The Apothecary Diaries Book 7

Fortune Cookies

Once Maomao got back to the dormitory, she pulled out the treats, opening the cloth and laying the cookies on top of it. There were seven in total, all with papers of about the same size inside them.

The heck is this?

The characters looked like a cross between snakes and earthworms. They were western characters, just like her father had been using; she thought she recalled that this was called cursive, a form of the letters adapted for writing quickly. The papers were covered with little clumps of two or three letters, but they weren't words; unlike the language of Li, in the west you had to put several characters together or they wouldn't mean anything. So she couldn't "read" the isolated, individual letters. Were they supposed to mean something?

She's testing us, Maomao thought. This consort certainly had her quirks. She was, after all, gutsy enough to enter the rear palace almost completely alone.

Realizing that she was being put to the test angered Maomao. But even more, it made her want to solve the riddle.

She looked from the cookies to the papers and back. Each of the papers had either two or three letters on it, and the papers themselves didn't have neat corners, but rather ragged edges, some of them on a bit of an angle. Maybe they'd been torn. The paper was stained with grease from the cookies, but thanks to the high quality of the material, it hadn't come apart.

This is awfully involved for a practical joke. What was the woman after? Maomao looked through the paper, but she didn't see anything.

She was still puzzling over it when there was a knock at the door. She answered it, a piece of paper still in her hand, to discover Yao and En'en standing there. They lived in the same dormitory—not that it mattered much to Maomao, seeing as they never spoke to her.

"Can I help you?" Maomao asked politely.

Yao, however, looked incensed. "I know you got some treats from the consort this afternoon. Give them to me."

Funny thing—Maomao didn't even have a special attachment to sweets, yet the moment she heard the demanding tone in Yao's voice, she decided she wasn't about to hand the cookies over. To be fair, she could tell that Yao wasn't asking for them as a snack. So she decided to tweak her a bit.

"I'm very sorry, but I ate them for my dinner. Western cookies are rather papery, aren't they? Do you suppose they have germ in them?" She tried to make it sound like she could still feel the funny texture in her mouth.

The blood drained from Yao's face and she virtually pounced on Maomao. "Spit them out! Spit them out right now!" She was shaking her. Ah. Her cookies must have had paper in them too. "Where are the rest?! You couldn't have eaten all of them without noticing!"

"Lady Yao," En'en said, finally stopping her from the violent shaking she was giving Maomao. She looked as dispassionate as ever. "I think I detect a slight smile on Maomao's face, as if she thinks she's made a fool of you. I believe you're being teased."

So En'en remembered Maomao's name! And could read her expressions, no less.

"You're teasing me?! Is that true?!"

Jig's up, Maomao thought, straightening her collar and meeting Yao's eyes. "I admit I was having a bit of fun with you, but I might suggest you were uncivil to me first. I don't know what you have against me, but bursting into a person's room and trying to take their things is theft and nothing but."

What Maomao was saying was perfectly right and true; no one could have objected. The blood rushed back to Yao's face, until she was so red she looked like steam should be coming out of her like a teapot. She took a deep breath, then let it out again and looked straight at Maomao. "Was there anything unusual about the cookies you were given? If there was, I want you to give them to me. I'll pay you enough to get another snack."