Never Merely a Stand-In - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I was furious. Looking at that smiling face, I picked up a rock and brought it down on him.

Rong Xiuyuan yelped, folded his arms over his head, and crouched into a ball.

“Xiangrong, we were at least acquainted once. Smashing me with a rock the moment we meet—that wounds my heart.”

He waited, saw that no second rock was coming, and only then got sheepishly to his feet.

Then he turned his head, spotted the snake lying beside him, and froze for a beat before patting his chest.

“So it wasn’t my ex-ex-husband you were trying to murder. You were killing the snake for me.”

I gave him a sour glare, then turned, found a rope, threw it down, and after a great deal of effort hauled him out of the pit.

His left leg wouldn’t take his weight. Looked broken.

So I snapped off a thick branch and tossed it to him for a cane.

We walked and rested, rested and walked, and after half a day I finally got him home.

He looked around my little shack, astonishment all over his face. “How are you living in such poverty?”

I poured a bowl of water. He reached for it, and I raised it to my own lips and drank it dry, then wiped the corner of my mouth.

“Thanks to you.”

Rong Xiuyuan’s outstretched hand hung in the air, then drew back awkwardly. He lowered his head and said nothing.

The room was quiet for a while.

I knew perfectly well that not all of the blame belonged to him.

So I spoke first, asking what on earth had happened, and how he had come to be deposed so suddenly.

Rong Xiuyuan sighed, his voice worn and helpless. “The day of the autumn hunt, a tiger burst out of the woods and my father fell off his horse in fright. Afterwards they seized a man, and whatever method they used on him, he insisted I had put him up to it.”

“You didn’t.”

The words came out of me before I could stop them.

He looked up at me, and there was something surprised in his eyes, and something warm.

“You’re the only one who understands me, Xiangrong.”

I added, “If you’d been the mastermind, you’d have filled the woods with tigers and made sure you were far away before it started.”

His mouth twitched, and he swallowed the thanks he had been about to give.

I asked again, “And the Crown Princess?”

Rong Xiuyuan was silent a moment. “Before the Eastern Palace was seized, I gave Minglan a letter of divorce. She went back to the jianghu.”

My mouth twisted and I let out a sneer. “Now that’s true love.”

He looked away awkwardly and said no more.

Just then the village healer arrived, and I told him to see to the leg first.

Rong Xiuyuan set his teeth while the bones were set, a thin sheen of sweat rising on his forehead.

I stood beside him watching, and something strange and unaccountable stirred in me.

After all, he and I had played husband and wife for three years.

Back then it was he who had come to me and asked me to hold the Eastern Palace in place for that swordswoman Crown Princess.

I had stood out since childhood, prettier than my eldest sister—my features, my figure, my bearing, each one a head above hers.

Unfortunately I was born of a concubine. My eldest sister and the Madam kept me pressed down hard, never once letting me show my face, terrified I would blot out her luster entirely.

As the years passed and I came of age, Father must have decided I still had some use after all, and for the first time in his life he let me accompany my eldest sister to a palace banquet.

His thinking being that even if some lord took a fancy to me and made me a concubine, it would still be a stepping stone under his career.

At the banquet, though, my eldest sister ordered me to wear a veil and not take it off.

She had made a fool of herself over some breach of etiquette at the table, and in a foul temper she shoved me into the rockery and slapped me across the face twice.

I took it, meek as anything.

There was no help for it. My birth mother was still pinched in Father’s fist, gravely ill out at the country estate.

Father only sent medicine once a month.

If I dared raise a hand, I was afraid even that little would be cut off.

My eldest sister finished the beating and swept away.

I crouched alone behind the rockery, tears pooling in my eyes, about to spill over.

Then a voice came from above my head. “Do you want to hit her back?”

I looked up. It was the Crown Prince, Rong Xiuyuan.

No telling how long he had been standing there, or how long he had been watching.

He said I bore a certain resemblance to the Crown Princess, Song Minglan, and that he happened to be short a docile stand-in to deal with all those eyes inside and outside the Eastern Palace.

In exchange, he would bring my birth mother out of the estate and have physicians treat her properly.

I agreed.

Only later did I learn that my birth mother had been gone for a long time.

Father had been dangling her over me all along, lying that she was still alive.

Something inside me burned until I could hardly breathe.

After that, Rong Xiuyuan arranged a disappearance for me, and Father’s post was demoted again and again.

In those three years at the Eastern Palace, I saw Song Minglan twice.

Once she came back for ten thousand taels of silver, saying she meant to relieve the poor.

The other time she had fallen into a fight with someone, lost, and come back to nurse her injuries for a few days.

When Song Minglan came to the side courtyard to find me, she studied my face for a long while, deep displeasure in her brows, and said, “You are only a stand-in. Know your place.”

I lowered my eyes and answered yes.

And yet Rong Xiuyuan never treated me badly. In food and clothing and everything else he never stinted me.

In spring he had crabapple trees planted all through my courtyard. In summer he took me to the mountain lodge to escape the heat. In autumn we went to see the maples in the hills. On winter nights we stood shoulder to shoulder building snowmen, packing snow into balls and flinging them at each other.

He was very handsome, his brows and eyes like a painting. Standing there he was like orchid and jade, clear-boned and elegant, a bright moon coming out from behind the clouds.

And beyond all that, he had once pulled me out of the mud, sheltered me from the wind and rain, and taken a blade for me.