The Nine Songs of Nan - Chapter 3
Chapter 3
The captain of the Eldest Prince’s personal guard once gossiped with me in private, deeply worried. “That woman from the Shen Family is so beautiful. Do you think the Eldest Prince might…”
I spat at him. The Eldest Prince was wise, mighty, and brilliant. Of course he would never lose his head over a woman’s beauty. He was only… curious about the people of the Shen Family.
Besides, he actually did not visit Shen Zheng’s room all that often. The Eldest Prince had plenty of amusements: riding, hunting, skating, soaking in hot springs. There were no few women in the camp, either. At most, Shen Zheng was merely one of the more unusual diversions among his many pastimes.
That was what I had always thought.
The Eldest Prince harbored great ambitions. He was not the sort of man who would vent the flames of war on a woman. In their grand, masculine way of thinking, war was ultimately a matter between men. Taking out his anger toward Daliang on a single woman was something he disdained to do.
So later, he rarely made things difficult for Shen Zheng. And with Shen Zheng looking so sickly and frail, every morning when I went to her room to attend to her, I was afraid that the moment I lifted the bed curtains, I would find her body already cold and dead. There truly was no need to make things difficult for her.
One morning, she did not wake for a long while. I called to her several times from outside the bed curtains, but she did not respond.
She was actually a very light sleeper. My heart lurched, and in my panic I lifted the curtains. She lay there quietly, and I… I could not help myself. I raised my hand and checked for her breath beneath her nose…
That was when she opened her eyes. I froze there in terrible embarrassment. Then she paused, realized what was happening, and burst out laughing with a little “pfft.”
She looked at me very seriously and said, “Sangji, don’t be afraid. I won’t die just yet.”
It was such a strange thing to say. What did she mean, she would not die “just yet”? Then when would she die? Did one have to choose the right moment even for dying? But at the time, I did not notice those details.
The main reason she had slept so long that day was that the Eldest Prince had been far too rough with her the night before.
That evening, the Eldest Prince somehow heard about it. He looked at me with a smile that was not quite a smile and asked, “Do all of you think she is very delicate?”
She truly was delicate, but not only delicate.
My feelings toward her were actually quite complicated. Sometimes, because she was one of the Han people, I did not want to pay her any attention. But other times, when I put myself in her place-
A young woman, thrown alone into an enemy camp, with the Eldest Prince so moody and unpredictable, his thoughts impossible to guess. If it were me, I doubted I could manage even one-thousandth of what she did now. So I could not help treating her a little better.
That night, the Eldest Prince took her to soak in the hot spring, because the physician said it would help Shen Zheng recover.
Thinking back on it later, the signs had actually appeared as early as then. The Eldest Prince was not a thoughtful person. Why would he pay such close attention to the health of a woman from an enemy kingdom?
But I kept convincing myself that it was only a passing whim, because I truly could not believe that someone like him would one day fall in love with anyone.
Shen Zheng could not swim. That hot spring was fed directly from the mountains, and the pool had been dug very deep. She clung to the edge and would not let go.
(The End)
