Lu Heng thought with a touch of contempt, then raised his hand and drank the tea newly delivered by the Office of Palace Attendants. Today was the Shangsi Festival, and the grand banquet at the Crimson Platform was about to begin. The Office of Palace Attendants had changed to new tea—it tasted somewhat different from what he usually drank.
For reasons he could not explain, after drinking that cup of tea he felt unusually drowsy and mentally unfocused. And in these past few days, already weighed down by anxiety over the death, he had even failed to react when an unarmed civil official right beside him seized his blade.
Luowei gathered up all the girlish dresses that Buyun had once sewn for her, washed them clean and let them dry, and hung them one by one throughout the garden where the crabapple trees were just beginning to bloom.
Yan Luo stood by her side and murmured: “Your Highness—this servant has already sent someone to deliver the tea to Guard Lu.”
Luowei tilted her head back. The gauze-thin ribbon ties and the faint breeze brushed against her cheek.
Yan Luo continued: “Your Highness moved too hastily this time and had not yet decided on the right person to stage the discovery. If something goes wrong…”
Luowei only said: “It is almost time. Help me change my clothes first.”
After she had changed, a senior eunuch from the Emperor’s side came personally to escort her. Yan Luo followed behind the Empress’s palanquin, head bowed as she walked—and near the entrance to the Western Garden, she encountered a young civil official dressed in the green robes of a junior official.
“This humble official pays his respects to Her Highness the Empress—and begs Her Highness to forgive this servant’s lack of proper courtesy.”
After the palanquin passed that young official, she looked up—and saw the Empress’s eyes, laden with meaning.
The choice of person had, in all likelihood, been settled.
“The weather looks as though it may turn. Go back inside once—tell the palace maids to take in the dresses from the garden.”
“Yes.”
* * *
Yan Luo turned these old memories over in her mind, kneeling on the meditation cushion of the inner chamber, bowing three times and prostrating herself three times, as she watched the Empress take out the handwritten letter that Buyun had entrusted to someone to send to her a few days before the grand banquet at the Crimson Platform.
Enclosed within the letter was a copper key and a jade ring—both stolen from Lu Heng’s hands the day before she resolved to end her life.
In her letter, Buyun set everything out in full—the handwritten letter, their meetings, her suspicions—holding nothing back, writing down for Luowei every one of her own deductions. For her, the betrayal of her beloved and the guilt that had gnawed at her day and night were simply too much to sustain. She could no longer go on.
Luowei read through that letter once more, thinking: the pillow beside each of us holds its serpents and scorpions—whether clever or not, it is difficult to see through them quickly, precisely because it is a person we love dearly, and so when the truth finally comes to light the despair is all the greater.
But you, ah…
Good people do not live long in this world—that is probably always because they hold too tightly to the principles in their own hearts. Even when that path has been trampled to powder by those with malice, there are still those who press forward in succession.
There had been a thousand and ten thousand ways for Luowei to see to it that Buyun need not die, and still see Lu Heng dealt with—but before she could devise any of her plans, Buyun had already made the choice on her behalf.
“I carry within me a guilty heart. I offer my life without regret. This humble plan, I present to Your Highness as a gift—hoping that with this one life, old hatred may be repaid. In the life to come, may we meet again. With an open heart, a spirit unsullied by dust.”
“Yun, in her final words, offers her respects.”
Yun—the word for bamboo—standing tall in the wood with dignity and grace. Even among the finest of the world’s flowers and plants, none could match this spirit.
Yan Luo looked and saw that on the flower-patterned notepaper by the window, the Empress had left a reply.
“…It is the height of spring, and new flowers are falling. Kindness is not to be forgotten; feeling is not to be cast aside. The eight sufferings of this world—I hold them all in my heart, together with this grief.”
Luowei placed that letter—containing Buyun’s detailed account of all she had witnessed and known—together with the flower-patterned notepaper she herself had written, and dropped them both into the incense burner. She watched as the two merged and burned into a single quiet expanse of ash.
“The Western Garden has long been desolate—and now there has been a violent death there as well. This is truly inauspicious. Let this Palace’s order be conveyed: have the gardeners clear away all the old withered weeds and plant green bamboo throughout.”