"Miss, wake—miss, wake!" Lanxin's fingers dug into the bedcover and yanked at Mingyue's shoulder. Mingyue's eyes snapped open. The ceiling was the same lacquered wood, the paper lantern outside the lattice still drooped with last night's warmth. She sat bolt upright and smelled the cold iron from a memory that did not belong to this morning: rope, the creak of the scaffold, the prince's laugh. "Lady?" Lanxin scrambled back. "You woke! You were calling in the night. Are you ill?" "I died," Mingyue said. Her voice was thin. She watched Lanxin's face change color in stages, like paint drying. "Die?" Lanxin's mouth formed a word that turned into a startled laugh. "Miss—don't say such things. You were pale, yes, but—" "You don't remember the banners," Mingyue cut in. "You don't remember the night the lanterns were taken down and the palace guards came before dawn?" Lanxin's eyes slid to the window, then back. "No. I... I was asleep. I never saw anything." Mingyue forced a breath out. Two sentences, quick and sparse. She would not stand in the room and speak riddle-poems to a maid. If she had been given time to plan, she would have wasted it. She had, instead, been given only this body and the memory of the gallows. "How?" Lanxin asked, too loudly. "Miss, you've frightened the whole wing." "Listen," Mingyue said. She swung her legs over the bed and stood