After watching the blue-green figure of the other person disappear into the garden of former days, Yan Luo stepped closer and asked: “What did he say to Your Highness?”
Luowei said nothing. The palace attendants had not yet been called back to the garden. She leaned against the pillar to rise, then—suddenly, like a girl in her chamber—she swung her wide official sleeves, shaking off the fallen petals. After that, she simply stripped off her outer robe, hitched up her layered skirts, and vaulted over the surrounding fence, landing directly beneath the flowering tree.
Yan Luo received the heavy outer robe and called with some concern: “Your Highness…”
Luowei closed her eyes, stretched out both arms, and—as she might have done in the most carefree days of her youth—turned a slow circle beneath the tree.
Hairpins and combs chimed softly together, pearls and jade knocking against each other, swaying on the verge of tumbling free—and still she paid no attention.
Yan Luo came around from the walkway carrying the outer robe, and saw that the Empress had already stopped. She was standing with her head tilted back, looking up through the gaps in the branches.
Sunlight fell in broken pieces. New blossoms drifted down. It was the height of spring—why the sorrow?
Yan Luo set the outer robe carefully away inside the hall, then brought out from a dim corner of the inner room a potted sickly plum—ugly and gaunt, with stark, protruding branches.
Luowei took the flower-and-grass shears Yan Luo handed her, studied the plum for a moment, then raised her hand and brought it down without hesitation—cutting away the lowest branch flush against the main trunk.
Though the branch was withered, after she had cut it away, there still remained a faint, barely visible wound on the trunk. She discarded the severed branch without a second thought, and held the pot of plum for a long while without saying a word.
Yan Luo raised her gaze. Amid the shower of petals, the young Empress—though her face wore a smile—had in her eyes a glimmer of flickering tears, barely restrained.
“A’Fei, come with me—let us recite a scroll of sutras together for Buyun.”
A dull, aching soreness stirred in her heart.
Because she knew—Buyun was Zhang Siyi’s childhood name.
* * *
In the final years of the Changning reign, fourteen-year-old Zhang Buyun took personal leave from the Silk Brocade Bureau and, for no payment at all, sewed a set of mourning garments for an old acquaintance—the daughter of the Chief Minister, the young Miss Su. For convenience, and also as a gesture of gratitude, Luowei invited her to stay at the Su family residence.
At the time, the Crown Prince Chengming was also at the Su family home. It was through this chance encounter that she met one of the Crown Prince’s personal guards.
The deputy commander of the Jintian Guard, Lu Heng—courtesy name Fengying.
He was a young man in his finest years, dressed in the narrow-sleeved robe of the Hairpin-and-Gold Guard. He followed behind the noble Crown Prince, his short coiled serpent-blade cold as ice, his spine as straight and upright as the pot of green bamboo she kept by her window.
Buyun had heard that every member of the Jintian Guard was a youth from a poor family personally selected by the Crown Prince from his earliest years—trained through years of relentless drill with knives and spears, fists and feet, tempered through a thousand hammer blows before emerging as a truly elite force.
And he was the finest among that group.
When Buyun watched him, she did not know that in another moment he had also been watching her—that when she sat before the window, carefully embroidering a crabapple blossom on the Crown Prince’s sleeve, her spotlessly white hands moving like clouds, there was a certain charm all its own in that moment.
That year, the young Miss Su and the Crown Prince Chengming became betrothed. Because of the paternal mourning period, the wedding was postponed.
To celebrate the occasion, the Emperor changed the reign name beginning the following year to Tianshi.
In the first year of Tianshi, Buyun received the Crown Prince’s consort’s favor and was transferred from the Silk Brocade Bureau into the inner palace.
The Crown Prince was deeply beloved by the Emperor above. Even after having his cap-pinning ceremony and receiving his own residence, he came and went freely from the Forbidden City.
Buyun and Lu Heng now had far more opportunities to meet.
In the third year of Tianshi, the Crown Prince was assassinated.
By the time Buyun heard the news, Lu Heng had already been reassigned to serve at the side of the new Emperor, who had hastily ascended the throne. She felt no joy at the glory and position that came his way. What was truly worth thanking the gods and Buddhas for was that he had survived the assassination attempt without injury.
The Crown Prince was dead. The young Miss Su had married the new Emperor and entered the palace as the central consort.
Buyun, who had long enjoyed the favor of this mistress, became her Mistress of the Wardrobe.
The new Emperor changed the reign name to Jinghe.
Peace and harmony—though it ill suited the clash of swords and shadows playing out above the court, for a small and ordinary person such as herself, this was the greatest hope she could hold in her heart.
In the early winter of the third year of Jinghe, Buyun made up her mind to petition for an imperial decree granting her leave from the palace. Her years of service had been fulfilled—and although continuing to hold her post within the palace might have led to great distinction, she was not greedy. To be allowed to marry the man she loved would be a blessing beyond anything she dared ask for.
This should have been a calm and sweet story, ending here without incident.
Yet on the day Buyun went to take her leave of the Empress, she was unexpectedly told that the Empress had caught a chill and was confined to bed.
Because she had always been close to the Empress, the palace attendants allowed her in.
The chamber was filled with a heavy, almost sharp perfume. She could pick out the scent of sandalwood; the rest blended into a single indistinct haze she could not separate. Smoke and mist swirled as though in a fairyland. She parted the light gauze curtains and tiptoed closer—only to find that in the cutting early-winter cold, the Empress wore only her inner garment. Her hair hung loose and unpinned, propriety cast aside, slumped before the couch in a heap, clutching something so desperately, so tenderly, as though trying to press it into her own body.
Hearing footsteps, the Empress looked up. The dazed expression had not yet left her face, and when she saw who it was, her lips trembled twice. First came two lines of tears, and then in a trembling voice she called: “Buyun!”
When had Buyun ever seen her like this? Frightened, she knelt at once—but refusing to act the ordinary servant and stay at a distance, she shuffled forward on her knees, reaching out to help the undone young woman sit upright: “Your Highness—why is this…”
Luowei raised a hand and pulled her close around the neck, weeping without restraint.
Buyun’s heart ached with a dull soreness. She thought of Luowei in the days before she was raised to Empress—when she had stayed overnight at her family home, sitting up late with a candle, bringing over pastries, and then staying up to talk through the night.
She and Luowei had always been of one spirit. In those days, when her parents both died, had it not been for Luowei and the late Crown Prince’s one glance of recognition and their patronage thereafter, how would Buyun have made her smooth way as the finest embroiderer in the Silk Brocade Bureau—and eventually entered the palace and arrived where she was today?
Yet this person who had saved her life no longer bore even a trace of the carefree, innocent girl she had once been. Now she was sobbing brokenhearted in her arms.
She was honored as Empress—even in grief this deep, she could not let the people outside the door hear it. She could only endure with the utmost effort.
Heartbreaking, and utterly silent.
Buyun gathered her courage and as she had always done stroked the Empress’s long hair in comfort, but her gaze wandered, and she caught sight of the small box in her arms.
A box of golden silk nanmu wood, carved with a profusion of flowers—the craftsman who made it had put his heart into engraving spring itself upon it, so that it bloomed and flourished, lush and dense.
Yet nanmu was such an ancient and earthy color; it had turned even the height of spring into something tinged with sorrow.
What astonished Buyun, however, was not this spring dampened by grief.