Chapter 2

My name is Lizhi. Mother said lychees were the sweetest fruit she had ever eaten. She wanted every day of my life to be that sweet, so she named me after them.

But perhaps there are no lychees in heaven. Heaven failed to understand and sent me into the palace as a servant at fifteen.

The year I entered the palace, I wasn’t supposed to serve Xiao Zhao.

The supervising matron said I had a pretty face and ought to try my luck with one of the favored princes, to secure a promising future. But Mother had taught me from childhood: better a common man’s wife than a rich man’s concubine.

Even an imperial concubine was still a concubine.

So I paid the eunuch who assigned us and begged him to send me to the youngest, the Ninth Prince. Xiao Zhao was only ten. A plate of cakes interested him more than a woman. By the time he grew up, I would be an old maid and even less likely to catch his eye.

Xiao Zhao was a good master.

I merely did what a palace maid should: put more clothes on him when the weather grew cold, light his lamps at sunset, warm his bedding with my own body on the coldest winter nights before he slept. In return, he was willing to share half of everything with me.

“Lizhi, no one has ever been as kind to me as you. The people who came before always pretended not to hear when I asked for things. You’re such a good person.”

His eyes shone with sincerity as he spoke, pushing meat from the Mid-Autumn Festival dishes into my bowl. Who would have thought a son of the emperor could have two decent bowls of meat only on festival days?

Before I arrived, I never would have imagined it. A prince whose mother had died young, and whom his father disliked, lived worse than a child from a comfortable family.

Yet even with so little, Xiao Zhao stubbornly insisted on giving me half. If I wouldn’t eat, neither would he. He was so like Mother, who had always broken off the larger half of her steamed bun for me.

And so, when disaster came and he instinctively clutched my hand and refused to let go, I let him hold on. We entered the Cold Palace together.

In those days of too few clothes and too little food, we ate all the grass in the courtyard. With a few broken bowls, we dug up the bare ground and sowed grass seed.

Later, fortune smiled on us. Birds brought seeds for several kinds of flowers. I had learned a little about keeping bees and harvesting honey from a beekeeper back in the countryside. After more than half a year of work, we finally tasted our first mouthful.

For that mouthful of honey, I was stung until my head was covered in bumps. My eyes were so swollen I could barely see Xiao Zhao’s tear-streaked face. He touched my burning forehead and hurled himself against the Cold Palace door.

Little Qian was the eunuch guarding the gate then. He had only just entered the palace, and a child’s heart was never quite hard enough. Gritting his teeth and stamping his foot, he went to intercept a young imperial physician, Chen Shi.

I was lucky. The man he stopped would one day become the greatest physician in the land, and naturally he saved my little life with ease.

As we made more and more honey, I had Little Qian sneak it out to sell. Xiao Zhao went further: he gave Little Qian the nickname Qian Shengqian—”Money Makes Money”—hoping that this source of income would last and last.

Now Xiao Zhao had become the most exalted man in the land. Little Qian really had changed his name to Qian Shengqian, with a different last character, and become chief eunuch. Chen Shi’s medical skills were renowned far and wide. Only I was being sent out of the palace in disgrace.