Deep in the Clouds of Bianjing
On the Lantern Festival of the third year of Yuanfeng, I smashed an imperial glass cup at Fan Tower. Xie Jingxing, Deputy Commissioner of the Privy Council, caught my wrist. "Miss Shen, was that an accident, or are you making a point to the court?" The xiezhi embroidered on his official robe was glaring, while hidden in my sleeve was evidence of the Xie family's smuggling.
For three generations, the Shen family had served as imperial merchants. No one knew that the old abacus my father pressed into my hands on his deathbed concealed half of a contract capable of destabilizing trade in the northwest. Xiao Heng, commander of the Imperial City Division, lifted my skirt with the tip of his blade, revealing a 300,000-tael shortfall in the Tea and Horse Bureau's accounts. I slipped medicine into his armor. "Lord Xiao's wound won't scar if you use my family's medicine."
In the spring rain at Jinming Pond, Xie Jingxing draped his official robe over my shoulders and pinched the string of beads I had sold to a Liao merchant. "You think you traded for warhorses? Western Xia got the border defense map!" I slapped a tea-boat contract onto his desk. "Lord Xie, perhaps you should look into whose pockets the concubine's makeup money is lining."
Xiao Heng crushed my abacus beads beneath his boot, yet placed a bloodstained jade hairpin in my hair. "Miss Shen, you can balance the accounts of the whole realm, but can you make sense of your own heart?" Seeing blood seep through his armor, I remembered the night he had braved the rain to come to the Shen residence, only to return a broken hairpin to me.
At court, I knelt and presented my father's last manuscript. Xie Jingxing's brush hovered over the Tea and Horse Bureau, Xiao Heng's blade pointed toward the border, and my abacus clicked. This time, I was calculating more than money and love: I was calculating the future of the Song Dynasty's trade routes.
