“She’s convinced marrying me into the tribe is the only way to preserve the alliance.”
She felt LinXin’s gaze shift—felt the weight of it, heavy and close. Then her sister reached across the board and took her hand, the grip warm and steady.
“What doyouwant?” LinXin asked, squeezing her fingers.
JingYi stared at their joined hands. She hesitated, just long enough to shape the lie.
“I don’t know what I want.”
The words slipped out too easily, because saying what she truly wanted would only open the wound wider. LinXin didn’t press her, but she tilted her head, searching her face.
“Are you still in love with him?” she asked gently.
JingYi’s throat thickened, closing around the answer she couldn’t give.
“It seems unproductive,” she said at last, “to keep wishing for something unattainable.”
LinXin shook her head. Her fingers tightened around JingYi’s. “You’re made of flesh and blood. Not productivity and duty.”
The game tiles between them lay untouched, their gentle pattern of strategy and territory now seeming like a mockery of the lives they’d been forced to play. JingYi looked out across the pond, where a lotus leaf drifted lazily under the sun. “It is safer to hide behind duty. Focus on being useful.”
“Safer. Notbetter.”
“It used to mean the same thing to me.”
“Not anymore.” Vehemence entered LinXin’s voice. “You are now the First Princess of the Tsaiqun-Veyara line. An Omega.You occupy the position I used to, but better, becauseheis no longer here tormenting us. Use this position to get what you want.”
JingYi glanced at her sister, struck once more by how their positions had been reversed.
She lifted her head when a cluster of court ladies paused on their stroll. Their fans lifted in unison—some to shield against the sun, others to muffle whispers. All eyes were on LinXin. In a court where secrets rotted faster than fruit and information passed for gold, the revelation that LinXin was not the emperor’s trueborn daughter had already taken root. Now, it bloomed. She’d been reduced from the First-Ranked Princess to a fodder for gossip.
LinXin rolled her eyes. “I can’t wait to leave this place.”
JingYi couldn’t help but smile. “And go where?”
“Anywhere. Be free.”
JingYi moved a tile upward and sighed. “I used to want something small. Not freedom the way you do. Not even love, necessarily. Just . . . peace. A home of my own. An herb garden. A place where I could wake each morning and be needed. Useful. Wanted.” Her throat closed slightly. “I would’ve called that freedom.”
“And now?”
JingYi’s gaze drifted past the water’s edge, toward the far horizon where the sky touched the lake in a hush of pale light. All around her, the garden bloomed in soft shades of green and pink—peony buds just beginning to open, the willow leaves whispering overhead—but her thoughts refused to remain in this place.
She could only see the impossible blue of his eyes. The gold of his hair, sunlit and wind-blown. The way he’d looked at her. The rough warmth of his palm against her cheek. The steadiness of it.
Her voice was barely audible when it came. “Now I want something I cannot have,” she said. “And so, I suppose I’m learning to want nothing at all.”
The oil lamps cast soft golden light over the garden paths. Night birds murmured in the trees, and every time a carp leapt in the pond, the ripples lapped against the stone foundations of the palace gardens.
JingYi sat alone on the marble bench inside a pavilion, breathing in the scent of wet moss and water lotus. She didn’t want to return inside yet. Not to the emptiness of her chambers. Not to another night of fretful silence and restless sleep.
Footsteps approached, familiar in their steadiness.
“Good evening,” she said softly, without turning. “Haorán.”
He stopped beside the bench, one hand resting briefly on the hilt of his sword before he bowed. “Forgive the intrusion, Your Highness. I noticed your ladies retired without you.”
“I asked them to go. I wanted air.”