Chapter 8 The Qilin Pendant
The smell of medicine in the Eastern Palace was too thick to dissolve.
I kept watch by his bed as the imperial physician pierce his blackened wound with a silver needle.
The old physician twisted his beard and sighed. "If it had been an inch off, Your Highness's hand would have been ruined."
When Xiao Huai An woke, he caught me staring at that square of bloodstained white silk.
He suddenly laughed softly and reached to brush the dark circles under my eyes. "Is Wen Yan holding a funeral for me?"
I knocked his hand away and passed him a bowl of pitch-black medicine. "Your Highness should think instead why the assassins knew your whereabouts today."
He tipped his head and drained the medicine. As his throat moved, a few drops splashed on his neck, like red plum blossoms opening in snow.
"Affairs of court have always been startling at every step."
He suddenly seized my wrist and pressed into my palm that jade pendant I had hidden for so long.
"But I promise you, I will never place you in danger again."
It was a white jade Qilin Pendant. The corners had already been worn smooth.
In the last life, on the day he bestowed death on my Elder Brother, I smashed it on the gold bricks of Taiji Hall, and a fine crack opened.
Now the warmth of his palm came through the jade, hot enough that my fingertips went numb.
"Wen Yan." He suddenly leaned close. His breath brushed my ear. "When I have cleared the obstacles, we will go to Jiangnan. There are peach blossoms there that you like."
I looked at the light jumping in his eyes and, in a daze, saw the snow of the year I was sixteen.
Back then he had looked at me like this too. The starlight in his eyes had been brighter than snow.
Even after cycling through once, I still fell in the same place.