The roads within the imperial city, unless there was an urgent courier from outside the city, did not permit galloping.
Yet that mounted party was swift as the wind, with not the slightest easing of pace; led by the red-robed youth, in an instant they reached the city gate.
The city guards, spotting them from afar, recognized the newcomer and had already flung both gates wide open, bowing and crouching by the roadside to wait for the young man to pass before them.
This young man was his youngest brother Yulin’er, who by his look had apparently just come from his grandmother Empress Dowager Jiang and, seizing the fair spring day, was heading to the imperial hunting ground west of the city for sport.
The young man at play: royal sons and noble youth as his escort, the five marquis-families’ sons vying to be his feather-guard. Bells and drums and lavish feasts, dashing hunts and shooting games, galloping his horse through the imperial thoroughfare, casting his eyes over all of jade-bright Yujing.
This was the heaven’s favorite, deeply beloved of his father the Emperor—his own brother.
The older his father grew, the more he favored him.
To what degree?
Two years before, on the fourth brother’s fourteenth birthday, the Emperor, drunk, had said something to the eunuch Shen Gao, who attended at his side.
He said: In former times, the Grand Elder of Zhou set aside Tai Bo to establish Wang Ji; King Wen of Zhou passed over Bo Yikao to establish King Wu. I observe that Prince Qin is very fine indeed.
What the Grand Elder of Zhou and King Wen of Zhou had done was the same thing: defying the rules of succession, setting aside the elder to establish the younger.
Shen Gao was so terrified he kowtowed and remained prostrate for a long while.
The Emperor, after speaking those words, seemed to sober somewhat and regret them; he never raised the matter again thereafter.
This incident eventually made its roundabout way to his ears—and it must naturally also have reached the ears of his two older brothers.
Consort Que had died young, and after losing his mother, the fourth brother had lived alternately in Empress Dowager Jiang’s quarters and in his own mother Empress Liang’s palace, frequently studying and hunting alongside the Crown Prince himself.
So unlike his relationship with Prince Jin and Prince Chu, the Crown Prince had always harbored genuinely deep affection for this much younger brother. And this younger brother had also been extremely close to him and utterly trusting—the Crown Prince could feel it.
Brothers bound by true kinship, though not of the same mother, yet closer than if they were.
He did not know what his other two brothers felt upon learning of those words, but for himself—even upon learning of his father’s drunken utterance—he felt only loss and sorrow: the loss and sorrow of a son who, no matter how hard he tried, could never win his father’s approval. Toward his fourth brother he had not harbored one trace of jealousy.
And yet in this moment, Crown Prince Li Xuanxin knew: he was jealous—truly jealous of his youngest brother.
Because, without doing anything at all, the fourth brother received the supreme love and favor of both his father the Emperor and his adoptive grandmother Empress Dowager Jiang.
Yes—Empress Dowager Jiang also cherished and was close to him himself, always encouraging and guiding him. But in the year when they were seven, after their aunt Grand Princess Jinxi had gone far away in marriage at the frontier, it was only when the fourth brother came to bring her joy that a look of happiness appeared in their grandmother’s eyes. At all other times she sat alone in bed, largely withdrawn from the world.
The Crown Prince was jealous, and also envied the fourth brother’s ability to revel carefree in pleasure. While he himself—from the moment he was old enough to understand anything, from his earliest years of growing up, had never felt one moment of safety. From the time he was first aware of the world, what had accompanied his growth was nothing but constant, unceasing fear and bewilderment.
He was already past thirty, and had seen spring in Yujing more than thirty times like this. Yet had he ever once done something as freely and fearlessly as his fourth brother—unconcerned about inviting a censor’s impeachment?
Never.
Not once.