Delicious Poison
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7
The Baofang, Beijing, Early Autumn, 1519
His answer came at dawn.
Not through Madame Fang. Not through Liu or any of the apparatus of imperial communication that she had begun to map. He came himself, which she had not expected, appearing at her door in the grey early light in the same simple dark clothing he had worn the night before, as though he had not slept, or had slept briefly and woken with his decision already made and saw no reason to wait for a more ceremonial hour.
She had been awake. She had been awake most of the night.
She received him standing, which she had chosen deliberately — she would not be sitting when he arrived, would not be in a posture of repose that suggested she had spent the night in comfortable certainty. She was dressed, her hair loose, and she watched him come through the door and read his face in the grey light and found it composed in a way that told her nothing, which told her he had practiced this expression.
He said, in Arabic, “The bow.”
Two words. Dropped into the quiet of the early morning with the flatness of a man who had made his decision and was not performing the making of it.
She held his gaze and felt something move through her that she identified after a moment as the first intimation of a problem. Not fear. Something more specific than fear. The particular sensation of a calculation that has assumed a known variable and is now uncertain of the assumption.
She said, “The bow.”
“You offered me any weapon.”
“I did.”
He looked at her steadily. He said, “Dawn. The training ground. An hour.”
He left.
She stood in the grey light of her room and breathed and thought about the bow and what she knew about her own skill with it and what she knew about men who chose their weapons in two words at dawn without ceremony or explanation and she thought: he is good.
She did not think: he is better than me. She had never thought that about anyone.
She should have asked the question. She knew this, standing there, with an hour before the thing that was about to happen. A less proud woman would have asked it months ago. A hunter without vanity would have gathered that intelligence the way she gathered everything else, methodically, without ego involved in the answer.
She had not asked. She had decided, and deciding had felt like knowing, and knowing had felt like safety, and now she had an hour.
She picked up her bow — they had returned it to her as part of the terms, she had insisted on that, she would not duel with an unfamiliar weapon — and she went to the training ground.
The Baofang was awake.
She had not expected that either. She had constructed the duel in her mind as a private thing — the two of them, the terms, the outcome. What she found when she reached the training ground in the early morning light was the household. Not assembled formally, not commanded to attend. Simply there, in the way that people are there when something worth witnessing is happening and word has traveled faster than anyone officially sent it.
Madame Fang stood to one side with the stillness of a woman who had decided her role here was witness rather than manager. Lady Aisha stood near her, and their eyes met briefly when Mei-Lin crossed the ground, and what passed between them Mei-Lin could not fully read — something that was not pity and was not hope and was perhaps simply the attention of a woman who understood what was at stake.
The soldiers were there. The wrestler. The household staff in various states of having dressed quickly. The Vietnamese girl stood on her toes to see over the shoulder of a taller woman in front of her.
The Emperor stood at the near end of the range with his bow in his hand and Liu two steps behind him and the expression of a man who was at work. Not the Emperor expression. Not the performance. This was the face he wore when he was doing something that mattered to him, and it was a face she had not seen before, and she looked at it and revised, for the first time, something.
She revised how seriously she should have taken the choice of weapon.
She did not show this.
She crossed the training ground and took her position and they looked at each other across the distance and he said, in Arabic, because they had established that as their language and he was keeping it, “Standard course. Five targets. Distance increases with each. Closest target scores one point. Farthest scores five.”
She said, “Agreed.”
“Highest score wins.”
“Agreed.”
He looked at her for one moment longer. He said, “You could withdraw the challenge.”
She looked at him as though he had said something in a language she did not speak. Then she nocked her first arrow and turned to face the range.
She was good.
She had always known she was good and this morning she was better than good — the dawn air was clean and still, perfect conditions, and her body knew the bow the way it knew breathing, and the first arrow flew true and the second truer and she felt the particular cold clarity of a competitor who has located their best self and is operating from it completely.
She hit the first three targets cleanly. The crowd was quiet in the way crowds are quiet when they are watching something they did not expect to see.
Then he shot.
He shot the way he did everything she had observed him do — without ceremony, without visible effort, with the focused economy of a man for whom ten thousand repetitions had compressed technique into instinct. The arrow was in the air before she had registered the release. It hit the center of the first target with a sound that was different from her sound, a flatter more authoritative sound, and she watched it and understood.
She understood in the way that hunters understand things — not through reasoning but through the body, through the accumulated knowledge of years spent doing this one thing. She understood what she was watching.
She shot the fourth target.
She hit it. Not center — slightly right, a half finger’s width, the kind of variance that on any other morning she would have dismissed and on this morning she could not dismiss because the margins were going to matter.
He hit the fourth target in the center.
The silence on the training ground was absolute.
She nocked the final arrow. The fifth target was at the distance that separated the exceptional from the merely excellent — far enough that the arrow’s arc became a factor, that wind mattered, that the shooter’s heartbeat mattered. She had practiced this distance. She had practiced it until she could hit it eight times in ten under pressure.
She breathed. She found stillness. She released.
The arrow flew true. It hit the target — not center, but true, solidly in the scoring ring, and she heard the small sound from the crowd that was involuntary, the sound of people releasing breath they had been holding.
She watched him shoot the fifth target.
She watched it and knew before the arrow arrived what the arrow was going to do, and it did it, and the thing she had been very careful not to feel for four months — not on the road, not in the chains, not in the dry riverbed — moved through her in a single wave that she controlled, contained, refused to show, and would examine later in private and not before.
The scoring was brief. His score was higher. Not by a large margin. By enough.
The training ground was very quiet.
She stood with the bow in her hand and the morning light coming up behind the garden wall and she took one breath, slow, complete, and then she turned to face him.
He was looking at her. That face — the working face, not the Emperor face — and in it she saw that he knew what this had cost her, and was not gloating, and was waiting.
She said, in Arabic, her voice level and clear and carrying in the morning quiet, “You won fairly.”
He inclined his head. The same gesture as the night before — not superior to inferior. Something lateral.
She said, “I gave my word.”
“I know.”
She looked at him for a long moment across the training ground with everyone watching, and she held what had just happened inside her like something sharp and did not let it show, and she said, “Then we both know where we stand.”
She handed her bow to the air in front of her — not to him, not to anyone specific, just set it into the space between them — and walked back across the training ground toward the main building with her back straight and her chin level and her eyes forward.
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