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“We have a couple more hours until dawn, and you are too weak to go anywhere. We might as well make conversation while we are here,” he said. “I am curious, that is all. In all respect, the Prince of Rong seems like a perfectly fine match.”

I traced the pattern of his embroidered robe, still draped over me. A secret for a secret felt fair. Yet…“You are right. Siwang is perfect, on paper and in every other aspect.Tooperfect, perhaps.”

“And that is a bad thing?”

“It is not easy to hold on to the love of someone so perfect,” I said, opting to give him half the truth. “Siwang is like the sun. When he bestows me his shine, I feel protected and invincible. However, I am not the only person who wants his light. When he becomes emperor, he won’t be just mine anymore. I would have to share him with countless concubines. Yet if I dared to even look at another man, I would be marked as an unjust queen and my lover would be sent to the execution block. That doesn’t feel fair.”

“But when he becomes emperor, you will be empress. Isn’t that whateverygirl wants in life?”

I chuckled. “If you think that’s what every girl wants in life, then clearly you don’t know many girls.” He went quiet at this, eyes averted, and I could have sworn I saw him blush. “Some of us just want to love someone and have that someone love us back, treat us not as something to possess, but as his equal. A simple request if Siwang and I were simple people, of simple birth.”

“You would rather live in a hut in the mountains with nothing to your name than share a husband with other women?”

“You are a man—a prince—you would never understand,” I replied. “Can it really be love if your positions are always unequal? One person holding all the power, while the other holds nothing?” Yexue just stared at me. He looked stunned to hear this. “And just because Siwang is perfect now, it doesn’t mean he will always be perfect. When he sits on the throne and bears the weight of an empire on his shoulders, he won’t bemySiwang anymore. For that is the way of conquerors. Siwang the prince will be different from Siwang the emperor. This much I am sure of.”

Silence crept up with a gust of wind, carrying flakes of snow from beyond the cave walls. The fire crackled; its light flickered like shivers against the darkness beyond.

“In order to make peace with our tribute states, our emperor has wedded many daughters and sisters and mothers of these conquered warlords and kings and emperors,” I continued. “If they are lucky, they will bear him daughters who will be raised in the northern courts, kept like prisoners until it is time to marry them off to new warlords and kings and dynasties to forge alliances. Glorified bargaining chips, you can say. If they are unlucky, they will birth sons, who will be sent far away to be raised in wealth but also loneliness so that no one can threaten Siwang’s claim to the throne. But because these concubines have given the emperor children, they will be spared from being buried alive with him when he crosses to the afterlife. The even more unlucky ones…?”

I swallowed. “I remember when I was six, the emperor married the eldest daughter of the Chu clan to the south. Huge military family. They are rich with both metal and grains, and an important family in terms of trade. When the spoiled Lady Chu married into Rong,she knew the power her father held. She was also a maiden of barely twenty, marrying a man almost thrice her age.

“She hated the emperor and everyone within the palace. For petty reasons, she framed one of the emperor’s favorites, Concubine Li, for stealing a family heirloom given to Lady Chu by her father. Though everyone knew that Concubine Li was innocent, the emperor still cut off her right hand and sent her to the Cold Palace, where all his discarded toys went to die. I had heard stories of the Cold Palace, a place where they didn’t have enough food to eat nor enough firewood to keep warm. Concubine Li was one of the few people in the palace who was genuinely kind, and she was born the day after the Midautumn Festival. I snuck into the Cold Palace to give her mooncakes because I didn’t want her to feel like the world had forgotten her birthday.”

I looked up at Yexue to find him watching me intently. There was a tension between his brows. Again, I wished I knew him enough to read him. “What I saw inside those walls are things I wish I could wash from my memories. How those guards treated the women…” My stomach twisted as sounds of that night echoed once more. “They forced the women to kneel and beg for their food. Concubine Li once told me the palace is like a garden. Where the emperor graces it is always warm with sunlight. The Cold Palace is like its name: cold and forgotten. Because those women belong to the emperor, they cannot leave the palace, as it would be an insult to his honor for another man to touch them. And so those women will waste their lives inside the Cold Palace, in hopes of perhaps being remembered one day.

“I don’t want my life to revolve around Siwang and the hope that he would remember me. No matter how kind he is now, nothing guarantees he would forever be this way. Sometimes when the emperor hadguests, like that night, with many ministers and envoys arriving from faraway lands, he would let those visiting men into the Cold Palace and…”

Nausea boiled in the pit of my belly.

The screams.

Those men’s leering laughs.

How those women had protested and fought.

Nobody did anything, even as those ladies were beaten by those vile men, simply because the emperor had allowed it.

“After that night, I helped how I could. I brought them the food that I saved and the winter coats that I stashed away and pretended to have lost.”

Nobody in the palace had cared about those women, but I did. Istilldid.

Yexue didn’t say anything for a long while. He just sat there, lips parted as if he had forgotten how to speak. He looked horrified, and I wondered if things like these happened in the Lan court, or if Rong was especially brutal.

Power corrupted. When men became accustomed to living above rules and consequences that the rest of us had to kneel for, the crueler their hearts became.

“That will never be you,” Yexue said finally. “You are the empress of all empresses.”

“And what happens after Siwang claims all the land and fulfills the prophecy—if it’s even real? What if everyone is wrong and I do not have a great destiny, just a strange mark between my brows? What if Siwang loses everything, what if Rong is conquered by another who will one day set Yong’An aflame?” My words trembled as I said this. “Even if that doesn’t happen, even if I want to believe that Siwang willbe different from his father, I have seen his vicious side. I know he is capable of terrible things—even if he’s never done such things to me. At the end of the day, Siwang is a prince. Men like him, like you, will always put their feelings before the feelings of others.”

There was a darkness in Siwang. I had seen it when he banished Lijian from the capital. I saw it in rare flashes when his perfect mask slipped in moments of rage, before he expertly reined himself in. Deep in the palace, under the ownership of the most powerful man in the kingdom, what would he do to me if one day I pushed his benevolence too far?

Childhood memories and years of companionship tethered him to me…. Was that enough?

?????:to accompany a king is like accompanying a tiger.

Yexue straightened himself. “Siwang and his father won’t let you walk away easily. Even if you bring them the first tiger of the season.”

“I know. But if Rong is capable of uniting the continent, then they will do it with or without me.”