“…I won’t.”

Shen Zhuxi withdrew her feet toward the foot of the bed.

“What do you think you’re—”

Her words were cut short by her own sharp cry. Receiving her refusal, Li Wu simply reached out and pulled off her left shoe himself.

“Li Wu!”

Her voice did not stop him in the slightest, and not even the next motion — removing her foot wrapping — faltered in the least.

Shen Zhuxi’s face burned scarlet. She pushed herself up from the bed and tried desperately to pull her foot free, but Li Wu’s large hand held her ankle like an iron clasp, completely immovable.

“…Did you walk all this way over these past few days to get these?”

Li Wu gazed fixedly at the swelling and the broken, raw skin on her foot.

“No!” Shen Zhuxi said forcefully.

“What’s the use of being stubborn?” Li Wu looked up and stared straight at her. “If you keep being stubborn, I’ll kiss you into admitting it. I am asking you one last time — did you get these from walking around these past few days?”

What an utterly unreasonable man!

Shen Zhuxi had no choice but to say pitifully, “…Yes.”

Li Wu let out a heavy sigh, said nothing at all, and straightaway removed her other shoe and the foot wrapping.

Two pale feet, dotted with red marks, rested in his sun-browned palms — the red growing redder, the white growing whiter against each other.

Li Wu said nothing. The pad of his finger lightly traced the skin on the outer side of her toe joint, where the days of long walking had left a vivid red patch.

“You little fool…”

He touched that petal of red — like a plum blossom in snow — with the greatest of gentleness, his voice low and rough.

“I call you a fool, and you go and prove me right… Why push yourself so hard for someone else’s sake?”

“You’re not someone else,” Shen Zhuxi said before she could stop herself. Then, watching the sudden shift in Li Wu’s eyes, she scrambled to recover, “You’ve been good to me beyond all measure. It’s only natural that I’d want to do the same for you.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Li Wu said, dipping his head and curving his lips upward slightly. “You’re thin-skinned. I understand.”

Shen Zhuxi: What exactly does he understand?

He rolled up the hem of her trouser leg, then cradled her feet as though they were a rare and precious treasure, and lowered them with careful tenderness into the basin of steaming water.

Shen Zhuxi had been a little worried by all that steam, but the temperature turned out to be just right — warm water, slightly above body heat, enveloped her tired feet in a gentle embrace, along with the two sun-browned hands holding them.

Steam billowed steadily up toward her face. Shen Zhuxi sat frozen and flustered at the edge of the bed, and could tell without even needing to think about it that her face must be a vivid, dripping scarlet at this very moment.

If her mother had known what she was doing right now, she would surely have shot up from the underworld to beat her to death.

She was actually allowing a man who was not her husband to hold her bare feet in his hands.

Watching Li Wu scoop up warm water from the basin and pour it over the top of her foot, she hastily said, “I can wash them myself!”

“Don’t move!” Li Wu set his expression firmly and gripped the struggling feet in his hands with greater force. “It’s not as if I haven’t seen them before — why all this fuss?”

Mother above!

Shen Zhuxi closed her eyes in despair.

Li Wu did not look at Shen Zhuxi’s expression — the expression of a warrior facing certain death — and lowered his head again to cup water in his palms and pour it over her two pale feet.

The difference in their skin tones was like night and day, and where they met, it was like snow-laden branches of wheat — at the slightest disturbance, the snow would curl and shrink away at the wheat’s touch.

“Shen Zhuxi—” Li Wu said.

“…Yes?” Her restrained voice came from between barely parted lips, like the small mewl of a kitten stretching its limbs.

“I will not fail you.” He said.

Shen Zhuxi could not help but open her eyes.

Li Wu’s hands cradled the most private part of her, as a woman, yet his expression held not a trace of impropriety. The slight furrow of his brow, the gravity in his face, the firm set of his features, and those eyes looking straight into hers — serious, without the smallest hint of jest — struck her like a drumstick falling with full force, sending a deep resonance reverberating through her chest.

For quite some time, the room was utterly silent.

Until a crystal teardrop fell into the basin, and the water rippled outward in widening rings.

Li Wu lifted his right hand from the water and reached toward her — her tears suddenly spilling over.

“You just used that hand to touch my feet!” Shen Zhuxi turned her face away. A single tear traced the line of her jaw and dripped onto the bedsheet, leaving a small, round water stain before it vanished.

She clenched the bedsheet where the stain had fallen, as if that could somehow conceal the fact that she had been crying.

“And whose feet are they, if not yours?” Li Wu’s voice carried a trace of helplessness. “Everything was fine a moment ago — why the tears again?”

“Who told you to be so good to me?” Shen Zhuxi said in a voice thick with tears.

“Is being good to you something to cry about?”

“You’re too good to me!”

“And what of it?”

“The better you are to me, the more I will…”

Shen Zhuxi choked on the words, and what followed drowned in her weeping. She closed her eyes, and crystalline tears continued to slip out from beneath her lids.

The more afraid I will be of the day we must part.

For one fleeting moment, she was seized by the thought of never returning to the palace.

Of going back to Yutou County. Of becoming an ordinary village woman, living out a simple, contented life with Li Wu, Li Kun, and Li Que.

She could squat over a pit latrine. She could eat offal. She could wear rough cloth, and haggle with traveling merchants in the market over two copper coins.

As long as that former life could go on forever.

But could it, really? Did she even have the right?

She was a princess of the Great Yan. She had lived, under the name of Princess of Yue, as a parasite upon the people of the land — sixteen years of luxury and privilege. How, then, could she abandon the Great Yan and its people to their fate at the moment of the dynasty’s collapse? How could she return to that paradise beyond the world, stop her ears and blind her eyes, and live happily as a simple countrywoman without a care in the world?

Whether it was to be used as a token of goodwill toward the Fu family, or married off beyond the border to placate the foreign tribes of the grasslands who watched and waited with hungry eyes —

She would go.

Because she was a princess of the Great Yan. The price of her life had been set from birth. She could not, having enjoyed every comfort and luxury her station afforded her, then cast aside the obligations that came with it.

She was not capable of that.

“Don’t be good to me anymore…” she said through her tears. “Don’t be any more good to me than you already are.”

Li Wu lowered his head, scooped up a handful of water, and gently poured it over the top of her foot.

“Do you think you could stop bursting into tears at any given moment?”

“I can’t!” Shen Zhuxi said pitifully through her tears. “It’s not as if I want to cry!”

“And I can’t stop either,” Li Wu said. “My heart won’t allow it.”

The more he indulged her, the deeper her shame ran. The part of her that should have long since made its peace with fate’s every arrangement refused to lie still — it threw itself against an invisible cage, slamming until it drew blood, slamming until the pain was unbearable.

Only because she longed to break free of everything and fly toward the open sky.

“Don’t be good to me anymore!”

Great tears poured from her eyes. Even closing them could not hold back the torrent. The helplessness of her situation and the torment of being torn in two turned inward into self-loathing. Shen Zhuxi, lost and enraged and utterly powerless, could only act the child and take it out on the basin of water at her feet.

“I don’t deserve you being this good to me!”

A splash of water hit Li Wu. He did not flinch or move aside, his expression unchanged.

“Why don’t you deserve it?”

“Because I am not as good as you think I am!”

Shen Zhuxi could not bear to face the sincerity in his gaze. She covered her face and bent forward, and warm tears fell ceaselessly into her palms, then dripped through her fingers, one after another, into the basin below.

Tears split open the false veneer of calm. Ripples shattered the water’s surface into fragments.

Shen Zhuxi wept until words failed her.

“And I am not as good as you think I am, either,” Li Wu said with quiet steadiness. “I am an orphan without father or mother. I was called a bastard for more than ten years. I have eaten spoiled food, stolen things, and done worse than that besides. If anything, I am the one who is not worthy of you.”

Shen Zhuxi, desperate to deny his denial, looked up in a panic and shook her head over and over. “That’s not how it is…”

“That is only your view.”

Li Wu said it with absolute certainty.

“Shen Zhuxi,” he said slowly, calling her name, and held her tear-blurred gaze without looking away. “Not everyone is like you — treating the fool, the ugly, the bastard of unknown blood, and the high official all the same.”

“You are born of the imperial line, a branch of gold and jade, yet you have never looked down on me. You taught me to read. You taught me proper conduct. You ran about on my behalf and suffered hardship for my sake. I am the one who is not worthy of you.”

“That is not how it is!” Shen Zhuxi could hold back no longer. Her voice shattered, and the most deeply buried secret of her heart burst through her throat with her cry of anguish: “I don’t deserve you being this good to me, because I have lied to you—”

She sobbed as she said it: “I have lied to you. I am the Princess of Yue…”

The room fell abruptly silent. Even the air seemed to have stopped moving.

Every lie lost all meaning in this moment.

Her throat felt as though a blade were lodged within it. Every word she managed to say had to be dragged across that blade’s edge before it could leave her lips.

Every word came out soaked in blood.

She wept without sound, and forced out the shattered, aching confession word by broken word:

“I am that very Princess of Yue — the one who was extravagant and dissolute, willful and unrestrained, and who already had a betrothed…”

Sorrow flickered in those round, soft almond eyes — like the glittering scales of light on a mirror lake in autumn, plucking at the strings of his heart without warning.

Just as it had when they first met, when she had curled herself into that small book cabinet, eyes shut against the glaring sunlight, and he had watched her without reaction — until she had cautiously opened those tear-filled eyes.

Washed in tears, those round almond eyes had been clearer and purer than any crystal he had ever seen, untouched by a single speck of dust.

Then she had tumbled from the book cabinet, and he had caught her without thinking.

He had watched her carefully, measured her conduct against a harsh standard, and every time, she had not let him down.

After much deliberation, he had proposed the marriage.

It would have been so easy to deceive her.

Anyone could have deceived her.

With almost no effort at all, he had used the title of husband to keep her beside him.

It was he who had deceived her — from the very beginning, there was no pretend marriage.

He had seen her reluctance toward marriage and her wariness toward men. But that was all right. Patience was the one thing he had in abundance.

From the very beginning, he had entered this marriage in earnest — a marriage of one, on his side alone.

From the very beginning, he had never intended to let her go.

“…And what does that matter?” Li Wu said.

Shen Zhuxi forgot to cry, and yet the tears fell on their own.

“No matter which nation’s princess you are, no matter who you were once betrothed to — you are my woman now.”

Li Wu pushed back his sleeve, and with the knuckle of his thumb, still wrapped in cloth, he gently wiped away the tear suspended at the corner of her eye.

“We only have a sham marriage…” Shen Zhuxi said in a daze.

“Go out and grab anyone off the street and ask them — see whether they think our marriage is a sham.”

“You… did you know from the very beginning that you were…”

“And what if I did? What are you going to do about it?”

Li Wu looked entirely unrepentant — a dead pig with no fear of boiling water, as the saying goes.

He was right. Shen Zhuxi truly had no idea what to do with him.

If he refused to call it a sham marriage, then she was the only person in the world who knew it was one — and could a truth known by only one person still be called the truth?

“Shen Zhuxi, I have the patience to wait for you to say those words to me yourself — that you are willing.”

Li Wu lowered his head and softly rubbed the top of her foot and the gaps between her toes.

Water rippled gently outward, and his steadfast, resolute features appeared and disappeared on the shifting surface.

“But as for everything else — don’t even think about it.”

Shen Zhuxi could not have imagined that the secret she had guarded most closely, revealed with the worst expectations she could muster — would land with results this understated.

It seemed that for Li Wu, whether she was the princess of the state of Chu or the Princess of Yue, it made no difference whatsoever.

In his eyes, she was still herself. She was only Shen Zhuxi. She was only the silly little fool who made him want to laugh and lose his temper in equal measure.

Shen Zhuxi stared blankly at him and murmured:

“But I am a princess of the Great Yan. To eat the sovereign’s grain is to be loyal to the sovereign’s cause… I cannot abandon my nation in a time like this.”

“You simply want to fulfill your duty — not to return to the palace and marry that number-one dog in the world?” Li Wu asked.

Shen Zhuxi held herself back, and did not correct him that the man in question was called the number-one gentleman in the world, not the number-one dog.

She had no desire to get drawn into the question of whether “the number-one dog” or “I” mattered more.

“…Of course not,” she said.

“You have no feelings of a romantic nature for him?”

“A match decreed by parents, arranged through a matchmaker… where would such feelings come from?”

“Then who do you have feelings of a romantic nature for?” Li Wu’s gaze was burning and intent.

Shen Zhuxi hesitated, then said, “…No one.”

“Rubbish,” Li Wu said without missing a beat.

“How dare you speak to me like that!” Shen Zhuxi flared.

“Is the number-one dog better-looking, or am I?”

Shen Zhuxi was rendered wordless.

She had guarded against so much, and still she hadn’t managed to guard against Li Wu starting his quacking.

Shen Zhuxi wrestled with herself and said, “…You.”

“Does the number-one dog have more literary talent, or do I?”

Shen Zhuxi strangled her struggling conscience and said, “…You.”

“Is the number-one dog good to you, or am I?”

This time Shen Zhuxi looked directly into his eyes and answered without hesitation, “You.”

“Shen Zhuxi, are you still going to deny that you are head-over-heels in love with me?” Li Wu said with great self-satisfaction.

“You — you’re talking rubbish!” Shen Zhuxi’s tear-stained face went instantly crimson.

“Rubbish is rubbish — who doesn’t talk rubbish? Only dead people don’t talk rubbish.” Li Wu looked entirely sincere, without a trace of shame.

Shen Zhuxi was too incensed to find words, and could only fix him with the most withering glare she could manage from her damp, reddened eyes — a glare that carried absolutely no power to intimidate.

“Look at me like that again, and I’ll kiss you,” he said.

Shen Zhuxi was caught — looking was wrong, not looking was wrong too. She was trapped between the two, and in her distress, tears began to gather in her eyes once more.

“Crying, crying, crying all the time — I can’t stand you,” he said.

Li Wu pressed his sleeve lightly against her wet eyes and absorbed the tears seeping from beneath her eyelids.

He spoke impatient words, yet there was not the slightest impatience in his expression or his voice.

Only in Li Wu’s presence could she be her most unguarded self.

It was all right not to be composed. It was all right not to be dignified. It was all right not to be proper.

It was all right to be impulsive. It was all right to do foolish things.

It was all right to go out in the middle of the night to shelter the spring onions from the rain. It was all right to want to see the young tiger one last time.

Whatever she wanted — it was all right.

He was always there — grumbling and cursing, yet gentle and endlessly patient — standing guard at her side.

“Your responsibilities — I’ll carry them alongside you,” Li Wu said slowly. “For as long as you are my woman, I am a man of the Great Yan.”

“Whatever the number-one dog can do — I can do it too.”

Li Wu held her gaze and said, word by deliberate word:

“Because of you, there is nothing I cannot do.”