From the age of five, Third Princess Chen Yueli knew that people’s hearts were impossible to fathom. Even those closest to you could hurt you, abandon you, and use you. So she locked the palace gates, threw herself into her studies by lamplight, and raised her baby brother.
In the twelfth year of Dashun, the dynasty was beset by turmoil at home and abroad, with undercurrents running deep. To avert disaster, Third Princess Chen Yueli of Dashun was sent abroad to marry into a foreign state.
War between the two kingdoms had long been inevitable, yet the officials at court declared, “The Third Princess is peerlessly beautiful. Her journey will surely turn swords into plowshares and bring the unrest to an end.”
But on the forty-seventh day of her mission, the Third Princess and her party entered Xianbei territory, then vanished without a trace.
Xianbei’s ambitions were plain for all to see. After the Third Princess supposedly died abroad, Emperor Shunyuan, to make amends to the princess, granted her younger brother a princely residence.
On the day the residence was completed, good news arrived from the border. First report: a great victory at Yunhe, where the Qingzhou army annihilated twenty thousand enemy troops. Second report: General-in-Chief of the Zhenyuan Army Chu Ji had married Third Princess Chen Yueli.
The entire court was in an uproar.
On their wedding day, beneath a red gauze canopy embroidered with phoenixes and intertwined branches, the Third Princess, whom everyone believed had died, clutched a wine flask and collapsed against the man’s chest, her cheeks flushed deep red.
Before she got drunk, she pointed at his high, straight brow and asked, “Chu Ji, did you marry me only out of pity?”
Catching her wavering hand, the man fixed his deep, shadowed eyes on her. “And you? Did you marry me only for Chen Zhao?”
