Chapter 8 Shadow on the Scroll
I started finding reasons to go to the study often.
Sometimes I brought food. Sometimes I ground ink for Crown Prince, and watched him write and paint.
But every time I saw that inkstone, I remembered him hitting my head with it. A chill went through me.
"What is it?" Crown Prince saw my ink-grinding hand stop, and asked.
I pointed at his painting and smiled, to show he had painted well.
He was painting a woman. She wore light gauze. Her face was like Guanyin, her hair like a fall of water. She looked like a goddess of the ninth heaven, beautiful past the mortal world.
Crown Prince often painted this woman.
The first time I saw him paint her, the woman in the painting looked familiar. Later I found it. My brows and eyes were a little like hers.
And Lan Zhi's lips were quite like hers too.
I understood why Lan Zhi had led me to the study again and again.
It seemed she wanted me to see, with my own eyes, how my husband longed for another woman, and to let me know I was only someone else's shadow.
I guessed that, to her, a daughter of a great house was too proud, and would never endure being a substitute.
That was very wrong.
Someone the heir could think of day and night, and still not obtain, had to be gone already.
People said the living could not outfight the dead. But why should the living pick a fight with the dead for nothing?
Living was for making endless possibilities. Not for fighting over an epitaph.
Besides.
I looked at the person in front of me.
This person was only a substitute for Crown Prince too.
The false Crown Prince drew me into his arms, held my hand, and painted with me.
The last of the sun came into the study and pulled a long shadow across the scroll.
"A Yue," he stopped all at once. "Look. This shadow always follows behind a person."
"Where there is a person, there is a shadow. Where there is a shadow, there is a person."
"If the shadow disappears, the person is gone too."
Light flashed in his dark, bright eyes. The ink brush ran even more freely over the snow-white paper.
I nodded, obedient. From the corner of my eye I kept sweeping every part of the study.
The hidden chamber's mechanism was well concealed. Even the scouts had not found it.
I meant to search, but the false Crown Prince did not give me the chance.
Now The Emperor was gravely ill. Crown Prince supervised the state. He often received court officials in the study and handled documents there. Even his rare rest was here. He almost never left.
If I could not think of a way to draw him off, then once he ascended, finding the real Xiao Yan would be even harder.
Since the real Xiao Yan was still alive, and had left me a note, I had to find him one step ahead. Only then could I turn this around.
But the thing I feared arrived.
A eunuch came to report. The Emperor's illness had worsened. He might not live past tomorrow.