That night, I had searched for the corpse lilies in bloom, flowers that blossom only once every six years. I gathered as many of them as I could carry and placed them around the campsite, hoping their scent would repel the soldiers. In the morning I woke to the sound of screams and smoke rolling down the hills. The soldiers had burned the fields, believing that the flowers had bloomed in the middle of the night, a bad omen. Our orchards were destroyed, along with half of our family’s tea garden. The blackened sky, the smell of charred trees …
I wake in the dark, thrashing. There is a heavy weight on my body, a shadow crouched at my legs. I swing my arms wildly at my attacker, but my reward is a heavy pressure on my chest. A hand closes over my throat, and another over my mouth, smothering me.
I consider, fleetingly, if it could be Kang, but the face above me is not the one who visits me in the night. She’s a girl. Her hair is pulled up high above her head, kept back from her face with a band. But the rest of her hair spills over one shoulder, black waves brushing my face as she breathes.
I know her now: the one who stands beside the princess.
“My name is Gao Ruyi.” Her whisper confirms her identity. “I am handmaiden to the princess. If I take my hand from your mouth, will you scream?”
I shake my head no, and the weight is lifted from my chest and throat when she rolls off me. I wheeze a little as my lungs protest the rough treatment.
I can feel her watching me with intensity, looking for weaknesses. I know she has calculated how to silence me if I make the wrong move. The lantern light from the courtyard streams through the carved shutters, leaving patterns of light and shadow across her skin.
“The princess requests your presence,” she says. Not a question. An order.
“Let me get dressed,” I tell her, a slight tremble in my voice. “I cannot see her in my current state.”
“It won’t be long,” she says, dismissing my concerns. “Throw on a cloak. That will be sufficient.”
I step behind the dressing screen, fumbling with the ties of my cloak, questions tumbling inside my head. Wondering how much the princess knows. If this is about my time in the kitchens, the accusations of the marquis … Or is it about my nightly conversations with Kang?
I trudge behind the handmaiden, my feet feeling heavier with each step. She does not speak when we make our way through the corridors of the palace, past unfamiliar gates with soldiers standing guard. They bow their heads and allow us to pass without question, until we reach an alcove with a sad-looking tree. I place my hand against the bark and sense that the life is being choked out of it, the leaves brown and crumbling. At the foot of the tree there is a stone carving of a lion, a snarl on its face, one paw extended with claws out.
Ruyi steps around the tree and touches the wall. In front of my eyes, a door opens, revealing a dark tunnel behind it. I gawk at it, marveling at how such a mechanism is possible, but she quickly pulls me through, shutting the opening behind me. We’re enclosed in darkness. I reach out and touch the wall. Stone.
With a strike of a match and the smell of sulfur tingling in my nose, Ruyi’s face is illuminated by an ignited torch. We make our way deeper through the dark tunnel, me hurrying after her confident strides. She seems like someone who has passed through these passages many times before, navigating the turns until we reach a wall with an iron ring hanging from the nose of a stone boar, sharp tusks curving from its mouth.
She pulls the ring and a door opens, revealing a moonlit garden. A figure, dressed in white, waits for us under the trees.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The garden looks exactly like it did in Kang’s memory: the weeping willow trailing leaves on the ground, the graceful dwarf pines in their round pots, and white decorative boulders placed around the perimeter in auspicious locations. The princess, seated at the stone table, the branches of the plum tree behind her in full bloom.
“Approach,” Ruyi says with a hand at my back.
I take a step forward and kneel, touching my forehead to the cold stones. I could never have imagined this moment, even in Shu’s most fanciful tales, that I would be standing before the princess, carrying a secret I am certain she does not want me to know.
“Rise,” her voice instructs me. I stand to look into the face of the regent of Dàxī, the heir to the throne.
Her hair is missing the pins and combs that usually adorn it, falling loose around her face instead. She’s dressed in a gown of pale purple, in a shade so light I had mistaken it initially as white. She appears to be the ethereal embodiment of the Moon Goddess, and I am the unworthy peasant.