Liu Lanzhi did not sleep.
She lay in the darkness of her chamber, eyes fixed on the ceiling, the silk coverlet cool against her skin. The palace was quiet—the kind of quiet that settled after midnight, when even the servants had retreated and the guards moved in slow, measured rounds.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw him. Small. Hunched against the wall. His face blotched with tears. You will come back.
She had not answered. She had not been able to. If she had opened her mouth, she would have promised him something she had no right to promise. She would have knelt in the dirt and gathered him in her arms and told him she would never let anyone hurt him again.
She had said those words before. In another life. And he had died.
The hours passed. The moon traced its arc across her window. She watched until the first pale light crept over the sill.
She rose.
–
The garden was empty when she arrived.
The hedge stood where it had always stood, leaves wet with morning dew. Liu Lanzhi stopped at the edge, her hand resting on the rough branches, and listened.
Nothing.
She should have been relieved. The boy had forgotten her, as children did. He was four years old; he would not remember a stranger who sat on a bench and said nothing.
She turned away.
She walked the old paths—past the pond, past the abandoned pavilion, past the places she had walked every morning since her return. She counted her steps. She did not think about the boy.
She was not looking for him.
And yet, when she passed the hedge again—a different hedge, a different corner of the garden—she found herself stopping. Listening.
Nothing.
When she returned to her residence, the morning was half-gone. She sat by the window and looked out at the garden she had left behind.
—
He was there the next morning.
Liu Lanzhi came through the hedge at dawn and found him sitting on the bench. He was smaller than she remembered—or perhaps she had been remembering a different boy, a different life. This child was four years old, too small for his robes, his hair uncombed, his hands folded in his lap with the careful stillness of someone who had been told, many times, to be quiet and wait.
He looked up when she emerged. His eyes were wide, watchful.
"You came back," he said.
Liu Lanzhi stopped at the edge of the courtyard. Her heart was beating too fast. "I walk here in the mornings."
He considered this. "Every morning?"
"Every morning."
He nodded slowly, then looked at the bench, then at her, then at the bench again.
She understood. She sat. Not close to him. Not far. Just there, in the same place as before.
He did not move closer. He did not speak. He simply sat, his hands folded, his feet dangling, and looked out at the courtyard as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to share a bench with a woman they called dangerous.
Liu Lanzhi folded her hands in her lap. She did not know what to do with them. She did not know what to do with any of this. But she did not leave. Neither did he.
—
He was there the next morning. And the morning after that.
On the third day, she brought her practice—not cultivation, not yet, but the breathing exercises she practiced in her past life. She sat on the bench, closed her eyes, and breathed.
When she opened them, he was watching her.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
She remembered, suddenly, a different morning. A different garden. A boy, older, asking her the same question. She had brushed him off because she was tired, because she thought there would be time later.
There had not been time.
"Breathing," she said. "It strengthens the body. Prepares it for what comes after."
He considered this. "Does it hurt?"
She thought about the cold pressure stirring beneath her awareness. The pain that would come when she finally reached for it. "No," she said. "Not this part."
He nodded slowly. Then he closed his eyes.
His face was serious. His hands stayed folded. He sat very straight, as if performing a ritual he had been taught long ago and had not forgotten.
In. Hold. Out. He was doing it wrong—his shoulders too high, his breath too fast. But he was four years old, and he was trying, and she had not asked him to.
She did not correct him.
—
On the fifth morning, he brought her a flower.
It was a weed, really—a small white blossom that had pushed through the cracks in the stones, roots intact, dirt still clinging to the stem. He held it out with both hands, his face serious.
Liu Lanzhi stared at it.
In her previous life, she had received jewels, silks, words of praise from men who wanted her favor. She had accepted nothing freely given since she was a child—since before she learned that everything had a price.
This flower had no price. It was a weed, pulled from the dirt by a four-year-old who had nothing else to give.
Her hands trembled when she reached for it. "Thank you."
Her voice cracked on the second word.
He smiled—a small smile, quick and shy, gone almost before she saw it. "It was the only one. The others were dead."
She tucked the flower into her sleeve, close to her chest. He watched her do it, and when she looked up, he was watching her face again.
"You kept it," he said.
"Yes."
He sat a little closer on the bench.
—
In the palace, messages moved quietly through servants' corridors.
The Crown Prince's morning reports were brief, efficient—a dispute between ministers, a request for funds, a note about grain shipments. At the bottom of the pile, a separate report. Short. Unremarkable.
The Northern princess has been seen in the eastern garden. She has been observed in the company of the Eleventh Prince on multiple occasions. No unusual behavior noted.
Yun Qingyu read it twice. The Eleventh Prince. He had forgotten the child existed. There were too many princes, too many consorts, too many children born to mothers who died and left them forgotten. The boy had been assigned tutors, quarters, a stipend. That was enough.
Or it should have been.
He set the paper aside. "Continue watching."
The servant bowed and withdrew. Yun Qingyu did not move. He sat at his desk, morning light falling across his hands, and thought about a woman who had no reason to care for a forgotten prince—and did it anyway.
He did not understand her.
—
On the seventh morning, the flower was gone.
Liu Lanzhi had kept it as long as she could—in a cup of water on her windowsill, where the sun could reach it. The petals had curled. The stem had bent. On the sixth morning, she had found it lying on its side, the water gone.
She had wrapped it in a scrap of silk and placed it in the drawer where she kept Zichen's wooden bird. The bird did not exist yet. Not in this life. But she knew where it would go when she carved it.
She came through the hedge expecting the bench to be empty. It was not.
He was sitting there, hands folded, feet dangling. He looked up, and for a moment she saw the ghost of a smile. Then his face fell.
"It died," he said.
He had looked for the flower in her sleeve, her hair, her wrist. He had looked, and he had not found it, and he knew.
Liu Lanzhi sat beside him. "Yes."
He looked down at his hands. His nails were bitten short. She had noticed that before, in her previous life. He bit them when he was nervous. When he was sad. When he thought no one was watching.
"The others were dead already," he said. "That was the only one left."
She knew. She had seen the courtyard—the cracks in the stones, the thin shoots that pushed through and withered before they bloomed. No gardeners here. No one watered the soil or pulled the weeds or cared whether anything grew.
He had found the only flower in the whole forgotten courtyard. He had given it to her. And it had died.
She reached into her sleeve.
She pulled out the silk bundle. Folded it open. The flower lay inside, petals brown, stem brittle.
"I kept it," she said.
He stared at the flower. Then at her. Then at the flower again.
"You kept it," he repeated.
"It was the only one," she said. "I thought it should be somewhere safe."
He did not smile. But something in his face changed—something small, something she could not name. His shoulders relaxed.
He sat a little closer on the bench.
—
She came through the hedge the next morning, and he was there.
He did not ask about the flower, or the breathing, or why she came. He simply looked at her, then at the space beside him, and she sat.
They sat in silence. The morning light moved across the courtyard. Somewhere beyond the hedge, the palace went about its business, unaware of the small boy on the bench, the woman beside him, the thing growing between them like a flower pushing through cracked stone.
He spoke when the sun was at its highest. His voice was soft, as if afraid of being heard.
"What should I call you?"
Liu Lanzhi turned to look at him. His face was serious. In her previous life, he had called her nothing at first. It had taken weeks, months, for him to trust her enough to speak her name. And then, later, when she was the only one who came—
She pushed the memory away. "You may call me whatever you wish."
He considered this. His brow furrowed. He looked at the bench, the hedge, the sky. He looked at her.
"Jiejie," he said.
The word fell into the silence like a stone into still water.
Liu Lanzhi's breath caught. She had heard this before. In another life, in a different garden, a different boy, older, thinner, his face turned up to hers. Jiejie. You came back.
She had not come back. Not in time.
He was watching her. Waiting. He did not know what the word meant to her—what it had meant, in a life he had not lived, to be called sister by a child who had no one else.
She should tell him not to call her that. She should tell him she was not his sister, that she could not be trusted with the weight of the word.
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
"Jiejie," he said again, softer this time, testing the shape of it.
Liu Lanzhi's eyes burned. She pressed her hands flat against her thighs, nails biting into her palms. She would not cry in front of him. She had done that once, in another life, and he had not understood.
She nodded.
He smiled. A small smile, quick and shy, but real.
She thought of the lake. Of cold water. Of the child she had failed.
Not this time.
She reached out. Her hand hovered in the space between them. He looked at it, then at her, then at her hand again.
He did not take it. He did not need to. He sat beside her on the bench, close enough to touch, and looked out at the courtyard as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
She lowered her hand. There would be time for that later.
She looked at the boy beside her—small, quiet, alive.
Tomorrow, she would come back.
Tomorrow, he would be here.
And the morning after that, for as long as she could keep him safe.