Chapter 1

Xie Jingzhi sprayed out his wine.

Madam Xie was overjoyed. She seized my hand. “Is it true?”

I lowered my head bashfully, my voice barely louder than a mosquito. “The physician has confirmed it.”

The Marquis slapped the table so hard the cups rattled. “Wonderful!”

Joy swept through the hall. Our relatives crowded forward with raised cups, congratulating us one after another.

Xie Jingzhi alone stood frozen, every trace of color draining from his face. “Impossible!”

The lively room abruptly fell silent.

My lashes fluttered, and tears rolled down my cheeks. My voice broke. “Husband… you do not want to acknowledge the child?”

His fists clenched until his knuckles turned white. Through gritted teeth, he said, “How could it possibly be mine? I clearly…”

“Then I… I will get rid of it.”

Madam Xie’s expression changed at once. She caught my arm. “No, no! You cannot! That is my precious grandchild. How could you get rid of it?”

The Marquis’s beard bristled with anger. “Have you lost your mind? You would abandon your own child?”

Xie Jingzhi stared at me, his jaw grinding. At last he burst out, “Who knows whether that child is even mine?”

I hid half my face behind a handkerchief and wept harder.

“Husband… do you truly refuse to acknowledge it?”

Madam Xie’s gaze sharpened suspiciously. “Jiang Qingluan, tell me the truth. Is this child Jingzhi’s or not?”

I lifted tear-bright eyes to her. “The physician says the baby is already three months along. If the father is not my husband… who else could it be?”

Xie Jingzhi’s ears burned red. Humiliation stripped away the last of his manners. “Bullshit!”

Madam Xie, however, relaxed. “Three months… then that was…”

She swung toward her son and glared. “Do you not know what you did yourself?”

Lowering her voice, she added, “Have some shame. How can you discuss such things in public?”

The Xie relatives exchanged knowing looks. No one dared say another word; they merely lowered their heads and drank their tea.

Three months earlier, at a flower-viewing banquet, someone had drugged my sister and left her alone with Xie Jingzhi.

Nothing had actually happened, but in her panicked flight she had dropped a hairpin.

The Empress was furious and ordered a thorough investigation, swearing to uncover whoever had brought scandal into the palace.

To save my sister’s reputation and his own neck, Xie Jingzhi dragged me into it. He claimed that I was the woman who had been alone with him that night.

After our marriage, he treated me with distant courtesy, as though a layer of frost always stood between us.

I was only a general’s concubine-born daughter, inferior to my sister in beauty and talent. In his eyes, I was an uncouth military girl who knew nothing but swords, spears, and bows.

He disliked my rough manners. To secure separate rooms, he even sacrificed his own reputation, pretending to be drunk before his parents and sighing that he suffered from a hidden ailment that left him impotent.

To save the marquis’s household from embarrassment, Madam Xie publicly insisted that I was the one who could not bear children.

My sister summoned me several times afterward. Each time she held my hands, her eyes full of guilt, and said that if I could not endure the injustice, she would beg the Empress to let me divorce him.

I shook my head at once. “No divorce. The young lord is wonderful.”

I meant it.

The Marquis of Yong’an’s residence was fabulously wealthy, and its back garden was spacious enough for me to practice with blades, spears, bows, and arrows. If I broke a flowerbed or smashed some ornament, servants quietly replaced it.

As for my reputation, I had never cared much about that.

It was no more than a cloud in the wind. How many coins could it buy?

My sister could never understand why, when Xie Jingzhi falsely accused me at the banquet, I had not defended myself and had instead confirmed his story.

She did not know what had happened the day before.

I had gone to Fahua Temple outside the city to pray. Kneeling on a cushion, I closed my eyes and begged the Buddha to grant me a sweet-smelling, soft, pretty young husband.

I kowtowed three times with perfect sincerity.

When I rose and walked behind the golden statue, I found a pale, handsome young man hidden in its shadow.

He was so beautiful that one glance nearly carried away half my soul.

His brow was tightly furrowed, his face flushed, and his eyes unfocused. He appeared to have been drugged. As I drew near, he staggered over and clung to my arm.

I had always been tenderhearted and generous toward beauty, so naturally I helped him work the drug out of his system.

Afterward, I left my personal jade pendant in his palm and made my plans.

The moment I got home, I would tell Father I wanted that man to marry into our family.

My sister and I were Father’s only daughters. After she became Crown Princess, he often worried that our general’s household would have no heir. Once, after drinking, he had clapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Luan’er, why not take a husband into the family?”

I could not have agreed more.

The young man had been supple, with a firm backside and a slim waist. When he lay limp in my arms, my heart practically melted.

I was thoroughly smitten.

But before I could tell Father, the scandal at the palace banquet fell into my lap.