Chapter 2
Yuhe’s prediction was not wrong.
Just as in our previous lives, the young lord of Qiangrong came to inspect the camp and saw the soldiers manhandling her.
Tears filled Yuhe’s eyes, and her dark hair tumbled loose around her shoulders. She was the very picture of a fragile, broken princess of a fallen kingdom.
Murong Jin immediately ordered the soldiers to stop.
He lifted Yuhe onto his horse and took her back to his tent.
For the next three nights, Murong Jin remained with her.
Yuhe imitated everything I had done to win his favor.
In my previous life, after marrying Murong Jin, I had never once smiled.
He tried every possible way to coax a smile from me, even stooping to the kind of foolish extravagance that had once toppled kingdoms. But my heart was consumed by the loss of my homeland, and I could not summon the faintest trace of joy.
This time, Yuhe copied me and wore a sorrowful expression every day.
Sure enough, Murong Jin became even more obsessed with her.
He issued a proclamation: whoever could make Princess Yuhe smile would be rewarded with ten thousand taels of gold.
A month later, we arrived in Qiangrong.
The young ladies of Southern Tang’s great houses had become the lowliest slaves in the palace.
My own assignment was relatively easy: I became a tea maid, responsible for serving Murong Jin.
One day, I kept my head bowed as I brought tea to Murong Jin and Yuhe, who sat beside him.
When I offered Yuhe her cup, she pretended to take it, then abruptly let go.
The cup fell, splashing scalding tea across her skirt.
Yuhe cried out in pain. Murong Jin’s face instantly turned cold.
“Guards,” he said. “Drag this slave away and feed her to the dogs.”
Everyone knew that Murong Jin, the young lord of Qiangrong, was capricious, cruel, and violent.
In our previous lives, he had been willing to spend ten thousand taels of gold for one smile from me.
In this life, he ordered my death without even hearing me speak.
Before I could say a word, Yuhe dropped to her knees.
In a gentle voice, she said, “She is my sister from Southern Tang. She may be clumsy, but for my sake, Young Lord, please spare her life.”
Murong Jin’s expression remained icy. After a long pause, he said, “Since Yuhe has pleaded for you, you will be sent to the stables instead.”
Yuhe looked at me with a smile.
I knew she had done it deliberately.
She did not want me serving near Murong Jin, afraid I might find a chance to seduce him.
But she did not want me to die too soon, either.
After all, she wanted me to watch her rise to the position of Noble Consort.
Sending me to the stables had been part of her plan from the beginning. In our previous lives, feeding the horses there had been her own assignment.
The work was grueling. Most Qiangrong steeds were fierce-tempered and could easily kick a person senseless.
To keep the horses from kicking her, Yuhe had starved them. A month later, one of the young horses died of hunger.
That horse was the Qiangrong princess’s prized Snow Dragon colt.
When the truth came out, the princess had Yuhe brutally beaten and disfigured her face.
Later, when Murong Jin brought me to the stables to choose a mount, he ordered the disfigured Yuhe to get down on all fours and serve as my mounting block.
The last thread holding Yuhe’s sanity together snapped.
She was the only legitimate princess of Southern Tang, born to the empress. All her life, I had been the one expected to wait upon her.
Now I stood above her while she was nothing but a lowly slave. How could she bear it?
Yuhe lunged at me and drove a spur into my throat.
“Noble Consort! I’ll show you who’s the Noble Consort!”
Now that we had begun again, our positions had reversed exactly as she wished.
She was Murong Jin’s secondary consort, and I was a stable slave.
“Once you’ve starved the Snow Dragon colt to death, you can learn what it feels like to have a princess flay the skin from your back.”
With those words, Yuhe left me alone in the stable.
The nearest horse had a long, snow-white coat. It stamped the ground, tossed its head, and snorted heavily.
I knew at once that this was the princess’s Snow Dragon colt.
It had inherited the wildness of its feral ancestors and was extraordinarily difficult for humans to tame.
Yuhe was certain the princess would have me killed.
What she did not know was that my mother had once served as an animal trainer in the imperial menagerie.
For me, taming a horse could not have been easier.