“On the chessboard of the Forbidden City, the ones who survive are never the pieces, but the players.”
In the twelfth year of the Chengqing era, Shen Qinghuan goes from a convict’s servant in the Yeting Palace to a maid who prepares medicine for the emperor. The world sees only how low she bows her neck, lower than a willow branch, as she kneels to receive a slap from the Noble Consort. No one knows that she uses her skill at tasting medicine and detecting poison to mix abortion-inducing cinnabar into Consort Shu’s calming tonic, or that she replaces the medical records of a false pregnancy with handwriting that implicates the empress’s maternal clan. When she mends the emperor’s old clothes, she hides dispatches from the northern frontier in the stitching. The secret letters she sends to the border general are scented with rouge. Everyone thinks she is as delicate as a trumpet vine clinging to the palace walls, but they do not know that, ten years ago, when she crawled out of the bloody massacre that destroyed the Shen family, she swore to tear apart this man-eating imperial power.
When Shen Mingyue, a woman who looks just like the late empress, wins the emperor’s favor; when the emperor rubs the burn scar unique to the Shen family on her wrist and murmurs, “Who are you, really?”; when the border general she grew up with holds a blade to her throat and demands, “Why did you betray me?”... the nine-tiered palace finally hears the tolling of its death knell.
“I want the phoenix crown, and I want justice too.”
On the day the new emperor ascends the throne, she smiles and tosses the bloodstained Tiger Tally into the flames. In the ashes, a child picks up half of a jade pendant, while a trembling historian records: In the first year of the Kaixi era, nineteen skeletons were unearthed beneath the floor tiles of the Phoenix Perch Palace. Every one was missing a finger from the left hand, exactly as in the dismemberment execution inflicted on the entire Shen family ten years earlier.
