Chapter Text
In accordance with the sacred customs of Leng, God-Empress Cixi took two husbands upon her ascension to the throne: one of YiTish descent, broad-shouldered and as solemn as the mountain ranges that crowned the eastern cliffs, who commanded the armies; and another of Lengii blood, silver-tongued and sea-eyed, who ruled the imperial fleets. One husband belonged to the earth, the other to the sea, and Cixi stood between them like heaven itself.
During her reign, she birthed seven daughters, and the poets of Leng claimed each child inherited not merely beauty, but dominion over a fragment of nature's soul. They named the eldest princess Meiyun after the clouds, for she was born during the monsoon season beneath thunderheads heavy with silver rain. Even as a child, she carried herself with the distant serenity of storm clouds gathering beyond the horizon, and she rarely raised her voice, but when angered, her temper was as sharp as lightning splitting cedarwood.
The second daughter was Haiqin, named for the ocean winds that sang through the shell-studded caverns under the palace cliffs on the night of her birth, and she was the chaos to her older sister's calm. Haiqin laughed too loudly, ran too quickly, and vanished too often into places forbidden to princesses. Her hair tumbled down her back in constant disarray, and her skin bronzed under the sun, no matter how diligently her handmaidens tried to shield her with silken parasols. She loved sailors more than courtiers and spoke with the untamed confidence of the crashing surf. There were even stories of her climbing the palace rooftops during typhoons simply to feel the rain strike her face.
Third came Zhilan, named for the rare dark orchids that grew deep within Leng's mist-veiled mountains. Even as a child, servants trembled at her attention, never knowing whether she might reward them with impossible generosity or reduce them to tears for her own entertainment. Zhilan loved beautiful things fiercely, but in the possessive manner of collectors preserving rare specimens. She kept songbirds in gilded cages within her chambers and once ordered a gardener whipped for allowing one of her favourite orchids to wilt, but there was an undeniable magnetism to her cruelty, the same terrible allure possessed by venomous flowers or predators cloaked in splendour. Among the sisters, she was perhaps the most feared, though never the least loved.
Born under a comet blazing red across the heavens, the fourth princess, Fengxian, inherited fire accordingly. She was quick-tempered, ambitious, and impossible to command. Tutors despaired of her because she questioned everything, from military strategy to the rites of the gods themselves, but no one could deny her brilliance, for Fengxian could defeat seasoned generals at strategy games before she reached her fifteenth year and made sure everyone knew it.
The strangest of them all was Xuefei, as silent as the snow she was named for, prone to disappearing for hours into the hidden corners of the palace libraries. She possessed a fondness for poetry, astronomy, and the old prophecies whispered by temple priestesses. Servants claimed she walked silently enough to frighten spirits, and that there was always something distant about her, as though some portion of her soul wandered elsewhere beyond mortal reach.
Then came the sixth princess, the first spring bloom after winter frost. Chunhua was warmth incarnate, embracing all she knew with reckless abandon, her cheeks forever flushed pink with mirth, and her hands perpetually stained with paint or flower pollen. She kissed stable boys, kitchen maids, foreign emissaries, and wounded stray cats with the same affection, and laughter followed her like perfume followed incense smoke.
Last was pear-blossom Lihua, the youngest jewel of the imperial household and beloved of all her sisters. She was born during the flowering season when the pear orchards upon the western terraces exploded into clouds of white petals so thick they resembled snowfall, and the court astrologers declared that the heavens themselves had bent low to kiss her cradle. She was endlessly compassionate, weeping over injured cranes and dying butterflies, spending hours tending the palace gardens with the old eunuch gardeners, and loving with the wholehearted ferocity only the youngest child in a cherished family could afford.
As children, the seven sisters moved through the grounds like a flock of brightly feathered birds, impossible to separate for long. The imperial palace itself sprawled across the cliffs overlooking the Jade Sea, an endless labyrinth of crimson pavilions, sweeping roofs of glazed green tile, moon bridges arching over koi ponds, and courtyards perfumed with incense and flowering plum trees. Golden bells hung from every eave and chimed whenever the ocean winds swept inland. At dawn, everything glowed amber under the rising sun, and at night, lanterns reflected in the black marble waterways until the halls appeared to float among the stars.
The sisters turned their vast home into a kingdom of games, playing hide-and-seek amongst bamboo groves taller than themselves, where sunlight fractured green through the leaves and painted their faces in shifting patterns. Haiqin climbed every wall and roof available to her, while Fengxian cheated shamelessly at every game. Chunhua once convinced the others to liberate several dozen silk moths from the royal weaving chambers simply because she pitied them, resulting in mayhem as the shimmering white insects flooded the halls with the servants running hot in pursuit.
During the summer festivals, they dressed in silks dyed every colour nature could conjure, and stole sweet rice cakes from the kitchens, hiding behind the dragon boats with feet dangling over the water as they devoured sesame pastries with sticky fingers. At night, they gathered atop the highest palace balcony, wrapped in shared blankets to watch the fleet lanterns drift across the sea while Haiqin swore she would someday sail beyond the edge of the world and Xuefei regaled them with the newest ghost story she'd overheard.
The palace gardens became battlefields for imaginary wars. Armed with willow branches as swords, the sisters divided themselves into rival kingdoms. Fengxian naturally declared herself empress each time and launched elaborate military campaigns involving stolen banners and meticulously drawn maps. Haiqin preferred ambushes from rooftops, Chunhua inevitably abandoned the game halfway through because she befriended the opposing side, and all the while, little Lihua followed whichever sister seemed most exciting in the moment, trailing after them with grass-stained skirts and petals tangled in her ink-black hair.
It was Zhilan who invented their cruellest games of all, once managing to convince them all that the western wing of the palace was haunted by the spirit of a murdered eunuch, only to hide there herself, draped entirely in funeral silk so that when the sisters entered carrying candles, she emerged pale-faced from the darkness and sent them all shrieking back through the corridors. Zhilan laughed so hard afterward that she collapsed into the lotus pond.
But for all her trivial cruelties, she adored her sisters in her own peculiar, vicious way, and when some of the palace boys drowned Lihua's cat in the pond, she arranged for their ceremonial robes to be soaked in fish oil before an important festival, leaving them humiliated before half the imperial court.
When monsoon rains descended upon Leng in silver curtains, the sisters raced barefoot through the covered corridors while thunder rolled over the sea. They floated paper lanterns down flooded garden streams and dared each other into abandoned sections of the palace where ancient statues gathered moss in the dark. Sometimes they even snuck into the Hall of Ancestors, kneeling before towering golden effigies of dead empresses while Xuefei solemnly recited old fables until everyone frightened themselves enough to flee back to the safety of the main halls.
There were more peaceful moments too, afternoons spent sprawled together upon embroidered carpets while scholars lectured nearby, only half-listening as Chunhua stained their nails with the vibrant poppy-orange pigment of balsam. Winter evenings were spent curled around bronze braziers while snow drifted pale beyond silk windows, Meiyun reading aloud from ancient epics while Lihua slept with her head in Fengxian's lap and her feet kicked up in Xuefei's.
In those years, they believed themselves eternal. The palace was endless, the sea eternal, and the gods watchful and benevolent above them. They could not imagine a world in which one sister might stand without the others beside her, but childhood was seldom infinite, particularly not for daughters of the crown, and even the grandest of kingdoms could not preserve innocence forever.
One by one, their games were swallowed by duty, silk ribbons replaced with veils heavy with pearls, and their names ceased belonging solely to themselves. Princesses, after all, were not raised for freedom. They were raised for diplomacy, bloodlines, and treaties signed in ink and sealed in daughters.
Thus, the daughters of Empress Cixi were scattered across the known world like petals torn loose in a storm.
As heir to the God-Empress herself, Meiyun remained in Leng to eventually ascend its throne, and in accordance with ancient custom, she took two husbands of YiTish and Lengii descent each, so that together they formed the balance expected of imperial consorts.
Haiqin was wed to a merchant-prince of Qarth whose fleets controlled trade routes stretching from Asshai to Old Volantis, and she departed Leng laughing even as her sisters wept upon the harbour steps, draped in sea-green silks with salt wind already tangling her hair. Rumour later claimed she became beloved amongst the sailors of Qarth for drinking stronger liquor than most men and personally accompanying voyages through pirate waters.
Zhilan was given to an elderly magister of Volantis whose family commanded entire legions of slaves and merchant fleets blackening the Summer Sea. Many pitied her when the arrangement was announced, but the princess herself merely smiled that terrible, beautiful smile of hers throughout the wedding rites, and within five years, it was claimed it was she rather than her husband who truly ruled their household, their servants, and perhaps several influential corners of Volantis besides.
For Fengxian, a match was brokered with a minor cousin of the Prince of Pentos, and she swept through the city like wildfire, transforming candlelit salons into battlegrounds with nothing more than her wit. Pentos adored spectacle, and the fourth princess of Leng gave it to them abundantly. Her husband, in contrast, was mild-tempered and perpetually overwhelmed, and seemed to regard her less as a wife and more as some magnificent natural disaster he had been blessed enough to survive.
Xuefei departed furthest of all, carried beyond the Jade Sea and the known trade routes to one of the distant Summer Isles, where the waters shone impossibly blue, and the air smelled perpetually of salt, fruit blossoms, and rain-warmed earth. She was wed to a princeling of one of the islands, who appeared as though he'd been carved entirely from polished jet.
The sisters mourned her departure most deeply, for the Summer Isles felt unimaginably distant from Leng, but Xuefei accepted her fate with that same eerie serenity she had shown in everything. Letters from her arrived infrequently afterward, written upon fragrant parchment and filled with descriptions of endless sunsets and singing birds bright as gemstones.
To everyone's astonishment, it was Chunhua who defied expectation. Though dozens of worthy suitors petitioned for her hand, she was irrevoably in love with her childhood playmate, the son of a minor minister whose family possessed little beyond crumbling ancestral estates and an embarrassingly poor talent for politics. The match caused outrage within court circles, but their empress mother relented because the girl wept openly before the court for the first and only time in her life. In the end, Chunhua remained in Leng with her beloved husband, scandalously happy and entirely unconcerned by whispers of wasted opportunity.
And then there was Lihua. Sweet Lihua who watched her sisters vanish one after another until the vast palace seemed unbearably lonely. By the time her own betrothal was arranged, she already knew what princesses were bred for, and there was no protest when she was informed that she was to marry Prince Sicong of Yi Ti, descended from a much lesser imperial branch. He possessed neither immense armies nor vast wealth, but his bloodline carried ancient prestige, and he had travelled all the way to Leng to seek her out.
He had chosen her, and so she let herself be chosen, and perhaps the gods, who so rarely granted princesses kindness, took pity upon her for a time.
The prince arrived during the flowering season, under clouds of drifting pear blossoms that tangled in the sleeves of his robes. He was not devastatingly handsome in the way songs praised men to be, nor particularly imposing, but he possessed gentle eyes, warm brown like steeped tea, and a smile that appeared easily and often. He spoke constantly, about everything and nothing alike, filling silences Lihua herself never knew how to bridge. He told stories over supper, recited terrible poetry with complete sincerity, and brought her absurd little gifts collected from marketplaces and ports across Yi Ti—painted fans, sugar candies shaped like birds, and tiny glass animals no larger than fingertips.
Most importantly, he chose to remain in Leng for her sake.
"You love this place too much to survive leaving it," he told her once in a tone that suggested no resentment or grudge. "And though I wish to be your home, I cannot take you away from your first one."
Their marriage was not the sort immortalized in epics of ruinous passion, but it became infinitely rarer amongst noble unions, a companionship built upon gentleness, and how lucky was she to have been given such a gift, for Sicong sought her opinions during every discussion and learned precisely how she preferred her tea without ever needing to ask.
Their first son was born in autumn, under skies of burnished gold and crimson, when the palace gardens filled with the scent of ripening persimmons and drifting chrysanthemum petals, and they named him Yize. Then, two years later, came Haoran, named for vastness and immensity, and he entered the world determined to embody it, loud enough even in infancy to consume every corner of the imperial household with his presence.
Motherhood suited Lihua with unequivocal ease, and the palace servants often found her wandering the gardens carrying one infant balanced upon her hip while the other clung sleepily to her shoulder, because she refused to hand her sons away merely for appearances' sake. She sang to them in half-whispers while rocking them beside open windows overlooking the sea, let Yize grasp her pearls with sticky fingers, and endured Haoran's screaming tantrums with endless patience, pressing kisses into his damp curls until he calmed.
Sometimes she carried them through the same corridors where she and her sisters had once run barefoot through summer rain, showing them koi ponds and moon bridges and hidden alcoves tucked behind flowering vines. Sicong followed often at her side, talking endlessly as always with one of the boys perched on his shoulders, the little boy shrieking delightedly whenever he pretended to stagger.
There were evenings when the four of them sat together in the palace gardens while cicadas hummed in the darkness and sea winds carried the scent of salt and jasmine through the trees. Sicong would read aloud from some dramatized romance, embellishing terribly for effect while Yize listened wide-eyed and Haoran attempted repeatedly to eat the scroll.
The palace halls of Leng, which had grown eerily silent with the marriages and departures of Empress Cixi's daughters, slowly filled once more with the noise of children. Laughter echoed again under lacquered ceilings painted with golden dragons and celestial maidens, and tiny slippered feet thundered through corridors once traversed only by solemn officials. Toys carved from jade and sandalwood littered the courtyards, and the place became alive in a way it had not since the seven sisters themselves had ruled it as children.
Chunhua was responsible for much of it. She visited often, far more than propriety truly permitted for a married woman, arriving in extravagant bursts of colour and noise with her husband trailing helplessly behind and their seven children swarming like ducklings. Her daughters possessed their aunt Haiqin's penchant for climbing everything climbable, while her sons possessed their mother's alarming gift for charming servants into allowing behaviour that ought to have been forbidden.
Chunhua herself merely laughed whenever Meiyun's ministers complained that the palace was becoming unruly again. "Palaces are meant to be unruly," she liked to say. "Otherwise they become tombs."
As Lihua had been the youngest amongst her sisters, so too were her sons the youngest amongst the sprawling constellation of imperial grandchildren. Yize and Haoran became treasured playthings to their older cousins, who delighted in hauling the little princes about. The boys tolerated it with remarkable enthusiasm, adoring the attention whenever the older children included them in their schemes.
Yize followed his older cousins everywhere with solemn devotion, his hands perpetually sticky with sweet bean paste or ink. He loved stories more than games and often sat cross-legged beside visiting relatives listening with enormous dark eyes as they recounted tales of distant lands. Haoran, meanwhile, inherited wilderness from Haiqin and Fengxian's branch of the family tree. He bit people when angered and once managed to smuggle a baby fox into the palace nursery. No one discovered the creature's existence until it stole dried fish directly from an ambassador's ceremonial luncheon.
Lihua found herself laughing more during those years than she had since childhood. She would sit under flowering pear trees with embroidery forgotten in her lap while the children darted around her in shrieking packs. Sometimes the older cousins balanced her sons upon their shoulders like sacks of grain, while the boys screamed delightedly enough to startle birds from the rooftops. Her husband always encouraged the nonsense rather than stopping it, joining their games when permitted and allowing the children to climb him like a tree or pretending to perish dramatically whenever struck by their makeshift weapons.
And though the other sisters never brightened the palace with their presence as they once had, their letters did instead. Letters from Volantis scented with heavy perfumes and written in Zhilan's elegant hand, ea-stained letters from Haiqin filled with crude sketches of exotic ports, lengthy philosophical ramblings from Xuefei copied alongside fragments of prophecy, and Fengxian's correspondence that read like declarations of war against everyone irritating her.
For a little while, happiness settled over Lihua and once again made her feel infinite.
Then Sicong went hunting.
It was such an ordinary thing, a minor expedition into the eastern forests with several noblemen and palace retainers. It was the sort of excursion he had embarked upon dozens of times before. The arrow struck his shoulder when a startled stag burst unexpectedly through the trees, causing another rider's aim to falter. It was a foolish accident, embarrassing more than dangerous, and the physicians assured everyone he would recover swiftly.
"It missed anything vital," they insisted while washing his blood from their hands. "He will heal in no time."
For a day, it even seemed true. Sicong remained conscious, smiling weakly whenever Lihua fussed over him, making jests about how impassioned everyone had become over a mere scratch and how she needn't hover at his bedside like an anxious nursemaid.
He passed before dawn that very night, and suddenly Lihua was a widow at four-and-twenty.
The world afterward felt wrong in ways too vast to articulate. The palace halls still existed. The sea still crashed against the cliffs. The children still laughed and cried and reached for her, but everything was touched by absence now, empty around the shape Sicong had once occupied.
Grief existed most of all in the small moments, when she'd turn to speak to him before remembering that he was no longer there. When she'd wake in the night and feel only empty sheets beside her. Worst of all was watching Yize proudly show a drawing to a room where his father no longer stood waiting to praise it, or hearing Haoran ask innocently when Father would return from the forest because he was too young to understand death.
Lihua dressed thereafter in mourning white, the colour of death in Leng, her dark hair unadorned by jewels. She withdrew almost entirely from court life. Festivals continued without her, councils convened in her absence, and musicians played in distant halls while she remained secluded within quiet chambers overlooking the sea.
But she still had her boys, and they became the only things tethering her to the world.
Yize curled next to her at night because he, too, missed his father, and Haoran climbed stubbornly into her lap whenever he sensed her tears approaching, pressing his hands against her eyes as if to halt their progression. Lihua poured every remaining fragment of herself into them, brushing their hair each morning, telling stories before bed, and holding them so tightly sometimes it felt like she could shield them from the world itself through the sheer force of love.
Her hundred days of mourning had scarcely ended when the proposals began. The court reminded her gently that she remained young, beautiful, and politically valuable. A widowed princess of imperial blood was not permitted to simply retreat from the world. Marriage was duty. Marriage was strategy. Marriage was sacrifice.
Once again, her life ceased belonging to herself.
Suitors emerged from every direction like vultures scenting vulnerability, ambitious courtiers, distant princes, and widowers seeking mothers for existing heirs. There was even an elderly YiTish general, already burdened with three dead wives and a terrifying number of children, who expressed interest in "a gentle companion for his later years."
Lihua rejected every single one, citing her sons each time. "My children are young," she would say calmly while ministers exchanged frustrated glances. "They require their mother."
She had already given enough of herself away, and any new husband would demand pieces of her, too. His household, his ambitions, and his children would always come before hers. Her boys were all she had left of the life she once loved, and in loving them, she could still love Sicong.
It was her fault then, because in holding them close, she'd damned them.
There were those at court who had grown frustrated by the way the youngest princess of Leng clung stubbornly to widowhood when she could still be traded for influence. There were men who looked at her and saw not grief or motherhood, but a wasted opportunity. A remarriage would strengthen the realm and bind foreign courts more tightly to Leng, but so long as Yize and Haoran remained the center of her world, she would never agree.
Surely there were those willing to remedy that, and so, four moons after Sicong's death, her boys were taken from her too.
Even afterward, there was a desperate, wounded corner of her mind that refused to believe they had truly died naturally. Little boys did not simply fall asleep beside their mother and fail to wake the next morning. Not both of them together.
Lihua remembered the morning in fragments. The pale dawn filtering through silk curtains, and the unsettling silence. Haoran always woke before sunrise to demand attention, while Yize always ended up tucked so tightly against her that it felt like he was trying to crawl back into her.
But that morning, they lay exactly as they had been placed the night before, Yize curled on his side with one hand tucked under his cheek, and Haoran sprawled untidily atop the blankets. They looked perfectly peaceful, if not for the unnatural coldness.
Children ought to be warm, but they were not.
There was nothing visibly wrong with them, no blood or wounds, merely cold hands and still little hearts. The physicians muttered about weak lungs and hidden sicknesses, and Lihua hated them for it. Her sons had been obstacles, standing valiantly between ambitious men and the political future they desired for her, and now they were gone.
While she had borne her husband's death with the grace expected of her standing, she could not survive this additional loss so elegantly. She wept until blood vessels burst scarlet across her eyes, and servants found her collapsed beside the boys' funeral altar, still clutching their robes against her chest.
The nieces and nephews who once filled the palace with laughter crept through her chambers carrying flowers and offerings left silently at her bedside, but Lihua could not bear to look at them, for they only reminded her of the unbearable absence of her own sons.
Her grief became monstrous then, devouring everything around it. It followed her through every corridor of the palace. She saw Yize reaching for her hand in every crowd and heard Haoran's shrill laughter in distant courtyards, only to remember abruptly that no sound would ever come from him again.
The world itself had become unrecognizable, and then Westeros came for what little remained of her.
The message arrived from across the Summer Sea, carried by envoys and sealed in foreign wax stamped with a three-headed dragon. The aging king of Westeros sought a second bride for one of his sons, and one of Leng's diplomats stationed at the foreign court had apparently suggested Lihua as a suitable match.
Suitable as if she were a bolt of silk to be traded between kingdoms.
By then, Empress Cixi had long since joined the ancestors, and Meiyun ruled from the Jade Throne in her place. It was she who came to Lihua's chambers carrying the news, for even in this time of great sorrow, none of her other sisters had managed to make the journey to mourn with her.
Lihua sat beside the open window, still dressed in mourning white, despite the court's increasing disapproval, and her hair hung loose and unadorned down her back. She did not rise when her eldest sister entered, and for a long while, neither of them spoke.
Then Meiyun crossed the room to take her hands gently. "You know Mother had always wished to ally us with the greater world," she murmured. "She had her sights on Westeros even then, but when she was finding matches for us, its king was preoccupied with uniting his own lands. There was talk of rebellion and disapproval upon his choice of queen, so he had no need to seek alliances from distant shores when his own realm was in disarray."
Lihua stared silently at their joined hands, wondering how long it had been since they had sat like this. How long since Meiyun had brushed her hair while feeding her slices of sweet plum? Since Lihua had clung to her sleeve during storms? Since they had been merely sisters rather than empress and princess?
"But now his kingdom knows peace." Meiyun's tender voice made this all the more cruel. "This will be a favourable union. They call him a good king—King Daeron the Good—so surely his son will be so as well."
Lihua said nothing.
"The prince you are to marry has lost a wife, too. You know what that is like, do you not? We almost lost Chunhua with her fifth. Would you not wish to care for her children if it came to it?" Meiyun cupped her cheek and smoothed a strand of hair back from her forehead. "The prince has six children to mind, the youngest only an infant. Who better to love those poor children than you, who has so much love to give?"
She felt herself recoil at that. Not because the children themselves were undeserving—gods knew she pitied them already—but because Meiyun made it sound like love was an endless resource to be harvested from her without consequence. Lihua had already bled herself dry loving people the world kept stealing away.
"You accepted." It was not a question.
Her sister's silence was a response enough, a condemnation delivered with loving hands. Meiyun seemed impossibly distant from the girl she remembered, more statue than sister now, and for perhaps the first time in her life, Lihua felt forsaken.
"The agreements this could open—" Meiyun began carefully. "The trade routes alone would reshape our standing across the western seas."
"I do not care."
Meiyun faltered only briefly before continuing. "This alliance would secure generations of prosperity. Political influence beyond just Essos. Our merchants—"
"My husband is dead." Lihua glared at their joined hands again because she could no longer bear looking at her sister's face. "My sons are dead, and now you would send me across the world."
"It has already been decided. Please understand that I would not do this if it were not necessary."
Necessary.
Lihua hated the word. Of course, it was necessary. Everything demanded of princesses always was.
She thought suddenly of childhood then, of seven sisters vowing to protect one another from the cruelties of the world. How foolish children were.
Meiyun tightened her hold, desperate to bridge a distance neither of them knew how to cross anymore. "The prince is said to be kind and lonely. You will not be unloved there."
Lihua wondered if she could be any more unloved there in a foreign land than she was here in her own home, being sold off by her own sister. Every person she had ever loved was so impossibly far away, and now her grief was being taken from her too.
"He is not old or vile, if you fear that," Meiyun continued. "My envoy says he is only a few summers older than Sicong was. And he is the youngest son, a fourth son, not an heir. You will not be burdened with learning the politics of a future queen."
No, it would never come to that, anyway. Foreign queens were seldom tolerated in any land. They'd kill her before it came to that.
"He lives separately from his father's court. You will have your own halls there. Your own household. Your own place to make a home."
If Lihua had it in her to laugh, she would have, because all she could think was that they were sending her—a ghost—to replace another ghost. Surely those halls would never belong to her. They already belonged to a dead woman. Somewhere across the world, there existed chambers still carrying another wife's laughter, another mother's shadow over a cradle and hearth and dining table. There would be gowns preserved carefully away in carved chests, portraits hanging in corridors, and children who still remembered her embrace.
And into that absence, they intended to place Lihua like mortar filling a crack in stone.
Six grieving children who would look upon her and see only intrusion. She imagined them already, solemn-eyed and suspicious, watching her with resentment festering behind their courtesy. They would hate her for sleeping in their mother's chambers and standing beside their father, hate her for touching belongings that were not hers, hate her simply for existing where another woman ought to have remained.
They would be right to, of course, for the world had committed a theft beyond forgiveness.
As for the prince himself, it did not matter how kind they claimed he was. Kindness could not erase despair. He had lost a wife and required another. His young children needed tending, and his household needed a woman's hand, so they had selected Lihua to be his glorified nursemaid.
Surely he would look upon her and see merely a troublesome burden, and she would spend the rest of her life competing with a dead woman for a place she never wanted.
That was the thing about competing with ghosts. The ghosts always emerged victorious, for they made no mistakes, and all memories were often rubbed smooth by longing.
Lihua no longer possessed tears enough for this new misery, having exhausted them already upon funeral altars and burial robes, but the space between her ribs ached with want nonetheless.
"Do not make me go," she begged hoarsely. "This is my home. My boys are here. I cannot leave them behind. Please do not make me leave them behind."
When Meiyun looked at her, there was an exhaustion etched deeply under her regal composure, the terrible loneliness of women born into power, forever choosing between cruelty and necessity until eventually they became indistinguishable.
Slowly, she leaned forward and kissed Lihua's forehead, the gesture a final declaration of her decree. "It is already done. The matter has been agreed to."
Lihua felt a single tear trickle down her cheek.
"I promise you will learn to find happiness," her sister soothed with false confidence. "You were always a loving child. You will find new things to love. This will not be the end for you."
Then she was gone, sweeping out the door without a single glance back, leaving Lihua alone with her ghosts once more, and for one aching moment, she wished that she had been born different.
If she had been Haiqin, perhaps she would have laughed bitterly in the court's face and fled across the sea before anyone could stop her. If she had been Fengxian, she might have turned her grief into fury sharp enough to cut kingdoms apart. Zhilan would have poisoned every minister involved and slept peacefully afterward, and even strange, distant Xuefei might have vanished rather than submit.
She tried not to think of Chunhua's absence and the betrayal of it.
But Lihua was only Lihua. Soft-hearted Lihua. Obedient Lihua. Pear-blossom Lihua, delicate enough to bruise under every hand that reached for her. In the end, there was nothing left for her to do except embrace her fate with the humility expected of her, even as she allowed herself to be carried farther and farther away from home.