If there was one rule Yena had learned in the palace, it was this:
Never trust tea served too warmly. It meant someone wanted you calm. Or silenced.
She stared at the delicate porcelain cup offered by Lady Sook, one of the Queen Dowager's most polished and passive-aggressive attendants. Sook smiled like a cat that had already eaten the canary.....and seasoned it with cyanide.
"Please," the lady said sweetly. "It's ginseng. Good for the nerves."
Yena gave a tight smile. "My nerves are just fine, My Lady."
"You must be quite shaken, staying near the Crown Prince. The poor boy's condition is… unsettling."
That was putting it mildly.
Yena set the tea down, untouched.
"I find him rather calm. For someone cursed, I mean."
Lady Sook blinked. Just once. Then her smile returned, slightly thinner.
"You're clever, shaman. Just remember...too much cleverness makes you noticeable. And that's not always safe."
Yena tilted her head. "Is that advice or a warning?"
Lady Sook leaned in, voice low. "It's both, dear."
Later that day, Yena returned to the prince's quarters to find Joon pacing.
She frowned. "You're supposed to be resting. Magical scarring takes time to..."
"Tell that to the snake who left this." He tossed a silk ribbon onto the table.
Yena picked it up. It was knotted in a very specific pattepn.... the kind only used by the Serpent Faction, the shadow court within the court.
"Where was this?"
"Tied around the neck of my falcon."
Yena raised a brow. "They're threatening your pet now? That's low. Even for them."
He looked grim. "It means they're watching everything. Even messages I don't send."
She moved to the window, scanning the rooftops.
"We need to send a message back."
Joon gave her a sideways glance. "You want to curse them?"
"No. I want them to think I already have."
That night, the palace was visited by a new rumor:
The shaman girl had summoned a ghost in the Serpent courtyard.That it spoke in tongues.That it screamed a name.
And by morning, three members of the faction had fallen mysteriously ill.
(No connection was proven. Of course.)
Meanwhile, in the library, Prince Joon calmly returned a scroll on war strategy, nodded politely to the startled scribes, and went on with his cursed, princely life.....as if chaos didn't just sip tea with him every morning.
But chaos wasn't done.
Not yet.
As he stepped into the corridor, a rustle echoed behind him. One of the scribes had knocked over an ink pot.....or so he thought.
Until he saw the message smeared across the stone floor in thick black strokes:
"Beware the Phoenix's return."
Joon froze.
No one had used the Phoenix symbol openly since the Fall of the Eastern Consort..... a woman once beloved by the late Emperor and whispered to have died under "mysterious circumstances."
Yena met him halfway back to his quarters. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
He held up a small scroll he'd picked up near the mess. "Close. A political ghost."
She read it. Her brow furrowed. "Phoenix?"
"I think we're about to uncover something that was supposed to stay buried."
Yena glanced around. For the first time, she felt it.....not fear, exactly, but the tremble of something much older than curses and court gossip.
"The past isn't dead," she whispered. "It's just waiting."
Far away, in a wing sealed off for decades, a pair of pale hands sifted through an old trunk.
From within it, a faded robe was drawn..... crimson and gold, embroidered with the fiery wings of the Phoenix.
A woman's voice, aged but sharp, murmured:
"You should not have stirred the ashes, little shaman."