Twin moons hung over the glazed-tile roofs. A girl who stole pastries from the imperial kitchen was forced to take charge of the empire. When an edict of succession fell from Qianlong's shattered jade pendant, the throne room of the Forbidden City was suffused with the scent of rouge for the first time. Little Swallow, once a wild troublemaker, turned out to be the lost jewel of the former dynasty's phoenix bloodline and Xia Yuhé. Before she could even warm the throne, three pairs of eyes had woven a tender net around the new emperor: Yongqi gave up his yellow sash to serve as her personal guard, his soft sword always striking down assassins on her behalf in the dead of night; Ertai commanded the Ministry of Justice, yet secretly kept a candied hawthorn skewer she had bitten halfway through, with a young man's heart hidden between the lines of the law; Benjamin's Western paintbrush recorded the curve of the golden hairpin falling from her temple, while beneath his parchment lay death warrants from agents of the Holy See.
Murderous plots lurked inside and beyond the red walls, as the curse of a woman ruling in a man's place alternated with the farce of the auspicious white deer. With cinnabar-stained fingers, Little Swallow tore up the treaty that would marry her off to another state, but she could not tear through the threefold web of love around her. Yongqi's hidden arrows knocked Turkic shafts from the air for her; Ertai's sharp tongue shielded her from open attacks at court; Benjamin's glass mirror turned Western cannon fire into a sky full of rosy clouds. When the Empress Dowager's poisoned wine met Xiao Jian's martial-world command, and the Empress's voodoo doll became entangled with Xiang Fei's butterflies, the girl who had turned the ancient poem “Marching to War” into a roast-chicken recipe finally understood: memorials were harder to get through than palace walls, and loving one person was harder than hating the whole world.
The nine-tiered palace was on the verge of collapse. Someone saw three locks of hair beside the female emperor's pillow: one tied to a mint sachet, one wrapped around a fragment of the Mencius, and one steeped in Venetian perfume. The historian's trembling pen hovered in midair, unable to write the words: “On this day, the Emperor went on an autumn hunt at Mulan with the three young lords and did not return to her tent that night.”
