Minister Li dismissed the last of his servants before the second bell. The brazier in his study hissed and guttered, as if it too disliked sharing warmth with a disgraced man.
Snow bruised the latticed windows in slow, patient taps. Somewhere beyond the walls, gossip cut through the city like a hungry blade: Prince Ning is dead. The phoenix girl killed him. Her father will be next.
Minister Li sat motionless at his desk, fingers resting on a scroll he had not opened in twenty years. The lacquer on the old wood had cracked like a smile dragged too far; the inkstone's water had turned the color of old jade. He did not look at either. He listened.
Footsteps in the outer corridor. A soft cough. Then the steward he had kept since youth—Luo, bent by loyalty more than age—slid the door and knelt.
"They are waiting outside, my lord. The Registrar, two clerks from the Board of Rites, and… a nephew of the Grand Commandant. They seek a public word."
Minister Li's mouth twitched. "A word is cheaper than rice, and yet the court spends it like gold." He rose, straightened his plain robe—the only silk he still allowed himself—and walked past Luo without taking his arm.
In the front hall, the snow had been swept into tidy heaps that steamed like dying breath. Four men bowed with careful zeal. Behind them, two guards watched his roofline, as if treason grew there like winter moss.
"My lord," the Registrar said, tone syruped with concern, "these are grave hours. The Emperor grieves. The city shakes. But if your house stands blameless, we must see it."
"Name your seeing," Minister Li replied.
"The registers," the clerk of Rites said, not meeting his eyes. "Strike the name Li Ziyan. Burn the line. Renounce her publicly, so that the Empire may know where you kneel."
Minister Li let the silence grow roots. He watched their shoes dampen on his stone. He thought of a girl with ink on her fingers, trying to write the shape of Heaven with a child's patience; of her mother's cough swallowed behind silk; of all the years he had called prudence what a smaller man would name fear.
"Bring the book," he said.
They set the lacquered genealogy on the table. He took up the brush, dipped it once, and wrote a single character beside his daughter's name—cut. The ink soaked into paper with a sound like a sigh given edges. The clerk took the brush back as if it burned.
"Good," said the Registrar, relief too quick. "And the seal?"
"Break it," Minister Li said.
They struck the wax with a small iron hammer. The crack seemed to please them. They bowed again, lower than before.
"Your loyalty will be remembered," the nephew of the Grand Commandant said, smiling with a boy's mouth and a knife's eyes.
"Loyalty is a habit," Minister Li replied. "Memory is a weapon." He gave them tea he had not brewed and watched them drink. When they were gone, he stood in the empty hall until the warmth of their bodies left the wood.
Only then did he return to his study and close the door on the snow.
Luo hovered in the shadow. "My lord. Forgive an old man his courage. Did you—"
"I cut the name," Minister Li said, voice flat. "To save the house."
Luo swallowed. "And the heart, my lord?"
Minister Li looked at the old scroll he had not opened in twenty years. He unknotted the faded silk. The seal was not imperial; it bore a lotus older than the dynasty's current mask. Inside lay three letters and a ledger page.
He laid them side by side like bones.
The first letter was a confession written by a young officer who later became a legend: how, on a winter border three reigns ago, orders had been falsified to hide a retreat that would have made a prince look small. The falsifier's name had been erased everywhere but here.
The second letter was a debt marker, signed by a then-obscure censor who now sat at the center of the web. It promised a kindness for a silence, and recorded the price of a widow's life.
The ledger was the ace his enemies had always suspected he lacked: a chain of "grain relief" shipments that never reached the famine towns but did fatten a certain commandant's stores before a war.
Minister Li touched the page with one finger. Ink ghosted his skin.
"I am a coward," he said, not to Luo but to the brazier's patient red. "I let the tide make my steps for me. I told myself that is how houses live." His mouth bent. "Perhaps I was right. Perhaps we survive only by wearing other people's ash."
"My lord," Luo whispered.
"She is cut," Minister Li said, voice hardening. "By the book, by the mouth, by the street's favorite sport. The city thinks she is the knife. Good. Let them shout. In shouting, men forget to listen."
He folded the ledger once, twice; smoothed it flat again. "Send a boy to the eastern quarter. He will deliver an anonymous copy to the Guild's inner hall. A second copy goes to the Censorate's hungry wing. The third, to the Emperor's private archivist—no title, no seal. Let them gnaw each other's names while I stand here and mourn the girl I taught to hide her cleverness."
Luo bowed, eyes bright with salt. "And if the Grand Commandant comes?"
"Then he finds an old man burning winter wood." Minister Li closed the scroll. "And if my daughter is as foolish as I raised her, she will live long enough to ruin me without my help."
He turned away. Luo did not see the tremor in his hand until long after the door slid shut.