In the fourth month of the twenty-fifth year of Hongwu, Crown Prince Zhu Biao returned from Shaanxi.
The officials of the court went thirty li outside the capital to welcome him, while the Crown Princess waited at the palace gates all day.
No one knew he had spent three months inspecting the region while ill, all to ease his father's burden.
Even fewer knew that the night he returned to the capital, Zhu Yuanzhang said just one word to him:
“Hmm.”
I am Zhu Xiongying, the Crown Prince's eldest legitimate son.
Before Grandma died, she clasped my hand. “Xiongying, your grandfather will never bow his head in this life. But you must bow for him.”
I didn't understand.
I only knew that Father kept reading memorials even from his sickbed, and his vermilion replies were always just two words: “Approved. Done.”
I only knew that Grandfather never came to visit him.
I only knew that on the day Father died, Grandfather sat in Wuying Hall all night and never came.
[Tenth day of the intercalary fifth month, thirty-first year of Hongwu. Fengtian Hall.]
He lay on the bed, his cloudy eyes fixed on me.
“You've come.”
I knelt and took Grandma's hairpin from inside my robe.
“Grandma asked me to give you a message.”
He snatched the hairpin and ran trembling fingers over it.
Tears streamed down his aged face.
Outside the window, locust blossoms had fallen across Nanjing for twenty-five years.
This time, at last, he wept aloud.
That night, the candles in Wuying Hall burned until dawn.
The emperor, who had never bowed his head in all his life, placed the empire in the hands of his fifteen-year-old grandson.
It was a debt he had owed his son for twenty-five years.
