chapter 2

chapter 2

I forcefully brought my parents and sister out of the estate.

My parents were angry.

My sister was in tears.

I was full of thoughts and walking in silence when I bumped straight into Zhao Ye.

I took a half step back.

He rubbed his chest.

I hurriedly bent to salute him.

The gatekeeper trotted over and introduced my parents’ identities one by one.

I said, “I will send them away right now.”

Zhao Ye said, “Let them stay. More people means more liveliness. The estate has not felt this lively in a long time.”

Before I could say anything, my parents fell to their knees to thank him for his grace.

My sister lifted her face and smiled sweetly. “Thank you, brother-in-law.”

Zhao Ye’s lips moved slightly, but he did not correct her.

I, however, felt a knot in my throat and panic in my heart.

They did not know that everyone in the estate called me Miss Li. No one had ever called me the prince’s wife or mistress, and Zhao Ye and I were not husband and wife.

That single “brother-in-law” from my sister made my heart pound with unease.

I had a huge argument with my parents.

“Three days. You can stay in the estate for at most three days, and then you must ask to leave.”

“Li Aqiao, how can you be so heartless? You won’t enjoy the good life and insist on suffering instead. Are you afraid your sister will steal your favor? What favor did you ever have to begin with?”

Family are the ones whose cruel words cut deepest.

Every word stabbed straight into my chest.

I looked at my sister.

“And you think the same thing?”

My sister hesitated, her big eyes blinking.

“I’ll listen to Mother and Father.”

I let out a sneer, and my heart went bitter.

When I left home, she had only been six years old, a naive and adorable little girl.

She had always listened to me, chasing after the carriage that took me into the palace until my mother held her back, and she had cried as if her heart were being torn out.

I remembered all of it.

I had once imagined what she would be like when she grew up: lively, bright, clever, and smart.

But not like this. Never like this, with no judgment and nothing but calculation.

I suppressed the fire in my chest and said each word carefully, “You should listen to the person in this house who has truly walked out into the world, not to empty gossip. If our parents really had foresight, they should have taken the silver I sent home and become rich. Instead, they brought you all the way here as refugees.”

My father was furious at my disobedience and wanted to hit me, just as he had when I was a child.

But I caught his wrist.

I said sharply, “See? Even you never truly treated me like the prince’s wife. You only thought you could rely on my identity to stay in this estate. Others are not fools.”

“Let me make this very clear: this marriage decree was a joke. The Fifth Prince has never felt anything for me. Staying here will not lead to anything good.”

“If you still want me as your daughter, then leave in three days. I will leave here someday too, and when that time comes, we may still have a day of reunion.”

“Otherwise… nothing good will come of this.”

I did not want us to end up in the kind of situation where reunion was only another form of parting, where meeting again would only be in vain.

I left in a rage.

My father’s angry voice rang out behind me.

“You’re rebelling, rebelling! Truly rebelling! You don’t have the ability to keep the Fifth Prince’s heart, but Arao never would be like you!”

I turned around and looked back at him in silence.

In my heart I had always remembered the sight of my parents crying so hard when I was chosen to be a palace maid and taken away in a carriage. Every time I thought of it, I felt a pang of sadness.

But now I realized that some relatives only belong in dreams. If they truly stood before you, that was the nightmare.

I did not speak with them much after that, and from then on we were like strangers.

They did not care either. They were busy fawning over Zhao Ye.

They racked their brains over hometown snacks, hometown stories, and hometown scenery, trying to come up with anything amusing in the hope that Zhao Ye’s gaze would linger a little longer on my sister.

Arao was very sensible too.

She circled around Zhao Ye step by step, moving from the doorway of his courtyard to his study, grinding ink, cleaning the inkstone, and keeping him company with her red sleeves and fragrance.

I once thought about asking Zhao Ye what he thought.

But when I reached his door, I stopped.

Inside, I could hear my sister’s sweet, coquettish laughter.

“Brother-in-law, give me a name too, will you? I don’t want to be called Arao. I want a name as nice as Sister’s.”

I did not know what Zhao Ye said.

I turned and walked away, standing in the bamboo grove and watching the wind rustle through the leaves.

I thought that perhaps everyone had the right to run headfirst into a wall, and I should respect the choices of those who wanted to. Why should I make other people think my choice was the right one? That would be far too arrogant.

My choices were only useful to myself. I had to remember that.

Days passed one by one.

My worries swayed like wild grass in the wind, drifting east one moment and west the next, until they were finally pressed flat under thick snow and became something discarded by time.

But the thing that truly made me let go was something very small.

On my birthday, my parents tried to mend our relationship.

They cooked hometown dishes and made longevity noodles.

The bowl was lavishly prepared.

I asked them where they had gotten the money.

My sister smiled. “From brother-in-law, of course. He gives monthly allowances to Father, Mother, and me. Sister, don’t you get one too?”

I quietly ate my noodles.

They were delicious.

I ate every last bite.

And after that, I finally let go.

My parents laughed. “Aqiao, we have thought it over and over, and Arao’s matter still needs you to speak to His Highness. If you don’t give the nod, the prince will never take Arao as a concubine… eh? Eh? Eh… what are you doing? Don’t push me… why are you being so disobedient…”

I pushed them out the door and ignored their yelling.

My heart was utterly peaceful.
chapter 3

This was my first meeting with Zhao Ye.

There was no dazzling first impression, only a clean break.

Later, after he relied on his own efforts to return to the ranks of the princes, I followed him back to the prince’s residence, still living the same life as before.

We did not interfere in each other’s affairs and owed each other nothing, so leaving was easy enough.

The only thing that made me less than calm was my parents and my sister.

I did not know they were coming to seek me out.

Only after they knocked on the doors of the prince’s residence did I learn that floods had struck our hometown. Hearing that I had become a prince’s consort, they had traveled over mountains and through rivers to find me, thinking they could enjoy a good life by following me.

Unfortunately, when we finally met, all of us were speechless.

After a long hesitation, my parents asked how I had ended up like this.

I could not tell them about the scheming behind the imperial consort’s bowl of medicine, so I could only vaguely say that I had fallen ill.

My parents were visibly disappointed.

They stayed in the guest quarters for the night. The next day, they said to me hesitantly:

“Aqiao, you need to win favor.”

“That won’t work if you rely on yourself alone. Why not look at your sister instead?”

“She’s only sixteen, younger than His Highness. He’ll like her.”

They pushed my sister in front of me.

At sixteen, my sister was in the bloom of youth. Even in plain clothes and simple hairpins, she could not hide her radiance.

Girls that age all looked lovely.

Unlike me, twenty-three already, three years older than the Fifth Prince.

They were hinting that I was too old and too ugly to keep the Fifth Prince’s heart, and that I should rely on my sister instead.

What they said was brutally practical, but it stabbed straight through my heart.

When I was in the palace, my hometown was like the moon in the sky. The old resentments and grievances, separated by the long river of time, had turned into nothing but deep longing and lingering melancholy.

But now that my hometown was right before my eyes, I had lost my voice and wanted to cry.

There are too many moments in life when one is left speechless.

For example, at that time, I could not tell them that Zhao Ye and I had never had any husband-and-wife affection; this marriage was just a game the nobles had whimsically played with.

It was an insult to Zhao Ye.

It was also contempt for me.

I could only calmly refuse my parents, personally pack their luggage, and give them the silver I had saved. I asked them to rent a room first, find some way to make a living, and talk about everything after they had settled down.

My parents refused and kept calling me Aqiao, Aqiao.

“Aqiao, you have to listen. Why are you still so stubborn now that you’re grown?”

“Aqiao, would we ever hurt you? Rather than let outsiders take advantage, why not give it to our own family?”

“Better to let the meat rot in the pot than to feed it to someone else. Don’t you understand that, Aqiao?”

Aqiao was my childhood name. When I was in the palace, the thing I longed for most was for someone to call me Aqiao, just as my parents once had. It was my one thought in the palace.

But when I really heard it, the name sounded especially harsh.

I stopped and said coldly, “Call me Shuyao. Call me Li Shuyao.”

That was the name the Third Prince had once bestowed on me.

When I was selected for the imperial consort’s Yongxiu Palace, the consort summoned the new maids and knocked us about one by one, even giving us new names.

Just then the Third Prince happened to be there. The imperial consort, wanting to test him, asked him to name us.

When he stood before me, he paused slightly, then smiled.

“From the moon rises bright, how fair the girl is. Elegant and graceful, it troubles my heart. Let’s call you Shuyao.”

Only later did I learn that it came from the Book of Songs, a line praising a beauty, lovely as moonlight, one who lingers in the mind.

At that time, I was thirteen, and the Third Prince was thirteen as well.

That compliment was only a joke, one that no one took seriously.

But when I was eighteen, those words almost cost me my life.

The Third Prince thought no one was in the hall. In a low voice beside my ear, he said, “Shuyao is bright and lovely, and my heart is troubled for it. Shuyao, one day I will ask Mother Consort for you.”

He smiled sincerely, with a little teasing in it.

But I had already fallen to my knees.

The imperial consort slowly walked out from inside. She looked down at me from above. She said nothing, only bent down slowly and let her long fingernails slide across my face inch by inch.

It hurt a little, but I thanked her for her grace without changing expression.

The Third Prince’s face went pale. He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

The imperial consort slapped him hard.

“You useless fool. If you really wanted to ask, why didn’t you ask in front of me?”

That day was a truly difficult one.

The Third Prince was beaten.

I was punished.

After the punishment was over, I wanted to curry favor with the imperial consort. Thinking to pick some osmanthus blossoms to make sweets, I endured the pain in my knees and stood on tiptoe to pick them.

Just then the emperor arrived and quietly watched me for a long time from the side.

Only after the imperial consort came out did the emperor recover himself and smile. “This girl has some of the bearing of a virtuous woman.”

An eighteen-year-old woman is a ripe fruit. Everyone wants to pick her, regardless of whether the fruit wants to be picked.

Later, the imperial consort fell ill. I tasted the medicine for her. One sip and the bitterness went straight to my heart.

I clutched my chest and fell.

When I woke again, purple scars covered my face.

The imperial physician said I was useless, beyond saving.

The imperial consort used the matter to clean house in Yongxiu Palace, then used the chance to drag in her enemies and win herself a dazzling victory.

Only I was abandoned in a corner of the palace, reduced from a second-rank maid in Yongxiu Palace to a laundry woman in the washing bureau.

Later still, the Fifth Prince was stripped of his title and reduced to commoner status, and the imperial consort remembered me and bestowed me in marriage.

At twenty, I finally left the palace.

I had finally gotten out and seen the blade-thin politics behind it all.

But my relatives, on the other hand, were determined to leap straight back in.

Naive, rash, greedy, resentful, and yet I could not explain any of it.

That chorus of “Aqiao” was not longing. It was a shackle, hoping to drag me back to the obedient, compliant Li Aqiao I had been at thirteen.

I had seen through it all.