CHAPTER 1
JINGYI
All her life, JingYi had known three kinds of silence.
First, obedience—head bowed, breath held, a rabbit frozen in a hawk’s shadow.
Second—calculating. A blade in the dark. The patient stillness of a concubine orchestrating a rival’s fall.
The third was her own. The silence of a woman so far beneath notice, she’d become part of the furniture.
A shadow, moving only when called.
But lately, even shadows had no rest. Dysentery swept through Xûen-Sarai, and the Imperial Palace of a Thousand Suns wasn’t spared. Servants and courtiers staggered, pale and sweating, into the Royal Dispensary inside the Jade Mortar Hall. Bitter herbs suffused the air, floors perpetually slick with spills. She brewed medicine day and night, fingers wrinkled from steam, sleep stolen in hour-long fragments between one task and the next.
Another row of clay pots simmered before her now. In a rare lull, her eyes strayed to the heavy tome open on the worktable:A Compendium of Flora Across the Issoirean Nine Kingdoms.Written a hundred years ago, it was still the unchallengedreference for healers. Her fingers rested on an entry about herb varieties, their fascinating uses noted in a tight, cautious script.
Wu Ma appeared at her side, white-haired and bent like a gnarled root, but still moving with the precision of a woman who’d spent forty years in these humid shadows. Without a word, she set down a small, covered bowl.
Only then did JingYi realize: The Hour of the Snow Leopard was upon them. Time for the noonday meal.
Wu Ma’s gaze fell on the book and she clucked her tongue, though the sound was more fond than sharp. “Poisonous moss and battlefield antidotes. Other girls dream of silks, you dream of weeds, roots, and barks.”
“Knowledgeisa kind of silk,” JingYi said without lifting her head. “It is protection. Armour. It just doesn’t tear as easily.”
“Hnn. It also doesn’t keep you warm at night.” Wu Ma’s hand briefly patted JingYi’s left cheek before tilting her chin at the bowl. “Eat. Plain porridge, boiled twice. Don’t touch whatever the kitchen brings. Who knows what filth they’ve let fester while this bloody flux crawls through the halls.”
A glance at the clay pots told JingYi the brew still had time to simmer. She shuffled to the washbasin and rinsed her hands. Steam rose as soon as she uncovered the bowl. It was humble fare—enough to keep one alive, no more.
“Princess YünYün is now sick,” she said, dipping a spoon into the gruel. “I just returned from Azalea Palace. Her fever’s getting worse.”
Wu Ma tsk’d. “That child’s always in the servants’ kitchen, picking at whatever’s left on the trays. Imperial Consort Shu should’ve kept her inside.”
Leaning in, Wu Ma whispered, “What if the girl dies? A Beta concubine without a son is a painted vase with a cracked bottom. The emperor might favour her now, but beauty fades.”
The image surfaced: Imperial Consort Shu in her peach robes, wringing a cool rag over her sick daughter’s bed. A son—an Alpha son—would’ve secured her place in the harem. A Beta daughter secured nothing.
JingYi forced down another bland spoonful of porridge. Her heart ached with the memory of being that age: small, scared, and utterly inconsequential in the calculus of the court.
“Princess YünYün is only six,” she pointed out. “There’s still time before her eighteenth year.”
Time for an Omega Awakening.
A phantom pulse of pain flared in her left cheek—her body’s cruel reminder, Omega or not, worth was a fragile thing. An advantage in theory, never a guarantee. She could only hope Imperial Consort Shu would be strong enough to protect what the court deemed a liability.
“The sickness is getting worse,” a voice came from above. Feng, her junior assistant, stood balanced on a step stool, one hand clutching a high shelf. The girl looked down, her long braid swinging. “The laundry girls said half the north wing’s kitchen has shut down.”
Wu Ma’s frown deepened. “The palace is running like a beast with two legs down, yet they expect to prepare banquets fit for foreign guests.”
JingYi looked up. “Foreign guests?”
“The Tremorian envoys arrived earlier at dawn. Important business for His Majesty.”
“For limyerite trade?”
Tremore’s mountains were veined with it: the hardest, most radiant stone in Issoirea, a crystal whose inner light captivated kingdoms. To the priests of Moon Goddess Luneth and Sun God Solthar, it was the sacred conduit to the divine. It was Tremore’s weapon and its chief export. No other kingdom possessed suchwealth. Xûen-Sarai had its own scant deposits in the eastern caves, but they were a pale trickle compared to the mother lode.
And the Xûen emperor coveted the crystals above all else.
