The Apothecary Diaries Book 11

The Strategist Strikes!

No sooner had they returned to the annex than they were summoned to Jinshi's chambers.

Like it couldn't wait till tomorrow!

It was the middle of the night; everyone but the guard on duty was sound asleep. The air was cold—and worse, Maomao hadn't eaten dinner. She was desperate to be done with this.

When she reached Jinshi's room, she discovered his desk riddled with abandoned drafts of numerous letters. Suiren or Taomei might have picked them up, had they been there; the fact they were still lying around showed that the ladies-in-waiting must really have their hands full. Maomao was clearly not the only one staying up late to work.

For a moment, she thought there was no one in the room—but then she happened to see Baryou peering out from behind a curtain. For a second, a charge went through the air between them, like two feral cats bumping into each other, and then Baryou vanished back behind his curtain without a word.

Something else, however, peeked out from behind the curtain in his stead: a duck with a black spot on her bill. Without Basen around, Baryou must be taking care of her. He wasn't much for human company, but maybe a duck was all right.

I feel like there's a real risk of her being eaten by Miss Chue. Apparently her husband's protection was enough to save the duck from the wife's cleaver.

"Oh, Maomao, you're here," said Suiren, who appeared from a back room. Maomao turned to her as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on.

"Yes, ma'am. I went to do a medical examination on Master Gyoku-ou's granddaughter. I think Miss Chue told you about it. Tianyu the physician was with me; he's at the medical office now."

He'd dumped the entire reporting-to-Jinshi thing on Maomao, on the grounds of "each doing what we're best at." When she thought of him sitting down to dinner—late, but still earlier than her—she privately vowed to serve him another cup of swertia tea. For now, she gave Suiren a brief rundown.

"I'll go call the Moon Prince," the other woman said. Before she went, she collected the discarded letters and put them in a basket.

"That's an awful lot of false starts," Maomao remarked.

"He's just been writing letters to anyone he thinks he can count on. He must have written close to a hundred—no, two hundred, even."

"T—Two hundred?!"

From what Maomao could see of the attempted letters, each one began with the sort of fulsome, vacuous description of the season expected of a message from a member of the Imperial family. Yes, there was probably a more or less prescribed way to write such things, but even so, writing every single one of those letters by hand would have been enough to give a person tendinitis.

Maybe I should get a wet compress ready. Unfortunately, she'd come armed only with her usual bandages and balm.

Judging by the number of drafts lying around, Jinshi must have been corresponding not only with the most prominent bureaucrats, but the regional rulers as well.

"It's great that he's actually doing his job and all, but won't begging everyone in sight for help sort of...take away from his gravitas?"

Maomao's question provoked a sigh from Suiren—she seemed to agree that those who lived "above the clouds" shouldn't be quite so quick to send letters to those who lived below them.

"Do you suppose that's the sort of thing that would bother the Moon Prince?"

"No... No, I don't."

This was a man who had spent six years pretending to be a eunuch, a position that had given him a thorough familiarity with the slings and arrows of public opinion. He was probably less worried than anyone here about the rather coarse treatment he was receiving in the western capital.