CHAPTER ONE : The Prince No One Dared Love

The capital city of the Zhu Dynasty stretched beneath a sky of hammered bronze, the autumn sun casting long shadows over vermillion walls and golden rooftops. Merchants hollered in the eastern market, children chased pigeons near the temple steps, and old scholars debated philosophy over cups of bitter tea. It was an ordinary morning for the city of Tianjing — except that it was not ordinary at all.

It was the morning after the Fourth Prince had nearly killed seventeen palace guards.

Word traveled fast in the capital, the way fire travels across dry grass, hungrily, indiscriminately, consuming everything in its path. By the time the palace maids carried their first trays of breakfast to the inner quarters, every soul within the imperial walls already knew: Zhu Longyin's eyes had gone gray again.

Lady Chen Yufang, the seventeenth fiancée of the Fourth Prince, was seen fleeing the Eastern Compound in the dead of night, wearing only one embroidered slipper, her elaborate hairpiece dangling from a single pin. She had lasted exactly four days and three nights — the longest of all seventeen women, a record she had not intended to set, and one she found absolutely no pride in. She arrived at her father's doorstep breathless, trembling, and with a very strong opinion about the institution of imperial engagement that she planned to carry to her grave.

In the Hall of Morning Calm, Emperor Zhu Chenghao sat behind his desk buried beneath mountains of state scrolls, rubbing his temple with two fingers in the particular way he only did when something involved his fourth son.

"How many guards?" he asked, his voice remarkably measured for a man whose fourth son had turned the Eastern Compound into a battlefield.

"Seventeen, Your Majesty," reported the chief eunuch, Head Eunuch Peng Anfu, bowing so low his forehead nearly touched his knees. "None fatally wounded. Prince Longyin regained himself before—"

"Before he finished," the Emperor said. It was not a question. He exhaled slowly. "And the girl?"

"Lady Chen has returned to her family estate. Her father has sent a letter respectfully withdrawing the engagement, citing..." Peng Anfu hesitated.

"Cite it," the Emperor said.

"'Incompatibility of constitution, Your Majesty.'"

A long silence filled the hall. Then, from behind a lacquered screen in the corner, came the sound of soft, deliberate laughter — low and warm, like a coal still glowing beneath ash. The Empress Dowager Zhu Ruilán pushed aside the screen partition, settling her small, dignified frame into the chair beside the Emperor's desk. She was seventy-one years old and moved like someone who had decided, very long ago, that the world could wait for her.

"Incompatibility of constitution," she repeated, tasting the words with great amusement. "When I was young we called that running away." She picked up a candied jujube from the tray beside her and chewed it thoughtfully. "She lasted longer than the girl before her. The one who hid in the kitchen pantry."

"Mother," the Emperor said.

"I'm being factual, Chenghao, not unkind." Empress Dowager Ruilán folded her hands in her lap and looked at her son with eyes that had watched decades of palace scheming and still managed to retain the clarity of someone who found it all faintly ridiculous. "The child needs a proper wife. Not these decorated vases who think marrying a prince means a lifetime of jewelry and favors. Someone with spine. Someone who won't flee at the first sign of difficulty."

"Seventeen engagements suggest that person does not exist," the Emperor said.

"Seventeen engagements suggest we have been looking in the wrong gardens." The Empress Dowager smiled, reached for another jujube, and said nothing more, which meant she had already decided on something. The Emperor had long ago learned that when his mother went quiet with that particular smile, she had already decided everything.

In the Eastern Compound — a sprawling, gorgeous, and perpetually half-abandoned mansion within the palace walls — the Fourth Prince, Zhu Longyin, sat alone in the courtyard.

He was cleaning ink from his hands with a damp cloth, because before the episode last night, he had been painting. A half-finished landscape still sat on the stone table beside him: mountains, a river, and a small boat carrying a figure too small to name. His brushwork was precise and deeply feeling — the kind of painting that made people unexpectedly sad without knowing why.

He was twenty-four years old, and he was, by any accounting, breathtaking to look at. Tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of build that came not from vanity but from years of genuine warfare, he held himself with a stillness that most people mistook for arrogance. His features were sharp and clean — a high, defined jaw, a straight nose, dark brows that sat low and serious over eyes that were, at this moment, their natural color: deep, liquid black, warm as river water in summer.

When they turned gray, they were nothing like that.

"You're bleeding again," said a voice from the doorway.

Wei Chengjun stepped into the courtyard with the unhurried ease of a man who had long ago made peace with mortal danger, given that his best friend was its frequent source. He was a compact, capable man of twenty-five with a permanently half-amused expression and a scar along his left jaw that he had earned defending the Prince during a border campaign three years ago. He carried a cloth and a small pot of medicine.

"It's not my blood," the Prince said.

"I know. I cleaned up the rest of it." Wei Chengjun sat across from him without being invited, which was one of his most reliable qualities. He set the medicine pot on the table and pushed it toward the Prince. "Your knuckles, though, are yours."

Zhu Longyin looked down. His right knuckles had split — not from the fight, but from where he had slammed his own fist into the stone wall afterward, in the moment of coming back to himself, when he had seen what lay around him and understood what had happened. He wrapped the cloth around his hand without expression.

"The girl left," he said.

"Fourth watch," Wei Chengjun confirmed. "She took three handmaidens and left her engagement gift box behind. The jade bangle." He paused. "She did take the bolt of silk."

"She can have it." Zhu Longyin turned back to his painting. "I don't need her."

Wei Chengjun watched his friend pick up the brush and continue as though nothing had happened — mountains, river, the small unnamed figure in the boat — and said, with the gentleness of someone who had said this many times and would say it many more, "You were not always like this, you know. You were a loud little child who stole kitchen dumplings and hid them in his sleeves."

The Prince's brush paused. Only for a heartbeat.

"My uncle told you that."

"Your uncle told me everything." Wei Chengjun leaned back, looking at the sky. "He also told me that you cried for three days when you accidentally stepped on a frog. Wept like the sky was ending."

There was a silence between them that was not empty. It was full — overfull — of the particular shape of absence, the weight of a person who was no longer in the world and had left an exact hole in it where they used to be.

Zhu Mingshan. The Emperor's younger brother. Painter, cook, scholar, fighter, and the only person, until his murder sixteen years ago, who had known that beneath the silence and the gray eyes and the rumors, the Fourth Prince was simply a boy who had never been given a safe place to be soft.

Zhu Longyin had been eight years old when he watched his uncle's body carried through the compound gate. He had not cried. He had stood very still, and something behind his eyes had gone very quiet, and he had been quiet in that same particular way ever since.

In the empress's chambers, Empress Chen Miaoling received the morning report of the Fourth Prince's latest incident with an expression of practiced concern and privately organized satisfaction.

"The girl fled?" she asked her head lady-in-waiting.

"Before dawn, Empress."

"How dreadful for her." She touched the rim of her tea cup. "And the Emperor was informed?"

"Immediately."

"Good." The Empress's gaze drifted to the window, where a pair of birds sat on the garden wall. Her face was composed and lovely — she had always been lovely, in the cold, structured way of things designed for admiration rather than warmth. "I wonder," she said lightly, to no one in particular, "if some people are simply... fated to be alone."

Her lady-in-waiting knew better than to answer.

The Empress sipped her tea.

At the southernmost edge of the capital, in a wide, lively lane called Goldfish Street, a shop sign swung in the morning wind: Lihua's Herbal and Remedy. Behind the counter, surrounded by dried roots, powder jars, and the warm, complicated smell of a hundred ingredients, a young woman was arguing with a list.

The list was of her own making. The argument was also of her own making. This was, for Li Lihua, a perfectly normal start to the day.

"If I move the ginger root supplier to the Weiyang District warehouse," she muttered, dragging her brush across a column of figures with fierce concentration, "then the transport cost drops, but the storage cost rises, and if it rains during—"

"Miss Lihua." Her shop assistant, a round-faced girl of fifteen named Dongmei, appeared in the doorway holding a bun. "You haven't eaten."

"I'm calculating."

"You were calculating at midnight. You were calculating at dawn." Dongmei held out the bun with both hands. "The numbers will still be wrong after you eat. They might be less wrong if your brain has food."

Lihua looked up. She had a face that was very difficult to look away from — not because it was arranged in the careful symmetry of court beauties, but because it was vividly alive, every thought and feeling crossing it with the transparency of water over stone. Her eyes were large and dark and quick, the kind that noticed everything. She was twenty years old and wore her hair in a simple style because elaborate hairpieces, she had decided at age fourteen, were an unreasonable tax on her time.

She took the bun.

"There's a letter," Dongmei said, producing it. "From your eldest brother."

Lihua ate and read simultaneously. Halfway through the bun and the letter, she stopped chewing.

She read the relevant passage again.

Then she set down the bun, pressed both hands flat on the table, and looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone receiving news from the universe that they had not asked for and did not welcome.

"What does it say?" Dongmei asked.

Lihua lowered her gaze from the ceiling to the letter. She read the passage one final time, as though it might have changed.

It had not changed.

"The Empress Dowager has personally selected you as a candidate for imperial marriage. The Emperor has approved. You are to present yourself at the palace within ten days. The intended is the Fourth Prince, Zhu Longyin."

Lihua placed the letter carefully on the counter. She picked up her bun. She took a very slow, thoughtful bite.

"Dongmei," she said finally, chewing.

"Yes, Miss?"

"Have you heard of the Fourth Prince?"

Dongmei's eyes went very round. "Everyone has heard of the Fourth Prince."

"Tell me what you've heard."

Dongmei sat down, which was answer enough. "They say his eyes change color when he goes mad. Gray like ash, gray like a dead man's eyes. They say he killed forty men in the Battle of the Northern Pass with his bare hands. They say seventeen women have run from his house." She hesitated. "They say when you look at him in that state, it's like looking at something that used to be human and forgot."

Lihua finished her bun. She wiped her hands. She picked up her brush and returned to her numbers.

"Alright," she said.

"Alright... you're not going?" Dongmei asked.

"Alright, I'm going." Lihua drew a line through a figure and rewrote it. "Someone has to. Seventeen women ran away. That's not a dangerous man, Dongmei. That's a lonely one." She dipped her brush. "And I am very, very curious about that eye condition."

Outside, the birds were singing on Goldfish Street, and autumn was turning the ginkgo trees to gold, and somewhere across the city in a quiet courtyard, a prince was painting a river and a small, unnamed figure in a boat.

Neither of them knew yet that everything was about to change.

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