Jinghe Year Fifteen, Twelfth Month, Twenty-Ninth Day. The snow had cleared.
The sky was fair, yet the clouds hung low.
The sunlight was deathly pale, bringing no warmth to the ground.
Runoff from the eaves had frozen into icicles more than a foot long. They swayed in the wind, dangling overhead, with no telling when one might fall.
Before the Ministry of Revenue offices, the snow had been cleared from the stone steps, but ice remained in the cracks, thin as autumn frost.
At the charcoal shop beside the offices, the furnace blazed. Its warmth reached several paces out, yet passersby merely breathed on their hands and hurried along, none daring to linger.
On the old plum tree above the wall, a few frozen buds were the very color of the lingering snow.
Blossoms and snow dissolved into a boundless white, impossible to distinguish.
The wind passed, and white flakes fell together-whether fading blossoms or falling snow, no one could tell.
Zou Mo had been waiting at the foot of the Ministry of Revenue's steps for half an hour.
Presently, a clerk emerged, his face piled with smiles and his voice warm:
"Oh dear! Vice Minister Zou, what unfortunate timing. The Grand Secretary is feeling unwell today and has just declined all visitors."
"Perhaps you could return tomorrow, Vice Minister?"
Zou Mo said nothing. He raised his head to look up at the Ministry of Revenue's plaque, then glanced at the clerk's smiling face.
He was the Left Attendant of the Ministry of Personnel, a third-rank court official. Since Lord Feng's departure, most of the ministry's affairs had passed through his hands. When had he ever suffered such a cold reception beneath another man's eaves?
When all was said and done, it was only because Shen Duan had sternly