said the house was behind the Ministry of Rites and that was all he would say."

"Then that is where it stands." The Empress rose, and the seal rose with her, back into its lacquered box. "The rites are on the ninth day of the ninth month. My brother will have his rolls stamped, because the rites are his and the calendar is the empire's and I will not be the Empress who let the Autumn Rites fail over a dead eunuch. But I have lost the one man in this court I never had to watch, and I will not pretend I have not." She closed the box. "Go back to your courtyard. Keep your cousin close. Spend your taels."

Yuelan went out along the walk. The water under the planks was green and still, and the Moon Carp hung in it, one scale fewer, as old as the Late Emperor's reign and as silent. She stood where she had stood on the day she first came to Still Water with two hundred cash in a maid's hand and a seventh-grade father to save, and she counted what she had: a courtyard, a rank, a cousin, a Concubine's enemy who had come uninvited to warn her, and a dead friend whose last ledger line she could recite.

Eighteen days until the Autumn Rites. The silk was found and the clerk was dismissed and her father kept his grade, and all of that had been true for six days and none of it had kept Gao Fu alive.

"Who killed you," she said to the water, "and what did the old woman write."

The Moon Carp did not answer. It never had. Behind her, from the direction of the Gate of Returning Clouds, she could hear the Minister's voice being sent in.