The Poisoned Mute Consort

Three years in the Cold Palace taught her the art of poison, and how to keep her mouth shut.

The day she left the palace, the Chancellor’s household handed her over to Prince Jing’s residence and its sickly master, who was not expected to live past thirty.

The whole capital was waiting for a laugh: a mute and a sickly man, a perfect match.

On their wedding night, she knocked over his medicine bowl and wrote on a sheet of paper: Your illness is an act.

He sat up, all trace of weakness gone from his eyes. “You’re a disgraced consort. How do you recognize the Imperial Medical Bureau’s prescriptions?”

She wrote: I’ll help you pretend to be sick for the rest of your life. In return, investigate one thing for me: how did my mother die?

He held out his hand. “Deal.”

She didn’t take it fully, just touched his fingertips.

Only later did he learn that she had hidden a packet of medicine in her sleeve that night, a drug that could leave someone paralyzed in bed without even the imperial physicians detecting it.

“What do you think,” she wrote on the paper, “was that an illness, or a drug?”