Chapter 60
JINGYI
For one suspended moment, she wasn’t in a Tremorian Receiving Hall with a hearth roaring behind her. She was back in the gardens of X?en-Sarai, her slippers crunching summer leaves, the peach cradled in her palms.
That fateful day, ShunLi had seemed like a prince carved from a story scroll—certainly not like someone who’d kill his own father to claim a throne.
How could she reconcile the man back then with this one?
When filial piety was one of the most revered virtues, slaying one’s father was a sin so deep it detached the soul. Even the ancient, lawless warlords had waited for nature to claim their fathers before seizing power.
ShunLi had not waited. He had taken it by force, beginning his reign not with honour and ceremony, but blood.
She closed her eyes. Her fingers brushed her temple.
Brother . . . what have you done?
When her lashes fluttered open, Haorán was no longer standing. He had fallen to his knees before her—forehead pressed to the stone floor, fingertips touching reverently in front of him in the gesture reserved for royalty.
“May the heavens watch over your steps, and the nine winds carry your name. A thousand years of peace and glory to Her Highness, High Princess X?en JingYi.”
Her breath hitched. She stared at him, the title hanging heavy between them. “High Princess?”
Haorán didn’t lift his head. “You are the emperor’s Omega sister, by blood and by rank. Second only to his mother, the Dowager herself. From this moment, you are the High Princess of X?en-Sarai.”
The words seemed foreign, unreal, as though they were being said about someone else. The supplication, even more so.
She was silent for a long beat before asking, “Did you know?”
He didn’t answer at first, but she saw him stiffen.
A strange quiet rose inside her. She didn’t feel like weeping or raging. The late emperor might’ve contributed the seed that bore her into existence, but he was no more a father than any man who’d whipped her for delivering medicine too late.
Still, her thoughts scattered like spilled rice on a lacquered floor, impossible to gather.
She asked again, voice trembling, “Did you know he planned to kill the emperor?”
Haorán lifted his head, but his eyes were on the floor.
“The kingdom was unravelling, Your Highness. Famine. Sickness. Southern floods had wiped out the spring planting, and the people were dying of starvation, if not dysentery. And still, the late emperor continued to spend lavishly while entire provinces suffered. I believe the prince made his move to avoid civil uprising, ending bloodshed before it could begin.”
Her throat closed.
“My father destroyed my mother. He tried to destroy me,” she rasped. “And now, my brother has destroyed him.”
She looked around her. “X?en-Sarai is a kingdom of ghosts.”
No one seemed to know what to say to her. Alexander held out a tiny piece of folded parchment.
“JingYi,” he said gently. “There is another message. Addressed to you.”
She took it from Alexander’s hand. She unfolded the thin slip of paper with trembling fingers. Her eyes skimmed the words once, then again.
The first line read:
Shō Meisha.
Her insides startled. The literal meaning was ‘cherished younger sister,’ a common enough address in a family of nobles, but not one she’d ever been addressed with.
She continued reading.
Shō Meisha,
You may come home.
The Imperial Palace that awaits you is unlike the one you left behind.
—ShunLi
She stared at the characters. Read them in her mind, then let them echo in her chest until their syllables jumbled and became unrecognizable. She held the parchment tightly, as if it were the only thread that tethered her to a past that had finally, violently, been burned clean.
And yet . . .
Even now, part of her reached for a reason to believe that ShunLi—a brother who had grown behind walls she was never allowed to enter—might mean what he wrote. That the palace she’d once called a prison could become something else.
JingYi exhaled and turned to Alexander.
“He invites me to return to X?en-Sarai,” she said.
His eyes flashed with emotions, but they were quickly shuttered, leaving a man as immovable as the mountains they could see from the palace windows.
She looked down at the letter again, at the pristine brush of ink by her thumb.
“Was it love?” she whispered, more to herself than to Alexander. “Or strategy?”
Neither answer brought comfort.
She’d returned to her room, mind and body heavy with fatigue.
Her healer’s mind prescribed rest, but she tossed and turned on her bed.
At midday, she ate her meal from a tray, taking only a few bites.
She’d swallowed without tasting, stomach too heavy for anything except silence.
ShunLi’s message lay on a table beside her, its presence a small, persistent weight. She hadn’t dared to reread it.
Outside, late afternoon sun had slipped behind a cloud. Her room dimmed further. Shapes lost definition, but rest remained out of reach, as if her mind were pacing its own narrow corridor.
A soft knock pulled her from her thoughts. She opened the door and found Alexander in the doorway.
“The gardens are peaceful,” he said. “Would you walk with me?”
JingYi turned slightly toward the window. Golden sunlight stretched across the stone courtyard outside, warming the ivy along the walls. She caught the faintest trace of earth and crushed leaves drifting in. It smelled of petrichor, like the edge of something new.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice surprised her—clearer than she felt. “I think I will.”
Alexander stepped forward, and for the briefest moment, she could see the strain around his eyes. He extended his arm. She took it, fingers curling around his sleeve, his strength bolstering her for the conversation that awaited them.
Outside, the garden path crunched beneath their feet, gravel giving way to the fallen leaves.
Golds and russets blanketed the grounds, curled like parchment edges where frost had kissed them overnight.
The last of the autumn blooms nodded in the beds, and somewhere farther off, a fountain gurgled beneath a veil of ivy.
JingYi breathed the scent of smoke, loam, and decaying flowers. Her fingers remained tucked in the crook of Alexander’s arm, though neither had spoken since leaving the chamber.
He was the one to break the silence. “I thought your brother might wait longer. To claim the throne.”
“He killed instead,” she murmured.
Alexander didn’t respond immediately. She could feel his restraint, the deliberate silence of a man trying not to reach too far, too soon.
“Do you mourn your father?” he finally asked.
JingYi didn’t answer at first. The fountain’s whisper filled the space between their steps.
“X?en children are taught filial piety from cradle to grave. It is the most important virtue. But I do not see the emperor as a father, only a sovereign.” She paused, gathering the thought.
“I mourn the silence where a father’s voice should have been.
I mourn the protection he did not give, the pride he never showed.
That is a different kind of grief. It is for a ghost that was never there. ”
Alexander’s arm was solid beneath her hand. “A ghost can be heavier than a man.”
“Yes.” The word was an exhale. “It is a weight made of absences. Should I mourn the architect of my unhappiness? The man who saw my body as a flaw and my person as a tool?” She shook her head slowly.
“I feel . . . nothing for the man. But for the institution of ‘father,’ I feel a sort of hollow anger for what was stolen from both of us.”
“You pity him,” Alexander said, not as an accusation, but observation.
The insight startled her. She stopped walking, looking out over the frost-touched blooms. “Perhaps I do. He lived in a cage of his own making. Greed was his only language; avarice, his god. He understood wealth, not daughters.” She glanced at Alexander as the image of the crown prince—no, the new emperor—appeared in her mind.
“ShunLi will be different. He must be. He has seen the cost of that cage.”
They walked for some time before Alexander spoke again. “He will have you beside him to remind him, won’t he?”
JingYi froze. She slipped from his hold and stepped away to face him. “Alexander—”
He lifted his hand. “Please. Let me speak first.” His voice was quiet, pleading.
For once, when she looked at him, there was no armour, only a man trying to bridge a chasm with words before it widened beyond reach.
“You’ve done more than I could hope for. More than I deserved.” His throat bobbed. “The truth is . . . I didn’t know what I needed when we married.”
He glanced away for a breath, the way he always did when emotion threatened to rise, then back.
“I thought I needed a flawless bride, one who looked the part. Then, you came into my life. Face veiled. Gait uneven. And I—” His mouth twisted. “I saw only what I’d taught myself to see: a woman who didn’t fit the mould.”
His voice turned rough, low. “But I was wrong. You healed more than the sick. You healed what I had let rot. You helped me uncover what Bertrand was hiding. You risked yourself again and again. You brought pride back to Wulfbane’s name. You saved this House, and you saved . . . me.”
Then, softer, almost a whisper: “Everything beautiful that’s happened to me began the moment you walked into my life.”
Her chest caved. It was a physical pain, a beautiful, brutal dream offered in the palm of his hand.
All she had to do was close her fingers around it.
She knew he meant every word. She had felt the truth of them in the dark last night, in the shelter of his arms where she had finally, completely, fallen apart.
But, no matter what happened, it couldn’t change the fact that this marriage had been brokered by a king and a prince for their own gains. King Ferdinand had used her presence to seal Adelise’s engagement, to ally Tremore with X?en-Sarai.
ShunLi had sent her here for his own agenda, too.
And Alexander—dutiful, principled Alexander—had no choice but to play his part. What else could he do other than accept his king’s edict, when the weight of his crumbling House and his sister’s future rested solely on his shoulders?
She swallowed. No one could change the past. Theirs was a tainted marriage, and what she felt for him—this love that bloomed anyway amid the bruises—wasn’t enough to rewrite how this had begun.
And the best she could do right now was release them both.
“I’ve known, for some time,” she said, her voice calm, “that I will return to X?en-Sarai.”
She watched him closely. No surprise, no plea. Only a faint tightening of his jaw, a flicker in his gaze, quickly mastered.
“There are pieces of me I left buried. Things I ran from. I need to go back to find out who I am when I’m not a solution to someone else’s problem, or a token in someone else’s treaty.”
She paused, the memory of the previous night—the dissolution of her fortress, the terrifying safety of his hold—giving her the courage for the final, cutting truth.
“You would have kept your vows. You would have given me a good life.” Her vision blurred.
“Last night, you saw me, truly saw me, and it was the most terrifying and beautiful thing I have ever known. But it also showed me the truth. You have fought for everything you have. I cannot be the one thing in your life you never got to choose for yourself.”
She took a shuddering breath, feeling the phantom pressure of his brow against her collarbone.
“You deserve a clean beginning. And”—her voice broke—“so do I.”
He looked back with an expression of profound, solemn respect—and beneath it, something turbulent and unspoken, banked like a fire under iron control.
He heard her. He understood her, perhaps better than anyone ever had.
And because he understood, because he respected the self she was fighting to become, he did not oppose her.
When he spoke, his voice was low, carved from a place of absolute, heartbreaking certainty. “I cannot agree more.”
The wind caught her sleeves, a cold caress where his touch had been. She stilled. His words were perfect. A release. A benediction. The final, graceful act of a lord honouring an ally’s request.
He was letting her go. Exactly as she’d asked.
She curtsied and dipped her head, the gesture formal, final. “I’ll speak to King Ferdinand. I’m sure the annulment can be arranged without too much of a fuss.”
Then, she turned. The wind caught her sleeves, cold where his warmth had been. She walked. One step. Two. Her chest ached with the effort of not looking back.
This is what you wanted, she reminded herself. Space. Room to grow. A clean beginning.
Then why did it feel like she was leaving part of herself behind?
Three steps. Four. The garden path stretched ahead, empty and endless. She could feel him behind her—still there, watching.
Five steps. She almost stopped. Almost turned. Almost ran back to the safety of his arms.
But she kept walking.
And he let her go.