The Princess's Gambit - Chapter 1

After helping my younger brother ascend the throne, I governed from behind the curtain.

They say power is the finest tonic a woman can take, and they are right. Everyone at court, human or otherwise, had to bow before me and wish the Eldest Princess a thousand years of life. Everyone except that wretch Xie Yunbai, the regent. He thwarted me at every turn. Today, before the entire court, he even declared that I had no right to travel in an imperial dragon carriage.

Anger, of course, needs somewhere to go.

When I returned home, I told my steward to bring me Pei Rong, one of the men kept at my residence.

Pei Rong entered, knelt, and began to undress. Just as he reached his underrobe, I ordered him outside.

His eyes remained lowered. His fingers froze, and he glanced at me with his lips pressed together. He did not dare put his outer robe back on before getting up and going out.

I had been in a foul mood after court yesterday, too. I ordered him to bark like a dog. When he refused, I had him punished.

Of all the men in my household, Pei Rong was my favorite to torment. Watching him endure one humiliation after another, forced to bow his head to me, gave me a sincere sense of pleasure.

On the flagstones, a silver chain circled his slender neck. He could barely support himself on his hands, and two buttons of his long robe had been undone.

I told him to hold a brush in his teeth and paint on a sheet of xuan paper.

Pei Rong pursed his lips. “Thank you for your mercy, Princess.”

His smile rose through the haze like mist. Even I lost myself in it for a moment.

I gripped his chin and thrust a brush between his bloodless lips.

“One quarter of an hour. When the incense burns out, shall we wager whether Young Master Pei still has his hands?”

In the sharp cold, he pressed his lips tight around the brush, bent down, and obediently began to paint.

When he first came to my residence, he would still ask, “What have I done wrong? Please enlighten me, Princess.”

“The fact that I am unhappy is your mistake,” I would answer, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Eventually he stopped asking such foolish questions.

He had no one to blame but himself for having a face that looked so much like Regent Xie Yunbai’s.

The thought of Xie Yunbai irritated me. “One day, I’ll kill him.”

When the incense burned out, I neither saw nor cared what Pei Rong had painted. I stepped on the painting.

I was thoroughly dissatisfied, and my judgment was the only judgment that mattered. “Twenty lashes,” I told the guards.

They obeyed. Within a few strokes his flesh split, and his robe was torn to shreds. He bit his lip and did not let out so much as a muffled groan.

But when the whip struck the dark red brand at his waist, he flinched.

Suiyin sighed softly. “If this goes on, Young Master Pei may not survive.”

“Suiyin, you talk too much.”

I had settled in to enjoy the sweet sound of the whip when strange words suddenly floated before my eyes.

【The wicked supporting woman has no idea that he’s the brother the regent has searched for all these years.】

【The eldest princess is all bluster. If she knew she would be mutilated and kept alive as a human pig, she’d be feeding the male lead the finest food and treating him like a prince.】

【Poor girl. She’s still sweeping the back courtyard of the princess’s residence.】

【The eldest princess took him by force, but our girl is the male lead’s true salvation.】

My heart jolted. I rose and walked over, and the guards drew aside.

I seized Pei Rong by the neck and forced his chin up until he met my eyes.

There was a delicate, scholarly beauty to his face. Xie Yunbai, by contrast, had sharp bones and an air of murderous severity about his brow. They did resemble each other, but their bearing could hardly have been more different.

No one else seemed able to see the words. I cared little about most of them. One line alone held my attention: 【Pei Rong is the brother the regent has searched for all these years.】

My lips curved. How interesting. I planted my foot on Pei Rong’s fingers. He bit through his lower lip at once, and a film of cold sweat broke across his forehead.

“Young Master Pei is skilled at playing the konghou. Yet since coming here you haven’t played once. Do you dislike it?”

Under the grind of my shoe, his hand was slick with blood. His little fingernail had been torn away during an earlier punishment; the raw red flesh was dreadful to see.

“Your Highness,” Suiyin said quietly, undercutting me, “you’ve never given him a konghou.”

I choked back a retort. She was pointing out that I was being unreasonable.

Pei Rong lay prostrate for a long while before feeling his way back onto his knees. He smiled at me. “Pei Rong is a lowly man. A mouthful of food is more than enough to earn my gratitude.”

Even the men kept for my pleasure received a monthly allowance. Pei Rong did not. I had spitefully informed him that if he wanted to eat, he would have to work for it.

Warm my bed. Endure beatings. Suffer whatever new torment I invented. I was waiting for him to beg to leave the hell of my residence, but Pei Rong always seemed strangely indifferent to his fate.

I studied the fading words. A maid who swept the courtyard? Pei Rong’s salvation?

What a pity. He would stay in the mud and sink with me, Jiang Zhaoxue.

I told Suiyin to bring in all the maids who swept the back courtyard. She looked puzzled, but sent someone to fetch them.

Pei Rong knelt meekly beside my chaise. No one had dressed his wounds, and he was holding on to consciousness by a thread.

A row of maids stood before me, faces bare of makeup, heads lowered in fear.

Rumor in the capital had it that I, Eldest Princess Jiang Zhaoxue, hated seeing women dressed prettily. Anyone who came before me in finery was asking to die.

They had guessed wrong. I liked flowers in full bloom, and I liked bright, beautiful women even more.

“Slap them.”

Suiyin tilted her head. “Which one?”

“Every one.”

When the guards struck a maid in a pink skirt, the strange words appeared again, just as I expected.

【Our poor girl hasn’t done a thing, and she’s being beaten.】

【One day the supporting woman will pay for what she’s done.】

【Am I the only one hoping for the male and female leads to catch sight of each other today?】

I narrowed my eyes and told the guards, “Bring me the one in pink. The pretty one.”