Chapter 7: The Alliance of Thorns
The note trembled in Li Mei’s fingers, the ink still fresh enough to smear against her skin. *They know. This time, run.* The words were a ghost of her own hand—a message she had never written in this life, yet one her soul remembered from the ashes of the last.
*They know.* Who? The Emperor? Her husband? The concubines who whispered poison into the night? She crushed the paper into her sleeve, forcing her breath to steady. Running was what the old Li Mei would do. The woman who had died screaming in a fire of her own making. This Li Mei had been reborn with claws.
And claws needed allies.
The imperial palace was a nest of vipers, but there was one viper who hated Prince Xian more than she did. Lady Xu, the late Empress’s younger sister, had been stripped of her title, her lands, her very name—all for the crime of witnessing the truth of Empress Chen’s death. The same truth Li Mei had uncovered in her final hours: that the Emperor’s favorite consort had been poisoned, and Prince Xian had held the cup.
Lady Xu had been exiled to the Cold Palace, a forgotten corner of the Forbidden City where disgraced noblewomen went to rot. No one visited. No one dared. The guards at the gate accepted Li Mei’s bribe with greedy eyes and a warning: “She’s mad, my lady. Bites like a feral dog.”
Li Mei smiled. “I’m counting on it.”
The Cold Palace lived up to its name. Frost clung to the crumbling stone walls even in the late spring, and the air smelled of mold and despair. She found Lady Xu in a shattered courtyard, surrounded by weeds that had grown tall enough to swallow a woman whole. The former noblewoman sat on a broken stool, her once-lustrous hair now a tangled gray rope, her robes patched and soiled. She was carving something into a piece of wood with a rusted nail.
“Another crow sent to peck at my bones?” Lady Xu’s voice was a rasp, but her eyes—those eyes were sharp as shards of glass. “The Emperor grows bold. Does he think I don’t know he sent the last one to ‘check on my health’? He had her drowned in the koi pond.”
Li Mei stepped closer, careful to keep her hands visible. “I’m not his crow. I’m the fire that will burn his nest.”
Lady Xu paused, the nail hovering mid-carve. She looked up, and for a long moment, the two women studied each other across the divide of rank, madness, and shared hatred.
“You’re Prince Xian’s new bride,” Lady Xu said slowly. “The country girl with the green eyes. They say you’re already turning his household into a battleground.”
“They say correctly.” Li Mei knelt, bringing herself to eye level with the exiled woman. “And I know what they did to your sister. I know who held the cup.”
The rusted nail clattered to the ground. Lady Xu’s face, weathered and gaunt, twisted into something raw and hungry. “You could not possibly—”
“Empress Chen’s jade hairpin was found in the gardens the morning after her death. But it wasn’t lost. It was placed there—by a maid who was paid in gold that came from Prince Xian’s private coffer.” Li Mei recited the facts with cold precision, each word a blade. “The poison was *bittersweet nightshade*, brewed into her evening tea. The Emperor suspected, but he needed Prince Xian’s military support to quell the northern rebellion. So he chose silence over justice, and you chose to speak.”
Lady Xu’s breath came in ragged gasps. “I chose to scream. And for that, they called me mad and locked me here to die forgotten.”
“I’m not offering you justice,” Li Mei said. “Justice is a word for poets and fools. I’m offering you revenge—the slow, burning kind that leaves empires in ashes.”
The silence stretched, taut as a bowstring. Then Lady Xu laughed, a cracked, broken sound that echoed off the frozen walls. “You want my secrets. The names, the alliances, the cracks in the imperial foundation that no one else remembers.”
“I want to know who the Emperor fears,” Li Mei said. “And who he trusts. I want to know where the bodies are buried—literally and metaphorically. In return, I will restore your title. I will give you back your name, your lands, and the right to walk the halls of this palace with your head high.”
“And if I refuse?”
Li Mei’s smile was thin and sharp. “Then I walk away, and you die here, forgotten, carving your sister’s face into a piece of rotting wood until your hands give out and the frost takes you. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve *been* it.”
She didn’t have to elaborate. Lady Xu stared at her, and in that stare, Li Mei saw the flicker of recognition—the understanding that they were two women forged in the same fire, burned by the same men, and now standing on the edge of the same precipice.
“There is a tunnel,” Lady Xu whispered. “Beneath the Empress’s old chambers. It leads outside the palace walls, to a house that belongs to a man called the Kestrel. He is the Emperor’s shadow—the one who does the bloodwork that cannot be spoken of. Find him, and you find every secret the throne has ever tried to bury.”
Li Mei leaned forward. “And who guards the tunnel?”
“No one. It’s been sealed since my sister’s death.” Lady Xu’s eyes glittered with a terrible triumph. “But I know how to unseal it. The lock is keyed to a song—a lullaby my sister used to sing to her son. The Crown Prince. The boy the Emperor claims is his heir.”
The Crown Prince. Li Mei’s mind raced. She had seen him once, a pale, silent child who never smiled. If she could reach him—if she could plant a seed of doubt in his mind about his father’s love for him—
“You’ll have your title by the next full moon,” Li Mei said, rising to her feet. “But I need one more thing.”
“Name it.”
“The name of the woman who poured the poison. The one who actually held the cup.”
Lady Xu’s lips curled into a smile that belonged on a skull. “That’s the sweetest part, dear girl. She’s still in the palace. She’s the one who taught you how to dress your hair. She’s your mother-in-law’s most trusted handmaiden.” She let the words hang in the air. “Her name is Nanny Fang.”
Li Mei’s blood sang with cold fury. *Nanny Fang.* The woman who had smiled at her every morning, who had braided her hair and whispered prayers for her fertility. She had been the one. The killer was already inside the gates.
She turned to leave, but Lady Xu’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. The grip was iron-strong, the nails biting into her skin.
“One more thing, Phoenix.” The nickname curled from her lips like a curse and a blessing. “They know you’re coming. The note you found—it wasn’t from the future. It was from the present. Someone in your own household wrote it.”
Li Mei froze. The handwriting. *Her own.* But she hadn’t written it.
“Look closer at the paper,” Lady Xu hissed. “The ink is silver. That’s not your handwriting—it’s your *mirror*.”
The world tilted. Her mirror. The reflection in her chamber—the woman who had smiled back at her with a stranger’s eyes. Could it be—
A shriek split the air from beyond the Cold Palace walls. A servant’s voice, high and terrified. “Fire! The east wing is on fire!”
Li Mei wrenched her wrist free, heart pounding. The east wing. Her chambers. The fire was already licking at the sky, orange and hungry, devouring the place where she slept.
And she knew, with chilling certainty, that whoever had written that note had just lit the match.