Huo Qilang pulled the hairpin out from beneath the bed and examined it. It was the most ordinary sort of ornament a woman wore in her hair, with a butterfly at its head and two prongs at its tail. Frequent wear had rubbed away more than half its thin gilding, exposing the copper beneath.
As for the verse, it was the final line of Tao Yuanming, Master Five Willows' "Draft Funeral Elegy." It seemed to have been written in the dark with a finger dipped in rouge, leaving the characters crooked and misshapen.
The sight of the verse filled Baozhu with a vague foreboding. She told Huo Qilang, "This is a death poem."
"The sort of last words people write when they know they're about to die?"
Baozhu nodded and fell silent in thought. The marks in the dust beneath the bed were just large enough for a petite person to hide there, with some round white spots at one end. Others might not have known what those were, but Baozhu, who cried easily, recognized them at once. When someone wept with a fully made-up face, tears washed the powder from her cheeks and carried it down onto the floor.
"That assassin your Third Senior Sister left half dead first pretended to be a bridesmaid from the Pang Family to slip into the Xiao Residence. Then he entered Xiao Ran's bedchamber, found it empty, and put on the bride's wedding robes and jewelry, disguising himself as Xiao Ran-a cuckoo taking over another bird's nest. He probably never imagined that the real bride was crying beneath the bed."
Huo Qilang said, "If Miss Xiao had been bound, gagged, and shoved under the bed so she couldn't make a sound, she could still cry. But how could she write on the underside