Bonus side story: Xiao Lin's own account (I)

I would never forget the winters in the Cold Palace for as long as I lived.

The lack of food was secondary. At night, wind poured through the broken windows, bringing a cold that drove one to despair. I often curled up beside Mother beneath our only tattered quilt, drawing on the sole warmth this deep palace held.

After giving birth to me, Mother's health grew steadily worse. She coughed night after night, as though she would cough her lungs out. She was a remarkable woman. Even in a place like the Cold Palace, she insisted on embroidering every day, trading her work for food to fill my stomach and shielding me from the cruelty of the palace.

Mother rarely spoke to me about the past, but I pieced together the broad outlines from the other deposed consorts in the Cold Palace. The emperor was a fool, his favored consort held sway, and a single fabricated charge had cast Mother into the dust forever. The man responsible sat high above it all. To him, the people were mere ants, and even the wife who had been beside him throughout his years before ascending the throne was someone he could crush to death at any moment.

Mother was well versed in poetry and the classics, and had been a renowned talented lady in her youth. Whenever she had the strength, she used a twig to write characters on the ground and taught me to recognize them, her eyes and brows filled with tenderness and love. My childhood was bitter, but it was happy, too. Sometimes I thought that spending my whole life like that would not be so bad.

But fate always liked to play jokes on me.

My mother died in the winter when I was six. Just a moment before, she had still been embroidering, murmuring that she would use the silver it earned to buy me new clothes. But when I finished drawing a picture on the ground and eagerly went to ask her to look, she never answered me again.

Later, an old eunuch dragged her away. I heard that the man who occupied the supreme throne had buried Mother with the rites due an empress and even bestowed a posthumous title upon her. I scoffed at it. It was nothing but a performance for outsiders.

After Mother died, I did not cry. What use was crying? Tears could not bring Mother back, could not bring charcoal, could not warm these walls that let wind in on every side. The only person in this world who cared about my tears had left me forever.

By the time the late emperor brought me out, I was seven.

That day, the doors of the Cold Palace suddenly opened, and several palace maids and eunuchs entered. The one leading them stood in the doorway with his nose covered, as though looking at something inauspicious.

"Your Highness, First Prince, His Majesty has decreed that you are to be brought out."

I remained crouched in the corner, watching the strangers before me warily.

In the end, an old eunuch at the very back picked me up. He said he had once served Mother, and that she would not rest easy if I refused to leave.

The first time I met my so-called imperial father was in the Hall of Mental Cultivation. I knelt on the golden bricks, my knees already aching. With my head lowered, I could not see his face, only the hem of his dragon robe. Only after a long time did he tell me to rise. He studied me for a long while, then announced his decree appointing me crown prince.

But his gaze was cold, as cold as if he were looking at an enemy. At the time, I thought I had been mistaken. Only later did I learn that I was not his true choice of heir. The one he favored was the son of Consort Shu, whose favor eclipsed all others in the six palaces-his third prince. It was only because those old men in the Censorate had pressured him for so long, saying that without an appointed heir the foundations of the state were unstable, and that ancestral law dictated choosing the legitimate son and the eldest, that he had reluctantly brought me out.

The crown prince's investiture ceremony was slapdash. The Ministry of Rites submitted three memorials requesting a ceremonial program, and the late emperor marked every one, "Keep it simple." I knelt in the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the crown prince's court robes until I could hardly kneel any longer. Only then did his indifferent voice sound above my head: "Appoint the eldest imperial son, Xiao Lin, as crown prince." His tone was as cold as if he were reading an inconsequential memorial.

As I kowtowed to thank him for his grace, I caught sight of the third prince, Xiao Xu, out of the corner of my eye. He was three years younger than me, and the entire court knew he was the emperor's favorite. He stood there in a moon-white brocade robe. Though I was the crown prince, I somehow always seemed a head shorter than him.

I understood very early that the late emperor had never truly wanted to appoint me. The third prince was too young and still needed time to grow. My existence was a whetstone, a ladder to help the third prince climb to the highest seat. But I did not care. Getting out of the Cold Palace, having food to eat and clothes to wear-that was already enough to satisfy me. The throne and all that meant nothing to me.

But someone cared.

Zhou Rucheng was the grand tutor the late emperor had assigned me after Mother's death. Perhaps even the late emperor never imagined that a mere thoughtless gesture would make me who I became. The first time I met Zhou Rucheng, he came to the Cold Palace wearing an official robe washed almost white.

"Your Highness, this old subject is Zhou Rucheng. I have been commanded to teach you to read."

From then on, he taught me for ten full years. Writing, studying the classics, policy essays-he personally instructed me in all of them. I had a bad temper from childhood, and would often fly into a rage while writing and throw down my brush. But my grand tutor merely bent to retrieve it, earnest yet resigned:

"Your Highness, this solves nothing. Write it again."

At thirteen, in my most rebellious year, I hated him bitterly and blamed him for being too strict and unfeeling. But later, I learned that he had refused every opportunity for promotion for my sake, staking the latter half of his life on a crown prince the emperor disliked. I asked him whether it was worth it. For the first time, his words were so gentle.

"Your Highness, you were always worth it. So do not lightly give up what you possess."

From that moment, for the first time, I wanted to fight for myself.

Not long afterward, perhaps the late emperor truly had grown old, for his governance became an even greater shambles than before. He trusted alchemists and sought immortality. Those elixirs not only ruined his body, but emptied the treasury as well. I merely watched his worsening health with cold eyes, without any thought of remonstrating with him. In his eyes, I had never been a son; in mine, he was no different from a stranger.

Consort Shu had the ravenous ambition of a wolf. Under the influence of her pillow talk, the late emperor dismissed loyal and worthy officials, banishing ministers who remonstrated frankly from the capital one after another. He favored and trusted Consort Shu's natal family, giving the lucrative posts in the Ministry of War and Ministry of Revenue to his consort's relatives. The people hated him, their grievances filling every road, yet he seemed unable to hear them.

As the third prince grew older, the late emperor could no longer allow me to remain. That year, when the Tartars invaded the northern border, he deliberately sent me to quell the rebellion, but gave me only a motley force cobbled together, with provisions sufficient for just one month. He wanted me dead so that the third prince could take the throne without trouble.

But in the end, he had been dreaming. I lived perfectly well. In that battle, I personally slew the Tartar vanguard commander and held out for forty full days with fewer than two thousand battered soldiers, returning in triumph. On the day I returned to the capital, I rode down Vermilion Bird Avenue as the people knelt along both sides of the street, crying, "Long live the crown prince!"

It was after that that Xiao Xu felt I had slipped beyond his control, and finally began his schemes. The struggle for succession was never a matter of a single day. Xiao Xu's methods were cleverer than I had expected. A censor impeached my Eastern Palace officials for embezzlement. The evidence had been fabricated without a single seam showing, and they were thrown into prison. The generals I promoted were transferred to the frontier by the Ministry of War in the name of gaining experience, their transfer orders bearing the emperor's seal. Every move clipped my wings; every move left me more isolated and helpless at court.

But waiting was what I had always done best. I watched him test my limits like a clown capering on a beam.

When the late emperor became too gravely ill to attend to affairs and I began overseeing the state in his stead, Xiao Xu panicked. He knew that once Father died, I would naturally succeed to the throne with full legitimacy as crown prince. He could wait no longer.

For the autumn hunt in the seventh month, Xiao Xu gathered the two thousand private soldiers Consort Shu's natal family kept in the capital and bribed the deputy commander of the Imperial Guard's Right Division, intending to strike at the hunting grounds.

But this crumbling court had long since become a sieve. I had more men in the Imperial Guard than he imagined. Before his two thousand private soldiers had even left the city, I had already received a secret report. I made no announcement, merely changing the autumn hunt's route to the North Mountain Hunting Grounds. Mountains surrounded it on every side, with only one road leading in. I let Xiao Xu's men enter, then sealed the mouth of the valley. No one could get out.

I waited for him in the imperial tent at the hunting grounds. When he charged in with his troops, the scene of panic he had imagined never appeared. I simply sat in the tent, with Kong Wu and fifty fully armored Imperial Guards standing behind me. Hundreds of torches suddenly flared outside. Kong Wu's former troops closed in from both sides, trapping the two thousand private soldiers at the valley entrance. Xiao Xu stood at the entrance to the tent, his complexion frighteningly poor.

"Third Brother."

I spoke first, my expression languid.

"If you behaved yourself, your elder brother might still let you live a little more comfortably in the years to come."

I did not kill him outright. I merely reduced him to commoner status and confined him within high walls, never to leave for the rest of his life. Consort Shu was ordered to die, and her relatives were stripped of their titles and exiled, without a single exception. After surrendering their weapons, the two thousand private soldiers were disbanded and sent back to their places of origin. The deputy commander was beheaded as a public warning.

I did not seek the late emperor's approval for any of this. In truth, there was no longer any need. Years of elixirs had long since ruined his body; even getting up was probably a struggle now. After dealing with everything, I went to see him. His face already bore the look of approaching death.

At the very end of his life, that old wretch actually took my hand and told me to be a good emperor, as though we were such a close father and son. I merely withdrew my hand coldly and wiped it with a handkerchief as though it had touched some rubbish, my tone flat.

"Of course I will be different from you. Without you in it, this realm would probably be far better off."

He begged me, for the sake of brotherly affection, to release Xiao Xu, grant him a princely title, and send him far away to the frontier.

I refused. Something like brotherly affection had never existed before, and would never exist in the future.

He breathed his last that very night. The man who, in my memories, had always looked at me with contempt and disdain-my so-called father-finally received the retribution he deserved. I sat beside his bed for a long time, looking at the rich moonlight outside the window, my heart still and untroubled.

The late emperor died, and the new emperor ascended the throne.

I was twenty-two the year I took the throne. The following year, I changed the era name to Jianxi.

This was the past I did not want to tell anyone.