Uncle Fu stood outside the bedroom door, rubbing his hands for a long time before he dared knock.
"Your Highness, it's time to get up."
There was no movement inside.
He knocked twice more.
"Your Highness, all six ladies are waiting in the front hall to pay their respects to you."
The door opened a crack, and Gu Moran showed half his face. His hair hung loose, with a lock draped across the bridge of his nose, and his eyelids drooped. He looked as though he had been hauled out of a wine vat.
"What time is it?"
"Between seven and nine. The ladies have been waiting since a quarter to six."
"That early? Aren't they sleepy?"
Uncle Fu pulled a pained face and lowered his voice. "Your Highness, there's trouble over where they stand. Madam Su arrived first and stood at the very front, saying that as the prime minister's legitimate daughter, she had the highest status. Lady Lin wouldn't yield, saying a distinguished military family was no lower than a civil official's. Princess Murong went straight in front of Madam Su and said a princess of the Northern Territory outranked everyone."
"And then?"
"Madam Su said nothing, but Biyu and Batuer faced off. Batuer put her hand on her sword hilt, and Biyu pulled a pair of scissors from her sleeve."
"Scissors?"
"Biyu said they were for embroidery."
"Pulling embroidery scissors during morning greetings? What kind of flowers was she embroidering?"
Uncle Fu didn't dare answer.
Gu Moran rubbed his temples. Without combing his hair or straightening his clothes, he shuffled toward the front hall with his hair loose and his shoes half on.
The scene in the front hall was just as Uncle Fu had described it.
Su Yao stood at the front on the right, her back straight and her eyes fixed ahead.
Murong Xue stood half a step in front of her, arms folded and chin raised.
Lin Qingdai stood level with Su Yao, a foot between them. Neither would yield to the other.
Shen Ling'er stood at the back against the wall, holding a cup of tea. When she saw him enter, she smiled and raised her cup.
Liu Ruyan stood beside a pillar in the side hall, neither competing nor retreating. Xie Wanqing stood at the very end, three paces from the others, her hands at her sides and her eyes on the ground.
Gu Moran stood in the doorway and gave an enormous yawn.
"Husband, are you still not awake?" Shen Ling'er asked sweetly.
"No." He leaned against the doorframe and looked around. "Let me say something."
"You're all excused from paying your morning and evening respects to me. Go back to your own rooms and eat breakfast. Tell the kitchen whatever you want; the braised pork hock is especially good."
Su Yao pressed her lips together.
"Your Highness, for every day the position of principal wife remains unsettled, order in the residence will remain unstable."
Gu Moran tilted his head and looked at her for two seconds.
"Who do you think should be principal wife, eldest Miss Su?"
The front hall fell silent. Lin Qingdai shot a glance over, and Murong Xue lowered her arms from her chest.
Su Yao said nothing.
"See? None of you can say it." Gu Moran waved a hand. "Enough for now. Go back and eat."
He had already turned and left as he spoke. Passing the flower trellis in the courtyard, he casually plucked a peony and tucked it behind his ear, then sauntered toward the exit.
"Where are you going, Your Highness?" Su Yao asked from behind him.
"Out for a drink."
He swung onto his horse and rode away.
After the sound of hooves faded into the distance, the front hall remained quiet for a few breaths.
Shen Ling'er clapped her hands. "That's it, everyone, off to breakfast!"
She headed out, then paused as she passed Xie Wanqing.
"Sister Xie, there's no color in your lips. You didn't sleep well last night, did you?"
"I slept."
"Don't be so particular about the rules from now on. Husband doesn't care about them anyway."
Xie Wanqing didn't answer. She lowered her head and walked away. Shen Ling'er watched her go, her smile fading, then followed her out.
Only Su Yao and Liu Ruyan remained in the front hall. They walked out in silence, one behind the other.
After leaving the prince's residence, Gu Moran headed toward the flower quarter, then turned into a teahouse at the entrance to an alley at its eastern end and went up to the second floor.
The teahouse owner, surnamed Zhao, was a covert agent for the prince's residence.
"Your Highness, we've found news of Ye Qingyun." Boss Zhao pushed a letter over to him.
"Where is he?"
"He's left Jizhou. At his current pace, he'll reach the capital in another twelve days."
"Anything unusual on the road?"
"He met a wandering Daoist priest in Jizhou. The priest gave him an ancient scroll, but we couldn't find out what was in it."
The ancient scroll-the first treasure of fortune Ye Qingyun obtained in the original story, which recorded a lost cultivation technique.
The timeline matched up.
He folded the letter and slipped it under his teacup. He sat in the teahouse for two hours, going through every piece of information he could obtain.
Then he slipped out the back door, took a roundabout route, and swaggered back through the main gate of the prince's residence.
As he entered, he shouted at the gatekeeper, "Today's wine was no good. It was watered down! Those crooked merchants only know how to swindle me out of my silver!"
The gatekeeper hunched his shoulders and gave him an apologetic smile.
Partway inside, Gu Moran ran into a maid carrying a bowl of medicine. He tilted his head and leaned over to sniff it.
"Who's that for?"
"Your Highness, it's a soothing decoction for Madam Xie."
"A soothing decoction?"
He pulled the peony from behind his ear and stuck it into the bowl with a smack, splashing the maid's hand with the liquid.
"Tell Madam Xie I said that if she can't sleep, she should count sheep. She's sure to be asleep by the time she reaches a hundred. Medicine is bitter, so don't drink it."
The maid stared at the flower in the medicine bowl and opened her mouth, then carried the bowl away.
Humming an off-key little tune, he entered the study.
Strategies for Governing the State, which he had read the night before, lay open on the desk. He turned to the seventh volume and placed the pages covered in annotations on top.
Su Yao's courtyard was fewer than thirty paces from this study.
After practicing her calligraphy in the afternoon, she would most likely come out for a walk.
As the prime minister's legitimate daughter, someone who had grown up steeped in books and documents, she couldn't possibly pass a study with its door ajar without growing curious.
He laid the book open in the middle of the desk, then got up and pulled the door nearly shut, leaving a gap neither too wide nor too narrow, just enough to see the light inside.
Then he returned to his bedroom, shut the door, and caught up on sleep.
That afternoon.
Su Yao practiced calligraphy in the Clear Frost Courtyard. She wrote three sheets in small regular script, but was dissatisfied with all of them and crumpled them up and threw them away.
She put down her brush, paced around the room twice, then walked to the doorway and stopped.
The study was directly opposite. Its door stood ajar, and no sound came from within.
She stood there for a while, then stepped over to it.
I'm not deliberately prying. I'm just passing by, she told herself.
Before pushing the door open, she looked back down the corridor. No one was there.
She pushed the door open.
The study was cleaner than she had imagined. Six brushes hung from the brush rack, the inkstone had been washed clean, and the ink stick lay in its case.
What seemed out of place was the copy of Strategies for Governing the State lying open on the desk.
Written by the founding grand preceptor, the work on statecraft ran to twelve volumes. More than half the students at the Imperial Academy couldn't make it through the first three.
This copy was open to the seventh volume, and the margins were covered in tiny characters no larger than flies' heads.
She lowered her head and read.
"The flaw in the system of levying one part in fifteen lies in its enforcement, not the tax rate. Local officials add surcharge upon surcharge in the name of silver-melting fees, and the people's actual tax burden has already exceeded three parts in ten. If this continues, it will surely drive displaced people to rise up everywhere."
The next line.
"The solution lies not in reducing taxes, but in purging corrupt officials. To speak of reducing taxes without cleaning up the administration is no different from cutting off one's own flesh to feed a tiger."
The line after that.
"The grand preceptor's argument commands a sweeping view, but is too general. It fails to address the abuses of clerks at the lowest levels. This is a study-bound argument, not a strategy for the fields."
Every sentence struck at the heart of the matter. Taxation, the administration of officials, and enforcement at the lowest levels-the three layers of analysis linked together one after another.
She turned two pages. What followed was even more detailed: the state monopoly on salt and iron, reform of grain transport, pay for the frontier troops. Every issue had a complete analysis and rebuttal. She had heard her father and his advisers discuss some of these views at the prime minister's residence, but conclusions the advisers had spent three days reaching were refuted in a single sentence in this book, with sound reasoning and evidence.
The capital's number-one wastrel.
Gu Moran, who drank wine and chased cranes, who stuck flowers into bowls of medicine.
Could he have written something like this?
She closed the book, hurried out of the study, and pulled the door back to its half-open position.
On the way back to her courtyard, her steps were a little quicker than they had been on the way there.
Biyu was waiting at the courtyard gate. "Where did you go, Miss?"
"For a walk."
Su Yao went inside, sat down, poured a cup of tea, and took two sips.
"Biyu, look into something for me."
"As you wish, Miss."
"Find out whether there are any capable advisers in the prince's residence, or any scholars who often write on His Highness's behalf. Be thorough, and don't alert anyone."
Biyu acknowledged the order and withdrew.
Su Yao sat at the table, her finger circling the rim of her cup again and again.
She recognized the handwriting in those annotations-it was identical to the signature on the red wedding envelope.
It was Gu Moran's handwriting.
Outside the window, the branches of a white plum tree swayed gently in the wind.
The system panel quietly flashed a line of text in the study.
[Su Yao's favorability: -63 (↑2), source of fluctuation: the annotations in Strategies for Governing the State prepared in advance by the host triggered a cognitive conflict; "confusion" emotional marker intensity +1.]