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

The palace had always loved its own voice, but after the coronation it found a new register—lower, breathier, hungrier.

The gossip mill was in full swing, not like I really thought it would be otherwise. But that didn't mean that I liked to be the topic that kept everyone so interested.

I could hear it in the corridors as soon as I stepped out with my hair braided simply and the red of ceremony traded for the deep plum I liked because it wasn't completely red.

They had known for a year that I was Mingyu's wife.

They had thrown parties and written poems and swallowed spite when it suited them. But knowing was different than accepting.

A wife you could ignore if you thought the wind would change.

But an Empress was a different animal. She sat where ink became law. She was the last pair of eyes a petition passes before it starts to be integrated into society.

So, now they took their time looking. Harder, longer. Not like they could pull me apart and sift the pieces for weakness, but like men stare at the cliff they didn't think would grow teeth.

A pair of ministers' wives stopped mid-step, their sleeves frozen in the air like birds whose wings had forgotten what to do. I gave them the smallest bow my neck would allow and kept walking.

A knot of younger eunuchs leaned against a pillar pretending to talk about brazier charcoal. Their words followed me—witch, Empress, untouchable—like rice husks spun on a breeze.

Untouchable was new.

I didn't slow down, and I didn't bother hide the smile that came without asking. It wasn't joy, it wasn't triumphant. But rather something heavier, deeper—like sliding a blade back into its sheath after the fight you'd been promised you'd never have to wage again.

"Your Majesty," someone tested, and I turned just enough to let the title hit me full in the face.

It didn't feel like a crown. It felt like a door closing softly behind me and the lock turning where no one else could reach it.

Shadow's claws clicked once on the stone before he remembered to keep them quiet. Yaozu walked a half-pace at my shoulder the way he always had, except now the guards lining the gallery didn't pretend not to notice. They measured him and measured me and decided, sensibly, to avoid learning what we were made of.

We passed a cluster of scribes unrolling proclamations. I caught a glimpse of Mingyu's hand in the brushstrokes—clean, decisive, like the man who'd kissed my forehead before dawn and gone to feed the empire its breakfast of orders and warnings.

I could still feel the imprint of that kiss cooling against my skin if I let myself think about it. I didn't. Not here. Not while the palace wanted to see if I would soften now that I had silk in every room.

"Should we take the long way?" Yaozu asked, low.

"Why?" I asked without looking at him.

"So you can enjoy being stared at longer?" His mouth tilted, almost a smile.

"I've been stared at my whole life," I said. "Let them learn what it feels like to keep their eyes open."

We cut across the east courtyard where the cypress threw dark nets across the paving stones. A pair of junior officials stopped talking mid-breath when I stepped into their shade. One opened his mouth, then thought better of what was about to fall out of it and bowed instead. Good instincts. Rare ones.

By the time we reached the inner hall, the sound of the city had settled into its familiar strata—vendors calling from beyond the walls, the scrape of wheels, the steady heart-beat thud of boots on patrol. For the first time since the mountain, since the ridge where three borders met and learned my name the hard way, I let myself unwind. Not all the way. Just enough to notice that the brazier near the dais had the wrong resin in it.

"Who changed that?" I asked, because I am who I am. And I definitely didn't approve of that scent.

A eunuch squeaked out a name. I nodded, and he fled, or perhaps just remembered somewhere else to be.

I was turning toward the side passage—tea, letters, the kind of work that looks like embroidery until you tug the thread and the whole tapestry comes away in your hand—when I felt the hush change. Not deeper. Wider. Like a door opening at the far end of a long room.

I didn't have to look to know Mingyu had stepped in.

He didn't cross to me. He didn't need to. He glanced once, and in that glance a hundred small pieces locked where they belonged. The court shuffled itself an inch and the palace pretended not to breathe.

Untouchable, the whispers said again, as if trying the word on their tongues to see if it would break a tooth.

It wouldn't. Not today.

I let the warmth of that settle where I kept the cold. Then I went to work.

-----

Yan Luo

The courier took too long. He knew it the moment the man bowed too deeply without meeting his eyes.

"Speak," Yan Luo ordered, and did not offer tea.

"Your Excellency." The man's voice stuck in his throat. "Daiyu has crowned their newest Emperor. The coronation was completed the day before. The woman is now… Empress."

Yan Luo's mouth didn't move. The room noticed anyway. The lacquered screen—a gift from a woman who wanted to be remembered and was not—caught a draft and rattled like enamel with a crack behind it.

"Repeat that," he grunted, as polite as a blade laid on silk.

"She is now the Empress," the courier said to the floor.

Yan Luo clenched his fists. A wife could be discarded by their husband, could run away, could be hidden from sight. A wife of someone else could still be his.

But not an Empress.

Yan Luo took in a deep breath and tried to calm down his racing heart and the anger that he was feeling. Cocking his head to the side, he wondered for a moment if having her made it worth it… to be Emperor.

It was defiantly something to consider.

If Zhu Mingyu was no longer alive, then Zhao Xinying would not be married.

It really was just a simple fix.

Flicking his fingers, he ignored the messenger. His mind already racing on what he had to do next to take back what was his.

Dismissed, the courier left with the speed of a man who valued staying alive more than trying to figure out what was going on in his boss' head. Yan Luo stood very still in the wreckage of quiet the man had left behind.

He did not throw the cup this time.

He sat it down and it made the softest sound porcelain can make. He crossed to the window and looked out at the city that pretended not to need him. A child ran across the alley. Someone argued about fish heads. Laundry confessed its shape to the wind.

"She chose him," he murmured, reminding himself why it would be foolish to take on an entire nation. But it wasn't only that. He was also a man who would not lie to himself when the room was empty, the words did not poison him on the way out.

He remembered details the way other men remembered debts.

A red fan placed where she would find it. A convoy turned off the road it meant to take because the road had acquired eyes. A night where he could have gone closer and did not, because he is clever and clever men watch. He had not bled for her. He had done something harder—he had rearranged the world a little at a time so the knife came late or not at all.

And now the world had rearranged itself without asking him, placing her on a chair built for men who think their spines are the same thing as their crowns.

He laughed once, the quiet kind that does not enjoy itself. Then he let anger pass through him like a storm through dry grass, leaving it blackened but un-burned. Anger was useful.

Obsession was a tool if you held it by the right end.

"Send a gift," he told no one. The room already knew how to become full of people when he decided it was time.

"What shall we celebrate?" a voice asked from the doorway that hadn't been open a moment before.

"Peace," he said, and smiled in a way that would look generous from a distance and like a knife up close. "And the health of an Empress I intend to meet."

He closed the window against an honest wind and turned back to his table.

Plans were good medicine. He picked up the fan he did not carry in public and considered the curve of its ribs. He had moved quietly for a long time. Perhaps it was time to learn how to be noisy again without being fully seen.