Su Luoyun did not reply, but her hands, which had been blending the fragrant herbs, slowed to a halt. She happened to know the reason why the General had become so hard-hearted.
If Queen Wang had truly caused Huiniang’s death, then the bond between the Princess and the General was truly a cursed one — there could be no peaceful resolution.
Yet Zhao Dong had never told his son the truth, severing the mother-son bond between Zhao Guibei and Princess Yuyang. And he had sought only a divorce by mutual agreement, not a formal repudiation. In Su Luoyun’s eyes, the General had, in the end, still held some regard for the years they had spent as husband and wife.
After Han Yao had left that day, Su Luoyun had thought it over and over, and ultimately decided to visit the Prince Consort’s residence herself.
Though back in Liangzhou, Princess Yuyang had already made a clean break with her, making her intention to sever all ties abundantly clear — Su Luoyun still felt a deep sense of gratitude toward the Princess.
When she thought about it, the reason she had been able to leave her father and stepmother behind, set up her own household, and make a living running a fragrance shop — all of it had been because she had met Princess Yuyang, a benefactress who had opened doors for her.
The Princess, though carrying the imperious pride typical of royalty, had always been generous toward the merchant-class daughters who came and went from her residence. In those days, she had often made exceptions to keep such women at banquets, allowing them to broaden their horizons, and wherever she could offer support, she had done so with open hands.
These had all been acts of casual kindness on Yuyang’s part — she herself might not even remember them. But Luoyun had taken them to heart.
Out of gratitude for that kindness, Su Luoyun could not bear to watch her starve herself to death.
However, when Su Luoyun arrived at the Prince Consort’s residence in her carriage with her attendants, the estate’s steward greeted her with an expression of helpless difficulty: “Your Highness the Crown Princess, the Princess has said she will see no one. Not even if the Prince Consort himself were to return…”
Luoyun had initially assumed that Yuyang’s hunger strike was a ploy of self-inflicted suffering, meant to make Zhao Dong reconsider. But hearing what the steward said, it seemed instead that she had cornered herself in a dead end.
With that thought, she no longer cared whether the Princess wished to see her or not. She told the steward directly that she was forcing her way in of her own accord, and that none of it was his responsibility.
The steward had no authority to stop the Crown Princess. Since the noblewoman insisted on visiting the Princess, all he could do was lead the way.
But when Su Luoyun actually laid eyes on Princess Yuyang, she was shocked.
Despite her seniority in the family tree — she was Han Linfeng’s grand-aunt by imperial reckoning — the Princess was in truth only middle-aged, and with the meticulous care she had always taken of herself, one could easily believe she was not yet thirty.
Yet now, Yuyang’s once jet-black hair had gone half white almost overnight. Her face, bare of powder and rouge, was gaunt and hollow, unrecognizable from the woman she had been.
“Your Highness… what on earth has become of you?”
Princess Yuyang started when she saw the Crown Princess standing before her. Instinctively, she reached up to hide her unpainted face beneath her sleeve — but her hand had only lifted halfway before she thought better of it and let it drop, saying in a dull, lifeless voice: “Did you come here specially to laugh at my misfortune?”
Su Luoyun stared at her with the frustrated displeasure of someone watching another person waste their potential, and said coldly: “Is a man the only thing in this world that could make you carry on like this? Is there truly nothing else worth living for? You have seen with your own eyes — after the chaos of war, there are people out there selling their own children, just to survive. Even if the General divorces you, you should find the strength to carry on. How can you abandon yourself this way, resorting to a hunger strike to proclaim your feelings? Who are you even proclaiming them to? You ought to be thrown into a crowd of refugees, to truly understand just how precious a luxury it is to simply be alive.”
If her husband had not become Crown Prince, Su Luoyun would not have dared to speak so freely to this grand-aunt of imperial blood.
But these words had been pent up inside her for a very long time.
At the very least, she told herself, even if Han Linfeng were to cast her aside one day, she would never carry on as though she wished to die.
A heartbreak was a heartbreak — the pain would certainly be real.
But all the more reason, in precisely such a moment, to live with dignity. Just as she had said: a person only passes through this world once. How could one lightly speak of giving up? This belief had been one of the things that had carried her through those dark years when she had been blind.
To be scolded so bluntly by a small merchant woman who had once come to her home to sell fragrances — Princess Yuyang’s first instinct was naturally one of indignation. She struggled to sit upright, but having eaten nothing for two days, she was so weak she could barely move.
Luoyun had already had the estate steward prepare thin rice porridge in advance. Now she took the bowl and held it out to Yuyang: “Drink this first. Then you’ll have enough energy to snap at me.”
Princess Yuyang wanted to refuse, but Su Luoyun brought the bowl to her lips — and catching the soft, fragrant smell of the warm porridge, she found herself swallowing a large mouthful before she could stop herself.
Luoyun then offered a pair of chopsticks bearing a side dish to accompany the porridge. The pickled mustard greens, well-seasoned and pungent, were enough to stir the appetite with a single bite.
Princess Yuyang had never in all her life eaten a bowl of rice gruel in such a wretched state. When she finished, Luoyun took a damp cloth and gently wiped her mouth for her.
Yuyang stared, dazed, at this small woman who spoke harsh words but acted with such quiet tenderness. Without quite knowing when it had begun, her eyes grew wet. She asked in a low voice: “Do you also think that my stubbornness all those years ago was a mistake?”
Luoyun, now with no reason to guard her words around her, spoke quite plainly: “Though I was not there to know the full circumstances of what happened, I can understand the difficulty it placed upon General Zhao and Huiniang. After all, the second son of the Fang family at the time could not have been any less daunting to face than you were. And did you not yourself witness the way those around me turned on me when Fang the Second made things difficult for me? You are asking about right and wrong now, which tells me you have not yet suffered enough of the consequences.”
Yuyang had by now taken the full measure of this woman’s sharp tongue. She could only respond with indignation: “And here I thought you came to comfort me!”
Luoyun offered her some water, then said: “All things in this world have their causes and consequences. The obsession you clung to in those years produced the outcome you face today — you must accept it with equanimity. If you starve yourself to death here, do you intend to leave the General branded as a social climber who drove his wife to her death? I did not come to offer comfort. I came to stop you from planting yet more bitter fruit, only to spend the rest of your days regretting it.”
Yuyang understood what Luoyun meant, and she recognized the exasperated concern behind those cutting words.
She set down the cup and said in a low voice: “My mother has been stripped of her position as Empress. I cannot even request an audience with her. The Emperor holds Zhao Dong responsible for failing to protect the imperial escort in time, and refuses to receive me. My only younger brother has been confined for his role in the rebellion. The old friends I once had in the capital avoid me as though I were a disease. Even the man who shared my pillow for years has denounced me as a venomous woman, and refuses to let Guibei come to see me. I am loathed and reviled on all sides. Even I have grown to despise myself. After the way I treated you before — why did you still come?”
Luoyun answered with composure: “The grievance between you and the General is a matter between the two of you — what has it to do with me? All I know is that in my most helpless hour, it was you who took me under your wing and gave my younger brother and me the means to stand on our own feet. That is a great kindness I will carry to my grave. The Princess I have always known lived freely and boldly — and that is not at all the person I see before me now.”
Hearing Luoyun’s words, the Princess — who for these past several days had been submerged in a fog of helpless desolation — finally let out a choked sob. She threw both arms around Luoyun’s shoulders and wept like a lost child.
And it was from Princess Yuyang’s own lips that Luoyun finally came to understand what the Prince of Dongping had said to the Prince Consort that day.
It appeared that the Prince of Dongping had tracked down the midwife who had attended Huiniang’s delivery all those years ago. From her account, he had learned that Huiniang’s difficult labor had been no accident — that the Empress, acting through the midwife she had planted in the General’s household, had caused something to be introduced into Huiniang’s food, inducing the early onset of labor. The result was that she delivered Guibei, and then died of hemorrhage. The Prince of Dongping had subsequently located a palace attendant who had been the midwife’s contact, and with that, the long-buried case was conclusively proven.
Having stumbled upon these facts, the Prince of Dongping had sought out the midwife and obtained her written testimony, then brought her together with the attendant and presented everything before Zhao Dong.
Zhao Dong naturally recognized the midwife. Hearing what she had to say, memories long buried began to surface — if he recalled correctly, Huiniang had mentioned at the time that this midwife had been recommended by Yuyang.
He had never been able to accept why a wife who had always been in good health could have died so suddenly in childbirth.
There had been whispers at the time, but out of respect for the Emperor and Empress, Zhao Dong had refused to believe them.
Yet now that Queen Wang had proven herself capable of holding the Emperor hostage, staging a palace coup, and slaughtering members of the imperial family — when this old matter was raised once more, Zhao Dong could not keep it from piercing his heart.
When he watched the midwife weep as she recounted how she had been coerced, his rage erupted in an instant. He kicked the woman into unconsciousness, and then, heedless of everything, launched an assault on the temporary palace that Queen Wang had been holding in her grip at the time.
Had Han Linfeng not arrived in time and fought him outright — struck him hard enough to knock reason back into him — it was likely that Zhao Dong would have cut his way inside and, once he had put her to questioning, would have run his sword through Queen Wang then and there.
After listening to all of this, Luoyun asked quietly: “Did the General eventually meet with your mother? Did he manage to draw anything out of her?”
Yuyang let out a long, deep sigh. “He did. But she simply refused to confess. Zhao Dong said it no longer mattered. Whatever she had done in those years, she had done it for my sake, and her refusal to admit it now is simply her last desperate hope that he might still keep me. Now that the person is gone, uncovering the truth has come too late. All he asks of me now is a divorce by mutual agreement — to never see each other again until one of them is dead…”
As she spoke those last words, Yuyang’s voice was completely flat, as though she were narrating the story of a stranger.
Then, in a tone of bleak resignation, she continued: “In truth, that midwife was recommended to Huiniang by me. Zhao Dong had gone to war at the frontier at the time, and she was managing the household in the capital alone. Whenever we happened to meet at a tea gathering, we would sit and talk a while. As it happened, the second daughter-in-law of the Junguogong household had been safely delivered by this very midwife. So I told Huiniang that she might bring this experienced woman into her household, to ensure a smooth birth. I genuinely thought I was helping her. Yet I could never have imagined… that my mother would do such a thing. Even if I were to die this instant, I would have no face with which to meet Huiniang in the afterlife. If Guibei were ever to learn the truth — how could he not despise me? Tell me — what is the point of my life now?”
The bitterness of her life had arrived far too late, as though it had been accumulating all along and then descended without warning, all at once.
Her father, her mother, her husband — even the child she had raised with her own hands — none of them were her support any longer. She had wandered in a daze of confusion and anguish for many days now.
Today, Su Luoyun’s arrival had given Yuyang a channel through which to release it all. Having cried herself hollow just now, she felt as though she had been emptied out entirely — and was finally calm enough to speak.
Luoyun could offer no comfort in the matter of this husband and wife’s entanglement — that wound was beyond any words she had. All she could do was urge Yuyang to rest and recover, and meanwhile call for the physician she had brought along to take Yuyang’s pulse, to see whether there was anything requiring attention.
To everyone’s surprise, after taking the Princess’s pulse, the physician looked up with a slightly puzzled expression and asked carefully: “May I inquire, Your Highness — have your monthly cycles been regular these past few months?”
The Princess gave a bitter smile. “At my age, I imagine they are beginning to dry up altogether. And with so much weighing on my mind these past months, they simply have not come…”
The physician chose his words carefully, deciding that the customary word of “congratulations” was perhaps unnecessary, and came straight to the point: “Your Highness, from the pulse, it would appear that you are with child — and already quite far along. It seems you are approaching four months.”
At this, Yuyang stared blankly, murmuring to herself: “That is impossible. I have drunk the water of hong hua flowers as a precaution. How could I possibly be pregnant?”
The physician inquired further about her recent course of medicines, then took her pulse a second time. At last, he said with certainty: “If you have also been drinking the tonic decoction prepared by the Crown Princess to strengthen your constitution, that would account for it. Your physical foundation is stronger than most women your age — you are younger in body than your years would suggest, and after such nourishment, you have conceived. If you were to terminate the pregnancy with medicine, it would do some damage to your constitution. However, carrying a child to term at your age does carry a certain degree of risk.”
Yuyang sat in a daze, her hands slowly covering her own abdomen. A dreamlike expression of astonishment and joy gradually spread across her face: “Why would I not want it? This is my child…”
Then her expression shifted subtly: “I did not eat for two days — could that have caused any harm to the child?”
“The heartbeat is a little faint,” the physician said. “I urge Your Highness to pay careful attention to your diet. Allow me to prescribe a stabilizing tonic as well, and we shall see whether things improve.”
When Luoyun heard that Yuyang was with child, she did not quite know whether to feel glad on her behalf. When the physician withdrew to prepare the prescription, she said: “If the General were to learn that you are carrying a child…”
“You must not tell him — not under any circumstances!” Yuyang broke in urgently.
She was silent for a moment, then continued: “Because of my mother’s actions, I have become utterly disgraced in the capital. Everyone avoids me as though I carry a plague. A few days ago, when I went to seek an audience with my father the Emperor, he refused to receive me, but sent word through a servant telling me to stop conducting myself so recklessly, to learn to keep my head down and tread carefully — or else I would bring ruin upon my husband through my own conduct. Besides — he despises me now. Why would I trouble him further with a difficult dilemma? If things are to end this way, then let the divorce by mutual agreement come. At least that way, he and Guibei will be clean, no longer entangled with the name of a deposed Empress. Their road in official life will be smoother for it.”
Listening to Yuyang speak, Luoyun felt that after all the upheaval — affairs of state, affairs of the household — the woman had actually grown in some inner measure.
The Princess who had once been pampered and indulged by her father the Emperor and her mother the Empress had finally stopped clinging so fiercely to her own fixations, and had at last learned to consider what was best for others.
It was only a pity that she had learned it so late. Had she come to understand the hardships faced by those in lesser circumstances a little earlier, perhaps this ill-fated bond would never have reached such an end.
That day, with Luoyun by her side, Yuyang finally pressed her handprint solemnly onto the divorce agreement the General had sent over. Two copies in all — one she kept for herself, and one she sent back to the General. From this day forward, the two of them could each go their separate ways, at peace.
The Princess lingered for a moment, casting a gaze of quiet reluctance around the residence she had lived in for so many years. In this place, she had spent what she had once believed were the sweetest days of her life. Yet in the end, it had all turned out to be nothing more than a golden dream — empty and fleeting.
Now that the dream had broken, why should she cling desperately to its remains? And leave that father and son without even a roof over their heads?
With that thought, she slowly spoke: “Crown Princess, I must be shameless and ask one more thing of you.”
Luoyun answered sincerely: “Speak. Whatever lies within my power, I will do my utmost to help.”
The Princess said: “The lands the Emperor bestowed upon me in those years are in Yun Zhou. There is a residence there where I used to stay during the summer. I would like to move there, and leave this house free for those two. But before I go… I wish to see my mother, one last time, to bid her farewell.”
Luoyun hesitated a moment. “This is something I cannot decide on my own. I will need to consult the Crown Prince.”
Yuyang smiled bitterly. “I know I am placing you in a difficult position. The debt of gratitude I owe you has long since been repaid. And this matter alone — that you have allowed me to carry this child — is enough for me to feel boundlessly grateful. You need not trouble yourself over it. If the Crown Prince cannot agree, it is entirely understandable. I will not hold it against you.”
With that, Luoyun took her hand and said softly: “For the sake of the child you carry, you must find the strength to hold yourself together. Do not let yourself sink into sorrow and melancholy — the little one will know.”
After offering these parting words of comfort, she and Yuyang said their farewells.
When she returned to the Eastern Palace, she found that Han Linfeng had already come back from his tour of the rural areas. A few days in the countryside appeared to have deepened his tan a little further. Even though the weather had already begun to cool, he was stripped to the waist and practicing his fist forms in the small training ground within the Eastern Palace — he had apparently been too occupied in recent days to keep up his martial exercises, and fearing he was falling out of practice, had wasted no time upon his return in working his body loose.
And when it came to his appearance, his physique was well worth looking at. Dressed, he carried himself tall and lean, but once he removed his garments, the underlying form was all firm, clean-lined muscle.
His back view in particular was something to behold — a taut, narrow waist, broad shoulders corded with strength. Each time his long arms extended and swept through the air, the force behind every strike was crisp and deliberate, carrying the sharp current of well-trained power.
Every time Luoyun looked at him, she felt grateful all over again that her sight had been restored. With such a beautiful sight as this to be seen, it would have been a genuine shame not to appreciate it with one’s own eyes…
Han Linfeng finished his forms and looked up to find his Crown Princess standing against a pillar of the corridor, cheeks flushed a soft rosy pink, watching him with a smile that held something she was not quite confessing.
Han Linfeng took the cloth offered by an attendant, wiped the sweat from his face, and then threw on his outer robe. He strode over to her on long legs and said: “What are you smiling at in such an improper way?”
The smile on Luoyun’s face did not fade, but her eyes widened in protest: “What do you mean, improper?”
Han Linfeng thought about it for a moment and told her honestly: “It is the same look my old friend Guo Yan used to get whenever he caught sight of someone beautiful…”
Luoyun had not expected him to compare her to that notorious rake.
Thinking of the Young Lord Guo’s well-known behavior, she tilted her chin upward, briefly touched her lips with the tip of her tongue, then reached out two fingers and hooked them gently beneath Han Linfeng’s chin. She murmured in a low voice: “These past few days have been inconvenient for us. When there is a moment, I will come to you… Ah!”
Han Linfeng had been standing over her, looking down at the little temptress who had not the faintest idea she was playing with fire, doing her best to flirt with him. By his reckoning, from the time they had been reunited, he had been living the life of a monk. The old physician had said the Crown Princess had just conceived and should not engage in marital intimacy — and so for these past several nights, whenever her warm and impossibly soft body pressed itself against him in bed, Han Linfeng had been silently reciting breathing exercises and inner cultivation techniques to keep himself in check.
Now this little vixen had the sheer audacity to tease him in such a manner. If he did not let her understand what it looked like when a man had been pushed to his limit, he would have no claim to being a man at all.
Before she could finish playing out whatever act she had borrowed from Young Lord Guo’s playbook, Han Linfeng had already swept Su Luoyun off the ground and was carrying her in broad, unhurried strides toward the bedchamber, where he pulled the door shut firmly behind them with one foot.
From behind the closed door came the sound of Luoyun’s low laughing cry of alarm: “What are you doing? I am with child!”
Then the man’s voice, low and grinding through his teeth: “You dare stir up trouble without any intention of seeing it through. Today you are not leaving this room until you have helped me cool down.”
After that, the sounds from within grew softer. It took Han Linfeng the better part of the time — changing tactics along the way — to educate the woman in the matter of helping a man regain his composure, by which point over an hour had passed.
Luoyun lay with her lips kiss-reddened, her arms wrapped loosely around the man’s waist, and found a quiet moment to tell him about Princess Yuyang’s wish to see Queen Wang.
Han Linfeng considered it. “They are mother and daughter, after all. To refuse them a meeting seems too cold-hearted. As it happens, the Mid-Autumn Festival is in a few days. Let them see each other once.”
Luoyun nodded, and sighed softly: “Princess Yuyang is carrying a child now, yet she has no intention of telling the General. She will raise it on her own. But perhaps her thinking is right. If the General were to tolerate her again only for the child’s sake, a knot that large would be very difficult to untangle… If she had not been so single-minded in those years, perhaps she and the General might each have lived their own lives in peace.”
Han Linfeng lifted an eyebrow and ran a hand gently through her hair. “You are carrying our child now too. So if you ever have a quarrel with me one day, you are absolutely not allowed to run off in a sulk, hiding a child inside you the way she did.”
Luoyun looked at him — he had taken the conversation somewhere so entirely unrelated that she couldn’t help but press her lips together to suppress a smile. “What has any of that to do with us? Though, in all honesty, if one day you were to cast me aside the way Zhao Dong did her — if I didn’t leave, wouldn’t I just be making a fool of myself?”
Han Linfeng kissed her firmly on the mouth. “Is that really what you think of me — that I am so unreliable? If a day ever came to that, you may be certain it would mean someone had sent me a false message. And rather than protecting your husband, you went ahead and ran — what kind of a wife is that?”
Luoyun listened to Han Linfeng’s convoluted reasoning, laughed along with him for a moment — but in her heart, a quiet unease had been there all along. In a hushed voice she finally said: “There are so many reasons a man can cast a wife out. Every one of the seven grounds for repudiation is framed as the woman’s fault. And the first among them is failing to produce an heir… If I cannot give birth to a son, what am I to do…”
Her voice hesitated for just a moment, because the thought followed — that if she could not produce one, there would always be other women coming forward, one after another, to bear the Crown Prince’s children.
Han Linfeng, however, was utterly unconcerned. He had noticed that ever since the pregnancy, this woman had developed a habit of asking all manner of strange questions at odd moments. He could only smile in mild exasperation. “I am not yet in my seventies or eighties. How could I possibly lack the means to get you with child again? And besides — if they all turned out to be daughters, we could simply adopt an heir from Han Xiao’s line. Has Han Xiao not been selecting a consort lately? He has been so overwhelmed by the choosing that he has lost his bearings entirely — he has selected not only a principal consort but three or four secondary consorts as well. Surely his household will not be entirely without sons. The Han imperial family will never be short of male heirs. You are truly worrying about nothing.”
With that, he held Luoyun close and fell asleep.
Luoyun gazed at the thick dark lashes casting their shadow beneath Han Linfeng’s eyes. She knew he was exhausted from the days he had spent in the countryside.
After all, if the famine were to return the following year, unrest among the refugees would rise again. And so even work as unglamorous as rural irrigation and farmland management was something he had attended to in person, as Crown Prince. Gently touching his sleeping face, Luoyun settled in close beside him and drifted off to sleep in his arms.
Since their arrival in the capital, he had not stopped moving for a single day. Moments like this one — simply lying in each other’s arms — were something to be treasured.
These past weeks, between the bouts of morning sickness and Han Linfeng’s absence from the capital, Luoyun had rarely gone out to see anyone.
As a result, rumors had begun to circulate in the capital. People said the Emperor was less than satisfied with the Empress, and that the Crown Prince was likewise less than satisfied with his Crown Princess, whose origins were too low-born.
After all, when this father and son had each chosen their wives, the selection had been made with rather too little care and deliberation — likely because neither of them had ever imagined that their line would one day rise to become the ruling house.
Now that they had ascended to the heights of power at last, it was understandable that they might wish to replace their principal consorts. And even if, for the sake of their reputations, they could not simply depose them outright — there were other ways to accomplish the same end, numerous enough to choose from.
For instance: the Crown Princess had been ailing and refusing to see visitors for some time now. Who was to say she might not suddenly suffer an untimely death one of these days? That way, the Crown Prince could both preserve his reputation as a loyal husband to his first wife — and then, with perfect propriety, select a new companion better suited to his station.