The Princess's Substitute - Chapter 2

“I can’t sleep.” After tossing and turning for a while, Dongmei finally spoke.

“Mm,” Qiuju answered. “We spent the whole journey frightened out of our wits. Now we’re settled, and we still can’t sleep.”

“Sister Chunlan, you entered the palace the year before last, didn’t you?” Dongmei poked her head out from under the covers. She had always admired Chunlan’s command of poetry and books.

Qiuju kicked her through the bedding, warning her not to bring up painful subjects.

They began talking about how they had come to the palace and where their homes were. It was the usual story: disaster, calamity, families separated by death or distance.

“I miss home. Will we ever go back to Great Liang?” Dongmei choked out.

After a long silence, Qiuju patted her back and told her to sleep.

Moonlight fell through the window onto my face. I opened my eyes.

The moon looked no different here than it did in Liang.

Home. I did not seem to have such a place to return to.

I had been sold into the palace at nine.

Because I was about Princess Fengning’s age, I was sent to Chaoyang Palace to be her playmate.

The story went that she had been born clutching a gold phoenix pendant. The emperor had summoned an eminent monk expressly to name her.

After circling Chaoyang Palace three times, the monk stroked his beard and smiled. “The morning sun rises, the golden phoenix comes; from this day forth, peace reigns beneath heaven.”

Delighted, the emperor bestowed the title Fengning upon her and cherished her like a pearl in his palm.

The princess had been willful since childhood. Serving her meant no small amount of suffering.

Yet I was profoundly grateful.

Not to her. To the human broker who had sold me into the palace.

Chaoyang Palace glittered with gold and jade. Even a lowly maid could wear fine silk and jewels and eat good food.

Outside its walls, droughts and floods came one after another. The dead lay everywhere, and disease followed. I could count the people still breathing in my village on two hands.

When the broker came to buy people, it took me a great deal of effort to make him understand that I wanted to sell myself.

He paid fifty copper coins. I kept ten and pressed the other forty into the hands of A-Niu, the boy next door.

A-Niu shook his head furiously and grabbed a sledge taller than himself, ready to beat the broker with it.

“This is to repay you for finding a doctor for my mother,” I insisted. “Use the rest to buy her a coffin.”

His eyes and the tip of his nose turned red together. “Don’t go. I’ll take on more work. We only need ten more coins to bury your mother.”

I pushed his hand back. “And then?”

Then we would end up like everyone else in the village. Even if he escaped starvation and disease, in a few years the men collecting forced laborers would drag him away. A girl alone like me would be at anyone’s mercy.

He began to sob, harder than he had when word of his father’s death came back from the frontier.

Princess Fengning often sat on her swing and sighed, lamenting that she was a bird in a cage, a carp in a pond.

When she caught me staring blankly, she kicked me hard with her embroidered shoe. “Ignorant country girl. I might as well play music to an ox.”

I really did not understand.

If she had the slightest idea what it was like outside, she would have begged them to lock Chaoyang Palace’s gates and keep them locked.

Her complaints reached people who saw an opportunity. They began inventing excuses for banquets to coax a smile from her—and secure the imperial connections they coveted.

It was at a spring banquet that the princess met Du Zhilin, the chief minister’s eldest son, who had just placed second in the imperial examinations.

Handsome and gracious, with a gentleness like polished jade, Du Zhilin captured her heart. The Noble Consort and the emperor were very pleased with him too.

Had the King of Qiang not torn the lovers apart, perhaps we would have been busy preparing the wedding of the princess and her husband-to-be.

Steady breathing came from behind me. I closed my eyes too.

I had heard that the Du family favored peace. Du Zhilin was no exception.

What had he said on the day the princess received Northern Qiang’s marriage proposal?