Chapter 1

After I had flailed in the vat for a while, a passing kitchen maid hauled me out by the ankles. She thumped my back, inspected me, and announced that I still had a breath left in me.

Her sister-in-law was childless. She pitied me, thought I was a decent-looking baby, and took me home.

I brought the full force of a corporate overachiever to my new life. I studied day and night, spent three years learning the local language, then another two-odd years following my foster father to his village school until I could read and write traditional characters.

Before I could display my genius and conquer the world, however, my foster father died after a serious illness.

His relatives wanted the main household’s inheritance. Once the formal mourning period ended, they forced my foster mother to remarry. Just before I turned six, I was sent into the Minister Gu residence.

Broadly speaking, servants in wealthy households came in two kinds.

The first were hired hands. They remained commoners.

The second were registered bondsmen and bondmaids. Their masters could dispose of them or sell them whenever they pleased.

The sole practical difference was that the second kind fetched three extra taels of silver.

For those three taels, Cook Zhang sold me before my sixth birthday.

It was infuriating. I was a human being. I had studied for five or six years. I had a legal identity, a mother, and a home—yet because I was young and female, I had no say in my own fate.

Just like that, I entered the slave register.

I was literate, reasonably pretty, and good at reading a room. It did not take long for me to become the personal maid of Gu Zhilan, the minister’s youngest legitimate daughter.

In this era, personal maids to young ladies usually did well for themselves. At worst, they would follow their mistresses into marriage and become concubines in the new household.

The problem was that Gu Zhilan had violent tendencies.

The old rule held that boys and girls should no longer share a table after seven. From that age onward, Gu Zhilan was raised in the innermost courtyard of a three-courtyard compound, like a canary in a cage.

Shut in every day, she grew irritable and vented her temper on her maids in private. She tormented girls her own age the way children pulled the wings off dragonflies or poked at ants.

Needles. Scalding water. Give her a maid in her embroidery tower, and she could amuse herself for an entire afternoon.

The first time I went upstairs, she tried it on me. I had met my share of spoiled little monsters. I shoved her so hard she stumbled.

I had grown up tough, running around outside. How could a pampered young lady like her compete?

When she tried to strike back, I charged her and gave her a beating.

She wiped her tears and threatened to tell her mother.

I stared her down and laughed like a villain. I told her I knew where the last maid’s body was buried. If she reported me, I might be beaten to death, but my friends would spread the story everywhere. Her reputation would be ruined.

Then I told her I had once swallowed a special drug. If I died violently, I would become a vengeful ghost and haunt her forever.

I described the dangling tongue of a hanged ghost in loving detail—how long it was, how the ghost’s eyes were pure white, how it walked, how it ate people.

What chance did a seven-year-old brat have against me? A few sentences reduced her to sobs.

I spent the next five years living quite comfortably in Gu Zhilan’s courtyard. She kept a respectful distance from me.

But girls here began meeting prospective husbands at thirteen. After Gu Zhilan made a few public appearances, Madam Gu started frowning. She thought my face made her precious daughter look wooden and dull, so she replaced me with a dark-complexioned, narrow-eyed maid.

My annoyingly foxlike face earned me a transfer to Madam Gu’s outer courtyard.

The outer courtyard was no paradise for newcomers. Too many chores, too many quarrels. Three women in one courtyard could stage an entire opera.

Still, kitchen workers were allowed outside.

That was enough for me. Errands, deliveries, emptying chamber pots—I would do anything if it meant leaving the gate.

I swept courtyards and ran errands for Madam Gu for three years. Little by little, I saved almost enough to buy forged travel papers.

By then I was fifteen, old enough to support myself.

My period had finally started too.

Young male servants began asking the steward about me, or making suggestive jokes when I went to collect things.

Social maneuvering was a basic corporate survival skill. I did not even need the several terabytes of educational material on my old computer to teach them about the diversity of human life. A sweet smile was enough to get whatever information I wanted.

This world was harsh, but not impossibly so. There were livelihoods open to women.

Just not to slaves.

A registered slave needed a pass token to leave the residence, a deed of ownership to leave the city, and travel papers to cross into another jurisdiction. Runaways could be captured and dragged back. They might even be branded on the face.

To erase my status, I needed the original bill of sale.

I could forge one, of course. Ancient anti-counterfeiting techniques were hardly sophisticated. But buying a new identity was difficult—and far too expensive.

I was still wondering where to find a suitable identity when I met Gu Zheng, Third Young Master Gu, the son of the late Concubine Shuang.

Minister Gu had one principal wife and four concubines. Between them, they had one daughter and three sons. The first two sons and the daughter were Madam Gu’s children.

Gu Zheng was a notorious wastrel. Handsome enough, but with a dreadful reputation, he had been packed off to the army early for some hardening.

When he returned and went to pay his respects to Madam Gu, she sat drinking tea in her room but claimed to be napping. Gu Zheng waited two hours beneath the blazing sun, a mocking smile on his lips. Whenever a maid or matron passed, he followed her with an openly flirtatious gaze.

Every maid who crossed the courtyard came away blushing.

When I walked behind a group of them, he was still wearing that careless, roguish smile.

“Little thing. Come here. What’s your name?”

He looked me up and down.

“Pretty enough. Want to come with me?”

In other words, he wanted me as a chamber maid—a servant he could sleep with.

He regarded me with the easy frivolity of a man choosing a cat or a dog. “I need someone agreeable at the border garrison. Come with me, and you won’t be an ordinary maid. No hauling wash water in winter, for one.”

Still a maid.

“What?” His brow rose. “Were you hoping to become a wife?”

To people like him, a servant should feel blessed merely to catch her master’s eye.

Maids and concubines were standing pieces of furniture in this world. A master liking you was considered an honor. Even if you became pregnant, he could give you away whenever he wished.

I had spent more than a decade here. I understood perfectly.

And I had not taken leave of my senses.