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The emperor shot Siwang a look of disdain. “Lifeng Fei, I hereby banish you and your family from Yong’An. You and your family will return to the Su’He region, where you were born. There you will think over your mistakes. You may return to Yong’An only if you change your mind and choose to marry my son. Do you understand?”

My heart sank. I looked at Father, whose head remained so low that I couldn’t see his reaction.

I’m sorry,I desperately wanted to tell him.I never meant for this to implicate you.

It was too late to change things now. This was the path I had chosen, so now I must walk it. Of course my recklessness would ensnare my family one way or another. It was naive of me to have hoped the emperor would spare them from bearing the weight of my actions.

I closed my eyes, knelt for the emperor for the last time, and bowed to receive this decree. “I…I understand.”

14

It snowed on the day my family was set to leave Yong’An. Feathery white flakes fell from the sky like specks of sugar.

I’d always loved the snow, and how it illuminated the gloomy winter days. I loved it the most on the days when our imperial teachers would allow the other kids to stay in the palace a little longer after our classes to play. It meant I got to see Fangyun for a few more hours, got to sit with her and hear her whisper news of Mother and Father and the world outside the palace. Gossip and rumors always delighted me, despite the nannies constantly telling me that the empress of all empresses should be above all this. I treasured these flickers of joy amid the monotonous gray of a life imprisoned.

Occasionally, if the emperor was free and in a fine mood, he’d come to judge our snowmen and award prizes for the best ones.

Years ago, before the pressure of being crown prince robbed Siwang of his childhood innocence, he spent two days in the gardens building an ice statue of an intricately scaled koi.

A symbol of fortune and luck. The emperor was so overjoyed byhis son’s creation that he rewarded him with a precious luminescent pearl. Which Siwang crafted into a hairpin, set in a crown of serpentine vines, and gave to me on my next birthday.

I had no idea where that hairpin was now. Like most of my things, I’d left it behind. The palace was the only life I had ever known, however that life had never felt like mine. It was temporary, and it was a cage. I didn’t need shiny memorabilia to remember my time behind those red walls, because the one thing I did want to remember, I couldn’t take with me. So I might as well bury him with the past.

When my carriage exited those iron gates and I watched the golden roofs of the heavenly pavilions grow smaller and smaller until they were specks in the distance, I knew this would be the last time I saw these lavish halls that had been my whole world for almost eighteen years.

After today, I would never see Yong’An again. Never see Siwang again.

Leaving was bittersweet. Sweet because I had gotten what I had prayed for. Bitter because regardless of how much I hated it, that palace was the only home I had ever known.

I’d never liked goodbyes, so I didn’t say them. Not to the nannies who’d raised me, not to the servant girls who’d become the closest things I had to friends outside of Siwang and my sister.

No goodbyes. Not even to Siwang, whom I had avoided up until my departure. I was afraid that the moment I saw him, everything would sink in, and that he would be the straw that broke my back.

I couldn’t risk tears. This was a seed I’d sown with my own hands, and there was no turning back now.

“Take that to the front yard,” Fangyun instructed the servants extricating our belongings from the family manor.

My sister was diligently picking up pieces of the life I’d shattered.

Only two years my senior, Fangyun had always felt so much older and more mature than I was. Some days, I wished Fate had placed the phoenix’s mark between my sister’s brows instead of mine.

She wouldn’t have crumbled under the pressure. She would have thrived and been the empress that Rong deserved, that Siwang deserved.

Our house was loud with chaos, soldiers stomping, hastily packing up my family’s belongings to be returned to the emperor. Mother was crying while Father sat in a corner, praying.

Neither Mother nor Father had said a single word to me since I’d come home. I wondered if they would ever forgive me for ruining their lives here in the capital.

You are doing it for them,I tried to remind myself. If I didn’t remove myself from this path, the capital would go up in flames, and they would burn with it.

“Be careful with that statue—it’s solid jade. If you drop it, the emperor will have your head,” Grand Eunuch Su instructed, watching everything carefully, ticking things off the list in his hand.

This house, along with most things inside, had been bestowed by the emperor, gifts he was now taking back.

A small act of pettiness, though in the grand scheme of things, it was nothing.

I had broken the heart of the emperor’s favorite son and stolen his fabled fate to becomeemperor of all emperors.I wouldn’t be surprised if worse punishments had crossed his mind, and the only reason I was still alive was because Siwang had to physically hold his father back.

A life in exile was too easy a sentence—we all knew this. Hence, wehad to leave the city as soon as possible, before the emperor changed his mind.