As a child, Xiao Jingheng was held hostage and imprisoned in the cold palace of Southern Liang. Shen Zhaohua was the only princess who treated him like a person. They spent ten years together: Xiao Jingheng once cut out wolf poison from Shen Zhaohua, and Shen Zhaohua once shielded Xiao Jingheng from a hidden arrow. On the night Southern Liang fell, Xiao Jingheng personally beheaded Shen Zhaohua’s father, yet locked her away in a golden cage, her wedding gown stained with blood, and kept her as his captive.
“Your Highness once promised to take Zhaoyang to see the apricot blossoms in Jiangnan.”
“But Your Majesty has forgotten: the day Southern Liang fell, my Jiangnan burned to ashes.”
Shen Zhaohua, the proudest princess of Southern Liang, met Xiao Jingheng, a hostage from Northern Yan covered in whip scars, in the cold palace when she was seven. She gave him a blue jade pendant carved with a chi-dragon, left behind by his mother, and he taught her to slit a vicious dog’s throat with a dagger. They spent ten years together in the cold palace. She cut away his rotting flesh, and he knelt in the snow for her. Yet on the night Northern Yan’s iron cavalry stormed the capital of Southern Liang, he broke her proud spirit with his own hands and locked her in a golden cage.
In the new dynasty’s imperial palace, Xiao Jingheng slaughtered the surviving members of Southern Liang’s royal house, yet every night he gripped Zhaohua by the throat and demanded, “Why didn’t you run?” Shen Zhaohua, her nails coated in poison, stroked the emperor’s chest, but when rebels besieged the palace, she swallowed the gut-rending poison for him. Only after a great fire in Yanjing consumed the Imperial Ancestral Temple did she learn the truth behind Southern Liang’s fall: it had all begun twenty years earlier with a case of “prince-swapping,” a plot to deceive heaven and alter fate…
