While everyone else was fighting for the Emperor’s favor, I built an intelligence station in the cold palace.
Until the day he died, the Emperor never knew that the woman stirring up the hidden currents of his harem was someone whose name he could not even remember.
I died in Yongxiang Alley during my third winter there.
Not truly died-only the kind of death where your name is crossed out in vermilion ink on the registry.
They said Noble Lady Li, who had once worked in the imperial garden and was later favored by His Majesty for her beauty, had gone mad.
Because on the late Empress’s memorial day, I let my hair hang loose, went barefoot, and sang a rousing rendition of “Liangzhou Ci.”
In truth, I was not mad. I had simply calculated that the Chief Eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial would pass through the imperial garden that day.
Madness was the best pass in the cold palace, and the best armor.
On the day I moved into the West Third Institute, only one lame old eunuch came to lead the way.
The weeds in the courtyard rose past my knees, and the moss on the well curb was as thick as a velvet blanket.
My roommate, Attendant Li, had been thrown in here three years ago after offending the Imperial Consort.
When she saw me arrive, she did not even lift her eyelids. She only kept rubbing a length of hemp rope in her hands, its edges worn fuzzy.
I set my only bundle down on the crumbling earthen kang.
Inside were two sets of worn palace clothes, a bald writing brush, and half a ream of yellow paper.
The paper pasted over the window lattice had a hole in it the size of a fist. The north wind poured in with a howl, carrying the faint sound of pipes and flutes from far away.
I stared at that hole, but in my heart, a sliver of light slipped through.
In a madwoman’s world, there were the fewest rules.
Here, perhaps, I could live.
