A long breath left the room, but JingYi didn’t allow herself relief, extracting the first set of needles to set them aside on a cloth to be scoured later in coarse salt and distilled rice wine. She picked up new needles, this time angling them to guide the flow toward stillness instead of release. Three along the abdomen, one at the ankle, another at the wrist. Points to tighten, to close the womb. These needles didn’t cloud. Instead, they grew warm to the touch, humming faintly—not drawing out but gathering in, coaxing the consort’s spent body to hold what it had left.
While the needles did their work, JingYi mixed crushed motherwort and safflower in a clay cup. Their pungent, herbal scent rose the instant she poured boiling water over them. Then, she added a pinch of angelica root for strength, and a few slices of red dates to restore blood. Carrying the steaming infusion back, she slipped an arm behind the consort’s shoulders and lifted gently. The woman’s skin was cool and clammy with spent effort, breath shallow against JingYi’s sleeve.
She held up the cup. “Your Highness, drink this. All of it.”
The consort sputtered but swallowed a few sips. Colour flickered back to her lips.
“My baby,” she rasped, her gaze fluttering toward the other side of the room. “Let me . . . see him.”
JingYi crossed to where the newborn swaddled in the nursemaid’s arms, fussing softly. Her youngest half-brother.
“Allow me,” she said.
The nursemaid hesitated, her gaze doing the familiar quick dance: a flick to JingYi’s open hands, then a flinch away from her left cheek. After a beat, she surrendered the baby.
JingYi rocked the bundle gently. His tiny limbs flailed, hands no larger than plum blossoms. She allowed herself a small smile—one he would never remember, from a sister he would never truly know.
“There, now,” she crooned. “All better now, isn’t it?”
For a fleeting moment, the world softened. The child’s warmth against her chest pricked a hole in the careful membrane separating her from everything soft. A dangerous, forgotten feeling flooded in—belonging. The sense, however temporary, that her presence wasn’t just tolerated, but wanted. A sip of water after a lifetime in the desert.
“Stay away from the prince!”
The maid who’d met her at the gates stood before her, eyes glaring. “Are you trying to rub that ugly stain on His Highness?!”
JingYi tensed. The drought returned.
“Hand him over before your bad luck clings to him!”
The words slipped through the cracks in her armour, finding the old, tender bruise. Numbness descended, ice spreading from her core. She returned the child, bowed, and gathered her tools. Inside, she was folding herself smaller, smaller, vanishing into that silent, obedient shadow—a dust mote. No one at all.
She retreated to the courtyard to repack her medicine chest. Each movement gave her fingers something to do, something steady and real. By the time she finished, a profound weariness had settled in. Her heart had crushed itself, sitting like a small, hard pebble in her chest.
For a moment, she leaned against the cool palace wall, eyes closed. She drew one deep breath, then two. She left one storm, only to turn her face toward the next. The dysentery outbreak. The endless need.
But the day went on.
So must she.
CHAPTER 2
JINGYI
The sandalwood and incense hit her before she cleared the gates—thick, cloying, too generous. They were trying to hide the sour-sweet rot of sickness, and failed.
The sun had descended; the Hour of the Tortoise approached. Soon, noble ladies would spill from their palaces in painted flocks, drifting down the garden paths to be admired and envied. JingYi kept her head down, focus narrowed to the path ahead—a meandering line to the Jade Mortar Hall.
If she didn’t look up, she didn’t exist.
If she made no sound, she couldn’t be heard.
She almost passed the Lotus Pavilion when the whisper of silk brushed her ears.
“Well, if it isn’t the ugly cripple.”
Lady LánYàn’s voice was smooth, unhurried—carrying the kind of cruelty that came from never having been challenged. JingYi knew the weight behind it: generations of Xûen’s oldest clan, the bone-deep confidence of a woman who had never doubted her place in the palace’s hierarchy.
JingYi’s hand gripped her medicine chest harder. She kept walking.
