In the twenty-third year of Yongchang, during the Great Yong dynasty, Li Mufeng, a prince banished to the Cold Palace, finds a jade clasp carved with a wolf's head in the snow at the Hanwu Hall. He has no idea it was left behind ten years ago by Chen Linshuang, the Prince of Zhenbei. One is an obscure prince whose mother was poisoned to death, hiding his sharpness behind a chessboard and using astrological divination to stir up the struggle among nine princes for the throne. The other is the Wolf King of the northern frontier, commanding elite armored troops and slaughtering his political enemies with ruthless force, yet relentlessly pursuing that cool, distant figure alone.
The court is a treacherous maze of intrigue. The salt-permit scandal uncovers a curse on the imperial seal from the previous dynasty, while the collapse of the Tower of Heaven reveals a deadly threat to the empire's dragon veins. Chen Linshuang massacres an entire village to protect Li Mufeng, only to hear him say, “Your blade is still dirtier than Your Highness's pen.” Li Mufeng takes a fake-death drug and stages a scene of torture, forcing Chen Linshuang to kneel on shattered porcelain until his knees bleed along Vermilion Bird Street. In the pouring rain, he cries out, “If you need those eyes to see clearly, then I'll gouge them out and make them your lanterns!”
From finding comfort together in the Cold Palace to being consumed by passion, from blood-soaked altars to misty Jiangnan rains, this wager with the whole realm at stake makes love the most painful scheme and the cruelest blade. When the imperial seal sinks into the deep sea, the history books record only that the Prince of Zhenbei died in battle at the frontier. They do not know that in a Jiangnan town's apothecary, someone is cutting a bloodstained battle flag into curtains, then asking with a soft laugh, “Can your wolf-head jade clasp match half a lifetime of storms and snow?”
