Ning Chen smiled. "Fine Porcelain Blue this good, and you didn't present it to His Majesty?"

Geng Jing looked at him. "No man has ever managed both loyalty and honor. And anyway, the palace is not short of the stuff."

Something moved in Ning Chen. Between loyalty and honor, Geng Jing had chosen honor.

That was plain enough. Ning Chen came straight to the point. "When you were working a case in Xiuzhou, you saw Yudie and Zisu, didn't you?"

Geng Jing smiled. "Never saw them!"

Ning Chen paused, studied Geng Jing's face, and gave a slight smile. "Ah, that reminds me. Have you been to see Prince Duan?"

Geng Jing nodded. "I've been. It's pitiful."

"It is. Not one of the famous physicians in the capital can find the cause."

Geng Jing said, smiling, "Do you know where I come from?"

Ning Chen thought about it. "Jiangzhou."

"That's right. I come from one of the counties Jiangzhou governs. My family was reasonably well off at the time — we had shops and we had land... But then a new magistrate took office, and my family came down in the world. My father pined away and died, and my mother followed him. I was the only one left."

"Fortunately my master was very good to me. He treated me as his own son and taught me all the martial arts he knew... Once, while I was cleaning my master's room, I found a book."

"That book recorded an old prescription. You grind sticky millet into flour, add a few other things, and use the flour to wrap powdered heart-piercing lotus (TL Note: 穿心蓮 — Andrographis paniculata, a real herb of Chinese medicine whose name means "the lotus that pierces the heart.")... Once a man has eaten it by mistake, it sticks to the wall of the gut and will hardly pass at all... but the poison of the heart-piercing lotus seeps out a little at a time, and the man's organs begin to fail and rot."

"Later my master died. Then that new county magistrate suddenly came down with a…