What Is It Now, My Princess? - Chapter 2

They say a motherless child is a weed with no one to tend it.

In the imperial harem, it was worse. A motherless child might not even survive.

Father’s favor could safeguard my rank, but a little girl without her mother’s protection had no defense against the dirty tricks worked in dark corners.

Luckily, I might not have a mother, but I did have an uncle.

His informants reached from the court into the harem. He kept me alive and let me inherit Mother’s habit of doing whatever she pleased in the palace.

More than once, I’d told him, “With connections like yours, it’d be a waste not to rebel.”

Eunuch Wang dropped to his knees with a yelp. “Your Highness, mind your words!”

But Xie Heng waved a hand. “No, no. Not interested.”

Then he went right back to moving mountains at court and smoothing over every mess I made in the palace.

He always seemed like that: composed, unhurried, effortlessly in command.

Until the crown prince married.

From the moment the crown princess appeared, something was wrong with Xie Heng.

He had never made a mistake in government. Now he blundered again and again, letting the crown prince nibble away at his power.

His spirits plummeted too. The once radiant, gracious regent grew darker and more withdrawn by the day.

At a palace banquet, the crown princess danced to thunderous applause. Xie Heng’s eyes practically stuck to her.

I hid behind my sleeve. For the first time in my life, I was ashamed to be seen with my uncle.

“I’m dying of embarrassment.”

“Who’s dying?” Eunuch Wang asked. “I’ll have them removed at once.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

Xie Heng had placed third in the palace examinations. Noblewomen who adored him could have formed a queue from the capital to the frontier.

And with a breathtakingly beautiful elder sister like my mother setting the standard, surely he ought to have discerning taste.

The crown princess was merely pretty.

She wasn’t even his type.

Yet he seemed bewitched. Anything involving her made him lose his mind.

As the crown prince’s influence grew, the sixth prince dared swagger in front of me again.

He said Mother had loved someone else before entering the palace. He called me a bastard and said that once Xie Heng fell, he’d marry me off for a peace treaty.

I slapped him into another spin.

“Is there a hole where your brain should be?”

Mother had been in the palace for eight years before she conceived me. The idiot couldn’t even invent a decent rumor.

He couldn’t. I could.

I leaned close to his ear. “The empress actually gave birth to a daughter. She swapped her for you to secure her position. You’re Eunuch Wang’s son.”

The sixth prince froze.

Eunuch Wang knelt.

“Your Highness…”

He was so overcome that he couldn’t get out the words “mind your words.” Tears and snot streamed down his face.

To the sixth prince, that looked like silent admission now the truth had come out.

He ran off screaming like a madman.

Eunuch Wang begged me through his tears. “Your Highness, if you want this old servant dead, just take my life. There’s no need for all this.”

The sixth prince was a little defective in the head, but once he worked it out, he wouldn’t let it rest.

Xie Heng was too busy brooding over love. I’d better handle this myself.

My solution was to have Father send the sixth prince to some remote fief. Permanently.

That might be asking a bit much.

So I started with something even more outrageous.

“Father, you’re bedridden because resentful spirits are haunting Xuanwu Gate. We need to suppress them.”

“The divination says hanging your underpants over the gate will do it. Quick, I’ll put them up myself.”

Father coughed twice. “I’d rather die of the illness.”

Eunuch Wang hit the floor with a thump. “Your Majesty, mind your words!”

I struck while the iron was hot. “All right, no underpants. The sixth prince’s birth chart clashes with yours. Send him away, and you’ll recover just as well.”

Father laughed.

“I wondered how you’d found time to worry about my health between all your mischief.”

“Quarreled with your sixth brother again?”

“Very well. I’ll send him out to see the world. Temper his character. He’s far too old to be bullying his little sister.”

I pursed my lips. He didn’t see me as a sister, and I couldn’t care less.

Father smiled at me. Gradually his eyes grew misty, as though he were looking through me at someone else.

I stayed until he fell asleep.

In his dreams, he murmured Mother’s name.

“Qingru. I’ve wronged you…”