The imperial banquet at Qujiang was designed as spectacle — white swans on the pond, draped gazebos, musicians who made the air seem to shimmer. Yet beneath the swans' wings the court's small beasts sharpened claws on their own reasons. Lin Wei was given a cup to offer to the Crown Prince. The vial in her sleeve was invisible and clean to the eye, but potent enough to end a life without fuss.
She was not the one to decide who lived. She wanted to set down her medical tools and return to the neutral ground of an infirmary where life and death were not weapons. Yet the world she had stumbled into insisted she take a role as bait and as blade.
An 'accident' — a spilled cup, a quick apology by a man who claimed to be a guest — shifted the shame and the danger. Shen's bottle in her hand was a hinge: an antidote disguised as unremarkable medicine; a small salvation passed in a whisper. A blow meant for her was taken by him.
Shen took a wound meant for Lin Wei. The sensation of watching someone fall who'd stood so close to being a protector shook her in a manner separate from fear. It etched the realization that allegiance and violence lived, in that court, on the same narrow ledge. The shouts that followed, the horse-hoof clatter, the final escape into the night with a rebel general — all became beads on a string she had not chosen but had to hold lightly enough to not let go.