The Cinnabar Ledger

About

Winter, 1126. The Jin are across the river and Kaifeng is arguing about it. Xue Wanru examines the corpses no male clerk is permitted to touch, and on the sixth day of the eleventh month she finds cinnabar burn on the gums of a granary supervisor's wife whose death certificate already says chill. Over the weeks that follow, every official who spoke for surrender dies politely at home, and Wanru keeps a private ledger no court will ever accept: measurements, colours, the smell of a stomach, the price of vermilion by the ounce at four shops. Two men can move the record. Lu Zhen writes confessions for the prison office and has been quietly editing her findings for four years to keep her employed and alive; his affection is real and so is the damage. Wanyan Kelu is a Jin envoy held hostage in a guarded pavilion, a man with no faction inside the walls, who answers her questions straight because he expects to outlive everyone who lies. Wanru needs one of them to make the ledger exist and the other to make it matter, and the siege has opinions about her timetable. A forensic drama with a famine underneath it, a love story that runs through two prison offices and one hostage's courtyard, and a betrayal sitting at her own family's table. Bodies are described with a professional's flat attention. Desire is frank, unhurried and cuts away at the door. The city falls whatever you choose; five endings decide who is standing in the snow when it does, and what they are still carrying.

Cast

• X Xue Wanru protagonist; body-examiner to the Kaifeng magistracy no portrait yet
• L Lu Zhen prison-office clerk; writes the confessions that become truth no portrait yet
• W Wanyan Kelu Jin envoy held hostage in the capital no portrait yet
• S Shen Zhao Wanru's late husband's brother; head of her household no portrait yet
• P Prefect Cui Yan the magistrate who signs the fair copies no portrait yet
• X Xue Yinniang Wanru's sister-in-law; keeps the household accounts and its silences no portrait yet