Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I could not drive the image of Jiang Shou from my mind.

Even when my fourth elder sister, Zhao Wan, came to provoke me as usual, I barely responded.

“Hey, Jiajia! Ahem, ahem…”

Late spring and early summer always filled the air with drifting pollen. Zhao Wan’s nose was acting up again, and her cough had returned, so she had missed the archery trial.

She and I had been born on the same day, which meant she, too, had reached the age to choose a consort.

Though she had been resting in her palace, she was better informed than I was. She had already examined the eunuch’s entire list.

“Qin Yan placed first in the martial trial too! Now this is troublesome.” Her eyes curved with delight. “You know I always have to win. Naturally, my consort must be the very best.”

“But you’ve clung to him since we were children, so I doubt you’ll give him up.”

“It seems we’ll have to compete again. What should it be this time? Pitch-pot? Table games? Oh, I know-let’s play hide-the-hook. We’ll write his name on a slip of paper, and whoever guesses it first wins!”

I sat by the window with my chin in my hands and slowly shook my head.

“…I don’t want to play.”

Zhao Wan blinked, then caught hold of my sleeve. “If you refuse to play, I’m certainly not conceding.”

I nodded mildly. “All right.”

She frowned. A moment later, comprehension dawned, and her brow smoothed into a smug smile.

“I understand. You’re so sure Qin Yan loves you that you think he’ll refuse to marry anyone else, aren’t you?”

This time, I was the one who stared. I dropped my hands and looked at her.

“He doesn’t love me. He loves you, Fourth Sister.”

Zhao Wan arched a brow. “What?”

She was even slower to understand than I was. I laughed at her.

“Whenever we played together as children, he always gave you the best of everything. It could be as small as a bottle of rosewater or as grand as that glittering pomegranate crown set with pearls-he was always willing to lose to you.”

“He knew you wanted the first-place candidate, so he fought desperately at the archery trial. He even knocked another man off his horse!”

Zhao Wan tipped her head back and spent a long, speechless moment digesting this.

Remembering the crown, she glanced at me and whispered, “…I didn’t know Lady Zhou had worn it. If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have fought you for it or paraded it in front of you.”

She pressed her pink lips together and cautiously hooked a finger around mine.

“I’m sorry the crown broke…”

I shook my head, finally at peace with it. “You didn’t know. And when you came to show it to me, I said nothing-I simply tried to snatch it from you. That was why it fell. If Mother were alive, she would only scold me for my temper. She wouldn’t blame you.”

By palace custom, imperial sons and daughters addressed the Empress as Her Majesty, while calling their birth mothers Mother.

Lady Zhou had been my mother.

She died very young.

There were many princes and princesses in the palace. With no mother to care for me, I had grown up letting Fourth Sister’s mother, Lady Wu, comb my hair and powder my face.

Later, Lady Wu died giving birth to our sixth younger brother.

Zhao Wan and I became the only two princesses in the palace without mothers.

I knew she was not cruel at heart. She simply loved competing with me. Perhaps our quarrels carried her back to the carefree days of our childhood, when Lady Wu would smile helplessly beside us and call us her two “little ancestors.”

I had cried so hard over that crown not only because I missed my mother, but because Qin Yan was one of the few people who knew she had once worn it.

He knew, and still he had not helped me win it back.

From that moment on, my heart no longer stirred for him.

He favored Fourth Sister, and she liked men as fiercely competitive as he was. They suited each other. I wished them well.

But Zhao Wan seemed completely oblivious. She kept pressing me.

“I was partly at fault over the crown. So this time, whoever you choose as your consort, I promise I won’t compete with you. Now tell me.”

“Will it be Qin Yan, who placed first, or the vice minister’s son, who came second?”

I said nothing. I touched my warm cheek and walked away.

Behind me, Zhao Wan sounded bewildered. “Why are you blushing? Are you ill too?”

Her voice stretched out like a cicada sheltering from the summer heat beneath the palace eaves.

“Who are you going to choose?”