When the crabapple blossoms in Bianjing had all fallen, Luo Qingwu's coming-of-age ceremony was crushed beneath the Jurchen army's iron hooves. From a flower-pinned, embroidered home to a muddy prison camp, her body was branded with humiliation, and her family's bones were buried by the Bian River. And then there was Pulao, the Jurchen whose hands tore open her clothes, who covered her ears on a freezing night, and whom she hated to the bone, yet longed to touch in a fleeting moment of contradiction.
Over thirty miles of captivity, he watched her chew back blood and tears yet keep her spine straight. Over ten years of entanglement, she saw him struggle again and again between the executioner's blade and his conscience. When his blade presses to her throat, when her fingertips brush his old wounds, will hatred burn them both to ashes, or will they admit to the forbidden bond between them in the cracks of a world torn by war? Her resilience is no surrender. Amid the ruins of her dignity, she is simply piecing together a new shape for being alive.
