On our wedding night, the Prince Regent stroked the scar on my collarbone and chuckled: "There should have been a mole here."
He taught me to imitate another woman's posture, right down to the sound of her breath.
Later, when I was pregnant with the dragon species, he tore open my collar in public at the palace banquet:
"Look at this scar, isn't it ridiculously fake?"
Until the day I gave birth, he knelt in the snow and prayed to the gods and Buddhas in the sky.
But I just smiled and asked the palace maid to pass the message:
"Tell the prince—"
"This time, even the scars are real."
