Chapter 5
Early the next morning, Xie Lin’s trusted aide hurried into the tent with the daily intelligence reports and discovered that I was still behind the screen.
Xie Lin emerged from behind it, picking up the outer robe from a chair.
The aide looked from the emperor to the screen, then stamped his foot in distress.
“I’ve been saying Your Majesty should choose a consort! Three years on the throne, and the imperial harem is still empty!
“But that hostage is a man! A man!”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, so Your Majesty’s harem has been empty all this time…”
Before I could finish, Xie Lin covered my mouth.
I had spoken in my natural voice, deliberately softening it a little.
The aide dared not peer behind the screen, but he recognized a woman’s voice. After a moment of shock, he hastily changed his tune.
“I see! Congratulations, Your Majesty!”
Xie Lin gave him a sidelong look and wrapped me in a robe embroidered with dragons and clouds.
I took a good look. It was the informal dragon robe he had worn the day before.
“You’re a princess too,” he scolded under his breath. “Have you no shame?”
I smiled. “At this point, what is there left to hide?”
He kept his handsome face stern, almost as though I had angered him. In the end, he merely signaled for me to stop talking.
My eyes curved with amusement. I had discovered last night that, for all his reputation as a bloodthirsty tyrant, Xie Lin was easily embarrassed in private. He couldn’t withstand my teasing at all.
Last night, that cunning man had tried to coax Yue’s frontier defense plans out of me.
I had remained on my guard. However he pressed me, I never answered directly. I teased him instead.
Until his face turned bright red.
When he asked where I had learned to talk like that, I told him it came from the storybooks I read in the army.
His expression changed. “The royal women of Yue receive a very unusual education. Stop learning nonsense from those army ruffians.”
What he didn’t know was that this was a strategy.
As long as I kept acting frivolous, he couldn’t get back to questioning me about military intelligence.
I wanted to save myself. I wanted to live. That did not mean I would betray my country.
By now, I could hardly afford to worry about my dignity.
When survival was at stake, fretting over whether the means were noble or degrading was a luxury.
“I’ve spent more than ten years in army camps. I’ve never observed those rules meant to keep women in line—not for a single day.”
I leaned toward Xie Lin and blinked into his eyes. “Isn’t my lack of manners what you like about me?”
“Enough. I don’t need a storyteller.”
His ears were scarlet. He turned away, raised a fist to his mouth, and coughed twice to cover his embarrassment. Only then did he remember his thoroughly bewildered aide outside the screen.
“Why the rush?”
Eyes lowered, the aide came around the screen, taking care not to look anywhere he shouldn’t, and handed over a report. I boldly leaned closer.
It was a compilation of intelligence gathered by the spies Xie Lin had planted in Yue’s capital.
Like a court diary, it recorded all manner of changes in the lives of the city’s important people.
Seeing me approach, Xie Lin closed the report. I shook his arm. “Let me read it with you. Come on. Why keep things from me now?”
My pestering gave him a headache. He let me look.
Quite a lot had happened in Yue over the past month.
In the imperial palace of Yue.
Although Jinyu was ill, the old emperor summoned her before the court and ordered her to kneel and admit her fault.
Word had long since spread that her capture was the result of her own willful excursion to admire flowers on the frontier.
After her rescue and return to the capital, she had faced considerable public criticism and formal accusations from the censors.
In court, the censors charged her with reckless self-indulgence and disregard for the greater good. She deserved punishment.
In private, ordinary people called her a troublemaker and a spoiled brat. She had insisted on going to the border to make trouble for the soldiers. If she wanted to get herself killed, she could do it without dragging everyone else down with her.
After Jinyu escaped the enemy camp, people questioned more than her chastity. They thought she had brought the entire disaster on herself.
One princess’s whim had cost the frontier army a victory.
Leaving her unpunished would provoke public anger and leave the soldiers bitterly disillusioned.
So the moment her illness improved, the emperor had her brought before the court.
Jinyu knelt with her body tilted to one side. As the censors accused her, her face filled with wounded innocence. She dared not argue, but kept looking at Lu Wei, who stood at the head of the military officials.
She seemed so fragile she might shatter. Unable to bear it, he stepped forward in her defense. “The princess cannot bear all the blame. If anyone is to blame…it is the Sixth Prince.”
The “Sixth Prince” was me.
I was the sixth imperial child. In my male disguise, I was the Sixth Prince, using the name Yue Ning.
The officials were briefly taken aback at the mention of me. Even my father on his throne seemed only then to remember I existed.
For years, I had lived among the soldiers, serving as the strategist behind Lu Wei.
He said I must avoid drawing attention to myself because of my mother’s family’s disgrace.
So every victory I helped plan was credited to him alone.
Neither the court nor the country knew that the “Sixth Prince” they ignored had kept the frontier safe for ten years.
Lu Wei would never have dared conceal the fact that he had exchanged me for the princess.
So even knowing I had been captured by an enemy country, my father still preferred to forget he had this daughter.
“The Sixth Prince was ignorant and bent on amusement that day. He enticed the princess into the valley to see its rare flowers. That was how she fell into the ambush, and why her entire retinue was killed or went missing.”
Defending her, Lu Wei added, “Now that the Sixth Prince is held in the enemy camp as a hostage, he is already atoning for what he did to his elder sister.”