The Fox's Gambit
Cold Palace shadows swallowed the last traces of daylight as I counted thirty-seven days of feigned madness. My unwashed hair reeked of medicinal herbs I'd poured into the floor cracks, my fingernails blackened with dirt and dried blood. The perfect portrait of a broken woman.
Then she came—through the window like a scarlet phantom.
Xiao Jing's armor gleamed dark as clotted blood in the moonlight. The infamous Wolf General of our enemy nation crouched before me, her smile sharp enough to draw blood.
"Your acting needs work," she murmured, plucking the half-rotten fish bone dagger from under my pillow. "But your survival instincts... those impress me."
I didn't flinch when she shattered my bedpost with a single palm strike. The secret documents hidden inside—proof of my brother's three-year correspondence with this very enemy—fluttered into her grasp.
"Sentimentality will kill you faster than poison." She tossed the papers into my chamber pot's feeble flame. "Your brother sold your mother to the executioners. Now he's selling what remains of you."
The firelight carved hollows beneath her eyes as she leaned in. "Join me. Help me take Dajing City."
"Treason?" My cracked lips barely formed the word.
Her laugh was the scrape of a whetstone. "Is this rotting empire still worth your loyalty? They called your mother traitor. They'll call you worse."
When she extended her hand, I saw the old scar across her palm—identical to the one my mother's sword had left on a battlefield years ago.
"Come with me," she whispered, "and I'll give you what your precious Crown Prince never could—an army at your back, and the truth in your hands."
Outside, owl feathers swirled on the wind—the Embroidered Uniform Guard's calling card. My brother would be here within the hour.
I took her hand.
Not as a prisoner.
Not as a pawn.
But as the fox finally slipping its trap.
[That night, the Cold Palace burned to ashes. By dawn, two bodies were found in the wreckage—one wearing my clothes, the other my brother's jade pendant.
And far to the north, where the wolves run free beneath the moon, a new shadow took its place beside the Wolf General's throne.]
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