A Robe to Share - Chapter 1

I was only fourteen the year I entered the palace.

The emperor took one look at me and seemed to develop a splitting headache.

“Who sent her here?”

Zhong Ze demanded answers from everyone around him, finally fixed his gaze on the chief eunuch, and kicked him without mercy, leaving a shoeprint on his backside.

An old hand at this, the chief eunuch rolled obligingly across the floor. “Your Majesty! Prince Tang sent her!”

“…Do I look like a lecher?” Zhong Ze was so angry he laughed. “I’m in my thirties, and he sends me a fourteen-year-old. Oh, yes, and last time it was a fifty-four-year-old…”

His face suddenly stiffened.

He had remembered a very peculiar conversation…

Prince Tang: Your Majesty, the lady may be fifty-four, but she plays the pipa lute beautifully!

Zhong Ze: Get out! Fifty-four, my arse! Why not four, while you’re at it?

Prince Tang, to himself: Ah. His Majesty likes fourteen-year-olds.

And that was how I ended up in the palace.

Zhong Ze looked as though he had swallowed a ton of something unmentionable.

“Hmph!”

With a cold flick of his sleeve, he left my quarters.

I was still standing there in a daze when, barely half an incense stick later, he returned to my hall at the head of a great procession.

“What’s your name?” He did his best to control his temper and crouched down to ask me patiently.

“Su Ziyi.” I dared not refuse to answer.

“How did you end up being sent here by that Tang Song fellow?”

“My mother starved to death. My stepfather’s family said they wouldn’t feed a useless mouth, and threw me out. P-Prince Tang gave me food. He said I wouldn’t go hungry once I came here.”

Zhong Ze narrowed his eyes and fell silent for a moment. Then he said quietly, “…You’ll be the last.”

Two days later, I heard from the maids that Prince Tang had thought the emperor shared his appreciation for beautiful women. Unfortunately, His Majesty had informed him in no uncertain terms that he was to stop sending people into the palace.

Prince Tang expressed his regret.

The regretful prince then returned to his fief and took two new concubines that very night.

Strangely enough, Zhong Ze had said nothing to me about rules before he left.

I never saw the instructing matron Prince Tang had told me to expect, either.

At first, I only dared tiptoe cautiously around the inner palace. A week later, I was running wild in broad daylight. The place was so deserted that even birds were a rare sight.

Qilan, the personal maid assigned to me, said His Majesty had worked so hard at governing these past years that he had practically lost all interest in women. His mother had died of anger while the late emperor’s consorts fought for favor. The other consorts had not been blessed with long lives, either. By the time the present emperor ascended the throne, the grass in the inner palace was a meter high.

Two older girls had come to the palace before me. One had been chosen as his principal wife while his mother was still alive, which made her the present empress. Her Majesty, however, had a chivalrous heart and boundless ambition. On the day Zhong Ze took the throne, she dashed off a leave request with a grand stroke of her brush and happily set off to roam the martial world. Over the years, the people she had helped in her heroic exploits could apparently fill half the capital.

The other girl had come from a small foreign state that had practically sobbed and howled its way into sending her here. The poor place had suffered a tsunami that year; more than half of it vanished in an instant. Its elderly chief was left dumbfounded. With no other choice, he sent his only daughter to seek refuge in our country with their people.

The foreign princess certainly tried her best. She wept, made scenes, threatened to hang herself, deployed her beauty and her suffering, and tried every trick she knew. The only thing left was to climb into Zhong Ze’s bed in the middle of the night.

As for Zhong Ze, he went from refusing outright, to being slightly tempted when he heard that their weapons were very good, to being completely won over by the news that their braised pork in sauce was unrivaled. That very evening, he happily pulled the clothes she was trying to lower back over her shoulders and remarked with studied casualness, “Hmm… I’ve thought it over. Your people really are in a sorry state. You may stay. …Oh, and that cook who makes the braised pork can stay in our imperial kitchens, too. Poor fellow.”

His great task accomplished, he ran back to the Hall of Diligent Governance, thoroughly pleased with himself.

Honestly, I had no idea whether that cook deserved anyone’s pity. But the foreign princess, who couldn’t even compete with a plate of braised pork, certainly did.

Perhaps she had come to terms with it. She threw herself into cooking and worked until her braised pork was even better than the cook’s. She never made it for the emperor, though. Not once.

Whenever she went out, a crowd of restaurant cooks would apparently be waiting at the palace gates, hoping to become her apprentices. In a way, she had found another route to being the center of everyone’s attention.

As for me…

Perhaps Zhong Ze really hadn’t decided what to do with me. And here he was, in his thirties, without a single imperial heir. Whenever he held court, the instant an elderly official from the Ministry of Rites so much as opened his mouth, His Majesty would develop a headache and practically roll off the dragon throne and back to his Hall of Diligent Governance.

Somehow, I had become the youngest mistress in the palace.

Everyone in the inner palace let me run wherever I pleased.

Sometimes, if I was lucky enough to bump into the foreign princess, she would bring me something she had been experimenting with in the imperial kitchens.

I am not exaggerating: even her experiments were a hundred times better than anything I had ever eaten.

If she hadn’t been busy teaching other people to cook, I could have clung to her leg all day.