Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Wang Yuanwai is dead.

It wasn’t from falling off a horse.

He was sitting in his hall drinking tea when a crossbeam suddenly plummeted from the ceiling, crushing his neck. His right hand was clenched tightly around a length of Red Thread. The coroner said it had been cut from a horse’s bridle.

The death my father embroidered had arrived. The path had changed, but the destination remained the same.

The Wang family rushed to the Shen Family estate like madmen, screaming that we had murdered him and threatening to burn down the Embroidery Tower.

Standing behind the gates, listening to the rhythmic thud of them battering the wood, I suddenly realized something.

Wang Yuanwai’s portrait hadn’t been a failure.

The failure was my father.

Someone had finished the stitch for my father before he could finish it for Wang Yuanwai.

And my own Death Portrait was the next contract.

That night, I sat in my father’s seat for the first time.

A blank piece of Fate Paper lay before the embroidery frame. Du Niang wrote my birth date and time upon it, her hand trembling so violently she could barely hold the brush.

“Miss, do you truly want to learn?”

“If I don’t learn, I will be dead in three days.”

“And if you do learn?”

I threaded the needle.

The Red Thread slid through the eye like blood weeping from a wound.

I closed my eyes, thinking of that embroideress in the veiled hat, of the person who mimicked my father’s technique, and of the culprit behind the scenes kneeling on the ground, bleeding from every orifice.

I made the first stitch.

But my father’s face surfaced upon the silk.

He was slumped over the embroidery frame, a needle driven into his heart, his eyes wide open.

My hand jerked, and the needle tip pierced my finger.

Blood fell onto the silk.

In the crimson stain, my father’s eyes seemed to blink.

Over the next two days, I tried seven times.

Every single time, the embroidery depicted my father’s death.

Sometimes it was the needle in his chest, sometimes the white in his hair, sometimes his stiff hands gripping the frame. The most terrifying time, I embroidered his mouth.

Outlined in black thread, that mouth looked as if it were silently screaming my name.

Lu Wenzhou said, “You cannot try anymore.”

“Then tell me,” I countered, “who else can?”

He fell silent.

I suddenly remembered something I had forgotten long ago.

When I was ten, I had sneaked into the Embroidery Tower and seen my father kneeling before my mother’s memorial tablet. In front of him was an embroidery of me lying in bed, my lips blue, clutching a Silver Hairpin in my hand.

I had cried out in terror.

Father burned the silk and held me in his arms, saying over and over, “Wanying, do not pick up the needle. If you hold the needle, fate will recognize you.”

From then on, I would fall into a fever every time I touched a Golden-tailed Needle.

I turned to Du Niang. “Did I… die when I was a child?”

Du Niang’s face turned deathly pale.

She turned to flee, but I caught her sleeve.

“Speak.”

She sank to her knees, her forehead pressed against the floor.

“Miss… the Madam did not die of illness. She died in your place.”