Chapter 65
JINGYI
It wasn’t every day that the forgotten daughter of the disgraced Lady JingMei was seen dressed in formal robes, a court maid in tow.
All her life, she’d been a cautionary tale.
Exiled since birth, then demoted to the rank of servants.
She’d been sent abroad as a political Omega bride yet returned without a husband.
By all accounts, she should’ve been hanged for having brought disgrace, but she was elevated to High Princess instead, favoured by the new emperor himself.
The whispers were not new, but for the first time, they carried awe rather than scorn. JingYi didn’t deign to respond. As she walked the garden paths to the Jade Mortar Hall, she kept her head high, spine straight, stride steady—as much as she could manage.
The slippers, soft-soled and practical, helped.
They were unlike the shoes sent by the Internal Affairs Bureau earlier—dainty things elevated on a three-inch platform shaped like an upside-down flowerpot, embroidered with golden-threaded plum blossoms. An ode to the winter season, yet wholly useless.
Her leg had buckled the moment she tried to stand in them.
She’d chosen these flat slippers instead. Not in fashion, perhaps, not for a High Princess, but they were comfortable, sturdy, and of her own choice.
When they reached the threshold of the Royal Dispensary, JingYi paused, smelling the scent of boiled roots and crushed herbs that brought something close to comfort.
“I’ll be inside for a while,” she told her new maid, Yīng. “Go find a place to sit down and rest.”
The young girl’s eyes widened. “But, Your Highness—”
“Go,” she urged gently. “You’ll only draw more eyes if you linger.”
Yīng hesitated, then bowed. “As you wish.”
JingYi turned toward the familiar space. Inside, warmth and moisture hit her all at once. The bubbling cauldrons. The grinding stone. She stood just past the entrance, watching as memories came flooding back. For a moment, the bustle went on, until someone looked up.
A pause, a whisper. One by one, heads turned. Tools stilled. Conversations died. Then, in a ripple, the physicians and their attendants rushed to kneel on the floor.
“High Princess JingYi,” someone whispered.
A chuckle tickled her throat. To receive this treatment here—a place where she’d once scrubbed floors and fetched towels under orders barked across the room—was jarring.
The Dispensary had once been her prison, her classroom, her sanctuary.
Not often kind, but it had been, for a long time, the only place where she’d belonged.
From the far end of the room, a figure in grey robes approached. The same moustache over thin lips. The same posture of a man straining to look taller than he was.
JingYi waited until Master Yu stood before her, until he bowed stiffly as though a bamboo stick had been strapped to his back.
“Your Highness,” he mumbled. The address seemed to pain him. “The Dispensary is honoured by your visit.”
JingYi nodded to acknowledge him, but no more.
“I am glad to see the cauldrons still burn as they used to,” she said, “that it fares well even after dysentery swept through the palace. How fortunate it was that you diagnosed the illness before it spread through the Peony Court, endangering His Late Majesty’s children.”
Master Yu’s jaw ticked. “I am aware that it was due to your . . . diligence that we managed to contain the illness to the servants’ spaces.”
She offered him a faint smile. “Yes. I had to be diligent, since credit was so often misplaced.”
Master Yu, so often eloquent before nobles and ministers, stood slack-jawed. JingYi let the pause stretch before speaking, calm but leaving no room for refusal: “Have Wu Mā and Fēng meet me in the scriptorium.”
She turned and went.
The scriptorium was a quiet room behind the main dispensary hall with access to the physician’s library. She’d spent many hours there, copying herbal formulas and transcribing physician notes into the master ledgers. If there were more books on purple limyerite to be found, it should be here.
The scent of old paper, dried roots, and ink welcomed her. Her gaze swept the shelves. She moved quickly, fingers trailing over cracked spines and faded labels until she reached the spot where she thought she’d seen more books on the subject.
Not there.
She was still sifting through the tomes when footsteps sounded behind her. She turned. Wu Mā entered first, Fēng followed. They looked just as she remembered, yet entirely different—older, wearier, but somehow smaller too, as if the months without her had weighed heavily on them.
Wu Mā paused just inside the threshold. Her breath caught audibly. “Ah-Yi? Is that . . . you?”
Warmth gripped her chest. The name left her lips in a whisper. “Wu Mā.”
The older woman surged forward before decorum could catch her, gathering JingYi into a fierce embrace. Those hands, still gnarled and calloused with years of work, cupped her cheeks with a touch she’d known all her life.
“Why are you still too thin?” she muttered. “Didn’t they feed you in that foreign castle?”
Behind her, Fēng hesitated only a moment longer before she rushed in, too, throwing her arms around them both. “You came back,” she breathed. “You really came back!”
JingYi couldn’t speak—throat tight, heart full. The three of them stood tangled in a knot of memory and longing. For a breathless moment, there were no titles between them, only the echo of shared years, steeped into these herb-steeped walls.
Suddenly remembering protocol, Wu Mā pulled back and tugged Fēng with her. Together, they rushed to their knees and pressed their forehead to the floor.
“May a thousand years of peace grace High Princess X?en JingYi,” they greeted.
JingYi rushed forward and grasped their arms, urging them to rise. “No, please. You never need to kneel to me. Not you two.”
Wu Mā looked up, torn between protocol and affection. “But . . . Your Highness—”
“Please,” JingYi said, softer now. “It’s me.”
That broke whatever spell the court robes had cast. Wu Mā hesitated, then hurried to rise. Fēng followed, eyes shining with unshed tears, hands trembling as she smoothed her skirt.
“I’m sorry,” the girl murmured. “It’s just . . . you’re so different now. And yet . . . still you.”
JingYi gave a wobbly smile. “Come. Let’s sit.”
She led them to the low table pushed against the far wall, its surface still cluttered with ink pots and rolled up scrolls.
“I’ve always dreamed,” Wu Mā said, clutching her hand, “of seeing you dressed like this. The way you should be.” She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. “If only your mother could see you now.”
JingYi’s smile held, though it felt stiff at the corners. She acknowledged the pain, then let it go.
“She wouldn’t have approved, not even now,” she said. “She would’ve said these clothes were too good for me. That I was being presumptuous. Unworthy.”
She looked from her clasped hands to their waiting faces, and her voice softened, turning from memory to the present. “But you are here. You see me. That is enough.”
Wu Mā’s hand lingered over JingYi’s wrist, her touch a bridge between the girl she’d raised and the woman she’d become. “Your mother . . . she was a bird with two broken wings. She forgot how to sing, and in her pain, she pecked at the only chick in the nest.”
Then, her voice softened, but JingYi heard the pure, undiluted protectiveness. “Your husband. Did he . . . treat you well?”
The question was simple, but she recognized the strain behind it. The way Wu Mā’s mouth pressed together, hands clenched, as though bracing for the answer.
“He treated me well,” she said. “But he bore the weight of a noble House. I was not what was best for him, and his people.”
Fēng’s expression darkened. “Then he’s more fool than we thought,” she muttered, “to let go of the only good thing that ever came out of this palace.”
Wu Mā let out an indignant sniff. “I’ve never trusted wolves. Too proud. Too quick to posture. Still, I never thought he would let you go without a word.”
“You will not blame him for it,” JingYi told them gently, holding their gazes, willing them to understand. “I asked him to release me for reasons that were mine alone. He honoured that choice.”
Fēng’s face softened with a dawning understanding. Wu Mā’s crumpled with sorrow, but even her indignation faded into a sigh of reluctant acceptance.
JingYi squeezed the woman’s hand. “Tell me. What happened after I left?”
Wu Mā exchanged a look with Fēng. “After you left, things got truly out of hand.”
Fēng nodded. “You knew dysentery started in the servants’ quarters. But without you here, no one was able to control it.”
“You’ve written protocols. Remedies.” Wu Mā’s voice lowered. “But Master Yu took credit for them and made a mess of the proportions. The nobles were terrified it’d spread to their palaces. They started hoarding everything. Goldenroot, most of all.”
JingYi’s stomach turned. That herb had been the base of half her most effective tinctures.
Wu Mā went on. “They locked it away. Refused to spare even a pinch for the servants or guards. ‘Precautionary,’ they said.”
“And the emperor?”
“Did nothing,” Fēng said bitterly. “He just fretted about whether his autumn hunting trip to the Tzadun-Khor plains would be delayed. Said the weak should just perish, as they always did.”
Then Wu Mā smiled, small and grim. “But the Crown Prince didn’t sit idle.
He stormed the Dispensary and ordered the doors opened.
Made them release the goldenroots and the decoctions to the lower halls.
He had Master Yu dragged out by his collar and ordered a new apothecary rotation.
He said if a noble had to fall ill for balance to be restored, so be it. ”
JingYi leaned back. ShunLi had watched the nobility barricade their medicines, their consciences, and done what their father never would: acted.
What the emperor had built glittered from afar, but inside, the beams were full of termites.
Perhaps it had taken someone willing to strike at the root, even at the cost of their own blood.
“Is the kingdom better now?” she asked. “Are people happier? Healthier?”
“The common folk sing his name now, Highness,” Fēng said. “The rice stores reopened, the medicines shared. Our grains are no longer shipped out to other kingdoms but sold to the people. Prices came down. Even the poor can afford to eat. There hasn’t been a dysentery death in weeks.”
The girl hesitated, then leaned forward to whisper, “But not everyone’s pleased. The noble families that courted Emperor HāiYán’s favours for decades lost their power, so they’re calling it a butcher’s peace. And there’s the matter of the Tzadun-Khor alliance . . .”
JingYi’s brow creased. “The marriage agreement?”
Fēng glanced toward the doorway. “One of the broom maids in the West Lotus Wing told me she overheard two stewards discussing it as they passed through the courtyard. Something about the Tzadun-Khor envoy being furious that the new Emperor broke the agreement, refusing to take an Omega bride from their tribes, even though it was promised. Instead, he’s chosen someone who isn’t even X?en. ”
Wu Mā sucked in a breath through her teeth. “That’s a grave insult. The Warriors of the Plains have long memories.” She shook her head slowly, lips pursed in a grim line. “This could bring war with the borderlands. Just when the kingdom is starting to see hope of recovery from sickness and famine.”
JingYi remembered the old maps that once lay before her—the jagged southern border of X?en-Sarai, where the jade-coloured mountains gave way to the golden steppes.
For generations, the Tzadun-Khor tribes had patrolled those vast and volatile frontiers.
Their allegiance was crucial to guarding the southern gateway into X?en-Sarai and into Issoirea.
Without their watchful warriors, the border would be porous, vulnerable. But the surrendering of their lands and their alliance came with a price: recognition, trade, and intermarriage with the imperial bloodline—namely the Tsaiqun-Veyara clan.
She stared down at the table, heart tightening.
She hadn’t asked ShunLi to do it, hadn’t even known of the proposal when it was made.
But she couldn’t pretend she didn’t understand.
ShunLi had cast the decades-old pact aside and traded a powerful southern alliance for one with the north for her. To get Tremore to agree to shelter her.
Her fingers curled into her palms. Was it wrong, then, to feel so conflicted? To feel both gratitude . . . and guilt?
She let the silence linger a moment longer, then as her eyes scanned the bookshelves, she asked, “Are there no more books on limyerite medical research? The one outlining the effects of prolonged exposures to the purple varieties? I can’t find them anywhere.”
Wu Mā’s brow furrowed. “When you asked High Princess LinXin, we helped her look but couldn’t find any. Strange. I thought I’d seen more, too.”
“I checked last week,” Fēng added. “Just to see if someone who borrowed the books might’ve returned them. But there was no withdrawal slip. They could’ve been sent to the academy archive, but no one’s sure.”
“No one’s sure?” JingYi repeated, brows knitting.
Fēng shrugged. “Some of the older tomes do get quietly cycled out during the reorganizations.”
JingYi nodded. Perhaps she was afraid of a shadow that wasn’t even there. Perhaps the disappearance meant nothing, merely a scribe’s carelessness.
For now, she tucked the unease away—a sliver of bone beneath the skin.