Chapter 4

Xiao Zhao and I had once imagined ourselves a loving married couple.

Back then, neither of us could tell fortunes. We couldn’t foresee the throne falling to a prince under house arrest. All we wanted, all we could do, was struggle to stay alive.

We had searched every inch of that ruined palace hall for anything useful. Most of what we found was nothing remarkable, except for a set of notebooks hidden up in the rafters. Xiao Zhao couldn’t put them down.

From their preface, they appeared to have been left by a learned imperial consort. She knew the history of Great Zhao so thoroughly that it flowed from her pen: emperors’ civil and military achievements, the essential points of ministers’ reforms, the fortunes and migrations of the common people. She had organized it all in the notebooks according to a set of principles.

She also wrote as she pleased. When she came to particularly outrageous people, she would spend whole pages cursing them. Some of the street obscenities were beyond Xiao Zhao’s understanding.

That didn’t stop him from spending every hour outside his chores immersed in those notebooks. Excitedly, he told me, “Ah Jie, the person who wrote this is extraordinary. Her insights go deeper than those of the Grand Tutor Father appointed. Let’s read together, and become as capable as she was.”

He was eleven that year. He stubbornly insisted on calling me Ah Jie, saying that only family would never part.

But at eighteen, the way he called me Ah Jie slowly began to change, because he was beginning to understand the latter half of the notebooks.

The writing in that half was sharply divided. Sometimes the consort wrote about the small moments she shared with her beloved; you could feel their happiness in those details.

She praised the Xiao family for producing devoted lovers. One had married a widow and made her empress; another had kept only one woman in his harem all his life. For the women they loved, those emperors had dared to defy ancestral custom again and again. Her husband, too, would surely do the same.

At other times, she wrote that every man of the Xiao family was scum: they forgot their promises and abandoned the lovers who had shared their road. Afraid of a beloved woman’s abilities, they trapped her within these narrow confines.

There was such hatred in those words that one glance told you how terribly they had broken apart.

After reading the details of their love, Xiao Zhao pressed a hand to his chest and told me, “Ah Jie, I don’t want you doing any of these things with another man. Just thinking of it makes me want to kill him. If you do them, you can only do them with me.”

There was desire in the way he looked at me. I knew then that he had grown up, and that he truly didn’t want me to be only his Ah Jie.

But I didn’t know what he was to me. Apart from Mother, he had been with me longer than anyone in the world. Without each other, we would probably have gone mad long ago in that broken hall.

Was it love, though? I didn’t know.

Then, without warning, the doors of the Cold Palace opened. Xiao Zhao sat upon that high throne, and I was no longer the only person beside him.

Eunuchs, palace maids, then the candidates forced upon him by his ministers—they circled around him like an unending stream.

The agitation in my heart, that savage urge to drive them all away, told me that it didn’t matter whether it was love. I wanted him to myself, just as I had in the Cold Palace.

“Xiao Zhao,” I told him, “I won’t be your Ah Jie anymore. I want to be empress. Your empress, whom you marry with all the proper rites.”

How happy he was that day. Holding me in his arms, he ran through every corner of Chonghua Hall. In the moonlight, where no one could see, each kiss came with a promise:

“Ah Jie, I won’t let you regret this.”

“I’ll make you empress. We’ll be together, just the two of us, for our whole lives.”

“Everything those devoted men of the Xiao family did, I’ll do for you.”

Those promises still rang in my ears. Only two years later, for a mere thousand taels of silver, he wanted to send me out of the palace.

I thought I had spoiled him too much. I had never made him hurt.

But it didn’t matter. This time, I would make him hurt so badly that he would never dare forget it.