Her Moon, My Mountain - Chapter 1

I had discovered that the prince was a woman.

The prince had also discovered that I had discovered she was a woman.

And so the two of us were now facing off in the back garden.

I knelt. She stood.

“Zhenniang.” Su Ji drew her crane-feather cloak closer around herself. Bathed in moonlight, she lowered her smiling eyes like a merciful bodhisattva. “You have kept up the act for so long. It must have been terribly hard on you.”

What a pity. She had a bodhisattva’s face and a viper’s heart.

After serving this living ancestor for three years, no one knew better than I did that beneath her harmless, devastatingly beautiful skin lurked a creature who was anything but kind.

This crisis of trust had begun with a dish of iced lychee pastry at tonight’s banquet.

I had grown careless.

I was far too used to watching what she ate.

Remembering that her monthly courses had arrived, I stared at the crystalline flakes of ice on the plate and said without thinking, “Your Highness should not indulge in cold food these days. Why not let this servant dispose of the dessert for you?”

She casually passed me the plate and even laughed. “If Zhenniang wanted a taste, why not simply say—”

Then she stopped.

She looked up at me, her gaze sharp as fire.

I shut my mouth, lowered my head, and began sweating like a waterfall.

We had both noticed the same two words: *these days*.

To the outside world, the Prince of Lin had always been “frail, chilled by the slightest breeze, and too weak to care for himself.” There was nothing odd about her avoiding cold food.

My unnecessary little qualifier was as good as a confession.

And who was Su Ji?

A ruthless woman who had fought her way out of a hellish beginning, deceived everyone about her sex for years, and climbed step by bloody step to her present height.

There was no fooling her. None.

When my excuses failed, she caught me and took me to the back garden for a personal interrogation.

She stopped pretending, too. Released from the low register she used in public, her voice carried its natural feminine warmth and elegance.

It was also sinister. And cold enough to freeze me solid.

Sweat poured down my back.

I stared at our shadows on the ground, my insides burning, my wits scattered, my head spinning through seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven kinds of panic… Wait.

My eyes flew wide.

The shadows on the ground were multiplying.

Once I retrieved the brain that had briefly fallen out of my skull, I sprang upright. “Your Highness, look out! Assassins!”

Everyone knew that I was one of the few female guards in the Prince of Lin’s Estate and that I enjoyed the prince’s absolute trust.

My martial prowess was unmatched. I was the greatest obstacle between Su Ji and her enemies.

—False.

In truth, I possessed nothing except the strength of an ox.

Su Ji had hired the finest instructor in the land, and after teaching me for two full years, he still had not managed to make me understand swordplay.

Therefore, whenever assassins paid one of their minor visits every three days or a major one every five, I relied on the only move that had never failed me.

Grab the prince and run!

The dozen assassins atop the wall stared in disbelief.

They were professionals, however.

No matter how ridiculous the sight, they would never forget to kill us.

And so I took the assassins for a moonlit run.

Normally I only needed to make half a circuit before reinforcements dropped from the sky.

Tonight, however, the trick did not seem to work.

The front courtyard blazed with lamps. Music rang out, and the banquet guests were still trading cups of wine.

Only the rear garden lay black and deathly still.

We were turtles in a jar.

And, as everyone also knew, our turtle—no, my master, His Highness the Prince of Lin—was as graceful as an orchid and jade tree, a charming beauty who made every maiden in the capital dream of him.

Unfortunately, he was a sickly invalid.

Even in midsummer, the prince wrapped himself in layer after layer. He could neither carry a load on his shoulder nor lift one in his hands. He possessed nothing except beauty.

—Also false.

Su Ji pressed lightly against my shoulder, signaling me to put her down.

Then she drew a sword from beneath her cloak and calmly stepped in front of me.

One against ten.

Before I could even see her blade move, cold light swept through the air and scattered falling blossoms everywhere.

She turned with her returning stroke. Blood splashed across the corner of one eye like a cinnabar beauty mark.

Her flawless face was pitiless, her figure that of an avenging demon.

This time the assassins did not have a chance to gape. Their heads hit the ground one after another.

The commotion finally drew attention.

The music stopped abruptly.

Su Ji looked at the wreckage strewn across the garden, then at the stickiness coating her hands, and frowned.

“Your… Highness…” I trembled and approached with care.

She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. Before the others could arrive, she turned her wrist, laid the sword across her own arm, and cut without so much as blinking.

Blood instantly dyed her snow-white cloak scarlet.

Then she shoved the dripping sword into my hands.

Me: “…”

I gripped it in confusion and was about to ask what she meant when a weight settled on my shoulder.

Su Ji had collapsed against me.

Her jade crown came loose. Ink-black hair spilled across half my body as she bowed her head, her faint breath brushing my ear, delicate and helpless.

Me: “…”

I steadied my theatrical master. Threads of agarwood fragrance mingled with the heavy scent of blood and flooded my nose, an intoxicating perfume.

The estate guards dropped to their knees in a great clatter.

Clutching the wound on her arm, Su Ji leaned most of her weight on me. She looked pale and fragile, but had lost none of her authority.

Her cold gaze swept the courtyard. “A pack of useless fools. If Zhenniang had not been here today, would you have come merely to collect this prince’s corpse?”

The poor guards, each chosen through layer after layer of rigorous selection, looked ready to smash their own heads against the ground and die of shame.

Me: “…”

And that was how I earned a promotion to first-class personal guard for saving my master.