Snow was too alive—too full of the sky's breath and the world's wandering—to be permitted past Huo's iron walls. Here, there was only frost: the same old ice clinging stubbornly to stone, to splinters, to the bars of the single high window. It did not flutter. It did not change. It simply persisted.
Like memory.
Lian sat with her back against the wall beneath that window, knees drawn up, the packet of ash and herbs trapped between her palms. The Cold Palace had taught her the economy of movement: do not waste a gesture on anything that will not keep you alive. And yet she turned that little folded scrap over and over, feeling its dry rasp whisper across skin that had once worn dragon silk.
Her orbit of qi circled, hesitant, like a wounded animal pacing the edge of its trap.
Not yet, the voice in her spiritual sea had told her once.
Soon, it had promised after.
She did not know whether that presence was the Phoenix Core itself, or some shard of her own stubbornness given shape by starvation and grief. But today, as the frost-laden air cut her lungs with every breath, the almost-heat pulsing faintly at her dantian was clearer than it had been since they locked her away.
The Spirit-Numbing Ash they mixed into her porridge and thin soups dulled everything: thought, rage, pain, memory. It was snow in the veins, falling and falling until she could barely remember what it felt like to burn.
Almost.
They buried you in ash, she thought, closing her eyes. They buried me in it too.
But ash remembers fire.
Bootsteps scraped outside, hesitant on stone.
She opened her eyes. Her fingers wanted to flare with flame at the intrusion, to lash out and sear, but her meridians answered slow and syrup-thick, as if dragging chains. She unclenched her hands instead and slid the packet into the tattered padding of her sleeve, where the stitching had pulled loose the first winter and she had never bothered to mend it.
The bolt of her door ground back.
The eunuch who slipped inside was one of Mei Yin's—their silhouettes all blurred into one in Lian's mind now, small and soft-voiced and smelling faintly of the jasmine oil Mei favored. This one's name was Ping, or Pang; she had heard it once and not cared enough to keep it.
He carried a wooden tray. Steam rose from the bowl on it, thick and fragrant in a way her usual rations never were.
Her stomach twisted.
Mei Yin is bored again, she thought.
The door shut. Cold crept around the edges of the room like a patient animal, hungry for any warmth that leaked from the bowl.
Ping-Pang bowed low, eyes carefully on the floor.
"Your Majesty," he murmured, and though his posture was submissive, his voice trembled on the last word as if the title itself might draw Huo's blade through the wall.
"Is that what they call me out there now?" Lian asked, voice rough with disuse. "Your Majesty? Or 'the mad phoenix'? Or simply 'the mistake'?"
Ping flinched. His hands tightened on the tray.
"They do not speak of you at all, my—Lady," he said. "The court is…very busy."
"Of course." She tilted her head, studying him. The Spirit-Numbing Ash blurred the edges of her perception, but not entirely; beneath the jasmine oil she could smell old fear and cheap incense, the lingering dust of prayers made in temples where no one truly listened. "Busy forgetting."
He swallowed. The sound was loud in the small room.
"I brought you congee," he said, taking a step closer and kneeling to set the tray before her. "Her Ladyship, Consort Mei, ordered it. She said the winter has been harsh, and you are still…delicate."
Ah.
There it was, then. The bait in silk.
Lian let her gaze drop to the bowl. Rice, thick enough to cling to the spoon if there had been one. Shreds of duck, gleaming with fat. A single salted plum, sunk like a drowned heart near the bottom.
It smelled like the outer kitchens of the Imperial Palace on festival mornings. It smelled like a life that had ended under Huo's blade.
"Delicate," she echoed softly. "She remembers me as I was, then."
Ping's brow furrowed. "As you were, Your—my lady?"
"As something in need of protection." She lifted her eyes to his, letting him see, just for a moment, the thin sharpness underneath the frost. "Tell me, little sparrow—did Mei Yin taste this herself?"
"She would never—" He bit down on the answer too fast.
They always forgot that in the Cold Palace, there was nothing to distract you from the things people did not say.
Lian's lips curved, almost a smile.
"That was unkind of me," she said. "Of course she would never risk sullying her own mouth with food meant for a condemned woman."
"I…" Ping stared at the bowl as though it might leap up and accuse him. "I am only a servant. I do what I am told."
"Everyone does," Lian murmured. "Until they don't."
Her orbit of qi twitched. The almost-heat at her center flared the faintest degree, like a coal shifting under ash.
The eunuch wet his lips. "It is very good congee," he said, as if that were the only lifeline he could reach for.
"I'm sure it is." She could smell the Spirit-Numbing Ash under the richer scents, a chalky dry powder hidden in comfort. Mei Yin had learned; the earlier doses had been clumsy, bitter. This was subtler, folded into spice and duck fat and nostalgia. "Tell your mistress I am grateful for her concern."
"You—" He blinked, surprised. "You will eat?"
Lian's fingers brushed the rough rim of the bowl. Her body screamed yes with an animal urgency that had nothing to do with Mei Yin or poison or revenge. Hunger had become a religion here; any offering on its altar was holy.
The Phoenix Core shivered.
Not yet, the presence whispered again, clearer, its voice like wind around a high mountain fire.
She thought of Li Wei—of the way his hand had felt in hers the last time she had walked across the Jade Pavilion bridge as Empress, of the heat of his blood on her face when he had shoved her aside and stepped into Huo's descending blade.
Forget me and fly, he had breathed against her cheek, and the lie of it still carved at her ribs.
"I will drink the broth," she said. "The smell is very good."
Ping's shoulders relaxed a fraction. "I will tell her Ladyship that you are…eating well."
"I am sure she will sleep very soundly," Lian replied.
She lifted the bowl, the steam washing over her face. Her fingers found the packet hidden in her sleeve, pressed flat and fragile against her wrist bone. Spirit-Numbing Ash in the congee, Spirit-Stirring Ember in her palm. Mei Yin's hand against hers, tug-of-war over the direction of her soul.
If she ate nothing, they would force the food down her throat. Huo would not permit the Emperor's last lawful wife to die of something as mundane as starvation; it would make the wrong sort of story. A martyr, not a monster.
Stories mattered to him. Architecture of the mind, he called them once, when she had been foolish enough to ask about his campaigns. You build the world people believe in, brick by brick. Then they will bleed to protect it, even when it is their own prison.
She tipped the bowl, drank the broth in slow sips. The liquid slid down her throat, warmth chasing a path into her chest. There it met the cold drag of poison, the ash reaching with numb fingers for the edges of her awareness.
Lian let it.
She let the Spirit-Numbing Ash seep, let the heavy snow of it fall into her limbs, waited until her eyelids trembled with the urge to close.
Then, under the cover of that sinking, she crushed the packet in her sleeve.
The herbs inside were bitter and sharp, Li Wei's last contraband gift smuggled in during those first confused days before Huo had tightened every chain. Spirit-Stirring Ember, stolen from some Taoist charlatan's stall beyond the palace walls and laughed over later in their private chambers.
"Imagine," Li Wei had said, tossing the dried sliver of root and red-thread-wrapped ash from hand to hand. "A miracle in a packet! Eat this and your qi will burn like ten suns, the man swore. I bought three. Enough to make a god."
"You are already insufferable with one sun," she had retorted, stealing a kiss and the packet both.
She had never used it. Not when the court had turned. Not when they dragged her through the snow. Not when Huo's sword rose like an eclipse in the courtyard.
Not yet, something in her had whispered then.
Soon.
She brought her hand to her mouth under the pretense of wiping her lips and swallowed the crushed dust dry. It scraped like sandpaper down her tongue, catching in the back of her throat. Her body, dulled by Mei Yin's ash, barely recognized it as anything at all.
But the Phoenix did.
Heat lanced through her spiritual sea.
She did not move. Did not gasp. The Cold Palace had taught her the discipline of statues. Inside, though, the smooth, stuttering circle of her qi orbit jerked, then shuddered.
The presence in her core inhaled.
Ping was watching her with the furtive fascination of a man who had never seen a legend stripped of its titles. When she lifted the bowl again and let the last of the broth touch her lips, he exhaled in relief.
"I will leave you to rest," he said, gathering the tray. "If you have any requests, Her Ladyship says—"
"I have one." Lian's voice came out softer than she expected. The Ember was threading fire into her veins, a delicate, deliberate unwinding of numbness. Each word felt like a spark struck from stone. "Tell Consort Mei that her kindness moved me."
Ping hesitated. "Moved…you, my lady?"
"Yes." She let her gaze unfocus, allowed her shoulders to droop, the picture of poison-dulled lethargy. "I had almost forgotten the taste of proper food. It reminded me that the world continues beyond these walls."
He understood that as gratitude. Of course he did. He bowed quickly, twice, and backed away, the tray shaking in his hands.
When the door shut, when the bolt slammed home and his footsteps faded, Lian let her head fall back against the stone.
The Ember burned.
It was not a roar, not yet. It was a slow insistence, a thread of heat uncoiling from her center, seeking paths that had been blocked and iced over. Wherever it passed, the Spirit-Numbing Ash hissed and retreated, the way a shadow flees a lantern's approach.
Her orbit of qi stuttered, broke, reformed on a slightly different path. Slower. Then, incrementally, smoother.
Her fingers twitched. Somewhere distant, her toes curled.
Soon, the presence at her core said, and for the first time she heard the echo of her own voice in it. Soon, but not yet. You are not strong enough to burn the cage.
"Then I will sharpen myself on its bars," she whispered.
The room seemed to lean in, listening.
"Let Huo think I am snow," she continued, letting her eyes drift closed, not in surrender but in focus. "Let Mei Yin lace my meals and polish my chains. Let the court forget the sound of my name until it tastes strange on their tongues."
Her qi orbited, circling fire.
"In the alleys, a commoner with your eyes is cutting his way back to me," she told the silence, as if it were Li Wei's chest and not unyielding stone pressed to her spine. "In here, I am remembering how to burn."
Beyond the Cold Palace walls, a bell tolled—the hour for evening court in the main hall, for new edicts to be read out under carved dragons with empty eyes. The sound arrived muted, as if smothered in wool.
Lian smiled into the dark.
"The funeral is over," she murmured again, tasting both poison and ember on her tongue. "Now we wait for the first spark."
Outside her barred window, the old frost creaked.
Not falling. Not melting.
But under pressure, ice can crack.