Chapter 24

As they made their way back along the walls of the Cold Palace, just as Yongning Hall was coming into sight, Xie Yan suddenly pulled her back.

“Let’s walk for a while.”

Su Jiao was unwilling and lifted her foot to head back inside.

Xie Yan grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her back.

“Walk.”

He brooked no argument.

The two of them walked along the dark path. Palace attendants hurried back and forth on their tasks; occasionally a few would encounter them and bow in greeting.

The night was quiet, and the moonlight was cool as water. It finally dispersed some of the irritation in her heart, and for a time she no longer felt so restless — she followed him and, for once, walked a little longer than usual.

Within the imperial palace, most of the consorts resided in the palaces on the left side; those on the right were sparsely occupied. Past the palace corridor ahead, not far in the distance, a row of palaces came into view, and the grandest one at the front was particularly striking.

Su Jiao’s gaze drifted toward it. The moment she saw that palace, fragments of old memories stirred within her.

That palace now stood empty and uninhabited — but in her past life, it had been Heming Hall, where she had spent three years.

On the eve before Xie Yan was to ascend the throne following the palace coup, an unprecedented uprising had broken out within the palace.

Rumor held that the old followers of the First Prince, having harbored treacherous intentions, conspired with the remaining factions of other princes at court and induced the Grand General to defect, storming their way into the palace. It was a chaos no less severe than the night of the palace coup itself — a night of rivers of blood.

Xie Yan had told her to wait for him in a hidden passage within Qianqing Palace. She waited a full night, and when she finally emerged, it was because the passage had been discovered — the rebel army chased her, pursuing her all the way out of the palace.

Outside the palace walls, flames blazed into the sky. She was terrified, yet had no choice but to run — she ran until she was utterly exhausted, hiding and fleeing from the east of the city all the way to the west. In the end, just as she was on the verge of dying at the hands of the rebels, Xie Yan arrived like a god descended from the heavens and saved her.

He too was drenched in blood, not a single guard at his side. With a long sword in hand, he led her step by step back in the direction of the palace. Halfway there, they were cornered in a hidden chamber, with mechanisms set outside the door.

Arrows rained down upon them from all directions within the chamber — fired with a resolve that they must die. Outnumbered, no matter how swiftly Xie Yan’s sword deflected the rain of arrows, it was not fast enough to stop one arrow that flew straight toward his heart.

In that split second — perhaps because two years of living together had made her dependent on him, or perhaps because she knew that if Xie Yan died, they would both perish here — she, who had always been utterly terrified of death, somehow found the courage to stand before him and take that arrow for him.

It was very painful when the ice-cold arrow sank into her shoulder. Blood splattered across her face. She saw the panic in Xie Yan’s eyes, and before she could even speak, she felt something from the arrow begin to burrow its way into her neck.

Cold. Writhing. Pain…

“It’s a gu…”

Her murmured words broke off mid-sentence, and she suddenly fell unconscious.

When she hazily came back to awareness, she was cradled in Xie Yan’s arms as they walked out through a long hidden passage, moving against the light.

She felt her entire body was ice-cold, and the place where the gu worm had burrowed in ached terribly — a pain that radiated to her face and her head. She murmured softly:

“Will I die?”

Her voice was very faint, yet he heard it.

“No.”

He held her tighter, and his ever-cold eyes turned red.

“My face hurts so much… Is there something in it… Will I be disfigured? Will I become ugly?”

He gazed long and deeply at her face, for a long while —

“That won’t happen either.”

The blinding light beyond the passage made it impossible for her to keep her eyes open. In his arms, she spent the last of her strength and fell unconscious.

When she next awoke, she was inside that palace.

The rooms were spotlessly tidy. Palace maids surrounded her in a flurry of attendance, beaming as they called out to her as Her Majesty the Empress. They told her the rebel army had been suppressed, and that His Majesty had issued an imperial edict in advance, naming her Empress.

“Then where is His Majesty?”

The moment she asked, the smiles vanished from the palace maids’ faces.

She leaned in before the bronze mirror. Looking back at her was a fair, rosy face like a lotus blossom. There was no pain on her face from before she had lost consciousness — and even the gu worm she had dimly sensed burrowing into her body was gone. Aside from the wound on her shoulder, she was no different from before — in fact, her body felt even more vigorous than it once had.

Wasn’t that a remarkably swift recovery?

“His Majesty was wounded while suppressing the rebel army. He has been unconscious for several days. They say the grand ceremony will be postponed.”

Wounded?

But when they had emerged together, he had still been perfectly fine.

The days at Yongning Hall — husband and wife, not exactly in perfect harmony, yet they had indeed lived together for two years. After that night when he led her through the hidden passage, there lingered within her a feeling she could not quite name. So she had wanted to go to Qianqing Palace to see him.

But the eunuchs would not permit her entry, saying only that His Majesty required rest and quiet.

She clearly saw ministers being allowed inside. He simply refused to let her in.

Worry and frustration wound themselves around her heart. Fretting and fuming, she waited four or five days — just when she could no longer hold back and was about to force her way in, he came out.

He seemed to have been truly gravely injured. His complexion was pallid and his frame looked thin. The moment she saw him, her anger dissolved, replaced by a pang of something bittersweet.

He had not a trace of strength left in him, and most of his weight was leaned upon her shoulder.

“I deliberately had you wait in a palace so far away, and yet you’re still this cross with me — I didn’t expect that.”

She kept her head lowered and said nothing, the tip of her nose prickling.

Xie Yan then held her and pointed outward.

“Then let’s demolish this palace and the one next to it and build an entirely new one for you to live in — the grandest palace of all. Consider it my apology.

You won’t live in Fengyi Palace. It will be called Heming Hall.”

She had not read many books growing up, but she remembered one passage from the marriage text that had been sent to her before the wedding ceremony.

There was a line in it —

“The phoenix takes flight, its harmonious call resounding clear — Mama, what does ‘luan and phoenix singing in harmony’ mean?”

A child’s tender voice pulled her out of her reverie. She came back to herself and heard a woman’s voice nearby scolding sharply:

“Where did a child your age learn such things? Give me that book.”

The noblewoman pulled the child away, and only the echo of their voices lingered in her ears, trailing on and on.

Su Jiao suddenly felt her throat tighten, and she had no more wish to look further.

“Let’s go back.”

…

That night passed, and early the next morning, Su Jiao had barely opened her bleary eyes when:

“Young Master Su has passed by here on his way down from court, and requests that My Lady come outside the gate to speak with him.”

She was instantly wide awake.

Seeing Su Wei again — watching him patiently remind her to dress warmly and not catch cold, asking with concern if there was anything she was finding difficult to adjust to — still felt like being in a dream.

How could it be him?

How could it be — this brother who had cared for her so tenderly since she was small, who in her past life had even stormed the Golden Hall and nearly been beheaded for her sake?

She gazed at Su Wei’s face, and tears gradually blurred her vision — until he slipped the bracelet onto her wrist.

“I sorted through Mother’s belongings and found this. It was her favorite, so I’ve kept it for you as a keepsake.

Both Mother and I… think of you. Jiaojiao, whenever you wish to come out, just tell your brother.”

He departed from Su Jiao’s presence, his refined and elegant figure just as she had seen him countless times before.

That silhouette had been there since she was born — through learning to walk, forming her first memories, through her marriage, through becoming Empress — all the way to the last moment before her death. It had always stood behind her as her steadfast support.

No matter what it was. No matter when.

Even in her past life, in the half-year after Xie Yan ascended the throne — when the palace was selecting concubines and a Noble Consort was about to be brought in — Su Wei had dared, in his cups, to storm the Golden Hall and point at the Emperor himself, demanding justice on her behalf.

Though that incident had stirred a tremendous storm — court officials raged that the Su family, as imperial in-laws, had the audacity to flout the law — Su Wei, once he had sobered, knelt outside the hall for two days. And because of it, she and Xie Yan had their most explosive argument ever.

At that time, Xie Yan had ascended the throne and was aggressively purging his political enemies. Beyond the Noble Consort’s Yun family and their kin, who were being uprooted one after another, the flame of this purge of dissenters had burned all the way to the Su family as well. Using the incident of Su Wei’s rampage at Qianqing Palace as pretext, Xie Yan demoted him repeatedly in rank. The two of them quarreled bitterly over the Golden Hall incident and the demotions, and she had screamed at him that with a new favorite he had lost all reason.

“Su Wei created a scene at the Golden Hall, and Zhen has already shown extraordinary leniency out of consideration for you. Su Jiao, do not overstep. For the past half month, you — as the honored Empress — have repeatedly met with him within the palace. Even as brother and sister, why must it be so frequent? Has Zhen’s palace treated you so poorly that it is worse than your days as an unmarried girl? Or has Su Wei blown some bewitching wind your way, that you must come here making a scene in the outer court?”

“His Majesty has already acknowledged that we are siblings by blood. I am Empress; my father and brother are subjects. The Su family has served Great Zhao with wholehearted devotion — the possibility of imperial in-laws seizing power to meddle in governance is utterly out of the question. Is His Majesty being too suspicious, treating the Su family as dissidents and repeatedly singling them out — or has someone been whispering in His Majesty’s ear at night, causing His Majesty to treat the Su family and my brother this way?”

“Since you know they are imperial in-laws, and you have entered the palace as Empress, how can you maintain such close contact with your brother outside the palace? You need not be taught about the rule that the inner palace must not interfere in court affairs.”

“Is it that I must not, or that none of your consorts may? The Su family are imperial in-laws and are under suspicion of seizing power and causing disorder — then who are your clean, unblemished officials? Your future Noble Consort and her maternal clan?”

Crash — a porcelain vase beside him was hurled to the ground by Xie Yan. He turned and strode away, and the following day issued an edict demoting Su Wei from his post as Deputy Minister of War.

The memories tore at her. Su Jiao turned the bracelet over in her fingers, and in the instant she lowered her head, a crystalline teardrop fell to the ground.

If Mother’s death in this life was his doing — could it be that in her past life, it too was connected to him?

“Brother — why? Why on earth?”

Why did you sacrifice so much, just to get me out of the palace?

The wind in the courtyard was strong. She stood there for a short while and then went back inside.

As she stepped over the threshold, Xie Yan stood in the corridor with his hands clasped behind his back, having already been there for an unknown length of time.

The two of them looked at each other. As she studied his expression, she inevitably fell into a daze again.

That argument had ultimately ended with the Emperor relenting. He had reassigned Su Wei, and sent many gifts into Heming Hall.

Once he became Emperor, a single command from him could summon wind and rain. He even had the senior head of the Imperial Medical Court summoned to teach her medicine — and, disregarding propriety and all opposition, had a courtyard cleared behind Heming Hall for her to grow medicinal herbs.

Setting aside his suspicious nature and the favored consort who stood between them, the way he treated her was, truly, quite good.

After a long moment of holding each other’s gaze, she stepped inside.

Xie Yan calmly looked away.

She took a step forward; he descended toward her.

“Your eyes are red.”

An ice-cold hand gently touched the corner of her eye. Su Jiao tried to pull away, but instead found herself encircled by him, unable to move at all.

His grip was immensely strong — it was as if he wanted to press her entirely into his embrace. Su Jiao was held so tightly she could barely breathe.

“Xie Yan.”

“Your eyes are red.”

He repeated the same words again.

“The wind outside is strong… ah—”

Before she could finish speaking, he rested his head on her shoulder and suddenly bit the side of her neck.

A faint, sharp sting. Then he asked again.

“Your eyes are red.”

She shook the bracelet visible on her wrist and finally admitted the truth.

“I was thinking of my mother.”

Only then did he release her. Her waist felt as though it had been crushed from the tightness of his hold.

“The wind outside is strong. Don’t go out so often.”

It was only then that she remembered — Xie Yan in her past life had also greatly disliked her going out. He disliked her leaving the palace, disliked her speaking with Su Wei, disliked her doing anything that might take her beyond his sight.

Just as in this life, Su Wei had gone to every possible length to get her out of the palace.

She rubbed her reddened eyes. Xie Yan took the opportunity to close his hand around hers.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

“Back to our Yongning Hall.”