11. First Contact #2
I don’t require rest. I require everyone to stop looking at me. But I take his arm because the alternative is standing in front of the entire court while tears prick at my eyes.
Hormones.
Definitely hormones.
The door to our chambers closes behind us, and the silence that follows is nothing like the silence of the throne room. This is just… ours. The kind that doesn’t need filling.
He hasn’t let go of my hand. I haven’t pulled away.
The formal robes suddenly feel too heavy, too ceremonial for this moment. I want to shed all of it—the silk, the phoenixes, the weight of being the emperor’s betrothed when right now I’m just a woman whose daughter decided to announce herself in front of the entire imperial court.
The baby kicks again—she seems to like the movement, the change in position—and his breath does that thing again. That small catch. That barely-there hitch that says more than any words could.
“You just approved an entire trade agreement you didn’t read.”
“I’ll read it later.”
“It could have been terrible.”
“It could have been.” He doesn’t seem concerned. His hand is still on my stomach, warm through the layers of silk. “I had more important things to attend to.”
The baby kicks again. Harder this time.
“She kicked you,” I say.
“She kicked me?”
“She has opinions already.”
“She gets that from you.”
“...Fair.”
Dumpling appears from wherever cats go when they’re not supervising human disasters. He launches himself onto my lap—his rightful territory, the spot he’s claimed since I started showing—and settles with a proprietary rumble.
The baby kicks.
Dumpling startles. Falls off my lap with maximum feline indignity. Lands on his feet—of course—but the betrayal in his eyes is absolute. He stares at my stomach.
The stomach that has betrayed him.
“Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
He stalks to the corner. Sits. Begins grooming with aggressive intensity, his back pointedly turned to the source of his displacement.
“He’s going to hold a grudge, isn’t he?”
“The cat holds grudges against furniture,” Ren says. “This is personal.”
I watch Dumpling’s tail twitch with restrained fury. The baby shifts inside me—settling, learning, real—and something in my chest cracks open a little further.
“The Xiang concessions.” I drag my mind back to matters that should concern me. “What were they?”
Ren pauses. The first fracture in his unconcern.
“I’ll find out.”
“You approved something involving Xiang without knowing what it was?”
“I was distracted.”
“By my stomach.”
“By my daughter.”
I want to be annoyed. I want to point out that emperors can’t afford distraction, that Xiang has been circling like wolves for months, that whatever he just approved could have diplomatic implications we’ll spend weeks untangling.
I don’t. Because he called her my daughter, and my chest does something inadvisable.
“Find out what you approved,” I manage. “Before Xiang does.”
He nods. His hand finally leaves my stomach—I feel the absence like a chill—and he straightens into the emperor I know.
“I’ll have the Ministry of Trade review the full text. The amendments can be drafted before anyone notices.”
“And if they do notice?”
His mouth curves. That almost-smile that’s more dangerous than it should be.
“Then they’ll know I have priorities they can’t predict. That’s not entirely disadvantageous.”
He’s already calculating how to turn the mistake into strategy. Of course he is. This is how his mind works—every setback becomes a tool, every vulnerability becomes information about what to protect.
I’m one of those things now. Something he protects. Something he prioritizes over trade agreements and political maneuvering and the slow grinding machinery of empire.
It should feel like a cage.
It doesn’t.
The archives swallow sound. Every footstep arrives muffled, like the room disapproves of noise.
I settle into my usual alcove—the one with the best light and the clearest sightlines to both exits—and begin pulling records.
Servant rotations. Duty assignments. Financial disbursements from the household treasury.
The careful documentation that empires require and most people never bother to read.
Someone tried to poison me. A trained operative who knew where I’d be and when.
The poison itself told me something. Delayed onset—designed to kill slowly, to leave time for the assassin to establish an alibi. Not the work of an amateur. Not passion or impulse. Professional.
Which means a professional hired them. The kind who knows how to cover their tracks.
But I’ve been hunting people for eight hundred years. Tracks fade. They don’t disappear entirely. Not if you know where to look.
I cross-reference the duty roster from the night of the attempt against the servant assignments for the following weeks. Look for anomalies. Transfers. Unexplained absences. The small administrative shuffles that might explain how poison ended up in my food.
There.
A servant named Mei-Tang—not Lady Mei, a different Mei, this palace has too many Meis—was on duty in the kitchens the night of the poisoning.
Three days later, she was transferred to the eastern wing.
No explanation in the records. No disciplinary note.
Just a quiet reassignment that would be invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking.
I’ve been focusing on the attempt itself, the poison, the method. But the cover-up—that’s where people make mistakes.
Not proof. But a thread.
I make a note. Cross-reference her name against the financial records Jing compiled. Look for connections, payments, anything that might explain why a kitchen servant suddenly needed to be somewhere else.
I pull another set of records. Who was on duty. Who had access to the sealed correspondence.
Another anomaly. A courier named Zhou-something was assigned to the imperial wing three times that week—unusual for a junior messenger. And then, nothing. No more assignments. No termination notice. Just... absence.
Two threads now. Two people who were where they shouldn’t have been, who disappeared into the palace bureaucracy like stones dropped in still water.
Someone is very good at covering their tracks. Someone who thought a pregnant woman would be too distracted to look.
They were wrong.
“I brought tea.”
I don’t startle. I heard her coming. Jing moves like someone who’s spent her entire life trying not to disturb anyone, but she still makes noise. Everyone makes noise.
She stands in the archive doorway holding a tray, her fingers white-knuckled around the handles. She’s been bringing me tea for months now. I’ve been refusing it for months. At some point, this became a ritual neither of us knows how to end.
“I also brought—” She adjusts her grip, revealing the stack of books balanced precariously beside the teapot. “I compiled a summary of the third trimester. With annotations.”
“Jing. I’m in the second trimester.”
“I like to be prepared.”
The books are color-coded. The tabs have subcategories. The subcategories have cross-references. She’s read all of them—there is at least thirty-seven of them—twice, and produced documentation that would shame most imperial archives.
There’s one with green tabs about nutrition. One with blue tabs about common complications. One with red tabs that I suspect covers everything that could possibly go wrong, because Jing is nothing if not thorough in her anxieties.
This is how Jing says I’m terrified for you and I’m doing something about it.
I should tell her it’s unnecessary. That I’ve survived eight hundred years without color-coded tabs, that I’m perfectly capable of growing a baby without academic supervision.
Her hands are shaking. Just slightly.
She’s twenty-two years old. She passed her archivist qualifying exams with distinction. She’s been orbiting me like a nervous moon since I first showed up in this palace, bringing tea I don’t drink and information I don’t ask for and stubborn, relentless care that I have no idea what to do with.
“Thank you,” I say. “Leave them on the desk.”
She stares at me. Blinks. Stares some more.
“The desk,” I repeat. “The flat wooden thing with the papers on it.”
“You’re— you’re going to read them?”
“That is generally what one does with books.”
“I—” Her voice climbs an octave. “I didn’t think you’d actually— I mean, I hoped, but—”
“The tea is getting cold, Jing.”
“Right! The tea!” She sets it down with exaggerated care, as if the pot contains something more volatile than ginger. “It’s ginger. For— I read that ginger helps with—”
“Jing.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For the books. And the tea.”
She makes a sound like a small animal being stepped on. Her eyes are suspiciously bright.
“I’m not dying,” I say. “I just said thank you.”
“I know, I just—” She backs toward the door, trips over nothing, catches herself on the frame. “No one ever— you never—” She takes a breath. Tries again. “If you need anything else, I’ll be— I’m always— you know where to find me.”
She flees before I can respond. The books remain, their careful tabs catching the lamplight like small prayers.
I pick up the one with green tabs. Flip it open. Her handwriting fills the margins—neat, precise, slightly frantic in places. Note: maternal diet affects infant temperament—see also section on cravings and cultural factors.
She cares about me.
It’s been a long time since someone cared about me who wasn’t actively trying to kill me or sleep with me. I don’t know what to do with it.
I set the book down gently. Return to my records.
Tomorrow, I’ll read her notes. Tonight, I have work to do.
Evening settles over the palace like a held breath.
Ren returns as the light goes golden through the windows. He looks tired—emperor tired, the kind that sits behind the eyes and never quite leaves—but he comes straight to where I’m curled in the window seat, my investigation notes spread around me like evidence of obsession.