Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The first time I met Pei Yuheng was also on a snowy night.

I was fourteen that year, following my father into the palace for the first time. My father was the Director of the Fengtian Office, in charge of stargazing and reading fates. That day, the palace was holding a New Year’s Eve banquet. All the imperial princes and princesses attended-except the Seventh Prince, Pei Yuheng.

I heard palace servants whispering in private that the Seventh Prince’s birth mother came from a low background and had been out of favor for years, and he’d been neglected along with her. A few days earlier, he’d beaten the Third Prince on the training grounds, only to be punished and made to kneel through the night. Now, with no one even mentioning him at the banquet, it was as though the palace didn’t have such a person at all.

I was young then and didn’t understand palace rules. I only thought the Seventh Prince was pitiable.

After the banquet ended, I wandered around the Imperial Garden with a rabbit lantern I hadn’t set loose. The snow was falling hard. Before long, I saw a boy standing behind the Plum Grove.

He wore a worn fox-fur coat, snow piling on his shoulders. His lips were so pale they were nearly colorless, yet his hand still clenched a wooden sword. Like a wounded wolf pup-shivering from the cold, but stubbornly holding himself up, refusing to show weakness.

When I walked over, he lifted his eyes at once, his gaze brimming with caution.

“Who sent you?”

His tone was sharp.

I blinked at the question and answered honestly, “No one. I got lost.”

He clearly didn’t believe me. He stared for a moment before saying coldly, “If you’re lost, then leave. Don’t come over here.”

Only then did I see the split skin on the back of his hand. Blood ran down between his fingers. Snow fell on it and quickly congealed into a dark red crust.

“You’re hurt.”

“That’s none of your business.”

He turned to go, but after only one step his body swayed and he nearly pitched forward. I hurried to catch him. Even through the layers of cloth, I could feel how scorching hot he was.

Not cold.

A raging fever.

“You’re burning up like this and you’re still trying to act tough?” I was so anxious my voice rose. “If you don’t deal with it, you’ll collapse tomorrow.”

He probably hadn’t been snapped at like that in a long time. He froze, and surprisingly, didn’t struggle free.

I half-dragged him beneath a corridor out of the wind, rummaged through my sleeve pouch for the medicinal powder I carried and sprinkled it over his wound, then stuffed my hand warmer into him. I’d just brought it out from the banquet; it was still hot. He lowered his head, glanced at it, and didn’t take it.

“I don’t want it.”

“You’re like a block of ice, and you’ve still got a stubborn mouth.”

I pressed it into his arms anyway, then held out the rabbit lantern too. “Here. This is for you.”

“For what?”

“It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone else has a lantern. You should have one too.”

He said, “I’m not a child.”

“But you do look pretty pitiful right now.”

The moment I said it, I regretted it. In the palace, the word ‘pitiful’ was the most taboo. I was afraid I’d bruised his pride and was about to patch things up, but he only lowered his head, staring at the rabbit lantern, silent for a long time.

After quite a while, he asked in a low voice, “What’s your name?”

“Ye Wentang.”

“Which ‘Tang’?”

“The ‘Tang’ in Haitang-crabapple.” After thinking, I asked him back, “And you?”

He lifted his eyes. For the first time, there was a trace of something not quite so cold in them.

“Pei Yuheng.”

I nodded, took a brush, and scrawled four crooked characters on the lantern’s tail before handing it back. “Then I’m giving you this.”

He lowered his gaze to look.

Long life, a hundred years.

“Vulgar,” he complained, but he took the lantern with a steady hand.

I smiled. “So what if it’s vulgar? Living is what matters most.”

Before I left that night, he suddenly called after me.

“Ye Wentang.”

“Yeah?”

“Next year at Shangyuan… will you come into the palace again?”

Snow loaded the branches. The wind was bitter.

But when I turned around, I saw the boy standing beneath the lantern’s light, a warm yellow glow reflected in his eyes-more vivid than all the red plums in the garden.

As if I were bewitched, I nodded.

“I will.”

Only later did I learn that year he’d been deliberately locked outside the Plum Grove, forbidden from attending the banquet. The wound on his hand had been done by the Third Prince’s people.

But he never told me.

He only truly came to find me the next Shangyuan-secretly.

We avoided the night-patrol servants and went to the base of the palace wall to release lanterns. His handwriting was still awful, yet he insisted on copying me and writing a wish on his lantern. I laughed at how ugly it was; he kept his face cold and shoved the lantern straight into my arms.

“You’re not allowed to laugh.”

I looked down.

On it, it read:

May I see Tang year after year.

For many years after, I could never forget the way he looked at me when that lantern rose.

Like he’d finally found a sliver of light he could grab.

So when I was sixteen, and my father said the Seventh Prince had been struck by Heart-Devouring Poison and wouldn’t live past tonight, I hardly hesitated.

I asked my father, “Is there still a way to save him?”

My father was silent for a long time before he finally spoke, slow and heavy.

“There is.”

“But it isn’t saving a life.”

“It’s using your life to trade for his.”