The Palace Remembers

Eighteen years ago a boy was ambushed and his mother, Luna, was hurt shielding him. She was never found. The boy was crowned soon after, and as emperor he has kept looking for her. She is closer than he knows. Luna lives in the Palace of Serenity as a slave doing heavy work, with no memory of who she was, keeping one small wood carving she cannot explain her attachment to. The carving is the one thing left from her son. What starts to move things is a window: a lattice cut with bamboo and birds, of a pattern the emperor knows from childhood, and seeing it again brings back pieces of the day he lost her. He begins to suspect a servant in that palace is his mother, but the court has its own accounts of who she is, and the suspicion becomes something his enemies can use. He acts on what he has been told, and not knowing her, he orders her flogged. A fire in the palace afterward brings out the truth and he pulls her from it. That does not settle anything, because the favored consort Jiang Wanting has understood what the woman is worth to him and is not finished.