Chapter 50 Noble Causes
NOBLE CAUSES
Silian was in her nightgown, in a gazebo on the Thousand Lotus Lake, practicing a Northeastern song on her mandolin. She looked so assured, with her white hair radiant in the moonlight, like there was nothing in the world she was afraid of.
I wondered if Maro ever hurt her.
Maybe it was only normal for a husband to hurt his wife. Maybe it was like how parents hit their children. The good ones did it to teach a lesson, the bad ones because they felt like it. Back in Lu’an, I had never seen Ba lay a hand on Ma, but maybe he only did it when I was not looking.
Silian lowered her mandolin as I approached. “I was not expecting you tonight, Wei.”
Even as anxious as I was, the way she looked at me still made my cheeks heat. “The heart-spirit poem that Maro wrote,” I said, trying to remain focused. “May I see it?”
Something in my voice must have alarmed her, because she took me to his study at once. She watched me copy a segment of it onto a scroll as I explained my predicament and my plan to counter it.
“You seem frightened,” she said. “Are you worried your plan will not work?”
I sucked in a breath, stole a glance out the window at the lantern-lit waters.
“Yes, very. And…” My voice came out quiet.
“And I’m also worried it will work. Yong Hesin is innocent.
I do not wish him harm. All he has ever done is serve the nation dutifully, even if it meant attaching himself to princes he hated.
He definitely doesn’t deserve…” I shuddered even imagining what Terren might do if I successfully convinced him of Hesin’s treason.
Either way, someone was going to have to be on the receiving end of knives.
“He is far from innocent,” Silian countered. “He has made no shortage of ruthless decisions, in the name of serving his nation.”
It was true, but hardly justified what I was about to do to him.
“Silian, I will become no better than the rest of them.” Qin Rong, whose false accusations had nearly destroyed Maro’s reputation.
Empress Sun, whose gambit during my wedding had nearly killed either me or Maya.
Song Siming, who did kill Taifong, gruesomely, just so he could frame Terren for it and turn Hesin against the East Palace.
All those insidious lies, told only for political gain—and now I was about to do the same.
“Is it necessary to be better?” At that moment, Silian’s smile had become as sharp as the empress’s. “Remember: our cause is noble. So many more innocents will die if we let the second son become emperor. Whatever the cost, you must survive to kill him.”
“Everyone believes their own cause is noble.”
“Then may everyone do what they must to win.”
I hid the copied verses somewhere I thought Hesin might find them and asked Wren to keep checking on them.
The moment they went missing, I asked Ciyi to send a message to Terren.
I cannot bear to spend another day without you, the message said.
If I do not see you at once, I shall weep so hard I go blind.
He was sufficiently alarmed when he received me in his tower. “What is it, Wei? Something urgent again?”
“I went to visit Lady Song in the West Palace.” I put a stammer in my voice, as if I expected the news was something he didn’t want to hear. “But before I met up with her, I saw … I saw Hesin there, speaking with your brother.”
He instantly stiffened. “When was this?”
“Two nights ago, after supper.”
“Two nights ago? He told me he was going to your pavilion.”
I lowered my head and said nothing, letting the silence be an implication.
His breaths quickened. “What were they discussing? Did you hear?”
“Yes, some of it. They were walking around the lake, and I could not get close enough to catch it all. But I think … I think they’re looking for a way to depose you through me. They want to come up with enough evidence that I am literate.”
If a prince’s wife was found literate, it would be grounds for him to be deposed.
The idea was that if he couldn’t even keep his own wife in check, how could he keep an entire nation in order?
Usually, any accusations of literacy would be verified through an exam, but with enough proof—especially if it was brought to light by the prince’s own advisor—the exam could be bypassed.
“I don’t believe you,” he said quietly. But beneath the sleeve of his dragon robe, I saw his hands opening and closing into fists. He was nervous.
“Hesin mentioned he had doctored some of your memorials to frame me. In a simple way, a way a woman might have done. Since I am the only one who sleeps with you, I am the only other person who has access to your documents. Any changes to them will be evidence directly pointing to me. They plan to bring them to the public.”
His eyes narrowed. He went to the door, threw it open, and summoned one of the servants waiting outside. “Go get some of my old memorials,” he said to the young and frightened-looking eunuch. “The ones I stamped and sent to Hesin to process. I want to see them.”
As soon as the door was shut again, I said timidly, “There is another thing.”
His head swiveled to me.
“Prince Maro”—I winced, as if I knew saying his brother’s name would enrage him—“is helping him fabricate evidence. He was saying that I would not learn to read without a strong motive. They mentioned … a heart poem. Something like that. I saw Prince Maro giving him a piece of paper.”
Terren was pacing the room now, his ward swirling frantically around him. “No. It can’t be. It can’t be.” He grabbed at his hair. “Hesin is loyal. He has served me since I was sixteen, running council for me all this time. If he wanted to betray me, he would have done so long ago. Why now?”
“Perhaps…” I looked at my feet, trying to seem too afraid to speak my mind.
He spun towards me sharply. “Spit it out already. You have been spying on my behalf for months, and you choose this moment to lose your speech?”
“Perhaps he is afraid of being replaced,” I said in a tiny voice, and immediately flinched as if I expected him to hurt me. I was getting good at this.
He understood my implication at once. “Ah, of course. He sees that I am relying more on you now, and does not like sharing his control of my affairs.” His anguish was plain on his face.
“After he came to serve me, I killed or deposed all my other advisors. I allowed him to be my only ally for years, and now I see that it was a mistake. The moment he sees me listening to someone else, he finds me compromised and plots to remove me.” A bitter laugh.
“Perhaps he has never been loyal to the nation at all. Perhaps it has all been a front to gain power. Perhaps that was all he ever wanted, same as everyone else in the palace, and I was a fool to have assumed him any different.”
My chest felt heavy. Somehow, this seemed the cruelest part of my scheme—this making of an honest man into a villain.
At least when Siming killed Taifong, the eunuch had died true to himself. But with Hesin, nobody would know the depth of his loyalty. His stories would only ever paint him as a lying and power-hungry traitor, if his stories were told at all.
“I wonder what my brother promised him to switch sides. Even more than what he was getting from me?” Another laugh, even more bitter than the first. “Or perhaps Maro didn’t need to offer him much at all. Hesin has always liked him more anyway, ever since we were children. Just like everyone else.”
He went to his wall, plucked a glass jar of wine from his shelf, and downed it all in one drink. Then he let it fall to the ground with a deafening shatter.
This time, my flinch wasn’t feigned.
“Although, there is another possibility.” His sigil flashed, and all the pieces of the glass sharp enough to respond shot up in the air, spinning until their tips pointed at me.
“There is the possibility that you do know how to read, and that Hesin is onto you. That you knew he was coming with evidence against you, so you have come to me first.”
My mouth went completely dry, my heart pounding furiously. “Terren, I—”
“But I don’t think that’s the case.” He let the glass pieces clatter to the ground again, looking satisfied that he had managed to frighten me.
“If you knew how to read, you would not have been lying in bed after our wedding night like a butchered rabbit, bleeding out from that knife wound in your chest.”
If you could read, I knew he must be thinking, surely you would have used one of my Blessings to mend yourself.
A knock on the door interrupted us. It was the young eunuch, returning with a crate of memorials.
Terren drew a few scrolls from the crates, unrolled them, and read them. His expression became darker and darker, sigil flickering with increasing malevolence.
“Go fetch my advisor,” he said to the servant, and this time, there was enough anger in his voice to make even me shiver. “Tell him I wish to discuss … poetry.”
After the servant scurried off, he opened another jar of wine.
My heart raced even faster. Very soon, I would find out if my plan would work. So far, everything had been going my way, but only because Hesin was not present to defend himself. As soon as the eunuch arrived, he would be able to talk to Terren, explain his own side. And Terren could …
I watched as he drank his second jar of wine, staring at the moonlit valleys outside his tower’s window. Terren could conceivably figure out that I had set Hesin up. He was certainly clever enough to.
Clever, but not always rational. I knew him well by now. I knew that sometimes, he was not a person so much as a monster, one with only violent intent and drunken anger. When Hesin came, he could win with reason—but only if Terren listened to it.
I couldn’t let that happen. Tonight, I needed him to be a monster.
I said, “You didn’t kill her.”
It was an abrupt change of topic, and he spun towards me with rightful suspicion. “What are you talking about?”