In the spring of the third year of Jianyuan, the daughter of a Jiangnan silk manufacturer, Lady Lin, enters the imperial palace. She wins the emperor’s favor in a single night, only to be drawn into a web of intrigue. As the emperor watches her play the zither, his gaze lingers on the beauty mark beneath her eye, identical to that of someone from his past. His decision to lodge her in Jingren Palace stirs up further undercurrents among the six palaces. Noble Consort Shu digs her vermilion-painted nails into Lady Lin’s wrist and sneers, “Who do you think His Majesty sees when he looks at your face?”
When she wakes in terror at midnight, the emperor’s scorching hand is clamped around her throat. But the moment he touches the crescent-shaped birthmark on her shoulder, he lets go in despair. A pair of golden hairpins depicting mandarin ducks hidden in her dressing case, and a blood-red mole between her brows identical to one in an old portrait among the northern frontier’s tribute goods, all point to a secret from twenty years ago: the fire in the Eastern Palace that consumed a pair of imperial twins. Holding a fragment of the “Rainbow Skirt Song” whose calligraphy matches the late empress’s, she pieces together the truth from the emperor’s sleep-talking. His favor is a poisoned chain, binding her like a bird meant to soothe his restless soul.
As rebel arrows rain down on the palace walls, she holds the tip of her hairpin to the emperor’s throat. Their two similar faces are reflected in a bronze mirror. “The one who carried you to shore in the ice cave, was she your sister who drowned, or was it me, the one whose name was erased?” A broken jade pendant cuts into their clasped hands, exposing the forbidden secret of the twins, stricken from the imperial genealogy in cinnabar. At last, beneath the crabapple tree in Jingren Palace, half a golden imperial seal lies beside a marriage contract in a gilded box. The dying emperor’s final words read: “In the spring of the thirteenth year of Jianyuan, I finally learned that the zither’s song had misled me all those years ago.”
