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

They washed the blood from the stones before the bells stopped ringing.

I watched from the side while the servants worked—quiet, efficient, the way the palace preferred anything that made it easier to pretend.

By the time the last bucket splashed and steam curled low and thin across the flagstones, the first bell sounded from the northern tower. Not the alarm I'd heard this morning, not the warning that makes metal in my bones want to stand. This was the slow, solemn call that meant: put away your whispers and bring your faces where the gods can see them.

It was time for the coronation.

I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and pressed a thumb where the green ribbon sat, hidden up my sleeve. It was frayed now, edges soft from being worried between my fingers. It smelled like smoke and pine resin and something that wasn't the palace. I kept it anyway.

"Your hair," said the chief attendant, hovering like a snowflake that refused to land.

"It's attached," I said, and she didn't quite dare to sigh. Yaozu did it for her from the doorway, a sound I felt before I heard, familiar as a heartbeat. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. His gaze moved over the women in gray and blue, over the open lacquer chest, over the phoenix crown resting on its stand like a threat.

The crown looked heavier than it was. That was the trick of these halls—everything designed to feel like weight whether or not it had any. Gold and pearls, tiny phoenixes rising from waves, tassels of red and black beads that would whisper against my cheeks when I walked. A lot of men had probably put their pride into it. I would be the one to carry it.

"Do it," I told the attendant. "But make it quick."

They moved like a single creature after that.

Three hands lifting my hair, two more smoothing oil at the temples, one clever set of fingers pinning a hidden coil so the crown would sit without biting. The room smelled like sandalwood and camellia oil and the faint iron memory of what we had done an hour ago. When they lowered the crown onto my head, the beads touched my skin and I thought: I have worn worse.

The robe went on after that, since my original outfit was covered in blood. This one was crimson layered over darker crimson, with phoenixes stitched in gold thread that refused to lie still, and clouds at the hem, mountains near the breast, the river pattern I had always loved circling the sleeves like a promise.

The silk was cool at first, then warmer as my body accepted it. It felt like being dressed in a story I had not agreed to tell but would finish anyway.

"Your Highness," the attendant breathed when they were done. "If you please."

I didn't please, but I stood.

Yaozu's gaze found mine as I turned. His face did that almost-smile it kept for moments when he could have said ten things and said none. He offered me his arm without touching. I took it without pretending I didn't want to.

Shadow lifted his head from where he'd been a heap of black fur under the table, yawned once, then fell into step at my heel. A phoenix crown, a demon dog, and a man with knives where his bones should be.

It was a proper procession.

The corridor to the ancestral hall climbed in patient stone. I counted the steps without meaning to—seven, then nine, then twelve and twelve again.

Ministers lined the way like the trunks of an old forest, their robes ink-dark, their eyes averted until I drew even with them and then not a moment longer. I could smell their relief the way other people smell rain: the rebel heads were off, the capital had not burned, the day would proceed.

Mingyu met me at the top of the last flight, where the paper screens threw soft light and the ceiling was painted with dragons so old the blue in their scales had faded to ash. He wore black with a narrow belt and no jewels. The only brightness was the seal on his chest and the way his eyes warmed when they found me.

"Walk with me," he said.

"As if you'd let me do otherwise," I murmured.

The corner of his mouth shifted. Not a smile for them but rather a smile for me.

We crossed the threshold together.

The ancestral hall always felt colder than the rest of the palace, even when every brazier glowed. The tablets along the walls held names I didn't care to read, the incense wound upward in a tight, measured braid, and the floor had been worn by too many obedience bones.

I did not kneel. Mingyu did, because it was his to do. He touched his forehead to the mat three times in front of the high table and rose without staggering. The old priest's voice droned out the words he'd been waiting his whole life to say: the jade had moved, the throne had chosen, the mandate had found a spine that would not bend.

No one mentioned the other emperor. Whether he had died or handed his sighs to someone younger didn't matter at this table. He was a weather that had already passed.

Mingyu turned, and the priest pivoted toward me with a smaller, lighter script, as if my oaths required less ink.

"Zhao Xinying," he intoned, "do you—"

"Yes," I said, and the ripple that went through the room was not disapproval so much as the sound of something alive remembering how to startle. The priest blinked, recovered, and recited the rest anyway. I listened because he had earned the right to speak, ash falling onto his sleeves when he lifted his hand to gesture at the censer, at the dragon, at the throne.

"Do you take on the virtue of—"

"No," I said quietly, shaking my head, and his mouth faltered.

I let the silence hold, then I gentled it, because today was a day for gentling things if possible. "I will take on the work," I said, louder now, eyes moving to the ministers, to the soldiers near the door, to the servants who pretended not to listen and always listened best. "But virtue is for poets. I'll tend to the fields I burned. I'll rebuild roads with the metal I bend. I'll keep the mountain quiet. I'll make a home where there wasn't one. That is the oath I can keep."

Mingyu's breath found mine like we shared it.

The priest looked to him. Mingyu's expression didn't move except for the smallest acceptance at the corners. "So recorded," he said, and the scribe bent to scratch it down with a soft rasp that sounded more like truth than the words had.

They brought the phoenix seal then, wrapped in plain silk because someone with sense had made that decision long before I arrived. The attendant slid it onto the low table with hands that shook. I set my palm on it and felt the cool bite of carved stone, the shape of a bird rising out of it like it wanted to leave.

Power never really liked being held.

You just learn how to keep it comfortable enough that it stays.