She was a princess high above all others; he was a powerful minister who commanded the court from behind the scenes.
When she was eight, as rain fell beneath the artificial hill in the imperial city, Xiao Che draped his outer robe over her head and said, “If the sky falls, I’ll hold it up for you first.”
Back then, Murong Yao was just a wild girl who climbed trees to steal pastries, while he was the Imperial Tutor who patiently taught her how to hold a brush.
In an abandoned tower lay the ugly portraits she had drawn. The blank spaces in his military texts were filled with notes he had added for her. A jade pendant and a dagger warmed to the same temperature in their palms.
But the imperial palace was never a place to raise fawns. When her half-sister’s plot left a maid dead in a pool of blood, when concern for his family’s safety made him fall silent and turn away in court, and when her mother clutched her hand on her deathbed and said, “Yao’er, live well,” she finally understood that innocence was the sharpest blade of all.
She put away her naivety and ignorance, wrote her schemes in blood, and climbed over a mountain of corpses to claim the throne. He donned his armor and guarded the frontier, becoming the great general who protected the realm, the one she relied on most and feared most.
Seated upon the throne, she watched him kneel below, his temples touched with frost. The question, “Do you still remember what you said beneath the umbrella?” caught in her throat, and in the end became, “General Xiao, lead the troops out.”
The willows along the palace walls put out new branches year after year, but the promise beneath the umbrella had long since been pickled by wind and frost.
They protected the same realm, yet stood at opposite ends of power, becoming each other’s most painful weakness and cruelest blade.
