Though Li Ce had returned to the prince's residence, he had by no means truly "let go" of Jiang Yuejian.
Overnight, he had a hidden window cut into the residence's back-garden wall—the wall that stood flush against Shangqing Temple. Every afternoon thereafter, the most powerful man in the empire no longer sat over his vexing border dispatches. Instead he sat in a rattan chair by the window, fingers curled around the red brocade pouch holding the "little prince," all ears as he watched the temple next door.
He couldn't shake the feeling that this woman's talents did not begin and end with "catheterization" and "expelling stones."
On this particular day, the quiet air outside Shangqing Temple was torn apart by shrill, desperate crying.
"Priestess Jiang! Help! Save my child!"
Hoofbeats and scrambling footsteps followed. Old Zhang Zhong, a garrison commander who had campaigned beyond the frontier at Li Ce's side and never once shed tears even after losing an arm, came stumbling into the temple grounds with a child of about five in his arms.
Li Ce, at his window, set down his teacup. His eyes sharpened; his figure swayed—and he was up on the wall, hidden in the deep shade of the trees.
In the middle of the courtyard the child's face had gone livid, tinged with a ghastly grey. Both hands were clamped around his own throat, mouth stretched wide open, but no sound came out—only a strangled, bellows-like heaving from his chest with every laboring breath.
The two army physicians who had come along were drenched in sweat. One was hammering the child's back; the other was trying to force fingers into his mouth to dig the obstruction out—and got bitten so hard he howled.
"It's no use! It's lodged too deep—it's walnut meat!" The old commander knelt on the ground, wailing in despair. "If this child goes, I might as well go with him!"
"Everyone, get back!"
Jiang Yuejian swept out through the curtain, brow furrowed, an air of calm so cold it bordered on ruthless instantly quelling the chaos of the courtyard. She didn't take a pulse, didn't check his pupils—just one sweeping look at the child's color and movements.
"Don't slap his back! You're driving it deeper into his lungs!" she snapped, shoving the two useless physicians aside.
Up on the wall, Li Ce's heart lurched. In his understanding, a suffocating child was a death sentence—the heavens coming to collect a life, beyond even the immortals to save. He was opening his mouth to send a shadow guard racing for the Imperial Medical Bureau when the scene that unfolded next seared itself into his memory forever.
From behind, Jiang Yuejian wrapped her arms around the child, hands clasped into a fist, placed with precision just below the ribs, under the breastbone.
"What are you doing? He's barely breathing and you're squeezing his stomach!" Zhang Zhong cried, lunging to stop her.
"Hold! Nobody touch her!"
Li Ce's voice cracked out from the walltop, low, imperial, brooking no argument. Only then did everyone notice the Prince Regent himself perched on the wall—and they froze where they stood.
Jiang Yuejian paid the commotion no mind at all. Her gaze was terribly focused. Both arms drove backward and upward, hard!
The first thrust: the child convulsed once—nothing. The second: jaw clenched, on her toes, every ounce of her strength gathered into her arms, she thrust again!
"Hrk—!"
With the third, a blood-flecked, spit-soaked morsel of walnut shot from the child's mouth like a hidden weapon, cracked against a stone pillar a few paces off, and dropped into the dust with a plop.
"Waah—kheh—Daddy—!"
Clear crying rang through the whole of Shangqing Temple. The child gulped down great breaths of fresh air, and the ghastly grey fled his face, color flooding back faster than any of them could have believed.
Only then did Jiang Yuejian let go, breathing a little hard, a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. She fished a clean handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped the spit from her hands with evident distaste.
"The Heimlich maneuver. Understood?" She cast a sideways glance at the two dumbfounded physicians. "Next time you see someone choking, don't just slap their back and kowtow. That's murder."
Old Zhang Zhong stared blankly at his boy, back from the dead. Then he spun around and knocked his head three times, hard, against the ground before Jiang Yuejian, voice choked: "Priestess Jiang—no—Divine Physician Jiang! That was an immortal art—you brought him back from the grave!"
Li Ce sat on the wall, watching sunlight sift through the leaves and scatter across Jiang Yuejian's face—that same indifferent face, faintly impatient even now.
Until this moment, he had thought of her strange medicine as a craft—no more than a good artisan's. But in that instant he had glimpsed a kind of power that stood above thrones, above life and death itself. She feared no gods and reverenced no heaven. She trusted only those two hands of hers, the ones that could snatch men back from the King of Hell.
"Brought back from the grave..." Li Ce murmured, thumb moving over the stone in his pouch without his noticing.
The little flame of curiosity in his chest chose this moment to burn across an entire plain. For the first time he understood that the great houses of Chang'an, all their power struggles, looked positively dull set against this pure, undiluted strength.
Jiang Yuejian seemed to feel the gaze. She looked up at the walltop and arched a brow at Li Ce, her expression eloquent: Done staring? Then come down and drink your water.
Li Ce laughed and swung down off the wall. He had made up his mind: a treasure like this, if those fossilized old physicians ever caught wind of it—Chang'an would never know a quiet day again.