Palace Maids, Destinies Bound to the Imperial Palace (3)
Jin Myeong and Jo Sik sat side by side, gazing at Noble Consort Wang, whose complexion had grown markedly more at ease.
"If Your Excellency had been even a little later, this humble official would have been in danger as well."
"It's a wonder you held on at all, Jeonbu."
With the poison that had been devouring her from within now gone, Noble Consort Wang slipped into the first deep sleep she had known in a long time, her breath rising and falling in even measures.
The attending eunuchs and palace maids had returned to their posts, and a couple of young female physicians who had arrived later were visible as well. They all listened closely to the conversation between Jin Myeong and Jo Sik. Beyond the pale nape of Jin Myeong's neck, bared beneath his official cap, the sleeping face of Noble Consort Wang seemed to overlay his own.
"You somehow managed to bring the Thousand-Year Jade Clarity."
"With the name of a Jeonbu who's been making waves lately, plus the Grand Director's name on top of it, what was the Imperial Pharmacy supposed to do? And when I added that it was for Her Highness the Noble Consort, they came running out in their stocking feet."
"The Grand Director's prestige is formidable, after all."
"They just asked me to keep the gossip from spreading. I can leave the aftermath to you, I take it?"
If raw influence alone could pry open those doors, every stray dog and passing crow would be trying to siphon medicines from the Imperial Pharmacy. Confirmation from the Rank 5a Director who headed the Imperial Academy of Medicine was required, and the very finest ingredients were inventoried so strictly that even their quantities were reported to the Emperor himself. Without that, every official with a rank to throw around would strip the place bare the way people plucked licorice root from a village apothecary.
The only men who could ignore the system were Zheng He of the Directorate of Ceremonial and Sa Hapji of the Jinyiwei — because they were the ones who oversaw it. Anyone who laid a careless hand on those stores would be dragged to the interrogation cells of the Jinyiwei's Northern Brocade Guard Prison, and once you went in there, you were more likely to come out a corpse or a cripple than a whole man.
"Of course. If the Imperial Physician simply states that the ingredient was indispensable, there will be no trouble. I will report the rest to the Grand Director myself. As for His Majesty… you understand, I trust?"
"Need you even ask? No sense painting the four corners of the earth in fresh blood. You'll handle it."
Jo Sik, who had grown his bones as a physician inside the imperial palace, grasped Jin Myeong's intent at once. No explanation was required. The Emperor's beloved consort had been poisoned. This would not be a mere wind of blood — the spilled blood would run in rivers. And the present sovereign was the Yongle Emperor, a man who, taking after his father, had made an art of killing people without a second thought.
"I will trust in the Imperial Physician's years of experience. The rest, this humble official will see to."
"Naturally. In any case, well done — such swift judgment. If it hadn't been you, Jeonbu, all hell would have broken loose. Heavens…! Just imagining it is ghastly."
The massacre of three thousand palace maids that had taken place before Jin Myeong's regression was the single incident in the history of the Central Plains in which the greatest number of palace women had been slaughtered in a single stroke. If word of Noble Consort Wang's poisoning reached the Yongle Emperor's ears, every eunuch and palace maid residing in Jangan Palace would be the first to be cut down in a line. As a physician whose calling was to save lives, Jo Sik could not allow such a bloodbath to come to pass.
"It was luck, that's all."
"You — this man! You think luck alone could have done this? No matter how I look at it, you are a heav— the finest inner court official under heaven!"
Jo Sik had been about to say a man appointed by Heaven itself, then thought better of it — such an epithet belonged to the Son of Heaven alone — and changed his words. The eunuchs and palace maids who had been watching nodded along.
I must be losing my mind. My heart's racing over a eunuch. But that face, those broad shoulders… he's young, and brilliant besides. Ah…! If only he weren't a eunuch.
Among them, Yeongsi — a Rank 5b attending maid of Noble Consort Wang — had fallen hard for Jin Myeong. Then again, what palace maid wouldn't have?
"Fengyu," she whispered, beckoning the woman who had just gone to fetch the Imperial Physician, "that's the Jeonbu from the rumors, isn't it? The one who saved His Highness the Crown Prince."
The two of them had spent more than a year or two together at Yeongan Palace, and they were quite close.
"That's right. Why do you ask?"
"How is an inner court official allowed to be that handsome? That striking face, and the force he had just now! Haah… the maids at Yeongan Palace must be living well…"
"And what's wrong with our kind? What, eunuchs aren't allowed to be good-looking?"
Fengyu's mouth puckered into a sulk. Jealousy prickled at her, and envy too — toward Jin Myeong, who was younger than she was.
"No, that's not—! Anyway! I want to meet the Jeonbu… can't you put in a word?"
"Wake up from that dream. The palace maids of Yeongan Palace will have their eyes peeled wide open. More to the point — just now, when the Jeonbu handled Her Highness's jade body… we keep our mouths shut about that, yes?"
"Why would you even say something that obvious? An inner court official touched her to save a life. So what? It isn't as if he kneaded her like dumpling dough. And if it hadn't been for the Jeonbu, we'd all be dead. You'd do well to remember that."
"Right? It shouldn't be a problem, then?"
"Of course not. If you so much as mention it, I'll kill you first."
While the two of them whispered, Jin Myeong had sunk back into thought.
Lady Yeo and Lady Eo, who had brought the fragrance sachets and the incense pieces. The two of them had been caught in an affair with eunuchs and, once discovered, had taken their own lives. And then there was the identity of the female physician who had brought the agarwood. What bound those three together, and how Noble Consort Wang's sudden death connected to the great massacre of the palace maids — he was sorting the tangled threads one by one.
The one who brought the agarwood was a female physician of the Imperial Academy of Medicine.
The crux was who that physician was. Only by gathering Lady Yeo, Lady Eo, and the physician together and investigating all three could he grasp the whole picture.
Lady Yeo and Lady Eo killed themselves the moment they were found out. One palace maid confessed that Lady Yeo and Lady Eo had tried to murder the Yongle Emperor… wait. This…?
As he retraced the massacre of the palace maids in chronological order, a hypothesis flashed through Jin Myeong's mind. There had been other women central to that incident besides Lady Yeo and Lady Eo. Two of them, in fact. And one of those two almost certainly held the key to everything.
In the same hour that Jin Myeong sat lost in thought, Yang Huiyeon — a Rank 7a Yangshi of the Imperial Academy of Medicine — was gazing steadily at Noble Consort Wang, who had clawed her way back from the brink.
How did a eunuch that young figure it out? What kind of training does the Directorate of Ceremonial even give, that he could identify Heart-Penetrating Incense Poison…
Before she had come to Jangan Palace, she had heard every word of the eunuch who had burst in with a face gone black.
"He said you must bring Imperial Physician Jo Sik, without fail!"
That he had singled out Jo Sik — the most skilled among all the imperial physicians — had been startling enough.
"The Jeonbu said you must bring it, without fail!"
And then, of all things, his superior had told him to bring the Thousand-Year Jade Clarity. Yang Huiyeon's mind had gone razor-sharp in that instant. She had known at once that Fengyu had come because of Noble Consort Wang. The Thousand-Year Jade Clarity was the antidote to Heart-Penetrating Incense Poison — the very poison she herself had used on the Consort.
They said he was no ordinary man.
Yang Huiyeon felt a pure, ungrudging admiration. Heart-Penetrating Incense Poison was no common toxin. It used a single poison as its base, then layered two fragrances over it so that the venom seeped in by slow degrees — a composite fragrance poison. Even the method of combining it was known to vanishingly few. And a eunuch barely out of boyhood had recognized it. He had even known the antidote. It was a shock.
If the Imperial Physician had not carried the Thousand-Year Jade Clarity with him, Noble Consort Wang would certainly have died. That a woman who had been as good as dead had clawed back to life, that the plan had come apart — all of it was because of that young Jeonbu.
Yang Huiyeon had no way of knowing that Jin Myeong had lived for a full twenty-nine years as a eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial and a guardsman of the Eastern Depot, so her reaction was only natural.
It doesn't matter. Everything ends today.
A plan a month in the making had failed, but that was of no consequence. She had come in person. The Yongle Emperor's beloved consort had collapsed; he would cast everything aside and come running. A man she could not ordinarily approach within a hundred paces would come within ten — perhaps even five. And then she could finish it here. All of it. The long, long road of vengeance.
Zhu the thief. I was going to take the things you cherish one by one and kill you last of all.
Yang Huiyeon's true name was Fang Huiyeon. She was of the blood of Fang Xiaoru, the man who had refused to the very end to draft the Yongle Emperor's accession edict, and who had died with his mouth torn open to the ears along with ten degrees of his kinship. She was the granddaughter a single scholar, a follower of her grandfather, had snatched from death by a hair. Raised thereafter in that scholar's care, Fang Huiyeon had become a member of Suchengye as if by nature, and a year ago she had infiltrated the imperial palace as a female physician.
This Fang Huiyeon meant to tear your mouth to your ears with her own hands.
She was still turning that thought when the voice came, exactly as she had expected, announcing that the Yongle Emperor had arrived at last.
It felt as though blood heated in her heart were surging up toward her brain. Her chest pounded. The beat of her heart began to climb with a frightening force — the sweet tremor of vengeance on the verge of completion, and the desolate shudder of a farewell to a world that had been paved with nothing but revenge.
Zhu the thief! Your end has come as well…?
She was waiting only for the Yongle Emperor to step into the chamber, her hand drifting toward the fold of her robe, when Fang Huiyeon found herself looking straight into the eyes of a eunuch who was staring right at her.
Jin Myeong.
In the time before the Yongle Emperor arrived, Jin Myeong's mind had been swimming through memory, dismantling that day's events piece by piece and taking them apart.
The other two.
He had not known either of their names. Back then he had been nothing more than a wooden-plaque attendant of the Directorate of Imperial Stables, and he had only glimpsed their heads in passing after they had been put on display. Faces, then — that was all he had seen. And yet the shock those two women had sent through the outcome of the affair had been far greater than anything Lady Yeo or Lady Eo had done. Lady Yeo and Lady Eo had been the spark. Those two had poured on the oil.
One of them made a false confession.
One of them, unable to endure the savage torture, had falsely confessed that Lady Yeo and Lady Eo — who had already taken their own lives — had intended to assassinate the Yongle Emperor. The trouble was that the confession had not saved her own life. It had awakened the Yongle Emperor's instinct to kill. With Noble Consort Wang already dead, and now this piled on top of it, the Emperor had gone clean out of his mind. He had come down to the execution ground in person, taken up a blade, and stabbed the palace maids to death. One, and then another.
And the last one — the woman people said must have been seized by some madness.
The other had been even more of a spectacle. According to the eunuchs who had been on the execution ground that day, one palace maid had taken one look at the Yongle Emperor, her eyes had rolled back, and she had begun to scream at the top of her lungs.
When she finished speaking, her whole body had begun to shake like an aspen in the wind, as though a ghost had taken her. So the Jinyiwei had struck off her head — and the fates of some two thousand eight hundred palace maids had been sealed in that very instant.
"Halt the interrogation. Drag them all out and put them to Lingchi!"
Believing he had been humiliated by that palace maid, the Yongle Emperor had lost his reason completely, and that had been the end of it. The screams and groans of three thousand palace women had covered the sky over Yingtianfu. So harrowing had it been that the terrified commoners of the city had not dared set foot outside their homes.
One of those two is definitely at the Imperial Academy of Medicine. But when am I supposed to search the entire Academy…
In any case, he had the gut feeling that one of them was the female physician who had brought the agarwood. The problem was how to find a physician whose name he did not know and whose face he remembered only as a blur. In years, it had been a matter of some thirty years past.
If I gather the people of the Imperial Academy of Medicine in one place, she'll surely grow suspicious.
Word that Noble Consort Wang had collapsed was already out. In a situation like that, if he suddenly called everyone together, only a complete fool would fail to realize she had been found out. She would have heard, too, that he had asked for the Thousand-Year Jade Clarity, and from that she would know that this side had identified the Heart-Penetrating Incense Poison. Then she might vanish — or she might attempt something even larger.
He was still turning those complicated thoughts when—
No choice but to check them one by one…? Oho…! This one should have been selected as an imperial consort, not a physician.
The profile of one of the Academy's female physicians had caught his eye. A rounded brow and crescent-moon eyebrows, large eyes and a sharp bridge of the nose running down to a small, neat mouth. It was only a side view, but she was a beauty who could stand comparison with Yeong Hwa, first among the Thirteen Flowers of Yuwol Pavilion.
I can tell from the profile alone. Who do you think I am? The Crown Prince of Yuwol Pavilion…!
As if to prove he was a man with a grudge from all those years spent as a eunuch, Jin Myeong — who had, a moment before, been sunk in the gravest of thoughts — had already forgotten that fact entirely and drifted into the appreciation of a beautiful face.
She's far too…
Then, in a single instant, Jin Myeong felt something strange. How to put it — a jarring sense of dislocation in the physician's bearing.
…calm.
He understood now why she had drawn his eye. In the atmosphere of the hall, she alone felt set apart. As if she were dwelling in another world entirely, she was far too composed. There was no sign that she was worried for Noble Consort Wang, and she did not even seem particularly interested. Her body was inside the pavilion, yet she was watching only the great gates of Jangan Palace — as though she were waiting for someone.
Her hands… if someone gripped a chopping blade every day…
And then there were her hands. It was only after the regression that Jin Myeong had begun looking at a woman's face first because he had started to like women. By nature, martial men instinctively examined another person's hands. Assassins were everywhere in the jianghu. Unlike a face that belonged in a painting of a beauty, the physician's hands were coarse. They looked like hands that had held some hard hilt for a very long time. She was a physician, so it could have come from gripping the handle of a medicinal chopping blade — but if she were a martial artist, those were without question the hands of someone who had held a sword hilt or a saber grip for years.
In that instant—
The voice announcing the Yongle Emperor's arrival rang out, and presently the Yongle Emperor and Zheng He entered. In that moment, Jin Myeong's eyes met those of the physician he had been watching all along.
His expectation had been right. She was a beauty striking enough to make the eyes fly open — and that was the problem. That beautiful face resembled someone, and resembled them terribly.
Over that face, so lucid it might have been painted by a master, another face superimposed itself. The face of the palace maid who, before the regression, had flown into a frenzy at the sight of the Yongle Emperor on the execution ground.
In a single instant, lightning struck through Jin Myeong's mind, and his pupils blew wide.
Why…?
It was the same on the other side. This was the hour when she ought to have been driving the blade of vengeance into her enemy, cutting and stabbing — and yet Fang Huiyeon, too, could not tear her eyes away.
Like people who had felt the pull of destiny itself, the two of them rose without looking away from each other's faces and formed ranks to one side. The Emperor had come. They were obliged to receive him.
And then—
Tread. Tread.
The sound of the Yongle Emperor drawing near. A slow gait, and yet a solid one, carried by a commanding frame. A broad forehead, eyebrows as dark as if charcoal had been set into the skin, and beneath them the eyes of a mad dragon, set like crystals.
Those mad-dragon pupils, pouring forth the fires of hell in ceaseless streams, looked down upon the world with contempt.
The people were so tense that the sound of their own swallowing made them flinch, and they shuddered at the sensation of every fine hair on their bodies standing on end, one by one.
The third emperor of the Great Ming. The first sovereign of a Han Chinese dynasty to campaign beyond the Gobi Desert. The iron-blooded emperor who had grown the Great Ming into an empire of the world. The conquering monarch, Chengzu — the Yongle Emperor.
And then—
A single phrase. Everything before and after cut away, leaving only those words — that he would hear it. The bodies of everyone standing there flinched as one.