On a snowy night in the third year of Jian Zhao, Su Yao clawed her way out of a mass grave, clutching a broken silver hairpin. In her previous life, the calming soup her legitimate mother had personally fed her let her see everyone’s faces clearly as the flames consumed her: her half-sister’s gold-embroidered shoes, the dragon’s-saliva incense on the Crown Prince’s python robe, and the black-iron sword marked with the character “Xuan” in the shadows.
In this life, she replaces the snow frogs bestowed by the Imperial Medical Academy with Bone-Eroding Powder, and cuts the imperial brocade into tinder. Everyone says the Duke of Dingguo’s legitimate daughter is gentle and kind, but they don’t know that when her fingers hold a pulse, they pin down the vital point. She has already written the fates of every high-ranking official in court into her ledger.
“Miss Su, do you know that the seventh solution to the Xuanji Diagram requires human blood?” Jun Wuxie knocks on the door of her medicine hut on a rainy night, bringing half of a bloodstained border map.
She crushes the Tianqi herb used to stop bleeding. “And does Your Highness know that when licorice, an antidote, is boiled with arsenic, it becomes a medicine that kills at a touch?”
When the plum trees on Vermilion Bird Avenue bloom with scarlet flowers, Su Yao burns the last prescription on the city wall. Jun Wuxie’s sword tip plucks a white plum blossom from her hair. “Now that this game has come this far, who exactly are you trying to save: the people...”
“Or you and me among them?” She sinks a silver needle three inches into his chest, but what she draws out is the wolf-fang arrow that disappeared in the northern frontier seventeen years ago.
