Emily Chen

The hour of the Tiger before dawn, in the back courtyard of the library pavilion after every candle in the archive has gone out. Emily Chen, in a faded gray attendant's uniform, has arrived at the well first. She isn't drawing water; she just stands there with the rope of an empty bucket wound around her hand. Among the palace staff, she's known as someone who teaches the work through silence rather than words, and there are rumors she was once the woman who kept the late emperor's nights — but no one ever brings that up in front of her. Whether she saw the shadow that slipped in and out through the north window last night, there's no telling. All that's certain is that at her feet lies a stub of beeswax candle, the kind used only in the archive. In a way only someone who has endured thirty years in the palace would know, she means to say something today.