Shouchun, 250 BC
Winter refused to relinquish Lord Chunshen's gardens. The branches of the plum trees bowed beneath the weight of a belated frost, and their petals, weary of resisting, drifted onto the motionless pond with an almost ritual slowness.
In Chu, envy did not whisper.
It struck like lightning.
And Lord Chunshen's plum trees—the tallest of them all—were the first to feel its fury.
Huang Yue watched the scene from the corridor, her hands concealed within the sleeves of her dark blue hanfu. At eighteen, she possessed eyes that did not ask permission to see. While other noblewomen embroidered butterflies to chase away tedium, Yue audited granary ledgers, salt routes, and the flow of taxes.
The reports lay upon the stone table behind her, sealed with red wax. A mote of ash from a nearby censer fell upon the final rice-tax figure. Yue did not blow it away; she watched it stain the white paper with glacial calm. In court, beauty was a mask; lucidity, a threat.
While the ladies embroidered dreams, Yue counted the ghosts that would soon inhabit Chu.
Yet that morning, for the first time, she could not help wondering whether the next number would bear her name.
A sigh escaped her lips and turned to mist before her mouth. For a second, the chill in the air reminded her of something she could not name: the sensation of a drop of water freezing upon her skin, a memory foreign to this winter, too ancient to belong to her.
"Miss…" Lian's voice trembled like a poorly tuned string. "Lord Chunshen summons you. The Royal Envoy has just departed. There was no tea ceremony."
The maid avoided her eyes.
In Shouchun, when tea was not served, blood had already been signed.
Yue closed the scrolls with a composed motion. She did not hurry. The information was already complete in her mind: if the Envoy had left without tea, the King no longer sought counsel.
He demanded obedience.
She walked toward the main hall. Each step was an act of discipline. The lacquered wooden columns seemed to watch her as she advanced; golden dragons climbed them with jaws open toward the ceiling.
They were not guardians.
They were warnings.
Constant echoes that even walls had ears,
and every favor, a price.
Her father, Huang Xie—Lord Chunshen—stood with his back to her, contemplating the great map of the kingdom of Chu. In his hand he held a scroll of yellow silk.
The color that precedes weeping.
Or annihilation.
The map did not display cities.
It displayed wounds.
Red marks where Qin advanced like a tide of iron.
"Yue'er… come closer," he said at last. "Qin gnaws at our borders like a starving wolf. But the deadliest danger does not wield spears."
He tightened his grip on the scroll. Yue noticed the pallor of her father's knuckles, usually steady, now drained of blood, as if life itself had withdrawn from them. In the air lingered the bitter scent of medicine he tried to conceal beneath sandalwood perfume.
"Smile. In Shouchun, Li Yuan's hyenas no longer hide their teeth."
He turned toward her.
For an instant, Yue saw something more than calculation in his eyes.
She saw weariness.
And fear.
Not the fear of a weak man, but of one who understands that even titans fall.
"I need the Huang family to merge with steel," he said. "You will marry General Xiang Yan."
The name fell between them like a sword driven into a table.
Xiang Yan.
The general of the south.
The man whose blade had halted three Qin advances.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Outside, the weight of gathered snow made a plum branch creak and split.
Yue did not blink, yet the sound of breaking wood echoed in her chest like a crack opening in her fate.
"An alliance, Father?" Yue asked calmly.
"Do you think he will accept this bond as a bridge…
or as a silken leash meant to strangle him?"
Huang Xie watched her in silence.
He did not see a daughter.
He saw the final piece of a game he no longer controlled.
But Yue saw her father. She saw the small ink stain at the edge of his robe, a human oversight in a man who always seemed carved from stone.
And she understood that he had exhausted every move.
"It matters not how he sees it," he replied, "but how you wield it. You are strategy itself.
You will be my eyes in the south.
I need to know whether that sword still points at Qin…
or whether it has begun to turn toward my throat."
Yue inclined her head.
It was not submission.
It was calculation.
Within her, rage burned in silence,
like lava beneath stone.
"I accept," she said, her voice as serene as a blade's edge.
"If my will is the price for the Huangs to survive,
I shall be the weight that keeps that destiny in place.
I accept.
Not because I wish to.
But because there is no other move."
She spoke not of love.
She spoke not of the future.
Only of survival.
The edict was sealed that very night.
Messengers departed before dawn toward the southern camps, where Xiang Yan trained his armies beneath skies that already smelled of war.
From the eastern tower, Yue watched the banners vanish into the mist.
She rubbed her hands. The cold she felt did not come from the northern breeze, but from what was already freezing within her.
As a child, she had believed love was a choice.
Now she understood it was only a coin.
Each step of those horses carried her farther from her former life.
That night, alone in her chambers, she opened a sandalwood chest hidden beneath the floor.
Inside rested half of a crimson jade, carved in the shape of a phoenix wing halted in mid-ascent.
She had inherited it without explanation.
As one inherits sentences no one ever asked for.
At her touch, an unnatural warmth traveled up her spine, as though the jade recognized her pulse.
It burned like a wound that did not bleed,
and its heat did not come from fire.
For an instant, the sound of crickets and the night watch vanished.
In their place she heard the distant echo of a cry that was not human,
and the beating of wings that scorched the firmament.
For the first time in years, Yue closed her eyes.
Not to see the future.
But to endure it.
Far from there, another hand held a brush.
Li Yuan dipped it in black ink before a sheet of rice paper.
The character Loyalty had not yet dried.
He stared at it too long.
His smile took a second longer than necessary to form.
Then he erased it.
"Lord Chunshen believes he has purchased a watchdog," he smiled.
"He does not know that Xiang Yan is a forest fire.
"And some fires do not destroy cities…
they destroy lineages."
He leaned toward his scribe.
"Tell him his wife writes with grace.
And that some letters are never erased."
The ink was still dripping when Li Yuan lifted his gaze.
In his eyes there was no strategy.
There was hunger.
The game had begun.
鳳凰