chapter 1

Qiwu Courtyard was silent as a tomb.

The Marchioness reclined on a couch with her eyes closed. Her brows suddenly drew together, and she coughed twice.

Matron Wang hurried forward from where she waited. “My lady, the kitchen has stewed loquats with rock sugar. Would you care for a bowl?”

The Marchioness opened her eyes and gave a listless shake of her head.

“It is all because yesterday’s living screen failed in her duty and let my lady catch cold.”

Matron Wang ventured cautiously, “You have not yet said how she should be punished.”

“Where is that screen maid?”

Jixiang had been waiting nearby. At those words, she dropped to her knees, trembling. Years as a living screen had trained her to endure even fire without flinching, but a single cough from the Marchioness made her shake from head to toe.

“Mercy, my lady!”

Everyone in the estate knew that Zheng Ru, the Marquis’s second wife, came from the Zheng clan of Xingyang. Proud of her noble blood, she demanded the utmost rigor in every detail of the servants’ work and provisions.

The slightest mistake could earn a servant her disgust and a sale out of the household.

Serving as a living screen was no easy post, but at least a servant within the Marquis’s estate had food and clothing. Once sold, she could never again hope to serve a wealthy family. If she was lucky, she might scrape together a living. If not, she would be sold straight into a brothel, unable either to live or to die.

Jixiang, moreover, had been born into the household. If she was sold, her parents might be punished with her.

As Jixiang begged again and again, Zheng Ru narrowed her eyes. She rose and tilted Jixiang’s chin upward.

“The maids in this estate grow more useless by the day.”

“This one is at least passably pretty. Send her to be beauty paper. Let all who come after her learn how a servant ought to do her duty.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Matron Wang answered in a quavering voice.

Jixiang froze. One broken sob escaped her, but she quickly knocked her forehead hard against the floor. “Thank you for your favor, my lady.”

I stood beside the door curtain, scarcely breathing, my eyes fixed straight ahead.

Needle-sharp gusts slipped through the gap in the curtain and sliced at my face and hands like knives.

I did not dare move. It was far too easy for a servant to die in the Marquis’s estate.

I did not want to die. Still less did I want to become beauty paper like Jixiang.

Beauty paper attended noblewomen at the chamber pot.

The name sounded delicate. The work was the filthiest imaginable.

The Marquis had praised his wife more than once for her beauty and ingenuity. Her beauty paper might spend day and night beside a chamber pot, but she still had to keep herself scented with powder. At the first sound from her mistress, she crawled forward on her knees and served with her lips and tongue.

“A beauty for paper. What exquisite amusement.”

That one compliment delighted Zheng Ru. Afterward she devised ever more ways to treat people as objects and win the Marquis’s approval.

The practice was too monstrous for her to purchase women openly for the role, so she condemned servants who had made grave mistakes instead. Those with less endurance killed themselves early and found what little release they could. A household-born servant like Jixiang, however, had her entire family inside the estate. Even death was not hers to choose.

Jixiang had begun training as a living screen a year before me. She should never have made such a mistake.

But yesterday, when Ji Song came to pay his respects, he had paused on his way out. Whatever he had been thinking, his eyes rested on Jixiang for one heartbeat too long.

The Marchioness said nothing, but her expression changed at once.

Jixiang had no idea that she had offended her mistress’s greatest taboo. Even if she had known, what could she have done? A screen maid on duty could not move, protest, or hide.

Zheng Ru did not punish her then. I thought Jixiang might have escaped, only to learn today that she had given the Marchioness a “chill.”

Once Jixiang had been dealt with, Zheng Ru stopped coughing.

“We have a family banquet today. Dress me quickly. Bring out the cloud-gauze jacket with green-gold embroidery that the heir gave me before New Year, and the jade hairpin I wore on my birthday last year…”

Matron Wang answered repeatedly as everyone crowded around to serve her.

Apart from the Marquis, Zheng Ru was heaven itself within this household.

She had been only fifteen when she became his second wife, a mere seven years older than Ji Song. The Marquis believed he had wronged her by such a marriage, so he indulged her in all things.

In the early years, he often led troops away to war. Sometimes he was gone for months, sometimes three or five years. In the finest years of her youth, Zheng Ru had been left to manage the entire estate and care for an heir younger than herself.

Once the noble legitimate daughter of the Zheng clan, she became the Marchioness and could no longer attend poetry gatherings with her friends or gallop freely across the hills.

She was shut inside the great house like a caged bird.

Year after year, the spirited, willful girl hardened into the woman she was now: silent and imperious, afraid of cold, heat, and dirt.

Servants surrounded her, yet her courtyard lay stagnant as a dead pond.

Only when the heir came each day to pay his respects did the place show a trace of life.

I lowered my eyes. Ji Song was the only light in this inner household.

He was also its sharpest blade, one that killed without drawing blood.

Jixiang was only the latest to be cut by it.

Before her, there had been Matron Zhang, who once loved me like a daughter.