"Drink up, Your Highness. Once you finish, you can be on your way."
A heavyset matron stood at the foot of the bed, a bowl of ink-black medicine cradled in her thick hands.
The woman propped against the headboard lifted her gaze. A ruinous beauty—skin drained to the pallor of temple marble. Beneath the lavish silk of her robes, a thin silver chain bit into one slender ankle, and every visible inch of skin was mottled purple and blue with bruises.
A porcelain doll wrapped in brocade, cracked and rotting from within.
"Was it the Prince Consort's order?"
Three years. Three years she had been his caged plaything, locked in this sunless chamber with no way to live and no way to die. At last, it was ending.
The matron gave a silent nod.
"Then thank him for me."
Su Jing took the bowl and drained it in a single swallow. A smile of pure relief crossed her lips.
* * *
The next instant, blood welled from her eyes and streamed from her nostrils. Something inside her chest clenched, then burst. The world tilted, and Su Jing was gone.
Her spirit drifted upward, hovering in the dark. Below, flames tore through her bedchamber. Servants shrieked and scrambled, but not one of them stepped closer.
Her lips curved. Of course. She was still, after all, a princess. A princess could die in an accidental fire. Never by poison.
Yet the road to the underworld never opened. No black-clad heralds arrived to guide her onward, and her soul remained tethered to the mortal world.
She watched her remains thrown into a shallow grave while her father, the Emperor, carried on his revelry behind palace walls—wine flowing, dancers spinning, not a single day of mourning observed.
She watched Wu Qi—the Prince Consort who had dragged her through three years of hell—arrive at last, only to launch a rebellion before her bones had even cooled in the earth.
But there was one person.
On the seventh day after her death, that person surrounded the Princess Mansion with soldiers. He defied every minister who opposed him and tore the truth of her murder into the open. He had Wu Qi's entire clan executed for treason.
Then he lost his mind. Night after night he knelt before her memorial tablet, whispering his repentance into the silence.
He turned to sorcery. Abandoned the affairs of state. Poured every waking hour into the mad hope of calling her soul back from the dead.
On the first anniversary of her death, the Prince of Pingyang raised his banners in revolt. She watched that person light every candle in her old bedchamber, set the room ablaze, and stand inside the flames until the dynasty fell to ash around him.
His name was Shen Yuan. The eunuch who had grown up at her side. The Grand Supervisor who now held the empire in his hands.
The man she had once loved.
A blinding white light swallowed everything. Her soul shattered—then re-formed. When she opened her eyes, she was not in hell.
She was back.
* * *
"Ahhh—!"
Summer, the sixteenth year of the Yongle era. A girl's scream tore through the stillness of the princess's chambers.
"Did Your Highness have a nightmare? Please don't be frightened—this servant has been here the whole time."
A young attendant in a blue-green robe rushed inside. He crept toward the girl huddled beneath the quilts, trembling, and reached out a hand—only to pull it back when it came within a fist's width of her.
She lifted her head from the covers. The moment her gaze met his, her eyes went impossibly wide.
As though she were staring at a ghost.
"Shen Yuan?"
"This servant is here."
"What year is it?"
"Your Highness must be joking. It is the sixteenth year of Yongle, of course."
"The sixteenth year of Yongle?" A laugh broke out of her, thin and cracking. "Ha—the sixteenth year of Yongle." She kept laughing until tears spilled down her cheeks and fell in fat drops onto the brocade quilt.
The sixteenth year of Yongle. Heaven had given her another chance. She had come back four years—before any of it happened. There was still time to change everything.
A sharp pang twisted through her chest. Even in death, she could never have imagined it—that the gentle, jade-warm boy who had quietly grown up beside her would shoulder an entire dynasty's hatred for her sake, and burn the empire to the ground as her funeral pyre.
"Shen Yuan, will you hold me?"
"What did Your Highness say?"
The tips of his ears flushed so red they might have bled.
"I said I'm scared. So I am ordering you—hold me."
The young man in his blue-green robe stood frozen, his body refusing to move. Then the girl closed the distance herself, warm and jasmine-scented, and folded him into a deep embrace.
Every wall he had built around himself dissolved like ash in rain.
In that instant, Shen Yuan remembered the first time he ever saw the princess.
Winter, the eighth year of Yongle. He was twelve.
Back then, he was still the legitimate second son of the Left Chancellor—a boy who could parse classics before dawn and draw a bow of eighty pounds by noon.
* * *
The other children pressured her into a game of hide-and-seek, and Shen Yuan was dragged in as well. They scattered in every direction, leaving the tiny Princess Cheng'an standing alone, her back turned, counting aloud in earnest.
Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.
Su Jing opened her eyes. No one was in sight.
The children had all slipped back inside the warm hall, huddling together by the windows, giggling as they watched the little princess perform her one-girl show in the garden.
The winter wind sharpened. It whipped the tips of her ears cherry-red. Again and again she breathed into her cupped hands, searching frantically.
"Brother Emperor!"
"Sister!"
Her small, milky voice was swallowed by the gale. The sky darkened. Shen Yuan watched the stubborn little figure in the garden, and something behind his ribs tightened without warning.
He slipped around the back of the hall, out through a side gate, and tucked himself behind a rockery—deliberately letting a corner of his black robe peek out from behind the stone.
* * *
The little princess's footsteps drew closer. Shen Yuan made a point of rustling the gravel.
From the corner of his eye, he saw her tears dissolve into a grin. She tottered toward him on stubby legs, stumbling over herself in her rush.
The corner of his mouth twitched upward. What a silly girl.
"I found you, Brother!"
Before he could react, Su Jing hurtled into him headfirst. The scent of warm milk flooded his nose.
Shen Yuan had never liked being close to anyone. But strangely, he did not dislike this accidental embrace.
She was cold all over, yet boneless somehow—soft everywhere, like a little cake made of cream. Absurdly comfortable to hold.
The hug lasted only a few heartbeats before the little princess seemed to realize what she had done. She wriggled free in a panic.
An odd feeling passed through Shen Yuan. Something like loss.
"Brother, I'm sorry—I didn't mean to—" She ducked her head and apologized in the smallest voice.
He wanted, fiercely, to tell her that he was not like the others. That he didn't find her repulsive. That he even—a little—liked her.
But the words never left his mouth.
"Well done, Your Highness. You caught me. The game is over. You should head back." The sentence came out stiff and colorless. He turned on his heel and walked away, his stride just slightly uneven.
The little princess stood where he had left her, the corners of her eyes curved into happy crescents.
"Brother Shen is so kind. After Mother, he's the kindest person in the whole world."
I wish, more than anything, I could make Brother Shen mine alone…
* * *
Su Jing had never imagined her childhood wish would come true three years later.
Though in the cruelest way imaginable.
Overnight, the Left Chancellor was drawn and quartered for treason. Nine generations of the Shen clan were condemned—every male castrated and sent into palace servitude, every female sold into the brothels. All that glory, all those years of merit, reduced to a name the empire spat on.
The boy who had been heaven's favored son was broken, inch by inch, until neither his dignity nor his spine remained intact.
"Doesn't this wretch look familiar? Oh my—it's Shen Yuan! What's become of you, you half-man thing?" The princes crowded around him, howling with laughter.
"My boots are filthy." The Third Prince strode forward and looked down at Shen Yuan with naked contempt. "Kneel. Lick them clean."
* * *
Shen Yuan stood with his head bowed, unmoving, silent as a walking corpse.
"You dare ignore an order from this prince? Guards—beat him!"
The cudgel sank into flesh, blow after blow. Shen Yuan clenched his jaw and made no sound, as though his body had forgotten how to feel.
"Third Brother!"
The beating stopped. Through the haze, Shen Yuan heard a voice—bright, crystalline, unmistakably a girl's.
"What are you doing here?" The Third Prince's brow furrowed.
"I want him." Su Jing raised her hand and pointed straight at the broken figure on the ground.
"Who do you think you are, making demands of me?" The Third Prince sneered, about to order the beating resumed, when Su Jing leaned in close to his ear. Her voice dropped to a murmur. "I know your secret, Third Brother."
"Yesterday I walked past the imperial garden. From just behind the rockery, I saw you and Consort Duan wrapped around each other…"
"There were two maids who also saw. I've already taken care of them for you—so no need to trouble yourself."
"All I want is Shen Yuan. It won't interfere with your—how shall I put it—filial devotion in the slightest. Do we have a deal?"
Su Jing's eyes glittered. Her smile was the picture of guileless innocence—and it clung to the Third Prince like a curse.
"Let's go." He ground his teeth and swept away, the other princes trailing behind him.
Su Jing let a satisfied smile curve her lips, then extended her hand to the man crumpled on the ground.
As though grasping the last rope thrown to a drowning man, Shen Yuan seized the girl's slender wrist on sheer instinct.
Su Jing crouched down and used her handkerchief to gently wipe the blood from his face.
She was wicked, truly. Seeing the brilliant, untouchable young prodigy finally cast into the same hell she lived in, she felt a flicker of dark satisfaction.
Because only here, in this place, did she dare hold his hand like this. Dare say she wanted him.
"Brother Shen, from now on, stay by my side. I promise I'll be good to you. So, so good."
And so he stayed. Nine years at her side, never once leaving.
"Am I not lovely to hold, Brother Shen? You've been embracing me for so long you seem lost in it." Su Jing leaned against his chest, laughing low, and yanked his thoughts back to the present.
Shen Yuan stepped back hastily, retreating to the safe distance he always kept between himself and the princess.