“Shouldn’t you be brewing filth for the sick servants?” LánYàn’s tone was idle, conversational. “Or has the news from Tremore given you ideas above your station?”
Laughter fluttered behind her. A swirl of gold and cream gauze swept into her path as another lady joined in.
“Careful now,” Lady RenHua sang. She was the prettiest of them, though JingYi suspected her prettiness hid a rotten core. “Or you might fall, Ugly.”
A third shadow crept up beside her. Lady MeiYün, whose silks were always gaudy and over-bright, as if to make up for her family’s newly acquired wealth and status at court.
“With that leg,” she tittered, “the ground must look so very near already.”
They were a triad. A chorus. Alone, they might’ve passed in silence. Together, their callousness became a performance—each insult a verse meant to erode her from the outside in.
JingYi offered a polite bow, her eyes fixed on the path. Her heart thrummed a frantic rhythm, urging her toward the steamy, herb-scented shadows of the Imperial Dispensary. She shifted her weight to step around them.
A hand struck her back. She staggered, breath gone. The jolt went through the medicine chest first, a lurch that wrenched her shoulder. Then, her balance simply . . . dissolved. Her ankle turned with a sickening, silent give. She hit the ground hard, palms scraping against the pavement. Pain spiked through her hip and shoulder. The medicine chest fell and clattered open, vials of precious tinctures tumbling free—one, two turns—before shattering. Black and golden-brown liquid seeped into the cracks between the paving stones.
Laughter closed in around her.
“Oh dear.”
She looked up just enough to see LánYàn’s smile, half-hidden behind an embroidered fan.
“You ought to watch where you’re going,” the woman leaned in, her whisper a venomous needle to the ear, “bastard.”
The word hooked into the oldest scar in JingYi’s soul. She knelt among the shards, throat closed, the world narrowing to the glittering wreckage at her knees. Her hands gathered the porcelain slick with tincture. The acrid scent of goldenroot became the taste of humiliation itself, bitter and medicinal at the back of her throat.
Their giggles scraped, but she pressed her teeth together until her jaw ached, taming the urge to flinch into a solid, iron core of resolve.
She would not give them the satisfaction.
JingYi waited for the mockery to continue, but a sudden silence, thick as a bog, swallowed all sound. She looked up when another voice spoke.
“Is this how you three spend your time?”
Steps away, a woman stood in the courtyard’s moon gate. Pale jade robes edged with golden phoenixes, hair pinned smooth, skin clear as fresh cream—she commanded attention the way still water did, unnerving in its perfect calm. The three ladies froze, their mirth evaporating.
JingYi’s heart stumbled.
Calmly, Princess LinXin approached. “While a scourge tightens its grip on the palace, demanding every resource and ounce of grace, you spilled medicine for sport?” Her voice was devoid of heat, but it was as cold as a judge’s final verdict. “You behave not like ladies of court, but like vandals in a plague house. How profoundly vulgar.”
All three reddened, but only LánYàn dared to talk back. “Your Highness, we were only?—”
A low, withering look from LinXin silenced the defence. JingYi knew it well—a look her half-sister had honed over twenty years into a weapon.
“Spare me your excuses. Reclaim what’s left of your dignity, if you can, and go.”
They dropped into hurried curtsies and ducked their heads, platform slippers click-clacking in frantic retreat. JingYi kept her eyes downward, acutely aware of her own dishevelment amid the broken vials and herbal smells. Silks rustled, and a shadow fell across her.
“You rise too, JingYi.”
The voice wasn’t unkind, but it held LinXin’s unassailable authority: the clear, cool command of aMeirûnsha—the First-Ranked Princess—that brooked no refusal.
“I need to clean this, Your Highness.” JingYi’s fingers were already carefully pinning a shard between two others.
“Leave it. A servant will see to it.”
JingYi didn’t look up. “Who do you think they will send?”
LinXin said nothing more. Instead, the whisper of fabric grew closer, and the hem of a robe entered JingYi’s downcast view. The silk pooled across the stone as the princess knelt beside her.