Silence hardens. The floor is lacquered night, veined by a single dark ribbon where blood dried thin. Lances lean outward in a slow, wary blossoming. The court breathes shallow as a hunted thing. Yanming does not move from three paces away; he is a horizon you cannot reach.

Meicao lifts her chain. Links uncoil with a secretive hiss, the crescent blade at its end winking like a sliver of winter moon torn free of the rest. Her stance is temple-taught but incomplete—weight a touch too forward, left heel eager, breath clipped short.

Meibei lowers the lance, point angling to the flagstones so it can rise faster than thought. The porcelain of her mask is lullaby-blank; the red around its lips is not paint. She inclines once—acknowledgment, apology, farewell, none of them permitted here—and steps.

The chain sings first. Meicao whips the crescent in a low circle, then breaks the rhythm high—an arc that would kiss a throat if it is slow. Meibei answers. The lance haft bites the chain out of the air with a wooden clack that jolts into wrists and ribs; she absorbs the pull, pivots, lets iron brush past her hip so close it nicks silk and skin. A bow-string line of blood inscribes her thigh; she does not look down.

Meicao flows into the opening. Her crescent chops for the knee. Meibei is already elsewhere. The butt of the lance pecks up under Meicao's chin with the precision of a physician and the intent of a butcher. Teeth click. She tastes copper. Her head snaps back; the chain falters.

"Breathe through your nose," Meibei says, conversational, as if tutoring a child beyond a window.

Meicao spits a rose-flecked thread to one side. "You were always the strongest," she says, circling, chain clicking over her knuckles. "Not only the wrist or the foot. In the rooms where the air wanted to break, you stayed kind. You hid behind shy. I envied that."

The chain lifts like a tide. The crescent scythes. Meibei lets the blade chase an absence and steps into the curve, inside the storm. A forearm slams Meicao's biceps; her fingers spasm. The lance butt kisses her ribs three times in a line that will bloom purple. Meibei's knee writes a single character into Meicao's thigh—pain—and Meicao stumbles, saves herself with the chain wrapped once round the haft.

Meibei feels the catch and releases the lance a heartbeat before Meicao yanks. The weapon clatters to the floor like a verdict. Meibei is already on Meicao's hands, not the chain: two quick taps to the extensor tendons, a thumb gouge along the meat of the palm, a rake of nails across the web between finger and thumb—rough, ugly, jailhouse pragmatism grafted onto temple grace. Meicao's grip loosens. The crescent pulls a red part from Meibei's sleeve as it flutters past; Meibei steals the falling chain with her other hand, lets the links run through her palm until the crescent kisses her knuckles, then flicks the moon back along the arc Meicao expects least—down and behind. The blade catches Meicao's calf. It opens a thin mouth in the muscle.

Meibei halts the follow-through and throws the chain back. It scrawls a bright line across flagstone and coils to Meicao's feet like a snake.

"Again," Meibei says.

Meicao blinks. A tremor climbs her calf to hide in the knee. She winds the chain around her waist, breathes once, twice. The lantern light makes little gates in her eyes. "How," she asks between the beats of a step, "is this not betrayal?"

Meibei's answer is a half-shrug as she flows to the left. "Because I still act for him."

"You call this—" Meicao feints right, snaps the crescent toward the mask, jerks it low at the last syllable "—for him?"

The blade glances off the porcelain chin. Meibei's neck moves just enough. Her hands catch the chain and climb it—left over right, right over left, a ladder made of iron—until she is inside the whip's cruelty. Her forehead meets Meicao's nose. Soft cartilage yields with an audible crunch; tears flood Meicao's eyes without asking. The world fractures into starry water.

Meibei's palm finds Meicao's sternum and pushes. Meicao's back finds the floor hard enough that the lacquer remembers. Air breaks out of her in a bark. Meibei steps back, breathing as if she is listening to someone other than herself.

"Your envy," she says, almost kind, as Meicao rolls to her knees and chases her lungs, "that is what brings you close to him. You thought: his cruelties are beautiful because they are sharper than mine. You wanted to be near the sharpest thing. I know you. I am you, without the wish to be seen."

Meicao laughs, and the blood makes it sound like drowning. "You were kind," she says, wiping scarlet from her upper lip with the heel of her hand. "I hated you for that, when the masters praised it, when the boys loved it and fell down in it, and I had only speed and anger. And yet—" she draws the chain up "—I loved you harder for it. That's the insult. That's the wound I could not cauterize."

"Then cauterize this," Meibei says, and is already moving.

Hand-to-hand now, the hall gone small as a cell. Meibei's fingers find a nerve below Meicao's ear; the world tilts again. Meicao answers with a heel to the inside of Meibei's knee—temple trick, illegal in polite duels. Meibei's leg buckles and straightens without permission; she answers with her own impolite acquisitions: a palm-heel that breaks Meicao's lip, a hook that finds the floating rib. Meicao snarls, low, animal; her crescent flashes from the hip, a desperate, beautiful cut. Meibei parries with nothing—just emptiness that isn't where the blade needs meat—and lets the crescent shave three strands from her hair.

A guard's spear lives too close. Meibei steals the shaft with a flick that is not theft but appropriation by a higher law. She snaps the red tassel loose; now it is a staff. She prods Meicao's shin, raps her knuckles, jabs the soft part under the biceps, sweeps the ankle—Meicao jumps—sweeps higher instead. Meicao lands wrong but beautiful, roll bleeding into stand. Meibei presents the bottom third of the staff like a gift; Meicao takes it, yanks; Meibei yields half a step then reclaims with a turn.

"That mask," Meicao pants, circling again, chain coiled at her hip. Blood paints her teeth. "How do you wear that and say you are not one of them? Face-changers" she swallows iron "—vermin."

"I always hid my true face," Meibei says simply, staff low now. "The mask is just an honest version."

Meicao lunges. Hook high, chain low. Meibei blocks the blade with the staff, sweeps the chain with her shin, takes the chain around her ankle and steps through—now the chain belongs to the foot and the staff and the hand all at once. She wraps it twice around the staff and pulls; Meicao is yanked forward into a knee that Meibei pulls short at the last instant. Meibei spins the chain off the staff and back into Meicao's hands again, as if saying: I will not let you leave yourself.

"Strongest sister," Meicao says through blood and laughter that won't decide what it is. She goes low and for once the crescent whispers where Meibei is late: it kisses the outside of Meibei's calf and opens a smile there. Heat runs down into her boot. Meibei's answer is a real hit. The staff comes down on Meicao's collarbone with the merciful deliberation of a magistrate. Bone groans and splinters. Meicao's left arm loses its job. The scythe droops like a dead petal.

A collective wince moves the court as if one muscle owned them.

Meibei kicks the fallen lance across the floor with the side of her foot. It skates, spins once, comes to rest against Meicao's unhurt hand. "Trade?" Meibei offers, calm as a market hag.

Meicao takes the lance, tries a thrust one-handed; it is clumsy and gallant and doomed. Meibei steps past it, lets the shaft rub her ribs to raise a welt, and slaps the flat back into Meicao's cheek so the butt kills balance. She strips the weapon once more and lets it go. Now she has nothing in her hands. It does not matter.

Meicao changes grip on the chain; pain kills pride and leaves only clarity. She loops it around her left forearm, makes a shield, comes hook-first again. Meibei's hands catch her—wrist-and-throat—and press her into the world. The chain uncurls uselessly. Meibei's thumb comes just short of finding the sleepy artery under the jaw; she lets Meicao feel it thinking.

"You said you envied shyness," Meibei says, voice not quite steady now with breath or something else. "You mistook it. It was fear. I have always been afraid. Of the four of us dying."

Meicao stares at the painted mouth. "Then let me go," she whispers.

Meibei lets her go.

The chain clatters to the floor. Meicao sways. The hall's breath catches the way a horse does at a snake. Yanming's robe cracks softly as dried blood breaks along a fold.

Meibei turns, stoops, and picks up the crescent. She weighs it in her palm. The blade licks a thread of her glove and opens it; a single dark bead swells. She flicks the chain into Meicao's hand with the lazy precision of a gambler returning a debt.

"Again," she says, and the softness is gone from the word this time. "While you can still lift the moon."

Meicao snarls a curse that is only said in the mountains. She whips the chain. Meibei rushes through it like a storm through barley. Her palm finds Meicao's face; the back of Meicao's head finds the floor with a dull, fatal sound. Falling stars take up residence inside her skull. Warmth spreads under her hair where skin yields. She feels the shape of the flagstone under her cheek.

Meibei drops into a crouch beside her, knee pinning the chain, forearm across Meicao's throat but light, a bridge not a guillotine. The mask tilts down. Up close the lacquer is crazed with the faintest web of cracks, as if truth has been tapping at it for years.

Meibei's weight shifts—subtle as a tide turning in its sleep—then vanishes from Meicao's throat. For a breath the mercy holds.

She catches Meicao by the ankles—one hand locking around the good leg above the malleolus, the other clamping the broken-collared side where muscles still obey—and stands with the calm of a craftsman about to test a beam. The mask drops its chin. The hall understands a second too late.

Meibei whips her sister up and over as if clearing a threshing floor.

The impact is a butcher's punctuation. Lacquered boards jump; a hairline fracture walks between two knotholes. Meicao's shoulders take the first blow: a dull, table-thumping sound, followed by the brittle tinkle of something smaller giving up—collarbone shards finding new neighbors. Breath rips out of her and spools across the floor as a wet ribbon.

Again.

Meibei pivots at the hips and the waist—temple economy—spinning Meicao like a bell-rope. The head strikes this time, not full, not kind: a diagonal kiss that scrapes scalp from skull and paints the wood with a crescent of hair and skin. Teeth click like dice; one breaks and flies, an ivory comet seen by no one. Blood spills and does not decide whether to pool or run.

Again.

Ribs. The sound is a crate failing at sea. Something inside Meicao coughs in a voice that's all iron and mucus and stubborn flame; a web of pink froth appears at her lips and bursts into red with each small, involuntary breath.

Again.

The pelvis this time, misaligned by the earlier fall—she's a rag-doll with the wrong stuffing. The slap is flat, obscene, followed by a low animal moan that does not pass her teeth. Her hands, loosed from orders, open and close on nothing.

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Again.

The hall shrinks to the size of that word and expands to contain every flinch. A junior soldier swallows his breakfast back down and the sound is loud. Shen Huo's hands remain clasped. Kexing does not move, but her throat works once. Even Yile, forehead to wood, feels the percussion in his jaw; it is memory trying the lock.

Again.

Meibei's breathing stays even. Not mechanical—measured. She rotates Meicao so the next blow takes the upper back instead of the spine, cruel knowledge applied with care. Dots of lacquer pepper her gloves. A tooth skitters to a stop at Yanming's bare toes.

The Emperor does not step back. His jaw tightens; something behind his eyes steps into a smaller room and shuts the door.

By the seventh, the floor smells like old coins and opened meat. Meicao's face is a red mask. Bruises bud and bloom toward one another, dark flowers cross-pollinating into a single, ugly garden.

Meibei stops as precisely as she began. She stands her sister gently on the floor as if returning a tool to its box, then kneels and arranges Meicao's ruined limbs so the joints remember where they belonged in the other world. She wipes a string of saliva and blood from her sister's lip with two fingers and rubs it clean on the hem of her own robe.

No one in the hall remembers to inhale until Yanming speaks.

His voice is even, but the tile learns a tremor from it. "Why not doing it quick?" he asks without ornament. "A point under the rib and twist, or a hand for the windpipe. Why this?"

Meibei turns her mask toward him. The lacquer reflects a neat palace, a careful world, and does not show the small living thing inside. "Because she betrayed the Son of Heaven," she says, and the formality scrapes in her throat like a worn coin. "In Behani, when the offense is open, the pain must be public, and slow. The road back to honor is the body's long walk. Death by hurry is a kindness she has not yet earned."

He studies her a heartbeat longer than comfort allows. Then the discomfort becomes a decision. "So be it," Yanming says. "Proof, minted." He lifts a hand—two fingers half-raised. Men lean toward the order they expect: tidy removal, waste disposed like any other palace night-soil.

Meibei speaks over them, not loud—clear. "Majesty," she says, and bows with the staff still across her knees, a posture that should be awkward and is instead devout. "Even traitors belong to someone. She is Behani, as I am. Our dead do not ride boats of paper and perfumed smoke." She lifts her head. "Let me take her. I will set her in the way our grandmothers taught. Your court need not dirty its braziers with a name it has already unlearned."

The hall listens for offense and finds none. Yanming considers the wrecked girl at his feet, the mask that refuses to blink, the line his reign has decided to draw on its second morning. "Take her," he says at last. "Behani rites. Do not parade. Do not preach." A pause. "Do not fail to return."

Meibei inclines, once. "I have already failed enough for one life," she says, and all the tenderness in the world breaks itself quietly against the porcelain and falls away.

She slides her arms under Meicao with the competence of a midwife and the reverence of a thief stealing back something small and irreplaceable. The broken body folds toward her the way a burnt paper bends toward the hand that spares it. Blood from Meibei's calf wounds thread down and stipple Meicao's hip; sister's ink on sister's page.

As she stands, the court sees it: the strength not of spectacle, but of habit. Meibei has carried weight like this before—injured boys off forest floors, women from riverbanks, a master who did not deserve it. The staff she leaves behind leans against a pillar and does not fall.

Kexing steps out of the way. Shen Huo's gaze pins a corner of air and keeps the hall from saying anything foolish. Yile does not lift his face; the salt that falls from him is not prayer.

Meibei walks. The space parts not out of fear now but so the stink of blood will not stain silk. Her shadow, long and thin, stitches Meicao's mess to the door with a thread the color of ash. She does not look left or right. The mask faces forward, a small, moon-white boat on a red river.

They do not see her again that night.

Beyond the palace, Pezijil lifts its lamps to learn the shape of a new era. Red lanterns open like wounds along the streets, one by one, each a tongue of sanctioned fire licking at paper skins. They bob in the damp like tethered souls. From a high balcony, the procession resembles a slow-burning forest you could walk through if you didn't mind leaving your name behind.

Under that glow—more funeral than festival—Meicao breathes. Barely. Each draw is a thin theft; each release a negotiation. The lantern light strobes her face—living, dying, living—until the city cannot tell whether it is welcoming a reign or lighting pyres for a girl who refuses, out of sheer habit, to stop.

...

Recognition detonates without sound. Meicao's breath stops halfway to her lungs. The cup in Kexing's hand tilts, steam unfurling like a ghost's sleeve; not a drop spills. Their eyes meet across polished zitan and rule-scrolls, and eight years collapse into a sharp, bright point.

"Kexing," Meicao says, voice roughened by alleys and bad dreams. "Where is Yile? Why are you pouring for… him?"

Sima's brush stills above the xiangqi board. His gaze cuts to her—a calm blade, honed to skin nerves. "You will address this household properly," he says, mild as frost. "Or you will be removed."

Kexing sets the pot down with sacred precision, then bows with an exactness that refuses servility. "Meicao," she answers without looking at Sima, as if resuming a paused conversation in a different century. "Alive is where he is. Leashed is how. As for my hands—" her fingers, burn-scarred, elegant, turn the cup toward Sima, "—they pour where work matters."

Fol shifts, a small step that places half his body between Meicao and the Prime Minister's temper. "Prime Minister," he says, deferent without bowing his head, "she struck her head. Her memory is… broken. The tone is an injury, not an insult."

Sima's eyes take Fol's measure, then return to Meicao. "Amnesia," he repeats, as if tasting coin for adulteration.

Sima exhales a laugh thin as wire. "Amnesia and Tepr hounds as valets for a retired legionary—ah, San Lian, you've done it. You've chased your favorite phantom out onto the grass. Gujel's gone to Tepr after all, and you—" he lifts his brush, dotting the air toward the old man—"are obviously one of them. Look, you even brought dogs."

"I came for a game," San Lian says. "You accepted."

Sima lets the silence weigh San Lian down until his shoulders bow. Then he turns to Kexing as if moving a piece on the board. "Take the Khan's dogs and the amnesiac elsewhere while we play. I do not like distractions in my endgame."

Jinhuang steps in. "Mistreating us might create a diplomatic incident with the Khan."

Sima's mouth almost smiles. "And deprive me of the pleasure of apologizing? Be still, child. The only incident here would be your Khan's decision to value a game she's already played." He flicks two fingers. Guards in black lacquer separate from the walls like cut shadows.

Kexing gestures them through a side door. The corridor beyond is white jade sobered by sandalwood ribs and measured footfalls. The guards keep a respectful spear-length, respectful in the sense a butcher keeps from a bull before the throat.

Meicao's question keeps burning her mouth. "Where," she tries again, softer, "is Yile?"

Kexing does not answer. The smallest quirk touches the corner of her mouth, a move so slight a scribe would miss it. "Do you still grind your teeth when you sleep?" she asks without looking back. "I used to hear you. In the eaves."

It happens on the turn past a gilded crane screen. Meicao's body remembers the angle where walls devour sound; her grief chooses the moment. She launches, every tendon singing: both hands for the throat, thumbs for the soft, secret places under Kexing's jaw. "Face-changing filth," she hisses, words clipped short and hot. "Traitor—"

The maid's hair shivers. A single ivory pin skims daylight, then kisses the hollow at Meicao's throat. It is surgical. Pain blooms like a small, perfectly placed rose. Kexing has stepped inside Meicao's momentum without effort, anchored her with a wrist bone to wrist bone bite, and arranged her against the wall with the courtesy one shows a valuable painting.

"One prick," Kexing murmurs, so close her breath fogs the polished red of Meicao's ragged lip, "and your tongue goes wooden. Two, and your lungs remember nothing but drowning." The guards do not intervene. They watch the angle of Kexing's wrist, the way a dog watches a volcano.

Kexing lets the hairpin breathe, just enough for the poison's scent to flirt: bitter almond stained with monkshood's sweet rot. Her eyes—plain, dark, impossible to place on any wanted poster—take in Meicao whole, from the ragged, nearly-invisible seam where a Behani master once split her brow, to the newer tapestry of bruises at the collarbone, to the scar that rings the throat like a criminal's wedding-band.

"Still alive," she says, and her voice, for a heartbeat, is praise. "After being used like a hammer by your own blood. I should send your physician a basket. What was the address, little girl? The one who sewed your face shut after your sister used the floor to teach you obedience."

Meicao's body floods with remembered heat: stone against skull, the yielding, awful give of cartilage in her nose, the way breath failed and the mask leaned close and called it loyalty. She has the sense—late and merciless—that she has been playing a child's game while Kexing moved the real pieces in rooms without doors.

"You—" Her voice stumbles, not with fear, but with a sudden, widening cut of understanding that hurts more than the pin. "You were playing with us." Her hands flatten, not surrender, not threat; a gesture seeking shape in air. She looks at the simple maid's face and sees a dozen rooms emptying of secrets. "Who are you? And where the hell is Yile?"

Kexing smirks.

...

Yile prises an iron nail from the cot frame and files it on stone until it is thin enough to slip between his ribs.

At dawn he kneels, robe open, point poised over the soft gap below his heart. The light tastes of winter plum—he remembers choosing that perfume for power, not warmth. The nail sinks a finger-width; pain sears; blood beads dark.

Before he can drive deeper, Meibei's hand cracks against his forearm. The nail clatters. She forces it through the floorboard instead, pinning his sleeve like an insect wing. Two more strikes hammer the nail through flesh into wood. He screams; she backhands him quiet.

...

He steals a porcelain shard from the wash-basin, threads a strip of silk around its edge, and saws at his wrists under the blanket. The cut is long and obedient; blood weeps fast. The blanket darkens, heat fading to wet cold.

Meibei enters carrying a bowl of millet. She smells copper and flies forward. The shard splits his palm when she stamps it; brittle porcelain seeds the wound. She clamps the severed vein with her teeth, spits clots onto the floor, then stitches him with gut pulled from a pouch at her belt. No tremor in her fingers.

"Next time," he rasps, lips grey, "take my head."

She knots the thread tight enough that he coughs from the pain.

...

He fasts, drinking only the water she slides under the door. Ten days shrivel him; sight blurs, knees knock. When collapse comes, he angles his skull to the stone hoping for a fatal break. Her slipper wedges under his temple a hair before impact. She feeds him rice mixed with powdered deer horn; he vomits. She forces the slurry back past his teeth with her thumb.

"Swallow," she orders.

... A splintered roof-tile arrives with the rain—gift of a cracked eave. He grinds dusk-moths and web into paste, coats the shard: crude venom. At moonrise he presses the tile to his tongue, eager for choking.

Meibei drags him bodily to the brazier, rams two fingers into his throat. He retches black foam. She slaps the back of his skull until bile and poison puddle on the hot coals, hissing like curses unfinished. Steam scalds her face; she does not flinch. She yawns, wipes spit from her sleeve.

"Your recipes are out of fashion," she notes.

He sobs, throat raw: "Let the fashion be death."

"Death is a robe you have not earned," she replies, and pours goat milk down his nose so he must swallow or drown.

...

He knots his own intestines to the ceiling in fever-dreams—no rope allowed now, so he tears the sheet into braids, loops them round a ceiling beam, and steps from the window sill. The loop cinches. Larynx crushes. Vision snows.

Then the weight stops. Meibei has climbed the wall cat-quick, knife between teeth. She slices the braid, catches him by the collar mid-fall, tears cartilage from his throat hauling him up. He wheezes, neck purpled, voice gone to cracked glass.

She flips the blade, carves the words "Imperial Property" shallow and neat across his chest. Blood pearls along each stroke.

"Read," she commands. He cannot speak. She digs the point into the fresh script; blood trickles. He gurgles a confirmation.

...

Rainy night. He hoards lamp oil in a wooden bowl, sets the cot ablaze while lying on it, ready to become smoke. Flame licks his robe, hair curls, skin blisters.

The door explodes inward; Meibei throws a bucket of brine so cold it cracks charred planks. Steam scalds both of them. She beats out sparks with her bare palms until flesh peels. The stench of burnt silk and skin claws the air. She drags him into the corridor, shoves his face into the cistern and holds it there till his lungs scream for fire's opposite.

When she lets him gasp air, he whispers, "Please. Mercy."

She shows her ruined hands, skin sloughing like parchment. "I have nothing but mercy for you."

...

The Emperor summons a report; Meibei leaves a single guard. Yile feigns fever, tricks the guard close, snatches his dagger. Blade edge rests at his carotid. The guard freezes. Yile meets his own reflection in the metal—eyes ringed black, yet still calculating. He presses. A bead of blood wells.

Meibei's returning footstep is soft, inevitable. He angles the dagger inward, desperate for speed. She launches a writing-desk across the threshold; it smashes his wrist against the wall. Ulna cracks. Dagger drops. She pins his shoulders with the desk's splintered frame, kneels on his sternum until ribs groan.

"I can't keep going," he pants, tears hot. "Why do you keep me?"

"For the day you beg to live," she answers.

"I beg to die."

She leans close; her breath smells of ashes and ginger root. "Beggars do not choose." She snaps the broken ulna straight; he screams so loud the torches flicker.

Later, splinted, drugged, he lies awake. Meibei sits cross-legged in the doorway, mask blank, hands bandaged. Hours pool. At dawn he croaks, "That day you swore to be my guardian. Are you my jailer or my guardian?"

The mask tilts. "I am the hinge," she says. "Doors open or close by stronger hands. Until then, hinge must hold."

He closes swollen eyes. Breath comes ragged but present. Somewhere inside, disgust shifts toward a colder, smaller shape—endurance.

Weeks stretch on. He studies the ceiling by lamplight, calculating angles, weighting every object for lethal potential. He listens for Meibei's step, already knowing she is the shadow that separates despair from success. He despises her, fears her, owes her each pulse that fouls his ears.

One night he whispers into the dark, unsure if she waits there: "If I live, it is on your leash. If I die, it is by your hand. Either way, I am yours."

The silence that follows is not empty; it is a promise sharpening itself in the dark.

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