Soul-Locking Needle

The year the entire Shen family in the northern frontier was executed, Shen Yanhuai was eleven. A seamstress hid her in an embroidery basket, and that was how she survived. Ten years later, under the assumed name “Shen Xiuniang,” she disappears into the Lin’an Imperial Weaving Bureau. Everyone thinks she is merely the steadiest-handed embroiderer there. None of them know she has mastered the army’s “soul-locking stitch,” which can hide a letter in a dead man’s flesh or sew a strand of poisoned silver wire into a living person’s clothes. At the embroidery workshop in the dead of night, Cui Ping, a seamstress who shares Shen Yanhuai’s room, is found dead before her embroidery frame, a needle carved from white bone lodged in her fingertip. Shen Yanhuai draws a silver token from the needle. Ten years ago, the late emperor died. Everyone said it was a sudden illness. But the token records the truth: someone “embroidered” the emperor to death. The murder weapon was a dragon robe embroidered with a golden dragon, now missing. That very night, Xie Linyuan, commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, comes to see her. This man, who should have been dead for ten years, brings a fragment copied from the dragon robe and asks her to finish embroidering a dragon. He says that in all of Lin’an, she is the only one who can recognize this needlework. She agrees. Hidden in the back of that dragon robe is a message only the Shen family’s layered embroidery can conceal: a blood letter her father left her. But someone has already carved away its secret mark. One dragon robe, a golden dragon on the front, a blood letter on the back. The person who embroidered the emperor to death and the one who carved away the mark are both hidden among this city’s stitches. She embroiders the dragon, seeks her revenge, and wagers the identity she has been afraid to claim for ten years. Shen Yanhuai looks up at the lamp in the secret chamber. “My lord, embroidery should never be left unfinished overnight. But this case, I want to stitch until dawn.”