On the fourth day, Shen Bao came to the house.
This was not unusual, in itself — he had been coming to the house for three months, with the cover of a distant cousin conducting business in the capital, a fiction that had been established carefully enough to survive casual scrutiny. The household staff knew him as a reliable caller who stayed less than an hour and never caused inconvenience. They had stopped registering his visits with more than a nod.
What was unusual was that he arrived before the morning meal, which he had never done, and that he came to the gate rather than the side entrance, and that when I met him in the east garden he was wearing the expression of a man who had not slept.
"There's a shadow," he said, without greeting.
I knew what he meant. A shadow was the word we had agreed on months ago for surveillance — for the specific kind of watching that suggested the Prince's household rather than ordinary official monitoring.
"On this house?"
