Chapter 2
After my confinement, I became much more docile. Faced with the scheming beauties of the harem, I learned to smile innocently, play the fool, and say odd, nonsensical things. Soon they were saying the fifth princess was so stupid she could hardly have come from the same mother as the clever third prince.
In public, I learned to follow obediently behind Mother and my brother, taking none of his glory.
The barbed remarks they dared not aim at him all landed on me. I smiled without arguing and went on beaming foolishly. Mother frowned in silence, looking wounded.
Mother said anyone who had everything would provoke envy. There had to be one flaw for people to vent their resentment on. For my brother’s sake, I had to be that stain.
Alone on the swing, I rocked back and forth. “Is Mother putting me in front of my brother to take the blows for him?”
A faint “Mm” drifted away on the wind. Ah Jiu never lied. It was infuriating.
I jumped off the swing and kicked a stone. “Ah Jiu, you must practice your martial arts properly. You have to become the best in the world.”
“All right.”
Because I had a feeling that Ah Jiu was the only person in the world who would protect me.
He seemed to take that casual remark seriously. Once I was asleep and he had made sure I was safe, he would disappear, returning the next day with injuries.
He said nothing, but I could still see when blood had soaked his black clothes.
He was growing stronger. I could not simply do nothing. Determined to give him the best support I could, I found a woman physician and began studying medicine.
Eight brief days of perseverance shattered that dream. Medicine was not for me.
I settled for needlework instead. By then, Ah Jiu sometimes talked to me of his own accord. “What use is that?” he asked.
I drew my needle through the cloth and smiled. “If you get hurt, I can mend the holes in your clothes.”
I might not dare sew flesh, but I could sew fabric!
Ah Jiu nodded. “Mm.”
After that, he became my practice piece. Whatever embroidery I learned during the day, I had to try it out for a while on the hem of his black robe.
“Ah Jiu, what is this?”
Proudly, I held up the brightly colored hem I had spent all afternoon embroidering. “A duck,” he said.
Crushed, I shut myself away and practiced for a month. Then I tried again, this time on his sleeve. “Ah Jiu, you can tell what it is now, surely?”
“A monster.”
None of my embroidery survived on his clothes for more than a day. He cut the decorated patch away with a dagger, explaining that gold and silver thread caught the eye and would expose him.
“Then wear black for the rest of your life.”
“All right.”
Time passed quickly. Ah Jiu grew much taller than his sword, and it no longer looked strange in his hand. But time also passed slowly. When my governess forced me to practice intricate double-sided embroidery, it seemed the sun would never set.
Gradually, people began talking about my needlework too. Mother covered her face and sighed: at least I had one accomplishment fit to be seen.
I finished the last stitch of a five-petaled flower on a black hem. “This is all I’m good for,” I murmured.
Ah Jiu drew his robe back. “No.”
As I grew, traces of Mother appeared in my childish face. Looking at me, people seemed to glimpse the girl who would become the most beautiful consort in the harem.
That was why the empress loathed me so much. She hated a face whose beauty was about to bloom. She felt that in a few years she would see the noble consort as she had been upon first entering the palace, when the empress’s own tragedy began.
I was terribly afraid of her then. After the princesses finished lessons, she often summoned me to Fengyi Palace and kept me in the main hall, where her senior attendant taught me embroidery.
Sometimes the empress was there; sometimes she was not. The unsmiling senior attendant was always there. I followed her instructions in a panic. Too unsettled to learn properly, I made mistakes and pricked my fingers, which only frightened me more. Two hours at Fengyi Palace could leave every finger bloody.
It was during that time that I grew close to my eldest brother, the crown prince.
At last, one day, the empress dismissed me. Blowing on my swollen red fingers, I ran outside and blundered straight into someone, burying my face in the apricot-yellow robes of the crown prince. I covered my face, certain I was doomed. Now the empress had something else to use against me.
The gentle, courteous crown prince smiled and raised a hand to stop his attendants. Bending down, he tapped my forehead with a curled finger. “You’re the noble consort’s little fifth girl. What’s the hurry?”
I covered my forehead. “I want my dinner.”
That made him laugh. He seemed about to tell his eunuch to arrange a meal, but changed his words before they left his mouth. “It’s only afternoon, and you’re already that hungry? Off you go, then.”
I darted around the attendants and ran out. I could not resist looking back, but the crown prince and his party had already passed through the doors and disappeared.
After studying state affairs with Father, he always visited Fengyi Palace. I sometimes ran into him. Whenever he saw me anxious and frightened in a corner, being made to embroider, he found some excuse to release me early.
His visits were my easiest moments. While he talked to the empress, the senior attendant sent me outside to play. I swung a twig at the flowers to vent my anger.
A gentle, teasing voice spoke behind me. “That is Mother’s favorite Wei Purple peony. How will you make amends?”
I hastily dropped the twig and played dumb.
He walked around me, saw the mangled petals at my feet, and shook his head in amusement.
“If you don’t like embroidery, tell the noble consort. Your eldest sister stayed behind after lessons today to learn painting from the grand tutor.”
“I like embroidery,” I mumbled. “It’s… very nice here with Her Majesty.”
Mother had already told me to come. As a noble consort’s daughter, I would suffer nothing serious at the empress’s hands. A little torment, at most.
“Go to the empress,” she had said. “If she has somewhere to vent her anger, she won’t keep watching your brother.”
So I would not go back.
The crown prince was ten years older than me. He asked nothing more, as though he understood everything. Feeling that he could see straight through me made me want to run away.
“Well, that is something. Her senior attendant was famous for embroidery even in Jiangnan. Coming to the palace with Mother has not diminished her skill.” Smiling, he patted my head. “If you come tomorrow, I’ll bring you something nice.”
Mother and the empress were bitter enemies. That night, I worried that the empress’s son meant to hurt me, that his “something nice” would make me suffer. Yet I could not help looking forward to it. So few people were ever that gentle with me.
Torn over whether to feign illness the next day, I developed dark circles under my eyes. “Ah Jiu, you mustn’t let me die tomorrow. Or get hurt.”
“Mm.”
The next day, I sat at my embroidery lesson with my eyes constantly straying toward the door. The senior attendant coughed so often that anyone would have thought she had caught a cold.
At last the crown prince arrived. His promised gift was an emerald-green kite with two ribbons hanging from its tail. I loved it so much I could not look away.
He chuckled. “It isn’t really kite-flying weather. We can only try. If it won’t fly, we’ll leave it.”
After a crowd of us bustled about Fengyi Palace for ages, the kite wobbled into the sky. That day, the ever-dignified crown prince behaved like a mischievous young gentleman, leaving everyone around him openmouthed.
He wiped the sweat from his temple and handed me the string. I gripped it tightly. The kite swayed from side to side and fell.
“Never mind. Never mind. Some things can’t be forced.”
He looked at the fallen kite, a little desolate. Quickly hiding the feeling, he patted my head. “Come. I’ll take you for hibiscus cakes.”
The following day, that fallen kite appeared at the foot of my bed. I did not have to guess who had brought it.
I could not remember asking Ah Jiu to fetch it.