"Delete it. Delete it right now."
Lilith's face flushed scarlet. She lunged for the phone, bent on destroying the evidence.
But Miss Stepmother sat up without the slightest hurry, carried the phone to her collar, and loosened her fingers so that it slid straight down inside. "Evidence of a bad girl," she said, smiling brightly. "That sort of thing has to be kept somewhere very safe…"
Lilith: …
The evidence lay inches away, and she could not fish it out. Trying would only compound the outrage.
"Never would have guessed it. Never. So this is the kind of Lilith you are." Li Fei's eyes curved into crescents, her smile pure mischief.
"What do you want…" Lilith's face burned, her legs twisting restlessly against each other. The shame breaking over her was enough to make her faint.
"How would I know?" Li Fei said, feigning difficulty. "Teacher Annie is going to be furious when she finds out… but a discipline problem this serious can hardly be kept from her."
"Please… delete it. I'll do anything you want." Lilith's eyes misted over, and she begged in a voice thin as a mosquito's whine.
"That depends on my mood." Li Fei drew the words out lazily, and no effort could keep the delight out of her eyes.
As she spoke she propped both feet on Lilith's lap. "You can start by rubbing this palace's feet," she ordered, imperious.
"…"
Faced with so outrageous a command, Lilith seethed and did not dare say a word. She bit her lip, lowered her head, and only then realized that being blackmailed like this might not be so terrible after all.
Because Miss Stepmother's feet were lovely: clear and white as polished jade, slim, delicately carved, even the toes giving off a warm, soft luster, as though they had been steeped for years on end in golden essence and jade nectar.
Lilith, pull yourself together!
She roared it inwardly until the improper thoughts scattered and her pride retook the high ground.
Burning with humiliation, she took one pale bare foot into her hands. The skin was slippery, warm, impossibly soft, and the touch sent a ripple through her; unbidden, she remembered what she had once glimpsed through a crack in a door, this same boneless, snow-tender little foot wandering across a wedding photograph.
Why is this nothing at all like holding hands…
Lilith jerked her gaze away as though shocked, forced the fluttering back down, and worked at the little tyrant's feet with unpracticed, faintly clumsy hands. "A-at least don't let her see it…" she mumbled thickly.
"If you don't want anyone to know, then don't do it in the first place." Li Fei laid down the great principles with enormous smugness. "You were always the one calling me indecent, and look how it ends. The one who breaks Teacher Annie's heart is you."
Lilith ground her teeth, then softened her voice. "I don't know why any of this is happening either… I'm sorry."
"If apologies were any use, what would we need an enforcement squad for? You do something wrong, you take responsibility for it properly, you brat!"
The wicked stepmother pressed her advantage, lifting her leg to hook an ankle over Lilith's shoulder, insufferably smug and thoroughly deserving of a beating. "I'm keeping this photo somewhere safe. One day I'll show it to your little sister… Hm? What do you think you're— ack— mmph."
Half a minute later Li Fei lay sprawled on the bed with her head tipped back, eyes rolled white, whimpering nonstop.
A moment ago, Miss Stepdaughter, bold beyond all heaven and earth, had let the wickedness in her heart get the better of her and clamped her hands around Li Fei's throat, following the example of Arthas himself in an act of the most uproarious "filial devotion."
"You're finished, you're finished, you're finished!" Li Fei smacked the bedsheets, huffing, all bared teeth and flailing claws. "I'm telling on you the moment we get back."
Lilith pulled her head down between her shoulders, guilt written all over her.
She had been the one to start it with her mouth, and then she had throttled the woman after being caught. It was, admittedly, a little unfilial.
Even so, she had no intention of reining her horse in at the cliff's edge. Face red as blood, she cradled the phone, still warm from where it had lain, fumbled her way through deleting the photo, then tossed it back to Li Fei and fled the room without looking back.
Watching that retreating back, skittish as a startled fawn, Li Fei quieted, straightened her collar, and laughed under her breath. "Silly girl."
Then she opened her photo album, found the [Recently Deleted] folder, and restored the incriminating evidence without the least difficulty.
The way the phone had just been snatched so rudely out of her collar seemed to have left her itching for something. Li Fei crooked a finger at Eva, who had been quietly craning her neck around the doorframe. "Come in. Shut the door behind you. Time for a shot of Witch Sickness suppressant."
Lilith ran a long way without stopping. Her heartbeat still thundered in her ears, and her ears themselves were scalding.
She caught sight of a tree, walked over with a perfectly blank face, knocked her forehead twice against the trunk, then crouched down clutching it and let out a wail of no particular meaning.
It was quite a while before she stood up again, put herself back in order, and returned to the road.
"Enchantress! Stop right there!"
A loud, brash boy's shout broke against her ear.
Lilith turned toward it and found a chubby little boy pointing at her.
He wore a brocade robe of unmistakably fine cloth and was ringed by guards carrying lanterns. He could not have been more than five or six, and already there was a distinctly overbearing cast to his brows.
How did I wander back here…
Lilith recognized him at once, but she had no appetite for dealing with Prince Rong's youngest son and only lowered her head, low-spirited.
That morning, at Miss Stepmother's request, she had already come to scout out Prince Rong's manor. She had not expected that, in her flustered state, she would drift back toward the manor on instinct, or that she would run straight into the little prince.
"Quick, grab her! I want her for a pet! I've never seen a yellow-haired monster before." The little prince hollered, and his guards stirred at once, itching to move.
Such reckless self-indulgence made Lilith frown.
She had learned enough about the state of affairs in the Great Song to know that if this child was not disciplined severely, he would grow into a man who made who knew how many women weep tears of blood.
But Lilith did not know that this same little prince had been just as rude to Li Fei at the birthday banquet, so she had no wish to draw attention and no intention of settling her elder's scores for her. She took out her Flying Broom in silence, meaning simply to leave.
"Lin'er. What have I taught you, day in and day out?"
Out of the dim yellow lantern light, an old woman came walking forward.
She was very old, and yet nothing about her sagged toward the grave. Her plain robes were clean and correct, her white hair pinned up without a strand out of place, her eyes calm and serene.
Years like frost had whitened her hair without ever bending her spine; instead they had settled in her as a deep and quiet presence. Even withered skin could not disguise the fine, upright elegance of the bones beneath.
Here, plainly, was an old lady who could still take a person's breath away.
"The higher you mean to rise above other men, the more carefully you must guard your conduct." The old lady admonished him earnestly, in a tone neither hot nor cold, and the little prince, lawless a moment before, hung his head and did not dare offer half a word in reply. "When we get home, copy out the family precepts three times."
"Lin'er knows he was wrong," the little prince confessed obediently.
"And what do we do when we have done wrong?" the old lady asked.
The little prince was quiet for a moment. Then he spun around and shouted at Lilith:
"I'm sorry! I was wrong!"
"That's a good boy. Grandmother will steam rice cakes for you tomorrow," the old lady said in praise, then walked slowly toward Lilith.
Grace and unhurried ease came off her with every step, and her slender frame in its plain robes looked upright and thoughtful without losing any lightness. Even in her eighties, there was still a dancer in her.
Lilith knew who she was: Prince Rong's birth mother, the late emperor's Imperial Noble Consort, Tong Yao, Dowager Consort Tong.
They said that in her day Dowager Consort Tong had been a beauty beyond compare, no less striking than the Empress who now outshone the whole world; only she had none of the latter's bone-deep chill. What she was known for was benevolence, mending bridges and paving roads, relieving the victims of famine, building schools. Some had even raised a shrine in her honor to thank her for her kindness, and its incense had never yet gone out.
Rumor further held that when Prince Rong's bid for the succession failed and he somehow escaped the purge that followed, Dowager Consort Tong deserved a share of the credit.
Lilith knew nothing more of the old lady's story, but looking at that graceful, composed figure, she found she already half believed the rumors.
"The young child of my house wants for discipline, and has given offense to you, miss." Dowager Consort Tong stopped in front of Lilith, her face gentle and kind. "I have taught him badly. Let this old woman apologize to you on his behalf."
"It's all right." Lilith shook her head.
"If the boy troubles you again, come to me and I promise I will not let him off so easily." Dowager Consort Tong produced a token and pressed it into Lilith's hand. "Come and sit with me at the manor when you have time, and tell an old woman about the immortal realm… The other immortal maiden is very much in the wind these days, snared by a hundred errands, and I would be embarrassed to disturb her."
Evidently the fact that two immortal maidens were lodging at the Prime Minister's Residence was hardly a secret.
"…"
Lilith accepted the token in silence, then heard herself ask, "If you hadn't known who I was, how would this have gone?"
"The family precepts would still have been copied out. I simply might not have traded on my years to invite you to visit… though perhaps I would have anyway. You are a little like I was, back then." Dowager Consort Tong smiled.
"I have golden hair and blue eyes…" Lilith said, puzzled.
"Not in looks. In heart." Dowager Consort Tong shook her head gently. "You're a kind, good child… and the kinder a person is, the better she becomes at giving way. She would rather wound herself than let anyone else be hurt…"
They said people saw more clearly the longer they lived, but Lilith had never dreamed that this quiet, elegant old woman would lay bare what she carried in a single stroke.
"But…" Confusion drifted across Lilith's face.
"But some things may be given up, and some things you ought to fight for, for your own sake… If you let the one standing in front of you slip past, there is no medicine in this world you can buy to cure regret."
Dowager Consort Tong studied that girlish face, written over with hesitation and bewilderment, as though she were looking at herself at that age.
"…"
Lilith said nothing. Expressions came and went across her face.
The words of a complete outsider went echoing through her, no less potent than Miss Stepmother's own repeated seductions. The Forbidden fruit inside her split all the way open, and its branches and leaves ran wild, like the elixir of immortality growing before the golden throne hall.
"Thank you. I'll come again." In the end Lilith offered her a quiet word of thanks and turned away.
"So long as you don't mind an old woman's chatter."
Dowager Consort Tong stayed where she stood, elegant and still, watching the bouncing twin ponytails dwindle out of sight, comforted by the thought that she had brought about one more good match.
Only, the old woman who had read the girl's heart at a glance could not possibly have imagined that the person hidden in that pure, luminous girl's heart was her own stepmother, and that the person she could not bear to wound was her mother, who had leaned on her through ten hard years and worn herself out scraping together her tuition.
If there truly is a Fengdu underworld beneath the Yellow Springs, weighing the rights and wrongs of the dead, then perhaps this old woman, kind to every soul she met her whole life long, would discover before the Ten Yama Kings:
that she had cultivated a lifetime of good fruit, and then, in her eightieth year, by guiding a girl she met once by chance out of her confusion, had unwittingly ripened a taboo and wicked fruit out of the abyss a stage further, taking on immeasurable karma for it, wiping away the greater part of the merit she had gathered, and forfeiting her chance to be reborn onto the Deva Path.
Three days went by in a blink.
Outside Funing Palace a party had assembled, the air among them heavy.
Modern medicine needed a good ten days of pregnancy before a test could confirm it. The court, however, had its share of uncanny talents, and needed only three days to produce an answer.
Zhao Bing paced restlessly back and forth before the hall doors. He was wearing an under-robe of spider-demon silk, warm in winter and cool in summer, and still he kept lifting a hand to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Beside him, Li Fei was pacing as well, faster than he was.
"Beloved minister, there won't be any complications with this, will there?" Zhao Bing asked, for the third time.
Li Fei had no interest in humoring him. "Just wait," she said, her face like thunder.
The eunuchs knew Li Fei's standing, and had been slipped no small quantity of gold and silver whenever they crossed her path. Seeing her verge on an affront to the sage sovereign, one of them hurried in with a placating smile:
"Your Majesty, they say a physician's heart is a parent's heart. Lord Li has worn herself hollow these past days looking after Her Majesty; she must be even more anxious at this moment than you are…"
"We understand, We understand…"
Zhao Bing paid no attention whatsoever to Li Fei's manner. He went on muttering to himself and pacing, as though he and Li Fei were racing each other.
"Your Majesty, Her Majesty the Empress is with child."
A female Reverend came hurrying out of the palace with a horsetail whisk cradled in her arms, beaming as she delivered the happy news. "Congratulations, Your Majesty."
I have a daughter? My own flesh and blood? I'm going to be a mother?
She had braced herself for it, and even so, hearing it said aloud left Li "Underage High School Girl" Fei somewhat dazed.
"We have a Crown Prince? Haha, hahaha…" Zhao Bing threw back his head and laughed aloud. "We're going to be a father! We're going to be a father!"
The thick branches shading them shook and rustled under the laughter, and then a single green leaf came drifting down and landed squarely on his head, lending the emperor's dragon cap a distinct touch of green.
A eunuch saw it and said, thrilled:
"Your Majesty, this is Heaven itself sending its congratulations! A green leaf signifies the spreading of branches and leaves. With this joy sent down from above to the Son of Heaven, the dragon child is bound to find all things going his way, and the imperial house is destined for a flourishing line!"
"It may not even be a dragon son," Zhao Bing said, waving a hand with feigned reserve, his grin far too wide to close.
Another eunuch stepped up at once, his voice trembling with excitement:
"This servant believes that if it is a princess, the green leaf means a branch of gold and a leaf of jade; and if it is a prince, it means he will one day stand as graceful as a jade tree in the wind, and that his great leaves, his great enterprise, will come to full fruition! This is the will of Heaven! This servant rejoices for Your Majesty, rejoices for the altars of state, rejoices for the realm of the Great Song! May Your Majesty live ten thousand years, ten thousand years, ten thousand times ten thousand years!"
"Excellent!"
The eunuchs' art of buffing the dragon's backside was no small skill. Zhao Bing listened with his whole face alight, plucked the glossy green leaf off his head in an ecstasy of delight, and gave his orders:
"Have it mounted and framed for Us and set in the imperial study… no. Hang it in Qianqing Palace! We wish to look upon it at every hour, and keep today's joy fixed in Our mind."
"Your Majesty, this is an auspicious object bestowed by Heaven above. Why not entrust it to the Imperial Guard, and display it by turns outside the imperial city and the golden throne hall, so that every subject under heaven may know that the coming of the state's heir is the mandate of Heaven itself?" The eunuch received the leaf carefully in both hands and slipped in his counsel along with it.
"Good, good, good!" Zhao Bing said "good" three times running, then swept his wide sleeve. "See to it at once."
"…Ah—"
Watching all this, Li Fei forgot her own daze entirely and clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing aloud.
Because she understood that a laugh here would be a shade too shameless, and Miss System would seize the chance to dock her Morality Value.
It was a long while before Zhao Bing, joy written over every feature, got himself back under control. He walked up to Li Fei with great solemnity and bowed to her in thanks:
"Lord Li, everything you have done for Us and for this court, We keep in mind… Here and now, We offer Our thanks. We swear that from this day forward We shall govern this realm well and never fail so loyal and ardent a heart; and We ask that Our beloved minister continue to spend herself on Our behalf and lend Us her aid."
Damn right you should be thanking me.
Li Fei clamped her thighs together to stop the restless Miss Tail from popping out to claim credit for herself. Her expression turned grave; she cupped her fists and bowed to the Song Emperor in turn, her low voice sounding as though it came straight from the depths of her heart:
"This subject accepts the decree."
Having witnessed with their own eyes a scene of such friendship in a sovereign and such reverence in a minister, a tale fit to be handed down for a hundred generations, everyone present broke into applause.
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