Chapter 11
Chapter 11
Of course, the fact that Heqing was a princess did not matter to them.
But her birth had been a deadly gamble.
Back then, Zhao Ling and I both knew that the Hu and Xu families, along with Prince Liang, Zhao Cui, could wait no longer.
They felt the emperor was becoming harder and harder to control, impossible to read.
They had even begun secretly selecting a new crown prince.
The Hu Family hinted that I should poison Zhao Ling to death.
Hu Minrong, who had always been obedient, went against their wishes and told them she was already pregnant.
They were overjoyed. If their own grandson ascended the throne, nothing could be better.
A grandson’s throne-would that not be their throne as well?
Once their family’s power was secured, what would Prince Liang amount to in the future?
The Hu Family and the Xu family were no ordinary players.
On the day I gave birth, exhausted and drenched in sweat, I told Zhao Ling that if the child was a prince, His Majesty should let him die young.
His birth would mean Zhao Ling’s death was near.
And I did not want my own child to become a puppet on strings, weak and easily bullied, forever crushed beneath his mother’s family, living a cowardly, muddled life.
There was no hope in a life like that.
Zhao Ling held my hand and wiped the sweat from my brow. Looking at me, he said with extraordinary firmness, “If Rong’er gives birth to a prince, one day I will take him to the fengshan sacrificial ceremony and let him look down upon ten thousand miles of rivers and mountains.”
At that moment, I wept.
I knew he never made empty promises.
Just as on the night we first consummated our marriage, when I was trembling so badly I could barely hold myself together.
With reddened eyes, he asked me, “Who was it?”
I said nothing. I only wept and turned my face away.
The veins stood out on his forehead. He restrained himself with all his strength before choking out, “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. I will kill him with my own hands.”
It sounded as if he were comforting me, and also as if he were comforting himself.
In the end, he gripped my hand tightly, our fingers interlaced, his damp lashes buried against my neck, and at last his tears fell.
“It was my fault. I deserve to die. I am the one who is filthy. Little Rong’er is clean.”
Later, during the suburban sacrifice in the tenth month, when the troops mutinied at the altar, he truly kept his promise and personally killed Zhao Cui.
I waited inside the palace with Heqing in my arms. Dressed in a black robe, sword in one hand and Zhao Cui’s head in the other, he came all the way to Jiaofang Hall just like that.
Blood was spattered across his flawless, white-jade face, lending him a strange, almost bewitching beauty.
Beneath his handsome brows, those slightly narrowed phoenix eyes held the faintest hint of a smile.
“I told you I would do it, Rong’er. We won.”
We had won.
And yet, not entirely.
The court was still fragmented, but Zhao Ling had at least gained a faction of his own.
Step by step, he infiltrated, planned, and laid his traps.
Among the officials, some began to pledge loyalty to him.
Even my maternal cousin-uncle Xu Xun, a master of political maneuvering, found some peerless beauty from who knew where and declared that he wished to present her to the emperor.
At the palace banquet, the beauty performed a dance. When her veil drifted down and their eyes met, Zhao Ling’s expression changed slightly.
In the First Year of Taicang, I married Zhao Ling.
In the blink of an eye, four years had passed.
I knew very well that he and I were husband and wife, but even more than that, we were kindred spirits.
Hu Minrong understood the shackles and peril he lived under, his quiet endurance beneath humiliation, and she also understood his ability to strategize from the shadows-his proud, untamable spirit in a body no more significant than an ant’s, his ambition as vast as a swan’s flight.
And he understood my fate as someone abandoned by her family, as well as the desperate resolve of one left utterly alone.