Chapter 7

Chapter 7

I was respectfully escorted into Ci’an Palace.

Matron Li told me, gently and again and again, of those old events buried beneath wind and snow. The sharp, severe manner she had shown earlier was gone.

“When you were born, the Late Emperor was critically ill. The foundation of the realm was shaken, and the matter of naming a crown prince had the whole court in an uproar. Consort Shu, resentful that His Majesty had been chosen as heir, colluded with the midwife and tampered with things on the day the Empress Dowager gave birth.”

“That midwife took advantage of the chaos while the Empress Dowager was in labor and secretly carried you out of the palace. When you were born, Your Highness had a crimson birthmark on your left shoulder. The Empress Dowager sent people to search for you many times, but they never found any trace of you. Thankfully, you have returned now.”

By the end, even Matron Li could not stop her tears from falling.

I touched the birthmark on my left shoulder and froze.

Since childhood, I had struggled to survive in the muck.

Countless times, I had nearly starved to death, frozen to death, or been beaten to death.

On those cold, hungry nights when I had no one to rely on, it had never once occurred to me that I might have been born noble.

I was nothing but an ant, kneaded into the mud by other people’s hands.

Yet now they were telling me that I was actually a princess.

That I had been born to honor and privilege.

That all those hardships were never mine to suffer.

That all that pain was never mine to endure.

It seemed like a reward from heaven, and yet also like some cruel joke.

It poured over me and fixed me in place, unable to step left or right.

It was laughable. Absurd.

Matron Li leaned closer. “Your Highness, the Empress Dowager has searched for you for so long. She has suffered such grief and pain. Now that you have returned, you ought to call her Mother, so the Empress Dowager can be happy.”

The Empress Dowager was crying as if her very heart would spill out. Her sorrowful eyes stayed fixed on me, filled with hope.

I only felt as though a clod of dirt had lodged in my throat. No matter what, I could not open my mouth.

Just as I was caught in that difficulty, a pair of delicate hands drew me into an embrace, rocking me gently as if coaxing a three-year-old child to sleep.

Her voice was both joyful and sorrowful. “Never mind. If you cannot say it, then keep calling me Empress Dowager.”

“It was I, your mother, who failed you. Now that you have come back, I will make it up to you properly…”

The Empress Dowager did not lie.

When I woke the next day, the palace chamber was piled high with treasures.

South Sea pearls as large as pigeon eggs, brocades with a sheen like lake water, hairpins crowned with enormous kingfisher-blue ornaments, and embroidered shoes woven with gold thread, patterned with hookwork, and studded with bright pearls.

The palace maid who dressed my hair arranged it into an exquisite coiffure, but all I could feel was the sticky discomfort of the osmanthus oil on my head.

The Empress Dowager, wearing nail guards, personally crouched down to put on my shoes. I could not bear to tell her that the embroidered shoes threaded with gold rubbed against my feet.

Then, as I was putting on the dress, the Shu brocade caught on my rough fingers and pulled loose a thread.

She froze. Tears dropped from her eyes as if they cost nothing.

“My child, you have suffered…”

Was that worth crying over?

Outside the palace, there were plenty of beggars who had their legs broken over a single mouthful of food and could only crawl along the ground.

“This is nothing. Before I entered the palace…”

“What was it like before you entered the palace?” she asked, frowning.

She probably wanted to understand my past.

I sighed and began telling her about the life I had lived begging on the long streets.

I told her about the white jade cakes people would occasionally toss me as alms.

I also told her about the palace meals, where one could eat one’s fill at every sitting.

But I said not a word of the days and nights spent starving and freezing, or of the hands that had festered with chilblains from being soaked in well water.

Because I knew hardships like those were things she had never even heard of.

After the Empress Dowager finished listening, she was stunned for a moment and said nothing more.

She removed her nail guards. With those delicate hands, she scooped out a bit of salve and carefully rubbed it into my skin.

The warmth of her palm seemed to travel from my fingertips to the crown of my head, then circle back into my heart.

The empty hollow in my chest was filled, sour and aching, swelling faintly.

All at once, I felt a little like crying.

How useless of me.