The markets of Chang'an were an atlas of motion: wheeled carts, voices like collisions, and spices that made the tongue dizzy. Lin Wei walked among them with the furtiveness of someone moving between lives. She sought particular herbs and a quiet place to work. It was there at the back of an old shop she met him again.
He was not the prince anymore, at least not openly. The man who had watched her from the sedan chair introduced himself differently: as Xiao Che of Wu—an exile general with a mission that skimmed the edges of treason. He had a habit of speaking as though he were describing the scene of a play rather than the architecture of a conspiracy. He unrolled a painting of a woman whose face folded into the lines of Lin Wei's own features, and with a slow rhetoric he claimed a history: that woman was a murdered princess, whose medical notes contained recipes capable of neutralizing every manner of poison.
Their meeting rained a new set of possibilities on Lin Wei's already overflowing plate of choices. She wanted nothing more than to be a physician. Now she had been placed at the center of a rhomboid of interests: a prince who would rather erase a rival than mend, a general who wanted to overturn a dynasty, and a scholar whose loyalty might be deeper than a single person could measure.
Shen's whispers suggested that faith might reside in study and in institutions; Xiao Che's promises suggested salvation could be seized by force. Lin Wei tasted both like medicines that were at once bitter and necessary, and recognized the terrible truth that the doctor's oath to do no harm could be taught in two tongues here.