Chapter 67
JINGYI
Days went by, then weeks. Three months passed since she left Tremore, two since she arrived in X?en-Sarai. The last plum blossoms fell, and spring took hold. The light snow melted from the garden stones, and sunlight now filtered soft and warm through the paper windows of her chambers.
She structured her days around a self-determined purpose.
She wrote letters, many of them to Yrenna—carefully worded missives full of questions about Parandor and Lornhelm.
How fared the people? Had spring come to the mountains?
Yrenna’s replies came with warmth, filled with news of the keep and its folk, but they both carefully avoided the one topic hovering between every line.
Alexander’s name never appeared, yet JingYi’s heart still claimed Yrenna as her own sister, marriage or no marriage, and she suspected Yrenna felt the same.
She also wrote to the home physicians of the Omegas who had been freed, sending detailed inquiries about their progress, reminders about dosage adjustments, words of encouragement for their continued care. A quiet promise fulfilled: She had not abandoned them.
The medical correspondences gently angled her to return to the practice she cherished: medicine. She made it known—through Wu Mā and Fēng—that her Magnolia Palace’s drawing room was open to anyone in need of healing, servant or noble. It was a reclaiming of her identity: the healer, not the pawn.
In the stillness, in moments between patients, her thoughts sometimes drifted to Tedric.
She abhorred his monstrous methods but understood the fury that could fuel such a revolt.
While she had spurned a gilded cage, he had chosen to burn the whole system down.
Opposites, but both were acts of defiance against a world that sought to define them.
Then, she took to writing long, meandering letters to Reiyana. In them, she finally revisited her time in the dungeon and asked the questions she still could not voice within the X?en court.
‘If you’re still wondering where Castiel Vaelmont meant to take you,’ she wrote, ‘I believe it was to one of those places—where they test purple limyerite on Omegas to strip us of what makes us who we are. To erase ourselves from the inside out.’
Whether Castiel had been right to think death would be kinder than such a fate, she wouldn’t presume to decide. That choice, she left to Reiyana.
‘I’ve wondered,’ she continued, ‘who Tedric Deymar truly is. He is a Beta—medium in height, with sun-browned hair and dark brown eyes. His swordsmanship is exceptional, quick and precise, favouring the rapier. On the surface, he is all charm. Too easy to trust. Too easy to like.’
Her hand faltered. She wiped her left cheek, the chilling memory of his fingers returning.
‘But the longer I knew him, especially in the dungeons, the mask slipped. He loathes Alphas, hates them with a fervour that feels personal. Killing them gives him satisfaction. And when it comes to Omegas . . .’ Her ink bled a moment as her quill lingered.
‘He watched them die without remorse. To him, their suffering is not tragedy, but an apt price to pay.’
She hesitated again. Then, her quill moved.
‘Tell me. Could Tedric be Castiel Vaelmont?’
She didn’t have to wait too long for Reiyana’s response. It came two days later, delivered by a royal Sparo.
‘JingYi, from your descriptions, Tedric isn’t Castiel but his brother, Lucen Vaelmont, who fights with a rapier. Castiel, I believe, uses a bow and arrows.’
JingYi sucked in a sharp breath.
Lucen.
She tried to match the name to the face—the voice, the blade, the cruelty, and found that name suited Tedric more than ‘Castiel’ ever had.
But the mysterious archer? That was Castiel.
She placed the papers down and buried her face in her palms. She wished Reiyana were here. Or that she was there, so she could ask more, glean more. But the letter offered no further clarity. Only silence.
The X?en court was nowhere as silent. Whispers wound through its corridors; debates murmured over tea and scrolls: what to do with the High Princess now.
How to best utilize her. Which alliances might be restored, advanced.
Which doors should open or close by her hand.
Marriage contracts were being discussed in antechambers, her name thrown around as if her choices were irrelevant.
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 voice seemed 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 Mā 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?”
“Yīng 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-Khor.”
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?
“She’s convinced marrying me into the tribe is the only way to preserve the alliance.”