Chapter 2
JINGYI
The sandalwood and incense hit her before she cleared the gates—thick, cloying, too generous. They were trying to hide the sour-sweet rot of sickness, and failed.
The sun had descended; the Hour of the Tortoise approached. Soon, noble ladies would spill from their palaces in painted flocks, drifting down the garden paths to be admired and envied. JingYi kept her head down, focus narrowed to the path ahead—a meandering line to the Jade Mortar Hall.
If she didn’t look up, she didn’t exist.
If she made no sound, she couldn’t be heard.
She almost passed the Lotus Pavilion when the whisper of silk brushed her ears.
“Well, if it isn’t the ugly cripple.”
Lady LánYàn’s voice was smooth, unhurried—carrying the kind of cruelty that came from never having been challenged. JingYi knew the weight behind it: generations of X?en’s oldest clan, the bone-deep confidence of a woman who had never doubted her place in the palace’s hierarchy.
JingYi’s hand gripped her medicine chest harder. She kept walking.
“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 RenHuā 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 a Meir?nsha—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.
The sight jolted a memory loose. Once, long ago, they had crouched just like this in the summer gardens, lifting warm stones to uncover scurrying beetles and tiny, jewel-bright frogs.
Two daughters of the emperor’s consorts.
Two girls so different in station, yet found time to be together.
Then, they both Awakened. LinXin—flawless, composed, the very image of celestial grace—was elevated as the Meir?nsha.
JingYi—marked, limping, a living flaw in the imperial tapestry—was swept into the shadows of the Jade Mortar Hall.
Yet here they were, shoulder to shoulder once more. Not in the sun-drenched earth, but on cold stone, gathering the sharp, wet pieces of JingYi’s broken world.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” JingYi murmured when they finished.
LinXin rose and dusted her palms. “Those three ought to be taught a lesson.”
JingYi’s hands stilled over the shards she’d carefully wrapped with cloth. She saw not the sneers of the women, but the rigid panic in their eyes as LinXin confronted them—the fear of those clinging to a ledge.
“They do it because their own lives have fallen short,” she said. “So they take out the bitterness where they can.”
LinXin’s dark eyes snapped to hers. “You’re much too kind. They don’t deserve your understanding.”
JingYi didn’t look away. The sting of shattered hopes was a phantom ache in her own bones, as familiar as the mark on her cheek. She knew the shape of that bitterness—how it curdled into cruelty. It was a kind of sickness, one she could diagnose, yet couldn’t cure.
The rhythmic, uniform click of boots on stone fractured the garden’s silence. They both turned. A contingent of stewards in the emperor’s dark green livery advanced, the gold threads of their salamander sigils glinting in the sunlight.
JingYi’s body stepped aside on instinct.
Her heart was a frantic thing, beating against the cage of her ribs.
They had come for LinXin. Of course they had.
To lead her to the throne room, to the carved jade dais, to the moment her future would be sealed and signed away to a stranger in a northern keep.
She stole a glance. LinXin’s face was serene composure, but JingYi knew the mask. She saw the truth in the strained corners of her sister’s mouth, the stillness of her hands. Understanding sat cold and solid in her stomach: LinXin was bracing for the verdict.
The Imperial Steward stopped and bowed deeply. “May a thousand years of peace grace Your Highness, Princess LinXin.”
Her sister acknowledged him with a slight nod, every inch the poised daughter receiving a messenger. Only then did the steward’s attention shift, homing in on JingYi’s stained uniform and the bundled cloth with wet shards inside. His nose wrinkled, mouth turned down in distaste.
She cast her eyes down and shrank back.
He cleared his throat.
“Physician’s Attendant JingYi, His Majesty summons you to the Hall of Serenity. You are to come with us at once.”
For a heartbeat, JingYi thought she’d misheard, the syllables twisted by some trick of the wind. Then, the air left her lungs.
Her? They’d come for her?
Her eyes snapped to LinXin. For a heartbeat, her sister’s perfect mask cracked: a minute loosening of the shoulders, a slight furrowing of her brows. Then it was gone, smoothed back into serene composure. That gaze met hers, and the intensity in them was not a look she could decipher.
“You should not keep His Majesty waiting,” LinXin said, her voice firm. It was the only encouragement she offered.
The steward gestured toward the sedan. The bearers lowered the chair before her, its lacquered frame gleaming like a beetle’s shell.
JingYi shoved the damp bundle into her skirt’s pocket and stepped in carefully, settling her medicine chest at her feet.
The poles lifted, and with them, her stomach—a brief, weightless lurch before the world settled into a gentle rhythm.
“JingYi.”
LinXin’s voice halted the forward motion.
Her sister stood framed in the garden’s moon gate. Silence stretched, taut and expectant.
Then, she said softly, “Take care.”
Two words, a most tender decree: ‘Look after yourself.’ So slight, so enigmatically offhand. JingYi opened her mouth. A dozen questions crowded her tongue, but the steward barked a command. The sedan swayed forward, swallowing her unspoken words into the rhythm of the bearers’ steps.
And, long after the garden vanished behind a wall, she felt the lingering weight of LinXin’s gaze—a relentless, burning point on her back.