In the winter of the seventeenth year of Chengping, there was never enough charcoal in the most remote room of the Imperial Medical Bureau.
I curled up on the couch, listening to the palace maids whisper outside the window:
“Have you heard? The Regent Princess fired three arrows at the training grounds today, and all three hit the bull’s-eye a hundred paces away!”
“Truly, women are every bit as capable as men…”
I closed my eyes. The “woman” they spoke of was using my muscles, my bones, the killing skills I had honed for twenty years.
My name is A Gui, chief of the late emperor’s secret guards, codename “Faceless.”
Three years ago, on the night the late emperor died, I should have followed my master in death. Instead, a foreign soul took over my body: Li Zhaoyang, the frail, sickly princess who spent most of her life bedridden. Using forbidden magic, she trapped my soul in her own failing body and took over my steel-forged one.
Now she is the Regent Princess, with power over the entire court. And I am the “mad, disgraced empress,” whose name is never spoken in the palace.
