Page 106 of The Blood Orchid

I held out my hands expectantly. Without another word, Wenshu passed me the scroll.

He turned back to the crowd. “Empress Fan Zilan has an announcement to make,” he said, before stepping back and nodding to me.

The crowd murmured uneasily at my title. I couldn’t blame them—there had been no wedding or coronation. But far stranger things had happened in Chang’an than someone like me.

I clutched the scroll tight in my hands, leaving scarlet fingerprints on the fresh paper. As I drew closer to the edge of the balcony, the vastness of the crowd suddenly overwhelmed me, all their expectant eyes pinning me down.

I had never given any sort of formal speech. I wasn’t Zheng Sili, who knew how to speak eloquently. The words on the paper before me seemed to blur together.

But I didn’t need them. I already knew what they said. These were perhaps the most important words I would ever speak in my life.

Once, only one floor above here, the Empress had stood over me in a room soaked with blood, and told me Hong would be dead within the hour.

What have you done with him?I’d said.

I’ve been thinking of posthumous names for Hong, she’d said, as if she hadn’t heard me.We can call him Emperor Xiaojing, even though he was never really emperor, but I think the people would find it endearing.

I remembered that moment so clearly because the very concept was foreign to someone of my class—merchants had the same name in death as in life.

But people that would be remembered—like the royal family—received new names after their deaths.

Taizong had been known as Li Shimin when he was alive, and Gaozong had been Li Zhinu. They’d received both posthumous names and temple names so the people could worship them long after their deaths, and those new names eclipsed their old ones, all but erasing them. It was disrespectful to call them their common names once their temple names had been established.

Wu Zhao had branded her name onto thousands of people, thinking it guaranteed her safety in the afterlife.

But very soon, Wu Zhao would not be her name anymore.

I took a deep breath and straightened my back.

“As many of you know,” I said, my words wavering, “the Perpetual Empress Wu Zhao has passed away. As such, in the tradition of great rulers before her, we must give her a posthumous title.”

The crowd began to whisper, people turning to each other in confusion. In the distance, the corpse that was not Yufei or Wu Zhao swayed in the wind.

Wenshu had thought all night about the Empress’s new name. As funny as it would have been to name her something she would have hated—perhaps a commoner’s name, like mine—it would likely confuse the people who had no knowledge of all her treachery. Posthumous titles were signs of respect, and if they felt the name was disrespectful, they might not use it.

“From this day forth,” I said, “the name Wu Zhao shall no longer be spoken in this kingdom. From now on, we will remember her as Empress Consort Wu Zetian.”

The characters forZe Tianmeant “Ruler of Heaven,” an appropriately pretentious name for someone of her status, though I was secretly thrilled to cement her title as empress consort rather than empress regnant—she had only ever ruled with power borrowed from the Emperor, not in her own right. If anyone asked, we’d say that her name was inspired by the Zetian Gate that led to the second palace in Luoyang, but it had another secret meaning—she would never again rule anything on earth, but she could try her luck in whatever world awaited her after death.

A notice about her new name had already been sent to all the other circuits in China. It would take time for the public to forget the name Wu Zhao entirely. But, as of this moment, her name had officially and irrevocably changed.

“May her soul rest in peace,” I said, because that was something an empress was supposed to say when someone of importance died. But I knew her soul wasn’t resting peacefully because I’d just sliced it to ribbons and hurled it into a river. It wasn’t her physical body, so surely she was already piecing herself back together. But soon, every door she’d built for herself would slam shut in her face.

I lowered the scroll, and as I looked across the kingdom that now belonged to me, I knew that Wu Zhao was truly gone.

Part of me had always known that her “death” in the throne room hadn’t been her end—I had sensed her in every shadow, every creak of old wood in the ancient palace, every cold and starless night. But this time, as I’d brought my sword down, the look in her eyes had been different. It was the same expression that the Moon Alchemist wore upon her death—the face of someone who knew they were about to meet their end.

I looked down at my hand, imagining the red thread of fate that had long tied us together. I could almost see its shorn end blowing in the wind, the thin string at last severed.

Goodbye, Wu Zetian, I thought, a strange lightness filling my chest. Long ago, I had sworn to myself that I would be the end of her story, that I would pry her kingdom from her withered hands. At last, I had kept my promise.

The sun sank just beyond the Buddhist temple on the horizon, crossing that thin threshold from afternoon to dusk with a fiery orange glow, and the crowd began to fall.

The first woman collapsed in the front row, her sun-scorched face suddenly gray, jaw slack as she fell to the dirt. A guard tried to lift her up, but her limbs had locked tight, as if long dead.

Someone screamed from the middle of the crowd, and the sea of bodies pushed outward, forming a circle around a man collapsed on top of another.

The crowd began to wilt, people toppling headfirst into each other, tripping others as they tried to flee and found themselves climbing over bodies. The crowd pushed outward, the street swelling with panicked screams and cries for help as they trampled each other in their haste to escape.

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