ShunLi, when time allowed, would walk with her through the inner courtyards, and they would talk—awkwardly at first, but slowly, gradually, like ink bleeding into water, their silences became less brittle.
“How does Princess Adelise fare?” he asked one afternoon, his gaze on the koi drifting beneath the lotus leaves. His voiceseemed carefully neutral. “I’ve had reports, but they’re only words on paper. You were with her. You would know.”
JingYi studied him from the corner of her eye. Throughout their time in the dungeon, JingYi had listened to her speak of ShunLi the way one might speak of a constellation: distant, beautiful, impossibly out of reach. The childhood crush seemed to have matured into something deeper over fourteen years of separation—hope, polished like a stone in a stream, waiting for the moment she might finally see him again.
“She’s stronger than she looks,” JingYi said. “She spoke of you often.”
ShunLi’s brow furrowed. “We were children. She was nine. I was sixteen.” A pause. “She cannot possibly remember me clearly.”
JingYi thought of Adelise’s voice in the dark of that cell, describing the sixteen-year-old prince who had been kind to her. Fourteen years, and she remembered everything.
“Memory is like that,” she said quietly, her fingers idly toying with the new pouch of Heat Suppressant Wu Ma had given her that morning. “Some moments leave imprints. They never fade, no matter how much time passes.”
He said nothing, his gaze lingering on the water. For a moment, JingYi thought he might ask more—might give words to whatever passed behind his careful mask.
Instead, he drew a breath and turned back to safer ground. “The Grand Treasurer estimates we’ll need to raise tax again next season,” he said one afternoon, eyes fixed on the still water of the reflecting pool. “But the people are already at their limits. Our father emptied more than the coffers. He bartered away silk, spices, salt, grain reserves—anything he could, for limyerite crystals.”
He looked at her, his smile wry. “Obsession makes a poor foundation for an empire.”
He said it without rancour. Almost without weight. As if the words had been sitting in his mouth for years, unswallowed. JingYi felt the chill of it anyway. The echo of a gold cane striking her jawline still fresh in her mind.
“And yet,” she said, “no one speaks of it now—not the debts and the price we’re still paying after his death.”
ShunLi gave a small smile, brief and tired. “That is the nature of inheritance. We do not get to choose what is left behind.”
JingYi saw the furrow between his brows, the strain beneath his calm. Their father had hollowed out the empire from within—court and treasury alike, eaten through like wood left to termites. What remained was a gilded shell, beautiful and empty.
Still, he carried it with grace. He listened when no one else would. He looked her in the eye, and for the first time in her life, she had a brother who saw her not as a blemish, but as a person.
She saw the fractures he was trying to mend. She had left one man bearing the weight of a disgraced House; now she watched her brother shoulder a kingdom crumbling from within. She wanted him to succeed, fiercely. And that was the cruel knot: Her value to his reign lay once again in being a political asset, a key to some alliance.
She longed for a life of her own—her herbs, her peace, her work. Not another foreign marriage. Not a husband who saw her as an asset to be deployed. And she had no wish to help the court that once spent over twenty years to break her.
But ShunLi’s fate was entwined with the fate of this kingdom. Still, he’d never asked her to cooperate.
That made it harder to sit by.
This morning, she and LinXin sat inside a pavilion at the edge of a pond in the garden, a board game on the table between them. The lacquered board gleamed under the late afternoon sun, each carved tile catching flecks of gold as JingYi slid one forward across the grid. The garden was quiet save for the soft lap of water against stone. Somewhere in the trees a crane called out, low and solemn.
“They’ve begun discussing matches,” LinXin began, not looking up from the game board. “For you.”
JingYi’s fingers paused mid-reach for a tile. Her jaw tensed. “I know.”
“How did you hear?”
“Ying brings me whispers from the kitchens and laundry,” she replied, voice even.
“So you know there is a list of candidates now.”
She sighed. “What did our brother say?”
LinXin rubbed the corner of a jade tile, brow furrowed. Her hair was looser today, slipping free from its pins, and her robe was pale and unadorned as if she no longer cared to impress. JingYi noticed. The court certainly had.
“He’s trying to protect you,” LinXin murmured. “But you know how this court works. The Dowager’s pressing him now, saying he should arrange a marriage between you and one of the princes of Tzadun-Khör.”
Bitterness rose, sharp and familiar, in JingYi’s throat. These days, that woman wielded more influence than the late emperor’s widow, who had long since faded into the backdrop for the unforgivable sin of bearing only one Beta son.
JingYi stared down at the game board, though the lines between tiles blurred. ShunLi had ascended as emperor, but could he ever truly sever the duty of filial piety? Or would he always be her son first, ruler second?