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followers to ask the emperor to do more. Even a prime minister set on changing the ways of a thousand years knew better than to push too hard on that.
    In fairness, it was unlikely that Prime Minister Hang wanted him dead. They had exchanged letters and even a poetry sequence once. Years ago, but still. They had debated policies with courtesy before the last emperor, though not in front of the son, the current one. Times changed. Arcs. His old rival Hang was … old now, too. It was said his eyesight was failing. There were others, younger, colder, near the throne now.
    Still, he had only been ordered
away
from Hanjin, from palace and office. He was allowed his own house and garden, books and brush, ink stone and paper. He hadn’t been driven ten thousand
li
south to a place from which men did not return.
    They didn’t execute out-of-favour civil servants in the Twelfth Dynasty of Kitai under the Emperor Wenzong. That, he thought wryly, would have been barbaric, and theirs was an emperor of exquisite cultivation. They just sent members of the disgraced faction away, sometimes so far that their ghosts couldn’t even return to threaten anyone.
    One of the two men coming to him today was on his way to a savage exile: across the Great River and the rice-rich lands, over two mountain ranges, through thick, wet forests, all the way to the low-lying, poisonous island that was only nominally part of the empire.
    Lingzhou was where the very worst political offenders were sent. They were expected to write their last letters or poems in the steaming heat and die.
    He’d been a pupil once, the one going there now, a follower, though he’d moved far beyond that. Another man he loved. Perhaps (probably?) the one he’d loved most of all of them. It would be important today, Master Xi told himself sternly, to preserve equanimity. He would break a willow twig in farewell, the old custom, but he must not shame himself or weaken the other with an old man’s tears.
    It was a reason he’d invited the second visitor. To change the tone and mood. Impose the restraint that preserved dignity, the illusion that this was not a final meeting. He was old, his friend was banished. Truth was, they were never going to climb again to a high place on the Ninth of Ninth Festival and celebrate friendship with too much wine.
    It was important not to think about that.
    Old men wept too easily.
    He saw one of his woman servants, the young one, coming from the house and through the garden. He preferred messages to be brought by the women, not his steward. It was unusual, but he was in his own home, could devise his own protocols, and he so much enjoyed the sight of this one—in blue silk today, her hair elegantly pinned (both things also unusual, she
was
only a servant)—as she approached along the curved pathway to the gazebo where he sat. He had curved all the paths when he designed his small garden, just as they were curved or angled at court. Demons could only travel a straight line.
    She bowed twice, announced his first visitor. The amusing one, as it turned out. He wasn’t really in a mood for that, but he didn’t want to be desperately sad when the other one came. There were too many memories, called back by a springtime morning.
    Then he saw that Lin Kuo had someone with him, and his mood did change a little. It was a source of immediate inward wryness. He had always been able to laugh at himself. A saving feature in a powerful man. But how was it that even today, at his age, the sight of a very young girl, fresh-faced to face the world, graceful and awkward at the same time (she was tall for a woman, he saw), poised on the threshold of life, could still enchant him so much?
    Once, a long time ago—another memory, a different kind—his enemies had tried to drive him from power by claiming he’d incestuously seduced a young cousin. There had been a trial. The accusation had been a lie and they had