Wei and Silian work together to gain Terren’s trust. Silian feeds Wei some information about Maro’s movements in secret and Wei gives enough of this information to Terren to please him but not enough to harm Maro significantly.

As Wei earns Terren’s trust, the servants of the Cypress Pavilion begin to avoid her. Only Wren knows about Wei’s plot with the heart-spirit poem, so the servants are fearful she’ll be tempted to turn against them the closer she becomes to Terren. The old maid Hu is the only one to continue her literacy lessons with Wei.

Meanwhile, Wei continues working on the heart-spirit poem. She adds stanzas inspired by Maro’s journals and by the empress’s memories of Lady Autumn. Then she begins to add things she’s learned about Terren herself—the mundane things such as his picky eating habits, his fidgeting habit when nervous, and his closeted love for certain birds, geckos, and snails.

Wei’s heart-spirit begins to glow as magic forms. When she calls for Wren, it is Hesin who answers and sees the glowing poem. For months, Hesin has suspected her and now she has given him proof to take to Terren. Wei tries to convince Hesin to allow her to go through with her poem, claiming the empire would be better off without Terren as a ruler. Even if Hesin would agree, his duty is to protect Terren and he will not be swayed. Hesin tells Wei that the nation is not doing well. Rebellions are starting and unrest rising amongst the Great Clans. War is coming to Tensha and they will need Terren’s Dao sigil magic to survive.

Wei is unable to kill Hesin to keep her secret because he had informed Terren that he was visiting Wei. If she were to kill him, Terren would immediately suspect her of treason. With Wren’s help, Wei restrains Hesin and burns the poem in the fire. She’s memorized it, so is unconcerned about writing it out once more in the future. With a plan already forming in her mind of how to condemn Hesin before he can condemn her, Wei lets him go and rushes to the West Palace.

A journal entry from Maro dictates the day he met with Terren in the peach garden for the final time, when Terren was 16 and Maro was 18. They met on the bridge above the carp pond. Maro offered Terren his favorite food—mung bean cakes—which were secretly poisoned with a concoction that wouldn’t be caught by their poison-detecting needles. Terren didn’t touch them.

Maro apologized: “I’m sorry I kept myself from you, after you wrote your first Blessing. […] I’m sorry that I stopped playing with you, after our father’s birthday banquet. The world wanted us to be against each other, and I was young and foolish enough to listen” (260). He continued apologizing for his cruelty in the mountains and hitting Terren for trying to keep him safe. Lastly, he shared his suspicion that without Maro’s protection in Tieza, Terren “fell off a tree […] a big one, bigger than either of [them] had ever seen, and [Maro] never asked [Terren] to show him” (261). The tree is a metaphor for a literal trauma Maro suspected took place in Tieza and he apologized for not being there for Terren.

His apologies made Terren cry and beg him to turn him into a fish, flower, or peach tree—anything, as long as he became something nice and innocent. Terren then attempted to eat the mung bean cake. Unable to go through with killing his brother, Maro knocked the poisoned food into the water. Terren screamed and cried and begged Maro to save the fish who died soon after eating the floating mung bean cake. In his distraction, Maro’s council—who had been hidden in the nearby trees without his permission or knowledge—shot arrows at Terren in an attempt to assassinate him. Terren enacted the Aricine Ward mid-attack and escaped.

Master Len died in the pursuit of Terren, taking one of the redirected arrows to the head. Despite his anger at his council, the death of his father-like mentor finally convinced Maro that Terren needed to die. Later, Hesin visited Maro for help against Terren, whom he believed killed his friend, Taifong. Maro, however, knew his childhood friend, Siming’s, tactics. Siming confirmed that he killed Taifong to frame Terren and upset the emperor’s closest advisor, hoping Hesin would be angry enough to caution the emperor against naming Terren heir.

Wei visits Silian in the West Palace and asks to see Maro’s failed heart-spirit poem. She copies a part of it onto a scroll as she explains her predicament to Silian and her plan to counter it. Wei feels terrible that her plan will condemn Hesin for a crime he didn’t commit, but it is necessary. Silian isn’t as bothered by the plan as Wei and tells her to remember their cause is noble, and that “so many more innocents will die if [they] let the second son become emperor” (268).

Wei hides the copied verses in places around the Cypress Pavilion where Hesin might find them. When they go missing one day, she meets with Terren to inform him that she suspects Hesin is plotting with Maro. She tells Terren that they were planning to depose him through Wei by feigning evidence of her being literate. She also accuses Hesin of doctoring Terren’s official paperwork to further frame her. Terren sends a servant to fetch his old paperwork so he can check the validity of Wei’s claims.

Wei also states that Prince Maro mentioned using a heart-poem against Terren and that she suspects Hesin is aiding Maro because he fears he will be replaced now that Terren has begun to trust and rely on Wei more. While Terren momentarily entertains the idea that Wei herself is guilty and trying to frame Hesin before she can be accused, he quickly dismisses it as implausible, because if she could read as Hesin claims, she’d have healed herself back when Terren stabbed her in the chest.

The servant returns with Terren’s past paperwork and when he finds the addendums Wei made, he finally believes Hesin has betrayed him. He summons Hesin, who tries to argue his innocence by bringing forth the papers he stole from Wei’s pavilion. Terren cuts off Hesin’s hand and throws him into the dungeon after reading the poem and recognizing it as Maro’s writing style.

The next morning, Terren slaughters all the servants in the Cypress Pavilion except Ciyi and Hu. Upon seeing Wren’s body, Wei wishes she could kill Terren immediately. Terren explains that he killed all the servants to be sure Hesin had no spies in his court.

When Terren sees Wei is displeased at this, he offers to pay for her brother’s school tuition and to send food to Lu’an. He grants her a month away from the palace to visit home and deliver the gifts personally.

The pavilion’s servants are replaced with new hires and Wei doesn’t bother learning their names. Wei and her entourage leave with several carriages full of provisions for Lu’an. As much as she wishes to go home, she knows she must visit Tieza to find answers. She sends half the provisions ahead with a few servants and guards, and takes the rest with her to Tieza.

Wei’s group travels anonymously to avoid attention. Ciyi fears being killed like Wei’s other servants for disobeying Terren’s edict granting her permission to travel to Lu’an. Wei tells him a false story that the servants were only killed because they knew how to read and she’d grown paranoid they’d use their literacy against her. Ciyi is disgusted by this answer, believing her “ruthless beyond redemption” (284).

On their journey to Tieza, they give out what provisions they can to various villages suffering from the famine. Just outside of Tieza, they stop at a graveyard where Wei pays respects to the dead. She writes her first blessing there. Nothing happens yet, but she wrote it for the future. In a few years, the poem will come to fruition and end the famine by revitalizing the crops.

Wei visits the Violet Heron Tower, which happens to be a brothel house, where she speaks with the woman in charge, Aunt Ahma.

Wei promises not to hurt or punish Aunt Ahma as long as she tells the truth. Ahma admits Lady Autumn worked at the brothel before the war. She wasn’t content with her life as a pleasure girl and was hungry “for something more—power, wealth, a place in history” (294). At the age of 14, she traveled to the palace to become a concubine.

She finally returned during the war to liberate Tieza and brought Terren along with her. Lady Autumn brought nine-year-old Terren to the brothel to learn childmaking duties. Ahma allowed it because if one of her pleasure girls were to birth a seal-bearing son, it would bring profit to her establishment, and if Terren were to have a son, Lady Autumn thought it would guarantee his path to the throne over Maro. Ahma explains a special chamber was made for Terren, which Wei requests to see.

The chamber is decorated luxuriously but Wei notices tongs on the mantle with three sharp prongs. Wei remembers seeing scars on Terren’s chest matching this exact pattern, and realizes it was used to torture and punish him during the seven years he was forced to perform at the Violet Heron Tower.

When pushed by Wei to give details, Ahma recalls Terren screaming and crying at first but eventually stopped resisting. Wei finds the remains of Terren’s childhood toys—Niu Niu, Tiger, and Little Sparrow—in the fireplace. Only Niu Niu is still in one piece. Ahma claims that Terren burned them himself one day, around the age of 16. She suspects he had finally decided he had outgrown them.

Wei is angry but does not punish Ahma for telling the truth, as promised. When she exits the Violet Heron tower, she sees a ghost. She’s seen apparitions before, but never one of a living person. The ghost is the child version of Terren playing with his toys amongst the nearby field of wildflowers. Wei believes she understands his story now. Terren was shown a world full of bloodshed and pain and “had learned that suffering was normal, a part of life, and so it hardly seemed remarkable to do it to others” (301). She hypothesizes that while everyone else believes he created the Aricine Ward to become powerful and seize the throne, he actually created it to protect himself from further harm.

Wei destroys Niu Niu, which she’d taken from the brothel’s fireplace, which allows the toy to join Terren in the afterlife. Only then does the ghost notice Wei. She keeps him company for a while as she works on the heart-spirit poem, adding to it the new information she’s learned. Terren reads it from over her shoulder and writes a verse in the dirt, which she adds to the poem.

When Wei returns to Azalea House, she is apprehended and taken to the palace prison, where she remains for three days. Eventually, she is brought to the main hall of the East Palace, where the court has gathered. A magistrate steps forward to administer a test of treasonous intent on Wei. If she is guilty, the Ancestors will punish her; if she is innocent, she will remain unharmed.

He brings forth three scrolls and asks her to choose one to copy. Wei correctly assumes that this is a disguised literacy test. To pass, she purposefully copies the wrong scroll, and the spell brings her immense pain. The test continues and she chooses scrolls at random, putting herself through continued agony to the point of near-death to convince everyone that she is not literate.

When she can barely continue any longer, Terren steps forward and calls a stop to the examination. After an extensive argument, Wei is considered to have passed the test and the trial is ended.

Wei is nursed back to health over the following days. She notices tea—just the way Terren loves it—is left by her bedside. When she has recovered enough, she asks her servants who went to Lu’an how the village fares. They tell her that the famine has worsened and everyone is thin and suffering. She lists off the people who have died. Luckily, her family is not among them but a young boy she knew, Rui Dan, is. Despite their misfortunes, the village was happy to receive the provisions and Wei’s brother, Bao, was thrilled to be going to school.

Terren visits Wei eventually to inquire as to why she went to Tieza. She tells him about visiting the Violet Heron Tower and admits she knows what they did to him. She insists: “What they made you do, it was not your duty. The burden of empire is not a child’s to bear. […] What your mother did to you was cruel, and needless, and evil, and it was not your duty” (317). He threatens to kill her if she keeps speaking but Wei continues anyway, stating that they all failed him. They hurt him when they should have protected him and he deserves to be safe. The words cause Terren to lose control of his emotions and he flees the room.