Chapter 1 #2
She rinsed her hands again. Turning to Fēng, she nodded toward the simmering pots. “Watch the decoction. It needs another hour.”
The girl’s brow furrowed. “What about the goldenroot? I’ve never—”
“Add the slices ten minutes before the hour ends, then strain. The timing is everything. A minute too long, it turns the whole batch acrid.”
Wu Mā shook her head, but her hands were already moving to help. “Of course. Only my girl uses that bitter root.”
No time for a full smile, JingYi glanced as she dried her hands. “It wakes up the other ingredients and increases the potency.”
She crossed to the small, lacquered elm chest she used for her supplies.
Lifting it by its brass handle, she placed it on the table.
Its fittings gleamed as she swung open the panel, revealing tidy compartments.
Her fingers moved quickly: binding cloths, clean linens, tinctures of motherwort and mugwort.
She pulled out jars of salve, rolls of gauze, and carefully stacked them inside the drawers.
Finally, from the lowest drawer, she withdrew a leather roll, unfurling it just enough to confirm all her limyerite needles were still inside, each crystal sliver gleaming like caught starlight against the dark hide.
Behind her, Wu Mā fussed. “Finish your porridge. Who knows how long the labour will last. You’ll need strength.”
“No time,” JingYi said, snapping the chest shut. When every childbirth was a wager at death’s door, there was no telling who’d return: mother or child, both or none. All she could do was hurry.
The Peony Court’s labyrinth unfurled as she made her way. Sixteen palaces, each walled and jealously guarded. Each a nest of rivalries between the emperor’s thirty-six concubines. Each courtyard a stage for some display of grace or cruelty.
She fell into the rhythm she’d perfected in nearly two decades.
Step-drag, step-drag. The medicine chest’s weight propelled her forward to spare the weak joint.
Each step sent a bright, hot lance of pain through her right leg, a companion as constant as her own shadow.
A sedan chair would’ve been faster—four bearers lifting her above the maze—but they sent no such courtesy.
Walk, JingYi. Always walk.
By the time the Orchid Palace’s curved rooftops came into view, sweat had drenched the coarse cotton collar of her indigo outfit. At the gate, she braced against the wooden frame, chest heaving.
A maid in a pale lavender and silver uniform emerged from the palace and strode toward her, skirt snapping with her pace.
“What took you so long?” the woman demanded. “We sent for help ages ago!”
JingYi dipped her head. “I came as quickly as—”
The maid clicked her tongue. “Excuses! If anything happens to our mistress, it will be your fault. Now, hurry!”
JingYi moved past without reply. Breath was better spent on work than on apologies no one wished to hear.
Inside, the scent of fresh blood hit her first—sharp and metallic, undercut by the stale tang of sweat and strain.
Consort YiLan lay half-reclined on the birthing couch, hair plastered to her temples, skin pale beneath the light.
Around her, midwives rushed, pressing fresh cloths into place.
Still, blood seeped through faster than they could replace them.
Consort YiLan was the emperor’s latest favourite—only eighteen years old and swollen with what the Imperial Geomancer promised to be a boy.
With Solthar’s blessing, he might one day Awaken as an Alpha.
If something happened to either mother or child, the emperor’s wrath would roll downhill like a flood through rice paddies, swallowing everyone in its path.
And she, a shadow at the bottom, would be among the first to drown.
“The baby is born, but the afterbirth hasn’t passed,” the midwife blurted the moment JingYi reached the bedside. “We’ve tried everything!”
JingYi’s hands were already moving, pressing down on the distended abdomen beneath the blanket. “We must remove the placenta, or the bleeding won’t stop. Hold Her Highness steady.”
She drew her limyerite crystal needles and found the pressure points by instinct: a potent point on the inner ankle to command the womb, and another in the web between thumb and forefinger to rally the body’s faltering strength. She slid the needles in with quick, precise movements.
The consort’s body flinched, and a ripple of renewed contraction followed at once. Jing Yi watched as murky darkness seeped up through the clear crystal—stagnant blood and trapped impurities drawn from flesh into the stone.
“Your Highness, breathe with me,” JingYi said, applying firm, rhythmic pressure just below the navel.
Slowly, the placenta detached. Another contraction pushed it out. She changed her kneading to a circular, gathering motion. Within seconds, the frantic red soaking the linens dulled to a sluggish seep, then stilled altogether.
A long breath left the room, but JingYi didn’t allow herself relief, extracting the first set of needles to set them aside on a cloth to be scoured later in coarse salt and distilled rice wine.
She picked up new needles, this time angling them to guide the flow toward stillness instead of release.
Three along the abdomen, one at the ankle, another at the wrist. Points to tighten, to close the womb.
These needles didn’t cloud. Instead, they grew warm to the touch, humming faintly—not drawing out but gathering in, coaxing the consort’s spent body to hold what it had left.
While the needles did their work, JingYi mixed crushed motherwort and safflower in a clay cup.
Their pungent, herbal scent rose the instant she poured boiling water over them.
Then, she added a pinch of angelica root for strength, and a few slices of red dates to restore blood.
Carrying the steaming infusion back, she slipped an arm behind the consort’s shoulders and lifted gently.
The woman’s skin was cool and clammy with spent effort, breath shallow against JingYi’s sleeve.
She held up the cup. “Your Highness, drink this. All of it.”
The consort sputtered but swallowed a few sips. Colour flickered back to her lips.
“My baby,” she rasped, her gaze fluttering toward the other side of the room. “Let me . . . see him.”
JingYi crossed to where the newborn swaddled in the nursemaid’s arms, fussing softly. Her youngest half-brother.
“Allow me,” she said.
The nursemaid hesitated, her gaze doing the familiar quick dance: a flick to JingYi’s open hands, then a flinch away from her left cheek. After a beat, she surrendered the baby.
JingYi rocked the bundle gently. His tiny limbs flailed, hands no larger than plum blossoms. She allowed herself a small smile—one he would never remember, from a sister he would never truly know.
“There, now,” she crooned. “All better now, isn’t it?”
For a fleeting moment, the world softened.
The child’s warmth against her chest pricked a hole in the careful membrane separating her from everything soft.
A dangerous, forgotten feeling flooded in—belonging.
The sense, however temporary, that her presence wasn’t just tolerated, but wanted.
A sip of water after a lifetime in the desert.
“Stay away from the prince!”
The maid who’d met her at the gates stood before her, eyes glaring. “Are you trying to rub that ugly stain on His Highness?!”
JingYi tensed. The drought returned.
“Hand him over before your bad luck clings to him!”
The words slipped through the cracks in her armour, finding the old, tender bruise.
Numbness descended, ice spreading from her core.
She returned the child, bowed, and gathered her tools.
Inside, she was folding herself smaller, smaller, vanishing into that silent, obedient shadow—a dust mote. No one at all.
She retreated to the courtyard to repack her medicine chest. Each movement gave her fingers something to do, something steady and real. By the time she finished, a profound weariness had settled in. Her heart had crushed itself, sitting like a small, hard pebble in her chest.
For a moment, she leaned against the cool palace wall, eyes closed. She drew one deep breath, then two. She left one storm, only to turn her face toward the next. The dysentery outbreak. The endless need.
But the day went on.
So must she.