Chapter 1: A Case of Honey Cakes
The box was lacquered black with a pair of cranes picked out in gold, and it had been placed in the exact center of Jinshi's desk, as if the desk had been built around it.
Maomao looked at the box. Then she looked at Gaoshun, who stood by the door with the face of a man who had been awake since the hour of the ox and expected to be awake until the next one. Then, because there was no way around it, she looked at Jinshi.
He was sitting with his chin propped on one hand, sleeves pooled on the desk, a strand of black hair escaping its pin and lying along his cheek like it had been placed there by a painter with a grudge against everyone else's peace of mind. The thin scar on his cheek had faded to a pale thread over the years. It did not help. If anything it made the rest of him look more deliberate.
"Poison," he said gravely.
"Is it," said Maomao.
"Possibly. It arrived this morning without a card. Gaoshun intercepted it."
Gaoshun's eyes drifted to a point on the ceiling. Maomao had spent four years learning to read Gaoshun's ceiling-looks the way her old man read pulses, and this one said: I intercepted nothing. It was handed to me by a giggling junior attendant from the Ministry of Rites, and I would like to go home.
She knelt beside the desk and lifted the lid with two fingers. Inside, on a bed of folded paper, sat eight honey cakes, glazed and pressed with a plum-blossom mold. The smell rose up warm and sweet, with something underneath it that was not sweet at all.
Oh. Now that was interesting.
She leaned in and breathed again, slower. Honey. Toasted sesame. Rice flour, good quality. And under it all a faint green bitterness, like crushed stems.
"You haven't eaten any," she said. It was not a question. Jinshi had many faults, most of which he wore beautifully, but he had learned long ago not to eat unlabeled food in the palace.
"I was waiting for my apothecary."
"Your apothecary has a backlog of a dozen fever cases in the servants' quarters and a eunuch in the east wing who swallowed a ring."
"Swallowed a ring?"
"On a bet. It'll come out." She broke one cake in half. The crumb was pale and fine, flecked with something darker. She pinched a fleck out and rolled it between her fingers until it gave up its scent, then touched it to the tip of her tongue.
"Maomao," said Jinshi, in the tone he used when he was trying not to sound alarmed.
She held up a hand. Bitter, then a slow numb prickle along the edge of the tongue. Not dangerous in this amount. Not dangerous in eight cakes' worth, either, unless the eater was very small or very unlucky. She knew this plant. Every courtesan in the Verdigris House had known this plant, because every customer who came in with a lovesick look had been sold it at least once by some street-corner charlatan swearing it would make the object of his longing fall into his arms.
It did not make anyone fall into anyone's arms. It made them itch.
"Well?" Jinshi asked.
"It's a love charm," Maomao said.
The silence that followed had a texture to it. Gaoshun made a small sound, quickly swallowed.
"A love charm," Jinshi repeated.
"A bad one. Dried root of a marsh plant, ground fine. The sellers in the capital's market district call it 'the swallow's heart.' The idea is that whoever eats it will be bound to whoever baked it." She brushed the crumbs from her fingers into a square of paper and folded it neatly for later. Waste not. "What actually happens is a rash. Red welts on the neck and inner arms for two or three days. Some swelling of the lips if they eat a lot."
"So someone wished to make me swell," Jinshi said slowly.
"Someone wished you would look at them," Maomao corrected. "The swelling would have been a bonus." She considered his face critically. "Not a large loss. You would still be tolerable to look at with a fat lip. Most people would never notice."
Jinshi's mouth did something complicated. "Was that a compliment?"
"It was a clinical observation."
"You said tolerable."
"Tolerable is a clinical word."
Gaoshun coughed into his fist. It was the cough of a man covering a laugh, and he had used it so often in Maomao's presence that she suspected he was developing a condition.
She stood, dusting her knees. "If that's everything, Master Jinshi, I'll take these back to the medical office and burn them. I'd advise finding out which attendant in the Ministry of Rites has been buying swallow's heart, because the stallholder who sold it to her probably sold her something else, and the something else is usually worse."
"How do you know it was the Ministry of Rites?"
She pointed at the paper lining the box without looking at it. "Ministry stationery. The watermark's in the corner. And the knot on the ribbon is the kind they teach their junior girls for wrapping ceremonial gifts. Also Gaoshun knows."
Both men looked at Gaoshun. Gaoshun looked at the ceiling.
"Gaoshun," said Jinshi.
"She seemed earnest, Master Jinshi," Gaoshun said, with dignity. "I did not think it would come to welts."
It was not, technically, the first love charm. It was the third this month. The first had been a perfumed sachet hidden in Jinshi's sleeve by a palace woman who had brushed past him in a corridor, stuffed with crushed jasmine and something that turned out to be ground mouse bone. The second had been a letter written in what the author had clearly believed was the blood of a white crane, and which Maomao had identified, after some enjoyable scraping, as madder dye and pig's blood. Jinshi had summoned her for both, with the same grave face, the same single word.
"Poison."
She was starting to think he said it the way other men said good morning.
Maomao walked back toward the medical office through the long covered galleries of the inner court, the lacquered box tucked under her arm. Plum trees leaned over the walls. The last frost had come and gone, and the gardeners were out in force with their bamboo rakes, hauling winter's dead leaves off the white gravel. A pair of maids passed her going the other way, recognized her, and dipped their heads. One of them whispered to the other behind a sleeve as they went.
She didn't have to hear it to know what it was. Four years ago she had been a scrawny nobody with freckles painted on her face to put off buyers, kidnapped off a street and sold into the rear palace as a laundry maid. Now she was the Moon Prince's personal apothecary, wore a proper attendant's robe with the medical office's knot at the waist, and had a room with an actual window. The maids found this fascinating in the way people found a pig that could count fascinating. Many of them had theories about how it had happened.
Most of the theories involved her doing something to Jinshi's tea.
Maomao snorted. If she had wanted to do something to Jinshi's tea, she would have done something interesting.
The medical office smelled the way it always smelled, of dried chrysanthemum and steeped bark and the charcoal brazier in the corner that never quite went out. Old Doctor Liu was in the back room shouting at an assistant about a mislabeled jar. Maomao set the box on her workbench, pulled the honey cakes out one by one, and broke them over a clean sheet of paper. Inside the fourth cake, pressed into the center where the filling should be, she found a tiny folded slip.
She opened it.
A single line, in painstaking, pretty calligraphy: For the Moon who does not look down.
Maomao read it twice and felt nothing in particular, which she found satisfying. She dropped the slip in the brazier, where it curled and went black. Then she sat down at her bench, rolled up her left sleeve, unwound the bandage from her forearm, and looked over the healing scratches she had made there last week testing a new salve. Healing well. Slight discoloration around the third one. She made a note.
Her arm was a map of her own curiosity. The newer marks were neat and small, since she had more patience now than when she first arrived. The older ones were not. Jinshi had seen the arm once, early on, and gone very quiet, and afterward had sent a box of the softest cotton bandages she had ever owned. She still had not decided what to make of that.
She was rewrapping the arm when the door opened and Gaoshun came in, alone, and shut it behind him.
That was unusual. Gaoshun did not come to the medical office alone. Gaoshun did not go anywhere alone. Gaoshun was attached to Jinshi's side so permanently that palace gossips had once spent an entire winter speculating that the two of them shared a single shadow.
"Is he poisoned?" Maomao asked, standing up fast. "Actually poisoned?"
"No," said Gaoshun. "Sit, please."
She did not sit. He sighed and sat himself, on the edge of Doctor Liu's stool, folding his large hands on his knees. For a moment he looked less like the Moon Prince's iron attendant and more like what he was, a father of grown children who had spent the better part of two decades minding a young man nobody else could mind.
"His Majesty," Gaoshun said, "has expressed a wish."
Maomao waited.
"Master Jinshi is twenty-four. He has fulfilled his duties in the rear palace admirably. There are no longer," Gaoshun picked the words with care, "reasons for him to remain as he is. His Majesty would like his younger brother settled. He has asked that a list of suitable ladies be prepared before the Moon Festival, so that a match may be decided."
"Ah," said Maomao.
"Master Jinshi has not responded well."
"I'd imagine not." She thought of Jinshi's face when the Ministry of Rites sent him anything with a ribbon on it. "Is he refusing?"
"He cannot refuse," Gaoshun said. "Not His Majesty. Not on this." He looked at her with an odd steadiness. "The list arrived an hour ago. There are nine names. Master Jinshi read it and said that before he would consider any of them, he required each lady to be examined."
"Examined."
"For poison," said Gaoshun. "Possible poisonings, past or present, in their households. Risks to his health. He was very specific." A long pause. "He said there was only one person in the palace he trusted to do it."
Maomao looked down at the black-lacquered box, at the scatter of honey crumbs and the tiny curl of ash in the brazier. For the Moon who does not look down.
"He wants me," she said slowly, "to investigate the women he's supposed to marry."
"Yes."
"All nine."
"Yes."
"Before the Moon Festival."
Gaoshun inclined his head. Then he reached into his sleeve and drew out a scroll tied with blue silk and laid it on her bench beside the ruined cakes, very gently, the way one would set down something that might go off.
"He also asked me to tell you," Gaoshun said, "that the first lady on the list keeps a garden of foxglove, and that her late mother died of a weak heart."
Maomao's fingers were already on the silk tie.
She hated that he knew her this well.