Chapter 2 #2
They passed through The Gate of Ascending Steps into the Celestial Court, the centre of governance.
The Hall of Serenity rose before them, its pale outer walls inlaid with broad veins of limyerite.
The crystal caught the sun, drinking the daylight to breathe it back out after dark.
The building’s roof swept upward like a pair of outstretched wings.
Beneath it ran a carved procession of the twelve animals of the X?en calendar, frozen mid-motion.
JingYi’s gaze drifted to the salamander in the centre.
Sculpted larger than the rest, its gilded scales caught the late light.
Emperor HāiYán, born in the Year of the Salamander, had ordered its image made prominent throughout the palace when he took the throne.
Now, it watched from every carving and corner, a sinuous reminder of the man who ruled these halls.
The bearers dropped her off at the foot of the grand steps. The flanking guards didn’t move. Their eyes fixed ahead, as if she were air, while the Imperial Steward disappeared inside to announce her.
Inside, the Hall of Serenity swallowed sound and scale. Above, the vaulted ceiling exploded with frescoes of warring gods in flaming chariots drawn by armoured dragons. She forced her gaze down the vast length of the hall, past the hanging banners of jade and gold, to the distant dais.
To the Salamander Throne.
To her father, Emperor X?en HāiYán.
An old, familiar chill, undimmed by months of absence, settled in her bones.
JingYi set down her medicine chest by the door and bowed to the emperor—right knuckles to left palm, a proper half-bow.
Then, she began the long walk. Her posture remained bent, eyes lowered, as protocol demanded.
After years of self-taught discipline, she performed the rolling step.
Pressing her right foot down heel-first, she rolled to the toe, then locked her knee just before her full weight settled.
A painful technique meant to smooth her gait into something less displeasing.
It was a futile performance. Her body remained a living flaw in his perfected court.
As she drew nearer, she saw the emperor wasn’t alone. Two officers in the slate-grey robes of the Imperial Geomancy stood rigid at the dais’s base. And beside the throne, one step lower, stood Crown Prince ShunLi.
Her half-brother’s gaze was a weight she felt from steps away—dark, assessing, inscrutable. If LinXin was a puzzle, ShunLi was a fortress.
A ghost-scent touched her memory: late-blooming peonies and the damp lacquer of a covered walkway.
They’d never spoken, but there was a moon gate that night and shadows where there should’ve been guards.
His presence had cleaved the dark—not with kindness, but with cold, imperial authority—scattering the young Alpha predators who’d cornered her.
He’d been her rescue and her deep shame. A debt carved in silence.
But whatever passed hadn’t changed the distance between them.
Twenty paces from the throne—no more, no less—she stopped and sank to her knees as gracefully as she could. She bowed until her forehead touched the cold floor, arms outstretched, fingertips meeting just before her head.
“May a thousand years of peace grace Your Imperial Majesty.”
Not ‘father.’ Never that.
“Rise,” he said.
JingYi lifted her upper body, though she remained on the floor. In the presence of the emperor, one never stood. One knelt.
She waited, the floor cold against her shins.
Gathering her courage, she glanced upward.
Her father was a slender man with the fine, sharp features of his lineage.
A salt-and-pepper beard framed a stern mouth.
He was draped in robes of jade green and gold, their austere perfection making him seem less like a man and more like an effigy of power itself.
This emperor’s reign was an anomaly: a Beta ruler, one of the only two in the Nine Kingdoms. When he ascended the throne, there hadn’t been any Alpha princes to contest him.
JingYi had always wondered which was the true cause: her grandfather’s vacant Alpha line, or the ruthless strategizing of the grandmother she’d never met.
The palace offered both stories in abundance.
The emperor spoke calmly, each word as cold as the floor, “Tremore has proposed a marriage alliance between our Omega princess and one of their noblemen: Alexander Wulfbane, Alpha Lord of Blackwood-Veyrde.” A brief pause as he leaned an elbow on the arm of his throne. “You will go.”
JingYi’s breath caught, fingers tightening on her lap. The muscles in her thighs, already trembling from the controlled walk and deep kneel, went rigid. She’d expected punishment from some unknown slight, or perhaps a cure for an envoy’s ailment, but . . . an arranged match?
She lowered her head, though questions swarmed in her mind. Do not speak, a voice inside her hissed. Bow, thank him, and leave.
Yet, one question slipped free.
“Does Lord Wulfbane”—her cheek throbbed in warning, a phantom echo of old lessons—“know of my . . . shortcomings, Your Majesty?”
The emperor’s tone remained calm, almost bored. “The envoy has been appropriately briefed. Lord Wulfbane will accept what is presented to him.”
It should’ve ended there. She should’ve bent lower, thanked him for the honour, accepted her fate with the docility of someone too inconsequential to resist. But something inside her—a spark of the healer who needed a diagnosis, a final, futile wish to map the borders of her own exile—lifted her head a fraction.
“Your Majesty, may I ask why . . . me?”
Why not LinXin, who would’ve been a logical choice for an illustrious match with a rich and prestigious kingdom?
The question was a stone landing in a still pond.
Ripples of silence spread. Her father inhaled sharply, the hiss of silk loud as he gripped his gold-plated cane, knuckles blooming white.
He descended the dais and strolled the twenty paces toward her.
JingYi’s body remembered before her mind caught up—knees and spine locking, shoulders curling in.
The blow came fast, a pale blur of gold striking her left jaw, just below the birthmark.
The crack rang in her skull. Pain splintered, vision white.
She caught herself on her palms, struggling to breathe past the ringing in her ears.
Her teeth chattered, and she clenched them still. Head bowed, eyes shut.
Another voice punctured the haze.
“No more bruises, Father.” The crown prince’s tone was calm, but it cut with the weight of steel. “The birthmark is nauseating enough.”
A hot pulse throbbed behind her eyes. Her fingers found the swelling, then the familiar, slightly raised dark-rose stain from cheekbone to jaw. She jerked her hand back, the map of her disgrace searing her fingertips.
The emperor scoffed, then climbed the dais and reclined once more.
“You will leave for Blackwood-Veyrde next month,” he decreed. “Preparations will be made immediately.”
JingYi pressed her forehead to the floor once more—the obligatory show of gratitude for the emperor’s ‘boundless’ generosity.
Footsteps reached her ears as attendants approached. Raising her head just enough, she glimpsed massive trunks—lacquered black, limyerite veins glinting in the light—borne forward with effort.
Tremore’s payment for an Omega bride.
It seemed the emperor didn’t just strip the kingdom’s land by the ounce—he traded his daughter by the pound.
One of the Imperial Geomancers stepped forward, bowing deeply to the emperor before turning toward her.
“This union is written in the stars,” he announced.
“Lord Wulfbane was born in the Year of the Wolf, an unyielding force, a harbinger of strength. Princess X?en JingYi of the Tsaiqun-Veyara clan was born in the Year of the Raven, a symbol of foresight and resilience. Together, they form an unshakable bond: hunter and messenger, wisdom and might.”
Laughter pricked her throat. The name and title rolled through the hall as if they’d never been stripped from her, as if her mother’s disgrace hadn’t erased them from every scroll, every mouth.
Tsaiqun-Veyara—Lineage of the Celestial Tide—was the emperor’s clan, the ruling blood of X?en, said to rise and fall with the rhythm of the heavens.
It was a title ripped from her at birth.
Her mother, the late Imperial Consort JingMei, had begged, wept, and bled for the emperor to believe her fidelity.
She’d sliced off her fingers as proof of her innocence, her screams echoing through the Peony Court.
But no amount of tears, no offering of flesh and blood, had been enough.
The emperor had already decided. The court had already whispered its verdict.
JingYi’s birthmark had damned them both.
Now, twenty-six years later, they returned her name as if nothing had happened. A princess again, back into Tsaiqun-Veyara’s folds.
The officer continued, almost buoyant, “Their four-year difference in age is auspicious. Four legs of a table, four seasons to a cycle. This union stands balanced, destined to endure, to bring forth many heirs.”
A stable table. A fine illusion for a woman who’d never known a stable thing in her life.
“By His Majesty’s wisdom, this fortuitous match binds Tremore and X?en-Sarai in shared prosperity,” he declared, bowing low. “Princess X?en JingYi’s departure marks the dawn of an era blessed by the heavens.”
JingYi inhaled, the cold floor biting her skin. The urge to laugh, to cry, caught sharp in her throat.
The heavens had never blessed her before.
Crisp air hit her cheeks as she stepped out, moving on instinct.
The drag of one foot, then the next. She barely noticed sitting down in the sedan until the ground fell around her as the bearers lifted it.
Celestial Court faded in the background, swallowed by courtyards and cloisters until there was only the dull ache blooming across her neck.
The next thing she knew, she was stepping into the Royal Dispensary.