The Princess Consort of the Wu Prince had thought through every scenario she could imagine, yet she still had little confidence in any of them.

In matters of commerce, she had always been self-assured — but on the battlefield, she dared not presume.

The Wu Prince had once told her that business could be seen as a form of warfare, only less brutal. If you approached war with a merchant’s mind, you would almost certainly be crushed, no matter how ruthless you thought yourself in business.

She only wanted to fight for that one chance in ten thousand. What if she could somehow bring her husband home?

The Wu Princess Consort worked hard to recall everything her husband had ever taught her about troop movements and battle formations, determined not to let any misstep of hers doom the army before a single blow was struck.

The relief force, following the plan, sent the main body of troops to the best crossing point along the middle reaches of the Panxing River — the very stretch where Tang Pidi had led his men across. But the Chu army’s intent was not to cross there. Before the main force had even arrived, the Princess Consort had already dispatched scouts upstream.

Of those scouts, seven or eight out of every ten never came back.

“General.”

A scout bowed low. “We’ve found a stone bridge upstream. After asking the local villagers, we learned that the Wu Prince once tried to break through at that very bridge, only to be turned back by the Ning army.”

The Princess Consort made a sound of acknowledgment. Her face remained calm, but how could her heart be?

Now that she was here, everything her husband had endured was becoming vivid to her. She seemed to see his silhouette at the riverside, and even on that bridge she had never laid eyes on before, she could see him there.

“Send word to the Prince of Ning. I wish to meet with him.”

After issuing the order, she turned and left the main tent. “Fushen Guard, with me. I want to see the terrain myself.”

She mounted a horse once outside, and with several hundred Fushen Guards at her back, rode upstream.

She rarely rode horses. For common folk, horses were a novelty — a source of excitement and curiosity. But for someone of the Princess Consort’s station, whenever possible, she avoided riding. Because riding was, in truth, an uncomfortable affair.

If a person rides occasionally, it does feel fresh and interesting. But spending most of every day in the saddle — the misery of that, one could roughly imagine just by thinking about it.

First, there was the chafing. Long hours on horseback would rub the skin off your rear end — an unremarkable, everyday occurrence.

And the pain of chafed-raw skin is different from the pain of a clean cut, especially since you’d have to keep riding even after the skin was gone.

If certain unmentionable areas were rubbed raw, the suffering would be a thousand times worse than a chafed backside.

The Princess Consort rode along the southern bank of the Panxing River, her Fushen Guards in tow, carefully examining everything as she went. Every piece of terrain that could be exploited, every detail that might tip the balance of battle.

After roughly an hour, the more she looked, the more her confidence drained away. That earlier notion — perhaps she could snatch a lucky victory — had vanished entirely.

The Panxing River was indeed shallow, easy enough to wade across. But that was precisely the problem: the Ning army could mass along the bank and butcher the Chu soldiers as they struggled through the water. The scene had not yet come to pass, but it had already taken shape in her mind.

No man can move through water as swiftly as he can on open ground. The Chu soldiers laboring through the current would be nothing but targets for the Ning army’s arrows.

The further upstream she went, the narrower the channel and the swifter the current.

Going further would be dangerous — too many scouts had gone out and not returned.

After more than an hour of surveying, the Princess Consort turned back.

Halfway along the return journey, she spotted a small boat drifting on the Panxing River. In it sat a single man in a bamboo hat, fishing.

The Princess Consort found this strange. With battle imminent, what ordinary commoner would have the nerve?

She reined her horse to a stop, and the several hundred Fushen Guards halted with her.

She watched for a moment, then called out toward the river. “Are the fish biting?”

The man raised his head and glanced her way, then nodded. “They are. No bait needed — they come of their own accord.”

The Princess Consort’s eyes narrowed slightly. She was certain this man belonged to the Ning army.

“Were you waiting here deliberately for me?” she asked.

The man on the boat nodded again. “Waiting for the Princess Consort to pass by, and to offer a word of advice.”

“Advice about what?” she asked.

“The Princess Consort seeks her own death,” the man replied. “Why take hundreds of thousands of innocent soldiers with her?”

“Perhaps,” she answered, “I’ll take hundreds of thousands of yours with me as well.”

The man seemed to sigh — the distance was too great to see clearly.

He had positioned his small boat at precisely the right spot, just barely outside arrow range, and sat there at his ease.

“The Princess Consort must know,” he called over, “that war is not child’s play.”

He looked toward her. “If the Princess Consort is willing, this battle need not be fought. I will escort you to Mangdang Mountain and deliver you to the Wu Prince. Let husband and wife be reunited — and spare those hundreds of thousands of soldiers their lives.”

The Princess Consort’s brow furrowed. She turned and ordered: “Loose arrows!”

The Fushen Guards unstrung their hard bows and took aim at the man on the boat. The man on the boat reached up and seized a bow as well — he was slower to draw than the guards, yet his arrow flew first.

Without so much as a glance for aim, an arrow flew.

As that arrow crossed the water toward them, the Fushen Guards’ arrows were already arcing toward the boat.

It looked like a single lonely shooting star passing through a meteor shower flying the opposite way.

But at that distance, the dense shower of arrows fell short, clattering one by one into the river.

That lone arrow, however, arrived quickly. Two Fushen Guards immediately thrust out their arms to shield the Princess Consort. Leather cavalry shields were strapped to their forearms — round, barely large enough to cover one’s head and face.

The arrow struck the first shield and punched clean through it, then through the guard’s arm, and only stopped when it struck the second man’s shield.

The Princess Consort’s expression changed.

The man in the boat set down his bow, took up the oar, and rowed away, speaking as he went. “I respect the Princess Consort’s devotion to the Wu Prince, which is why I came to wait for you. I only wished you to understand: to throw away the lives of hundreds of thousands — that is not wisdom. Go back and think it over carefully. Why bring such slaughter upon the world?”

“We will meet on the battlefield,” the Princess Consort called after him.

She watched the man row away into the distance and thought: that must have been Tang Pidi, the Ning army’s Grand Marshal.

By reputation, this man possessed unrivaled strategic brilliance, and a martial prowess that had never met its match. From the arrow he had just fired, it was plain that his arm strength far exceeded that of her personal guard.

Yet the manner of it, she thought, was somewhat beneath his dignity.

Because of this encounter, the Princess Consort felt a cloud settle over her spirit. Her expression was dark as she rode back to camp.

Not long after she returned, a subordinate came to report that the messenger sent to the Ning army encampment on the north bank had already returned.

The Prince of Ning, Li Chi, was willing to meet with the Princess Consort of Wu. The appointed time: the following morning. The appointed place: the stone bridge upstream.

The next morning, the Princess Consort made her arrangements early. Worried that the Ning army might take advantage of her absence to launch an attack, she positioned troops along the riverbank to hold the line.

With her Fushen Guards and a large cavalry escort, the Princess Consort truly went to the stone bridge.

When she arrived, she found the Prince of Ning already there, waiting at the very center of the bridge.

The Prince of Ning appeared to have brought only two attendants: one sat across from him, and the two were playing chess right there on the bridge; the other stood at Li Chi’s side, watching. The three of them exchanged words from time to time, and every so often they would break into laughter.

The Princess Consort took a slow, deep breath. The Prince of Ning could come with only two attendants. She did not dare.

She walked onto the bridge with her escort and gave a slight bow toward Li Chi. “I pay my respects to the Prince of Ning.”

She had identified him as the Prince of Ning because the man on the right wore a python robe.

Li Chi rose and returned the courtesy. “My respects to the Princess Consort of Wu.”

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Li Chi introduced his companions. He gestured toward the man he had been playing chess with. “This is Tang Pidi, Grand Marshal of my Ning army.”

The Princess Consort offered another greeting; Tang Pidi returned it with a cupped-fist salute.

She gave Tang Pidi a second look. The arrow he had fired from the river the day before had given her quite a fright.

On the way back, she had reflected that while Tang Pidi’s combat ability was truly exceptional, that manner of doing things had struck her as somewhat lacking in bearing.

Li Chi then pointed to the guard standing behind him. “This is General Liu Ge of my Ning army.”

The Princess Consort gave a small nod — and saw the man called Liu Ge smile slightly. “The Princess Consort and I met yesterday.”

At those words, her expression shifted.

She looked at him carefully, closely, and asked almost without thinking: “The man on the small boat in the river yesterday — that was you?”

Liu Ge nodded. “It was.”

The Princess Consort found it difficult to believe. Had that been Tang Pidi, it would have been one thing — but that it was someone whose very name she had never even heard before was another matter entirely.

Li Chi smiled. “General Liu formerly served under the Feathered Prince. He told me yesterday that he had once met the Wu Prince in Jizhou, and that the Wu Prince had treated him with courtesy, so he wished to offer you a word of counsel. I gave my permission.”

“However,” Li Chi continued, “when he returned yesterday and reported that he had fired an arrow at the Princess Consort, I was displeased. A meeting is a meeting, persuasion is persuasion — firing arrows is not proper conduct. So I reprimanded him, and today I brought him along so he might apologize to the Princess Consort in person.”

When Li Chi finished, the Princess Consort’s expression darkened further — because it was she who had given the order to fire first.

Liu Ge had returned a single arrow, but his arrow had merely been later to leave yet first to arrive.

Liu Ge stepped forward and clasped his hands in a bow. “I gave offense to the Princess Consort, and I ask that you not hold it against me. My lord has already reprimanded me yesterday, as has the Grand Marshal.”

At that last part, the Princess Consort instinctively looked at Tang Pidi again. She had not expected Tang Pidi to reprimand Liu Ge as well — this sort of thing was formality enough with one reprimand from Li Chi, so why would the Grand Marshal also feel the need to add his words?

Noting her expression, Liu Ge gave a small smile. “The Princess Consort may not know this. My lord reprimanded me for firing the arrow — saying it was discourteous, that it lacked propriety. Even in war, one does not cut down an envoy. To act in such a manner, he said, made our Ning army look small.”

He paused, meeting the Princess Consort’s eyes for a brief moment before continuing. “What the Grand Marshal reprimanded me for was different. The Grand Marshal said… the arrow was wrong in itself — but since I had already decided to fire, why hadn’t I aimed?”

The Princess Consort’s heart clenched.

She looked at Tang Pidi again. That handsome young man showed not the slightest change — his expression remained placid, as though nothing could stir much reaction in him.

The Princess Consort asked Tang Pidi: “Grand Marshal — were you also considering whether to seize me here today?”

Tang Pidi looked at her. “Why do you use the word ‘also’?”

The Princess Consort blinked.

Tang Pidi swept his gaze over the guards she had brought onto the bridge. He wore the same expression as always — the look of someone for whom nothing he surveyed would provoke much response.

In addition to several hundred Fushen Guards, the Princess Consort had brought a number of jianghu masters with her onto the bridge.

After that sweeping glance, Tang Pidi said lightly: “If the Princess Consort intended to make a move, these are not enough. You brought too few.”

The Princess Consort’s voice was ice-edged as she replied: “I had no such intention. One can never be too careful about one’s safety.”

Tang Pidi still wore the same expression. “If the Princess Consort wished only to protect herself, these are not enough. You brought too few.”

—