Xi Chanzui was unique in that he had never killed anyone before, much less his father.

  Three had more blood on her hands than that which ran through her veins; all she did was wring her hair of the wet that had seeped into it, rivulets of red running down her hands. Her body, wracked with pain, could no longer stand; she sat back on the floor, her legs spyed by her sides.

  Xi Yu, though shaken, had seen war and once held a bow in her hands; she just wiped the blood from her face, stooping over to tend to Hu Yingliu’s injuries.

  Qi — not a lot of it, just a little, but incomparably warm and gentle — slid into her veins, slowly mending her from inside out.

  But Xi Yu’s brother did not move. He didn’t know what to do. It was pin on his face, slow like a receding tide, as his gaze followed the blood mist that gently seeped into the shattered floor and splintered air.

  They didn’t speak and waited for him.

  He stood in silence for a good while until he finally said, ‘Sister, you shouldn’t kill…’ He turned to her and spat, ‘You, what’s your name?’

  She said, ‘Hu Yingliu, Your Highness.’

  He snorted and scrubbed at his face. ‘Jiejie, you shouldn’t kill Hu Yingliu.’

  Xi Yu paused. ‘I wasn’t pnning to.’

  He just snorted. ‘Good.’ Then he forced a smile and said, ‘I understand Father a little better now.’ He jabbed a thumb at her and added, ‘Her too.’

  Hu Yingliu opened her mouth but ended up shutting it; Xi Yu didn’t say anything either. They weren’t close enough to this young man to ask for his thoughts, for what he’d just understood — they just watched the lump on his throat roll, the corners of his eyes redden, and ignore the nasal quality of his voice.

  ‘I have something for you, Jiejie,’ he said. Reaching up to his ear, he pulled off the long, lonely earring on his right ear. It was carved from smoothed wood, as long and as thick as a pointer finger. The cquered gze of it glinted in the sunlight.

  He pinched the top of it, pulling, and as the red shell split apart in his fingers, a key appeared in his hands. Its metal body had a moon engraved on it, split in two by a tall, shadowed tree with arrows and a picture of a tent. It was as long as a little finger, as thick as a thin bamboo rod; its teeth jutted out in all directions like a pinecone.

  He handed it to Xi Yu.

  The princess’s expression turned a little surprised. ‘Wait. This is —’

  ‘Just let me expin, first.’ Xi Chanzui’s face twisted with a mix of grief, guilt, a bottomless greed and a hollowness. His lips curved up, but his pink eyes held no light. ‘That New Year after Mother was granted her half of tiger tally — when Father and I came to the North to visit. She gave it to Father, and he swapped it with a fake, keeping the real half. Perhaps he wanted more power — or perhaps he’d hoped when shadow guards went after her, she’d give them his name. Except I stole the real one. Because —’

  Xi Yu murmured, ‘Because you wanted to bckmail Mother into returning home for your birthday.’

  They froze.

  The prince chuckled, ‘But she never did.’ His ugh swelled into one with a terrible, horrible misery, ‘So, when the emperor demanded the tally back, Mother couldn’t surrender it. I still had it, and she didn’t dare believe that the fake could fool the sharp-eyed Daughter of Heaven. She kept deying, trying to come back to the court, but she…’

  ‘— Was mistaken as attempting treason,’ Three muttered. Her head spun, a terrible nausea rising in her throat. ‘And then I was sent to kill her.’

  And she suddenly thought of that tiger tally in the dead emperor’s hands, that tiger tally that couldn’t quite click together. The wrongness that they’d dismissed, thinking the dried blood had stopped it from sliding together.

  What a horrible mess.

  Did Xi Chanzui really think his mother wouldn’t die? Or did he just keep thinking that the mounting pressure would make his mother share that birthday with him? Maybe he kept waiting, waiting for just a little more, and then…

  Ridiculous.

  Fucking ironic, wasn’t it?

  ‘As for that real tiger’s half…’ Xi Chanzui gave them a bitter smile and as he gazed down at that key. ‘Sister, you know where it is now, don’t you? From the pictures.’ His smile grew into a grin, ‘Now that it’s yours, after getting our hands on the other tally, we can march down and summon the Northern Army. It’ll let you command the Northern Army. Perfect for the daughter of traitors, isn’t? Then you can be —’

  ‘No.’ Xi Yu cut him off, ‘I won’t be emperor. You will.’

  Then both their jaws dropped.

  Xi Chanzui spluttered, ‘Sister, you, what?!’

  The princess’s eyes flickered with a fire-like red. ‘Brother. That throne, for me, was never my destination. It was a means to an end — it was once, for both you and I, the only road to survival. But now, Didi, we have more to pick from. Of the two of us, if we trust each other enough, neither of us will die. The competition — it’s over. It’s over, for real now.’

  Hu Yingliu almost couldn’t breathe from the bubble rising in her throat.

  ‘I don’t want that throne,’ Xi Yu said, ‘but it might be a different story for you.’

  He froze.

  Slowly breathed out.

  ‘I’ve tried to kill you before,’ he said.

  Xi Yu just said, ‘I know.’

  ‘I sent Six after you. I tried to bme you to escape the empress. I even —’ his words came out in a rush, ‘I was the one who put poison in your food! It was all me, all me, so why —’

  Of course.

  It was only now that Hu Yingliu understood.

  Understood why that poisoning attempt was so weak. Why it had been so inexperienced. Why the princess had survived it without any training or specialised medicines.

  It was Six who’d made the poison.

  And suddenly, Xi Chanzui started to cry.

  Big teardrops rolled down his cheeks, his lips trembling as his hands fisted in his pink silks. He no longer looked like the scornful, scheming man from the court of politics; he had become a youth who’d just come of age, only twenty-one, a boy who’d pushed his mother to death, fought his cousins, killed his father, and now realised —

  ‘Why did it have to be you?’ He whimpered and sobbed, scrubbing his face as tears poured down, ‘The only one who’d pay attention to me, why wasn’t it Mother or Father, why was it… you?’

  Xi Yu didn’t hug him or comfort him. She just said, ‘But it doesn’t have to be just me.’

  His head jolted up.

  ‘You could have the eyes of the world as emperor, Little Brother,’ she said. ‘You can turn yourself into a good, compassionate and wise ruler who’s praised in the annals of history, a man beloved by his people.’ She reached out, the silver key waiting in the air on her fingertips. ‘You can be for this empire what our parents weren’t for us.’

  He fell silent.

  Then he reached out and took the key.