Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The wake for Grand Princess Xiao Lingyi was held in Zhaoming Palace.

The palace gates were locked tight, layer upon layer. White funeral banners hung from the eaves like a row of silent tongues. Attendants knelt on both sides, yet there was no sound of weeping. Imperial funerals were governed by the strictest of rules; even grief had to wait for a nod from the ritual officials.

I stepped into the hall and saw her lying in a coffin of golden-thread phoebe wood.

Xiao Lingyi was twenty-six, a year younger than me. Ten years ago, when I was still just a young apprentice grinding ink for Qin Lao, she had come to the painting academy on imperial orders to select screens for a palace banquet. She had complained that every artist painted peonies like cabbage leaves, except for me-I had painted a single, half-bloomed white herbaceous peony.

Standing behind me, she had asked, “Why didn’t you paint it in full bloom?”

I replied, “After full bloom comes the wither.”

She laughed. “Are you afraid the flower will die, or are you afraid of people seeing it die?”

After that, she visited the painting academy often. She would sneak me pastries rewarded from the inner palace, or intentionally bump my elbow while I was practicing my line work. In the deep of night beneath the palace walls, she once asked me, “Shen Yan, if one day I were no longer the Grand Princess, would you dare to take me away?”

At the time, I didn’t dare to answer.

Later, she was betrothed to the Northern Frontier Military Commissioner, but the marriage was called off due to a rebellion at the border. Later still, I became the Imperial Painter, and she became the Grand Princess who controlled half the imperial court. We were separated by the protocols of sovereign and subject, like a sheet of paper that grew thicker with every stroke I painted.

Now she lay with her eyes closed, her face pale, though a trace of color remained on her lips.

As I approached, everyone in the hall withdrew. Only Liu Quan remained by the door, whispering, “His Majesty has decreed that the portrait must be finished before dawn. If it is not, Mr. Shen, you need not bother leaving the palace.”

I asked, “How did Her Highness pass?”

Liu Quan’s eyes flickered away. “A sudden illness.”

A sudden illness again.

I opened my painting kit, spread the silk, ground the ink, and took up my brush. Yet my fingers hesitated, unable to make a mark.

Xiao Lingyi’s face was too peaceful. But I noticed a faint, thin red line on the side of her neck, as if something had been tightened around it. The red line extended all the way behind her ear, disappearing into her hair.

I remembered Liu Ah Ruan’s words: Don’t finish the painting.

There are rules to painting a funerary portrait: first define the bone structure, then draw the features, and finally dot the lips. The so-called “Soul-Locking” was contained in that final stroke. Once the color of the lips was set, the spirit of the subject in the painting would be complete.

I intentionally slowed my pace.

By the third watch, the sound of the night watchman’s drum echoed from outside the hall.

I had just reached the corner of her eye when the person in the coffin suddenly opened her eyes.

Those eyes were startlingly dark, staring straight into my soul.

My hand jerked, and the tip of the brush dragged across the silk, leaving a messy half-inch line.

Xiao Lingyi did not move. In a voice audible only to the two of us, she said, “Shen Yan, do not paint me.”

My throat tightened. “Your Highness is still alive?”

“I am dying,” she breathed softly. “Someone wants to borrow my face and take my destiny to enter the Imperial Ancestral Temple and sit upon the Phoenix Throne.”

I whispered, “Who?”

Her eyes turned with great difficulty toward the rafters of the hall.

A white lantern hung from a beam. On the inside of the lampshade, a faceless human countenance had been painted.

“Paint yourself,” she said. “Only your face can block The Door.”

As the words fell, she closed her eyes again, as if she had never woken.

Outside the palace doors, Liu Quan asked, “Mr. Shen, why have you stopped?”

I stared at the messy line on the silk, suddenly realizing that Xiao Lingyi wasn’t asking me to take my own life.

She wanted me to divert the soul-swapping art that was meant for her onto myself.