Chapter 68 Nothing
NOTHING
I held on to him as he died.
I stood in the sun-glittered water as my torturer sagged into my arms, and his blood seeped warm into my gown. He was lighter than he looked, or perhaps I was stronger than I thought. Stray hair billowed over his still-wet cheeks, and his eyes fluttered shut, like a child giving in to dreams.
We were all so foolish in the end, I thought. So foolish and so, so wicked.
Leaves and blossoms drifted in the water and swirled in the sky around us; mutilated roads and forests of twisted blades stood among the bones of what had once been trees. It was remarkable, the things we made.
I was sorry I killed him. I was even more sorry for the girl who would have been empress, the girl who held the power of dynasties, the girl who could have been anything.
With her husband’s death, she had become nothing.
I wondered if, in the poems and the ballads and the history books, they would mention her name—if they would mention that she was a rice farmer from Lu’an, that she was sister to bright-eyed Bao, that she had once danced with her village under a sky full of lanterns—or if they would simply write Guan Terren was murdered by his wife, and let that be the truth.