Chapter 2

In truth, I never wanted to return to the palace. One glimpse of the flawless Crown Princess was enough to make me wish I never had to see her again.

I had grown up believing every woman ought to resemble Changning—gentle and generous, noble and refined.

Then I learned that a woman like the Crown Princess existed. She was the wind, the moon suspended above the frontier, the embodiment of freedom itself. The one thing she should never have been was a perfect crown princess.

It almost made me grateful that I had been unwanted from birth. I had grown up free, then married into distant Liao, where my husband had no interest in me. I was still free.

Inside the carriage, I removed the hairpin the Fourth Prince had made and held it out to him.

“You made this with your own hands. There is only one in the world. It shouldn’t belong to me.”

Life at the prince’s residence was tolerable—more luxurious, even, than my life in Shu—though the food took getting used to.

The Fourth Prince had no time for me. He was endlessly busy. Once, determined to win his favor, I dressed myself with great care and carried chicken soup to his study.

His guard stopped me at the door. “His Highness is attending to important business, Princess. He cannot receive visitors.”

Having my first attempt to please my husband thrown back in my face was both discouraging and humiliating. I was so angry that I refused to seek him out for an entire month. He, meanwhile, continued to dine and spend the night with me on the first and fifteenth of every month, utterly unaware that his wife was waging a cold war.

I had never expected marital harmony or devoted love, so that was hardly the worst of it. My true headache was the Empress’s sudden fascination with me. Every few days, she summoned me to keep her company. Each time, I entered the palace in terror, certain she had prepared some deadly trap.

But she truly only wanted to chat.

The Crown Princess was always there as well.

She and I were fellow sufferers. A fashion for building Buddhist temples had recently swept Liao. The Crown Prince had been placed in overall charge of the towers and monasteries, while the Fourth Prince supervised construction. At least the Crown Prince was considerate enough to steal a few days in the Eastern Palace with his wife. My husband was a block of wood given human form.

The Crown Princess liked me, and after I entered the palace, she became the person I spoke with most.

“I heard your name even in Shu,” I once told her. “My eldest sister said that if…”

Realizing I had nearly said too much, I smiled and hastily finished, “You would surely have become the closest of friends.”

She saw my embarrassment but spared me. Instead, she followed the Empress’s lead and teased me as usual.

“Mother always says Fourth Brother doesn’t know how to cherish anyone. I say he simply hadn’t met Wan yet. Even I want to hold such a tiny, lovely girl in my palms and keep her safe.”

I covered my mouth with my handkerchief and lowered my head, feigning shyness. That impervious block of wood did not know how to cherish anyone. He sometimes pulled me into his arms in his sleep, but there was nothing tender about it. He held me so tightly that I felt less like a living person than an outlet for feelings he had no other way to release.

The Empress smiled. “Look at Wan’s face—she doesn’t believe a word. Yue, tell her again about that campaign you fought with Yuan.”

“Mother,” the Crown Princess said helplessly, “if I keep telling these stories, Fourth Brother will blame his sister-in-law.”

“You are his elder sister-in-law. What is there to fear? Besides, the two of you led armies together from childhood and saved each other’s lives. Only you can tell these tales. If anyone else tried, Yuan would be knocking down their door.”

The Crown Princess still hesitated.

The Empress waved a hand. “If Yuan truly gets angry, we’ll send the Crown Prince to deal with him.”

At last, the Crown Princess obeyed and began describing a Fourth Prince I had never known.

“It happened only a few years after we first took command. His Majesty wished to test the Fourth Prince. Bandits in Tongzhou were stealing government silver and slaughtering local people.

“The Fourth Prince volunteered to suppress them. I was young and hotheaded, so I asked His Majesty to let me join him.”

She smiled, and for once, a trace of girlish mischief enlivened her face. “Father was worried and insisted I stay home. Grandfather finally rebuked him, saying the Bian family had never produced a coward.”

“Yue, get to that part,” the Empress urged.

The Crown Princess obeyed. After briefly describing the hardships of a winter march, she continued, “We won a great victory. In the chaos, I put an arrow through the bandit chief. After that, the Fourth Prince’s opinion of me changed completely.”

Curiosity overcame me. “Did he roast a leg of lamb for you too?”

She shook her head. “He swore brotherhood with me, drained three bowls of spirits, and slapped my shoulder. He said he had underestimated women and that, from that day forward, I was his brother in life and death.”

That did not sound like the Fourth Prince at all.

The man I knew was grave, courteous, rational, fair, and even cold. Not one part of him resembled the person in her story.

“After we returned to the capital, he became a cat after a mouse. No matter where I hid, he found me and dragged me to the barracks for a spar. Before long, he had learned most of my family’s archery.”

The Crown Princess looked back on those days with a longing I could not name.

She sighed. “None of that bothered me. I always preferred swords and spears. But I was still a young lady, and I still had to attend the flower and moon-viewing parties held by the noblewomen of the capital.

“At the time, Mother was considering wives for both the Crown Prince and Fourth Prince, so she hosted a flower banquet.”

The Empress began laughing before the important part had even arrived, laughing until tears filled her eyes.

I looked at the Crown Princess in confusion. She too was struggling not to laugh, which only baffled me further.

“Miss Du was a friend of mine and asked me to introduce her. I brought her before the Fourth Prince, praised her every virtue in detail, and placed particular emphasis on her makeup.”

At the time, tear-streak makeup was fashionable in the capital. Fine pearl powder was dotted beneath the eyes so that every glance seemed to shimmer with autumn water, pitiful and beautiful.

“Unfortunately, Miss Du was so nervous that day that most of the makeup beneath one eye rubbed away. The Fourth Prince stared at her until her cheeks turned scarlet.”

“And then?” I pressed.

“Then he turned to me and asked, with perfect seriousness, why Miss Du could cry from one eye but not the other.”

Miss Du had naturally stormed away. The Crown Princess had doubled over laughing at the Fourth Prince. Her laughter attracted the Crown Prince, who also burst out laughing after he heard what had happened.

I immediately asked how the Fourth Prince had reacted.

The Crown Princess wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. “I doubt he understands even now why Miss Du left in a rage.”

I heard many stories about him that day. Only then did I realize that the man first described to me had not always been the man he was now.

He had always been rational and grave, but he had also chased a rabbit through the winter snow and fallen headfirst into a drift. He had asked a young woman, to her face, why she could cry with only one eye.

I had known none of it.

When I returned home, I found him there on a day other than the first or fifteenth—an unusual occurrence. We ate in silence. I bit my chopstick and stole one glance after another.

He had grown thinner and darker, making the angles of his face more distinct. His throat moved as he swallowed.

Heat rushed to my face, and I bent over my bowl again.

He placed a piece of meat in my bowl. “Do you have something to say?”

I gathered my courage and met his eyes. “The Crown Princess told me many stories about you today. So you weren’t always… like this.”

His chopsticks froze. He set them down and stared at me without moving.

My heart lurched. I had said the wrong thing. I had not fought at his side like the Crown Princess. Of course he would be angry that I had brought up his embarrassing past.

But he did not lose his temper.

“What else did she tell you?”

I chose the least outrageous stories. He listened intently, then smiled at me once. In that brief smile, I thought I glimpsed the Fourth Prince the Crown Princess remembered.

“So she still remembers all those ancient little things.”

Something in those words made me wary.

I looked at him, and he looked back. His usually cold, inhuman eyes now held an emotion so intense that it frightened me. I wanted to speak, only to find that no sound would come.

Suddenly, I remembered the lily-of-the-valley pin.

“You… you love…”

I covered my mouth. I was as shocked as I had been when I discovered Changning’s secret meetings with Mr. Zhou.

He loved the Crown Princess.

He loved his own sister-in-law.

He did not attempt to explain. He merely watched the horror in my eyes as resentment spread through his own. Through clenched teeth, he said, “If only…”

If only what?

Then he looked directly at me.

“I could have married her.”

He did not spend that night in my room. I lay alone in the vast bed, turning restlessly from side to side.

He loved the Crown Princess. But did she love him?

I rolled about in frustration and finally sat up, a dull pressure weighing on my chest. Moonlight covered the floor beyond the window. I went outside and sat alone beneath the gallery, gazing over a courtyard washed in silver.

It was the sixteenth. The moon on the sixteenth was fuller than on the fifteenth.

“You are supposed to bring people together,” I murmured to it. “Why, then, can no one beneath you be reunited?”

There must have been something wrong with me. Before I knew whom the Fourth Prince loved, I felt nothing for him. He was merely a handsome, well-built man of Liao who happened to bear the title of my husband.

Once I learned the truth, I began to pity him, and then to think of Changning, thousands of miles away.

I wondered how she and Mr. Zhou were faring.

At least my marriage had bought Changning time to maneuver. The Fourth Prince was more pitiful. He had no chance at all, and no one who could purchase one for him.

But it could not be helped. He was Liao’s celebrated god of war, and the Crown Princess was the daughter of a military clan. Had two such people loved and married each other, how could either the Emperor or Crown Prince have slept at night?

The Fourth Prince was often away, leaving me ample time to ponder matters that had nothing to do with me. I thought myself in circles, unable to decide whether it would be worse if the Crown Princess did not love him, or if she did.

When I learned that he, like me, had been raised under the Empress, I pitied him even more.

The Fourth Prince seemed to have finally found someone to whom he could confess the feelings he had long suppressed. He came home more often. At night, as we lay in the same bed, he would ask how the Crown Princess had been lately.

I did not dare ask whether they loved each other. If they did not and I had imagined it, I might as well have tugged a tiger’s tail and waited for my neck to be snapped.

“She is very well,” I told him. “The last time I entered the palace, she gave me a handkerchief she embroidered herself.”

He rolled over and fixed me with a burning gaze.

“Y-you don’t want it, do you?” I stammered.

Absolutely not.

Yes, the Fourth Prince had grown up dependent on others just as I had, and the woman he loved had become his own sister-in-law. Any young girl would shed tears for him. But this was the Crown Princess’s handkerchief. It was harmless in my possession; found in his, it would be impossible to explain.

“I’m tired.”

Even I found the excuse painfully stiff. Fortunately, he did not press me or demand the handkerchief as some mad token to ease his longing. He watched me silently for a time, then turned away to sleep.

I thought the matter was over and peace would return.

The very next morning, he returned from outside with dew clinging to his clothes and a wreath in his hand.

Women often possess instincts sharper and more vigilant than men’s. One look at that wreath told me trouble was coming, and I turned to run. Unfortunately, I had short legs and little courage. One command to stop brought me obediently to a halt.

He dismissed the servants. “Consider it a favor to me.”

I waved both hands frantically. “No. You’ve lost your mind. If the Crown Prince finds out, both you and the Crown Princess are finished.”

I did not have the nerve to add that I would be finished too.

The Fourth Prince looked at me. His eyes were far too beautiful; the slightest furrow of his brow made him seem so wronged and pitiful that my heart softened at once.

“It is only a wreath. An ordinary wreath. She won’t know I made it.”

I could not refute that. Aside from an ugly choice of colors, there was nothing remarkable about it. But if I could not say he had woven it, the Crown Princess would naturally think I had.

My taste was not that dreadful. I would disgrace all of Shu.

Still, I accepted it. When his face brightened visibly, I dared to ask, “Does the Crown Princess feel the same about you…?”

His new smile vanished.

“I don’t mean anything by it,” I hurriedly said. “I was only asking. You don’t have to answer.”

Yet where the Crown Princess was concerned, he possessed a tolerance that continually astonished me. He answered.

“After she entered the palace, she truly became nothing more than my sister-in-law.” He lowered his eyes, his voice indistinct. “She abandoned everything that came before.”

I was doomed.

Their entanglement was more heartrending than any romance I had ever read.

Afraid the flowers would wilt, I hurried to the palace after breakfast. Normally, I first paid my respects to the Empress. Today was different. I wanted to place the wreath in the Crown Princess’s hands as soon as possible, so I went straight toward the Eastern Palace.

Fate, however, delighted in tormenting me.

I ran into the Crown Prince as I entered, smiling and calling for my sister-in-law.

Dressed in easy splendor, he was as gentle as spring rain. Instead of chastising my lack of decorum, he politely offered me an excuse.

“What a lovely wreath, Sister-in-law. Were those flowers picked outside the palace?”

At the sight of him, guilt nearly killed me. The more warmly he smiled, the more desperately I wanted the floor to swallow me.

“Yes, Your Highness. They were picked outside the palace.”

“Yue is like you. She prefers wild flowers to those grown here.”

He seemed inclined to keep chatting, and cold sweat soaked my palms. I told myself again and again that I was entering the palace as I always did. I merely happened to be carrying a wreath.

“Where did you gather them? I should pick some for the Crown Princess too.”

My dry smile held on by force. “Many wildflowers grow on the slopes beyond the capital—flowers one never sees in the palace.”

At last, the Crown Prince nodded and released me. “I see.”

He left for the construction site. I wiped my clammy palms against my skirt. At some point, I had crushed one side of the wreath and shaken loose several petals.

Without another word, I thrust it at the baffled Crown Princess and fled to pay my respects to the Empress.

Misfortunes came in pairs. A senior palace maid stopped me outside and said the Empress was unwell and had fallen asleep after taking a calming draught.

With nowhere to go, I wandered aimlessly around the palace.

The Fourth Prince and Crown Princess seemed bound by fate. One or the other always appeared just when I most needed someone to rescue me.

A maid came to invite me to the training ground.

The Crown Princess was dressed for exercise, her long hair bound high. Her commanding presence yielded nothing to the Fourth Prince’s.

She smiled, took my hand, and asked whether I wanted to try archery.

I declined. Princesses in Shu were forbidden to learn such things. I had never even ridden a horse.

Assuming I was shy and afraid of embarrassment, she comforted me. “When I first learned archery, I drove away several instructors. In the end, Grandfather had to teach me himself.”

She chose a light bow and personally demonstrated how to draw, aim, and release. I copied her, awkwardly pulling the string. We loosed our arrows together.

The result left me wishing the ground would open beneath me.

My arrow landed neatly beside my own foot.

The Crown Princess’s came a breath from the center of the target.

The guards and servants applauded, praising her for having lost none of her old brilliance.