chapter 2

# chapter 2

From that day on, I carried a secret in my heart.

I stopped resenting Mother for favoring my elder sister. Instead, I curbed my temper and served meekly at their side.

Mama was right. Mother simply could not fight Father, so she vented her anger on me. She and Mama were both pitiful women.

When I told Mama this, she laughed with such scorn that she was even louder than the first time we met. When her laughter finally died, she told me a tangled story.

In that story, she had been the daughter of a powerful family in the capital, lovely as peach blossoms and steeped in learning. She loved the finest man in the world: the crown prince whom Father had robbed of his throne and who had died in the old capital.

She married him and threw herself into becoming a worthy crown princess. Within their household, she and her husband lived in harmony, and she soon bore him an eldest son. Beyond it, she treated each of his younger brothers’ wives generously, hoping to preserve good relations for the crown prince.

Of all those women, she liked Mother best. Yet Mother used that affection to pry for information again and again. Mama said she had understood that they served different masters, and that the victor would always write the fate of the defeated. That alone was not why she hated Mother so much.

But at the very end, Mother deceived her into entering this old residence.

The sixth brother whom she and the crown prince had treated with such care had coveted his own sister-in-law all along. And his wife, desperate to secure her husband’s heart, surrendered even her dignity as a wife and became his accomplice.

Mama never told me what happened to her in that place. She did not need to. The depth of hatred in her eyes told me how terrible it had been.

Even so, I did not obey her demands that I provoke Mother.

Mother was the Empress. I was a princess whose true birth could never be exposed. Why dash an egg against a rock? People said a desperate army could win, and a dog that truly meant to bite did not waste time barking.

Mother had always been clever and practical. In the past, she had helped Father gather intelligence. Later, after injuring herself while giving birth to my elder sister, she had swallowed her pride and kept me-the proof of Father’s crime-at her side. As long as she had me, Father could not depose her merely because she had no son.

Once I became docile, Mother could no longer excuse her cruelty by calling me unruly. On the contrary, to keep the other consorts from noticing anything strange, she had to give me, at least in public, everything my elder sister received.

That included lessons from great scholars, a place in the dynasty’s first academy for women, and the chance to mingle with the daughters of noble houses.

When Mama learned of this, she sat facing the wall for a very long time. Then she rose with light blazing in her eyes.

“A true daughter of the Shen family,” she said. “Vicious, but ambitious enough to match.”

They were mortal enemies, yet at that moment they seemed to reach some silent accord across the distance between them. After that, Mama no longer objected to my meek behavior.

My life became simple. I attended lessons at the Imperial Academy in the morning and reviewed my teachers’ assignments before bed.

My elder sister’s life, however, became far more exciting.

It was as though some hidden channel inside her had burst open. Each essay she wrote was more brilliant than the last. Little by little, she abandoned the delicate sentiments expected of young ladies and turned her pen like a sword toward affairs of court. More and more talented girls gathered around her.

I was dull and could not rival her gifts, so I befriended overlooked concubines’ daughters and girls from minor officials’ families. Qingwu and Jiantong became my closest companions.

Qingwu was the legitimate daughter of an insignificant military officer. Her father had moved heaven and earth to place her in the academy, hoping she would marry a scholar and elevate the family. Instead, she had been born with extraordinary strength and martial talent, and read military treatises with an obsession bordering on madness.

Jiantong came from a prestigious scholarly family. Her father, Chancellor Gu, had students throughout the realm, but she was only a lowly concubine’s daughter. Among the noble houses, everyone knew her as a beauty with nothing in her head.

Add me-a princess whom Mother herself had declared “beyond teaching”-and ordinary young ladies could not avoid us quickly enough.

One day my elder sister found the three of us beside the dog hole near the academy’s back gate, earnestly debating how Dezhao Tavern’s braised pork knuckle might be improved. For the first time, she spoke to me of her own accord.

“Anping, you and I were always different. Perhaps it is just as well that you know how to accept your fate.”

Of course we were different.

My name was Anping-peace in the ordinary. Hers was Fenghua-peerless splendor.

My sister had grown up. She no longer needed to steal my things to prove that I was beneath her. Now, when she looked at me, I was probably no more than an ant.

I suspected the change had come from the intoxicating dream Mother had spun for her.

I did not finally understand that dream until I met Zhao Qinbai and Li Hui.