The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis

The doors to the Emperor's chambers had a way of closing like a sentence.

Mingyu heard the finality of it even after he stepped away, even after the eunuchs fell into place behind him and the guards matched his pace, even after the lamp in the alcove bowed with the draft and then straightened as if pretending nothing had happened inside that room.

He didn't look back.

He felt her still—the warmth of Xinying's forehead under his mouth, the small shift of her body as she settled into the mattress because he told her to. He carried the fact that she was resting the way other men carried swords. It changed the angle of his spine. It changed what he would and would not allow tonight.

"Clear the way," the senior eunuch murmured, and the corridor obeyed. Maids pressed back against lacquered pillars and lowered their eyes. A clerk with an armful of scrolls stepped into a shadow and became furniture. The palace knew how to make itself thin around a man who had somewhere to be.

Deming and Sun Longzi were waiting in the inner council room two turns and a flight of steps away—the small room with the low ceiling and no windows, the one they used when they didn't want the walls to start rumors. It had a single table that swallowed the space, a brazier that never gave enough heat, and a silence that behaved like a fourth person in the conversation.

At the threshold, Mingyu raised two fingers. The procession behind him stopped like water meeting a stone: guards at attention, eunuchs at exact distances, the two maids with the tea tray steady as a pair of cranes.

"You wait here," he said. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to.

Deming was already standing when Mingyu entered, one palm on the table, the tendons in his forearm carved hard. Sun Longzi remained seated, his posture straight, and his hands folded on his knee. He was the picture of patience if you didn't know him well enough to recognize the impatience stored neatly behind his eyes.

On the table: an unrolled map, its edges weighted by ink stones; three slips of paper with fresh writing; the broken shell of a seal he didn't have to study to recognize. Yuyan had sent something to the court. Of course she had.

"Sit," Mingyu said. It sounded like a courtesy. Everyone in the room knew it was an instruction to the part of them that wanted to pace or shout or name things too loudly.

Deming obeyed, but the chair protested under him as if absorbing the strike he didn't deliver to the wall. Longzi inclined his head, the barest nod that acknowledged hierarchy without flattery.

Mingyu took the seat at the short end of the table. He let his palm rest on the wood for a breath, grounding himself in its familiar smoothness, in the smell of ink and cedar and the faint metallic tang that meant Yaozu had walked through earlier and leaned where he always leaned.

"She lives," Deming said, losing patience with the quiet first. "And she wants us to know it."

Mingyu slid one of the slips toward himself without looking down. "What did she say."

"Nothing worth the reed it was written with," Longzi answered mildly. "But the nothing is the point. Polite phrases about Baiguang's sorrow, about the need for the civilized to remain civilized, about roads being safe for grieving families if Daiyu is as magnanimous as it pretends. A request for passage to 'facilitate relief.' And a line at the end that does not translate in any tongue except the one made of knives."

Deming's mouth flattened. "She wrote: I will endure."

Of course she did.

Mingyu set the slip back between the ink stones as if returning a pawn to a board he had no intention of playing on. The letters looked almost prim from a distance. He didn't have to bring them closer to feel how pleased she must have been with herself when she sealed it.

"She sent copies to three ministers," Deming added. "But not a single one to a general."

"Not to the Empress or the soon to be Empress, either," Longzi said, glancing at Mingyu through his lashes. "An oversight, I'm sure."

Mingyu's lips curved without humor. "She is counting doors and choosing the ones that open too quickly."

"She's counting faces," Deming snapped. "And hiding behind the ones that still feel important when they look in the mirror."

Mingyu reached for the map, smoothing a corner that didn't need smoothing. The southern line was a series of quiet circles now, supply chains that ran because people were being paid, garrisons that hadn't needed to empty their arrows into anything for nine days. Nine days wasn't peace. It was the room in the middle where peace might decide to sit if invited properly.

He had promised Xinying a room like that.

"What is Li Xuejian doing now?" he asked, his eyes never lifting up.

Longzi tipped his head, thinking. "Being careful in ways that look like being brave. He answers messages addressed to no one in particular. He does not invoke his old throne because there is no throne left to invoke. He does not call himself regent or prince or crown prince because those words would force him into a shape he cannot defend. He talks as a man who happens to be listened to—so that when we say he speaks for Baiguang, he can shrug and say: do I?"

"Clever," Deming said, and it wasn't a compliment.

"Useful," Longzi replied with a shrug. "To himself."

Mingyu traced a road with his fingertip. He remembered Xuejian's face in the hall earlier—the cool curiosity, the way interest had lit his eyes like oil catching a wick when he looked at Xinying.

Men didn't often bother to disguise that look around him. They assumed their appetites were a kind of proof. It had been a long time since anyone in his position had had to put a knife into someone in public for forgetting where their eyes belonged, and sometimes Mingyu regretted that.

"We cannot make martyrs," he said.

Deming huffed back a laugh. "But we can make graves."

"And funerals become songs," Mingyu returned, tone flat. He didn't look up. "Sing a song long enough and it stops belonging to the dead."

Silence. The brazier popped, sharking a red ember that died on cold iron.

"Then we do nothing?" Deming said at last, low, dangerous with the fear that doing nothing would be called wisdom because people were tired of acts that cost.

Mingyu finally looked at him. "We do not move as if we were pushed."

Something in Deming's expression gave a little. It wasn't agreement. It was the reminder of the boy who used to take a breath before charging because he had learned too early that breathlessness looked like rage and rage made you stupid.

"Talk to me of law," Mingyu said, turning to Longzi, who liked to pretend law was something slow that couldn't be made to run if you whistled right. "Is she the Crown Princess?"

Longzi smiled with only his eyes. "If you ask Baiguang, yes. If you ask their ancestors, perhaps. If you ask the earth that keeps records more honest than any scribe—no. Not when the line to which a crown is attached has been cut at the root. She is a name without a tree. Baiguang doesn't have a royal family, so it doesn't have a Crown Prince, so it cannot have a Crown Princess."

Deming grunted. "And Xuejian?"

"A man with ink on his hands and enough charm to make ink look like blood if anyone squints. But no. He is not crowned. He is not even chosen by anything larger than the room he is in."

"Then they are not heads of state," Mingyu murmured.

"No," Longzi agreed. "They are valuable prisoners who do not yet know they are prisoners."

The words hung there. The room did not change temperature, but the air did.