Chapter 4

Su Qing was badly hurt. By the time we reached the Imperial Laundry, she had fainted.

She slept for a full day before waking.

Her face was a swollen mass of bruises. It took over a month to heal, and she narrowly escaped being disfigured.

Life at the Imperial Laundry was every bit as hard as I had feared.

The work was already a punishment everyone in the palace dreaded. With Qin Yanran’s special attention as well, there were more clothes than we could wash from dawn to dusk.

The slightest delay brought a vicious beating.

To finish our daily quota, we often had to work until midnight.

The washhouse was unbearably hot in summer. By the end of the day, sweat had rubbed our skin raw, and the skin on our hands peeled away layer after layer.

In winter, the water was cold enough to pierce the bones. Our hands were covered in chilblains. Even when the sores broke open, we had to keep washing.

Fail to finish, and there were fists and kicks, slaps and whips.

I had endured sixteen years of hardship in this world. I could just about bear it.

Su Qing had never known anything like it. She wasted away until she was little more than skin and bone.

Whenever she could not finish her quota, I stayed up to do it for her.

Back in our room late at night, she held up her sore-covered hands and cursed Qin Yanran.

“Ah Yun, one day I’ll be empress. And when I am, I’ll kill Qin Yanran for everything we’ve suffered!”

“Mm.” I was too exhausted to answer with any strength. I took out the chilblain salve I had traded my last hairpin for and rubbed it onto her hands.

“When I’m empress, Ah Yun, I’ll give you anything you want. Whatever you wish for, I’ll make it happen.”

I smiled.

All I wanted was to leave this palace that devoured people.

All I wanted was a simple life.

Su Qing had not been here long. Even trapped as we were, she still had hope for this world.

I was different.

She did not know what I had lived through in those sixteen years.

I had not been as lucky as she was.

I had been born into a farming family.

We scraped a living from the fields. From one end of the year to the other, all our labor barely kept us fed.

In a bad harvest year, hunger and cold were ordinary things.

As a child, my dream was to have an egg at New Year, or a cake made from white flour.

When I was eight, my parents sent me to apprentice at a tailor’s shop.

Besides learning to sew, I had to wash and cook for my master, clean the shop, feed the pigs and chickens…

Sewing often left all ten fingers riddled with needle marks.

In winter, my hands were so swollen with sores that my fingers looked like ten little radishes.

Every needle prick hurt enough to tear me apart.

Pus seeped from the broken skin. My master said I was dirtying the customers’ clothes and lashed me with his measuring ruler until I hopped with pain.

When I was twelve, a terrible drought left our family with no harvest at all.

The tax collectors took our only ox. Father ran after them to argue and had his leg broken for his trouble.

To keep us alive, Mother and my six-year-old brother went into the hills every day to look for food.

Before long, my brother fell from a cliff while digging for wild greens and was killed.

Mother was inconsolable. Less than a month later, grief took her, too.

Only Father and I were left.

Each day, I saved half my ration and brought it home for him.

But how could that little food sustain a grown man? He had never recovered, and his health grew worse.

The deaths of his wife and son, one after the other, broke him. He did not survive the winter.

I stayed at the tailor’s shop for three years.

When I was fifteen, my master sold me to the town butcher for money.

I refused to be handed over to a butcher like that. I ran away in the middle of the night.

On the way, I fell down a low slope. A servant of the county deputy magistrate found me and saved my life.

But his household had not rescued me for nothing. They wanted me to take his daughter’s place in the palace selection.

The young lady already loved someone. She would rather kill herself than attend the selection. With no other solution, the deputy magistrate gave me her identity and sent me to the capital instead.

I had thought I was certain to fail. Then I would leave the palace, free to go wherever I wished.

Instead, one twist of fate had landed me here.

Now I had no idea when I would ever get out.