"Lanxin! Miss, wake!"
"Miss, open your eyes. Speak to me."
I swallowed and pushed my eyelids up. Light struck the room like an accusation.
"You're sweating," Lanxin said, fingers clamping my wrist. "You were muttering again. Miss—"
"Where am I?" I asked, voice thin.
"Your bedchamber," Lanxin said. "Xie manor. Father left before dawn for the training field. You slept long. I burned the jasmine. The pewter comb—it's on the dresser."
The comb hit something in my memory like a hammer. A dungeon stone. Guards' boots. The sound of a vial clinking.
"Not now," I told Lanxin. "Tell me—what year?"
Lanxin blinked. "The imperial calendar says the twelfth year of Emperor Huan. Why—"
"Twelfth year," I repeated. The number settled. I tasted iron on my tongue, the taste that belonged to the last time I heard that number. I forced a laugh and let the memory spill.
"Don't make a fuss," a guard had said in that memory. "Nobody deserves a show in the dungeon."
"Gu Jingzhi," I said aloud before I could stop myself.
Lanxin tightened her grip. "Miss?"
My breath shortened. I let the remembered scene play as clean and sharp as a struck spear.
The dungeon smelled of wet straw and old blood. My hands had been tied. My wrists still remembered the bite of rope. The torchlight had thrown strange shapes down the corridor. Guards had left a gap. He entered wearing a scholar's robe that never fit his shoulders
