The Princess's Gambit - Chapter 7

I was hardly idle. A secret letter went to the Changdong garrison. It was time to clear the muddy waters in the capital.

At a country estate outside the city, I kept Pei Rong confined just as I had at my residence. He did not object to being brought there either. He asked only to bring the konghou I had recently given him. I could not feel at ease unless I kept him close and watched him.

As for the instrument, I remembered what Suiyin had arranged on her own initiative and agreed. Pei Rong treasured it, perhaps because he had once earned his living as a musician. He was forever polishing the phoenix carved at its head. But the injury to his fingernails had not healed; his fingers bled. Afraid of staining the strings, he had never played it.

I took an interest and ordered him to perform. His fingers stiffened, then he nodded. Halfway through the piece I remembered something and interrupted casually.

“Do you have any family?”

The music stopped. “I don’t remember clearly. When I was small, famine seemed to be everywhere. I was living on the streets. Because I was… passably handsome, I became a young master’s study companion and learned to read.”

The wealthy family that had bought him later fell on hard times. After more wandering, he learned music from a musician. Suiyin’s investigation called him an orphan who had been on his own since before he could remember.

If the comments were true, Pei Rong might not know he had family left in the world. Xie Yunbai certainly did. I intended to hold that card tightly.

Before leaving Wensi Palace, I had asked Su Yin, “Your father once fed the regent when he was hungry. Did you ever hear that he had a brother?”

She said only that once, while drunk, he had gazed at a flowering plum and sighed, “Life passes like a traveler; how can flesh and blood stay together?”

A plum tree? Xie Yunbai was not a man given to idle poetry. I remembered the dark red mark at Pei Rong’s waist when he was whipped. There was something I needed to verify.

“Take off your clothes. The light was too dim that night. I didn’t see clearly.”

Perhaps because I had so often tormented him, he assumed this was another new cruelty. His fingers left the strings. With a sigh, he lowered his eyes and obeyed.

His long pale hands drew his short jacket down to his waist. At the curve of his narrow, lean waist, I glimpsed a blurred dark red birthmark. Steam from the warm pool obscured it. I stepped closer without thinking and pressed my hand to the pattern on his cool skin.

It really was a plum-blossom birthmark, not a forgery.

Through the rising steam, the long-absent comments appeared again.

【Hold on a little longer, male lead. Once our girl has won the little emperor’s trust, she’ll save you.】

【If the eldest princess hadn’t tried to kill her, our girl would even have spared her a whole corpse when she became empress.】

【The supporting woman doesn’t know the female lead was born with her heart on the right. That dagger she thought went through her heart accomplished nothing.】

Each drifting line mocked me. Xiaozhou was alive? I pressed harder without meaning to.

Pei Rong winced at the place the whip had struck him. “Princess,” he asked hoarsely, “is that enough?”

“What?” I had finished my inspection. I kicked his robe toward him. “Yes. Carry on playing.”

He lowered his brows, something unreadable in his eyes. “You only wanted to hear the konghou?”

Perhaps too many beatings had damaged his wits. He sounded almost offended. His tune lost its shape and fell utterly apart. I vaguely praised him anyway, thinking over what to do next.

Before I left the residence, the other men had put on a false display of jealousy over my attentions. I might as well keep up the performance of indulging in pleasure, exactly as the comments suggested.

During my days at the estate, two major events took place in the capital. The day before, word came that the young emperor had gone hunting with imperial guards at his side. If something happened to Jiang Zhaoyu despite their protection, it was his fate.

I sent Suiyin into the palace to retrieve something from Yuyin Pavilion. When she left the estate, there was an extra passenger in her carriage. I told her to move Pei Rong elsewhere and place him under close guard.

I stayed at the estate myself under the pretense of reveling with my men. Pei Rong could no longer be seen at the princess’s residence.