Feng Yi's Secret

The identity of Lin Fengyi had been constructed with considerable care. There were paper trails — merchant guild records, warehouse contracts in three southern cities, a reputation for fair dealing and slightly eccentric business hours. It would hold against a casual inspection. It would hold against an official investigation that didn't specifically know what to look for.

What it would not hold against, Yun Su was discovering, was Xiao Hou Chuan.

Not because Xiao Hou Chuan suspected him. That would have been manageable. The problem was the opposite: Xiao Hou Chuan trusted Lin Fengyi, which meant he spoke openly, which meant Yun Su was privy to information he absolutely should not have, which meant the boundary between useful intelligence and — he refused the word and found it waiting patiently for him to return to it — intimacy was dissolving in ways he had not planned for.

He knew that Xiao Hou Chuan had received three separate proposals from political families in the capital and declined them all on the grounds that he had no wish to marry someone he'd never met. He knew that Xiao Hou Chuan wrote to his eldest brother every week and that the letters were long and affectionate and entirely lacking in the careful political phrasing that such correspondence between prominent officials usually required. He knew that Xiao Hou Chuan sometimes sat in the east courtyard at dusk with a particular expression that was not sadness and not contentment but something that lived between them, and that on these evenings he was thinking about something he never mentioned.

Yun Su knew this because he had made it his business to know everything about Xiao Hou Chuan's household, and having made it his business, he had discovered he could not make himself indifferent to what he found.

It was A-You who stumbled first onto the edge of the real problem.

"Steward Lin," A-You said, appearing at Yun Su's elbow one afternoon with the expression of someone who has developed a theory. "Lord Su asked me yesterday where I was from originally."

"And?" Yun Su said, not looking up from the accounts he was auditing.

"And I said the south, like we agreed. But he then asked me which city, and I said Xuanhe, like we agreed. And he nodded and said, 'Interesting, the Xuanhe dialect has a particular way of pronouncing the final consonants, I've always found it distinctive.' And then he looked at me, Uncle Fengyi, and he kept looking at me."

Yun Su set down his brush.

"He knows we're not from Xuanhe," A-You said. "He's known for a while, I think. He's just not saying so."

"Why wouldn't he say so?"

A-You looked at him with the particular exasperation of youth confronting an adult who is being deliberately obtuse. "Because he trusts you anyway. Uncle Fengyi, Lord Su has been doing this thing where he —"

"That's enough," Yun Su said. Quietly. Not unkindly.

A-You subsided. But his expression said clearly that he had opinions about this which he was only temporarily restraining.

That evening, Yun Su went to Xiao Hou Chuan's study on the pretext of reviewing correspondence from the capital and found Xiao Hou Chuan sitting at his desk with a small painting propped against the inkstone, doing absolutely nothing except looking at it.

The painting was of a boy of perhaps twelve, in court robes, standing in a garden. The style was Yuan Imperial, the garden recognizable to anyone who had grown up within the Yellow Walls.

Yun Su's breath stopped.

Xiao Hou Chuan looked up. He looked at Yun Su's face. Something passed between them that was not a question and not an answer but shared an uncomfortable amount of structural similarity with both.

"I acquired it from a dealer who specializes in items from the old empire," Xiao Hou Chuan said, in the tone of a man discussing something unremarkable. "The subjects are unknown. But I've always thought the boy in it had remarkable eyes."

He set the painting face-down, calmly, and picked up his correspondence.

"About the capital dispatches," he said. "There are two that require —"

"Xiao Hou Chuan," Yun Su said.

Xiao Hou Chuan stopped. Looked at him. And in his expression — in that steady, open face that hid nothing and somehow still surprised you — was the answer to the question Yun Su had not asked: how long have you known?

Long enough, that look said. Since almost the beginning. Since the fighter's hands and the voice that was controlled in a way it hadn't been when you were seventeen.

"The dispatches," Xiao Hou Chuan said again, softer. "We can talk about the other thing later." A pause, that held the weight of six years inside it. "There's no hurry. You're safe here."

You're safe here.

Yun Su, who had not been safe anywhere since a burning palace and a wide smile and the sound of his own name spoken by someone who was bleeding for him, sat down in the chair across from Xiao Hou Chuan's desk and picked up the first of the dispatches.

"The northern governor's tax falsification is worse than his records suggest," he said. "There are three hidden accounts."

"I know," Xiao Hou Chuan said. "I found two. Tell me about the third."

They worked until the candles burned low, and did not speak of burning palaces, and both of them understood everything.

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