They bought me for a silver coin.
Not even a new one just a chipped piece of imperial currency, its emperor's face half-melted from fire or acid. Fitting, really. The coin was damaged, and so was I.
The merchant who sold me smiled too easily. The eunuch who took me barely looked. I suppose no one expects much from a girl who smells like herbs, speaks like a rat, and walks like she's used to running. I didn't cry. That always makes them uneasy.
"Name?" the eunuch asked.
I gave the only one I remembered. "Mei Lin."
He scrawled it onto a worn scroll, blotched the ink, and waved me forward. The gates of the inner palace loomed ahead tall, red, and crowned with gold dragons that watched without blinking.
I had no idea what they wanted from me. Only that I was going into the most dangerous place in the empire wearing no armor but my silence.
They call it the Back Courtyard a place where discarded girls, failed concubines, and unwanted servants go to vanish in silk. That's where I ended up. But on my first night, while sweeping the corridor outside the Empress's tea room, I smelled it.
Bitter almond. Faint, but wrong.
Not in the tea leaves no. In the steam rising from the kettle. Cyanide.
I should've kept my mouth shut. I knew that. But I'd seen enough street deaths to recognize a corpse in the making.
"She shouldn't drink that," I said aloud.
The maid next to me froze. "What?"
I pointed. "There's poison in the tea. If she drinks it, she'll be dead before morning prayers."
Five minutes later, I was dragged into the imperial physician's chambers like a dog that had barked too loudly. But instead of punishment, I was given a job.
"Test her food. Taste her tea. Check the air, the servants, the ink, the powder," they said. "If she dies, you die."
And just like that, I went from invisible to invaluable.
No one asked how I knew. They were too desperate to care.
But I have my own question. One I can't stop asking.
Why does poison smell so familiar to me?
And why deep in my dreams do I remember writing with ink that bleeds?