At the spring hunt when I was sixteen, I won first place with a single arrow. Princess Xiao Jin grabbed my hand in front of everyone. “Teach me.”
From then on, a pair of shadows appeared in the palace. She taught me poetry, and I taught her archery. One rainy night, hiding in a grotto in the rock garden, she stole a kiss on my cheek. “A Yu, if I weren’t a princess...”
I fled in a panic, never seeing the tears at the corner of her eye.
Later, I guarded her realm, rising from Cavalry Commandant to General Who Guards the Nation.
She carved out a path for me, going from a pampered princess to an iron-fisted regent.
At the end of a battle report, I wrote in code: “I dreamed of you again, wearing the white jade hairpin I gave you.”
Her reply included a dried flower, with a message carved into its petals: “Go ahead and try dying. I’ll be waiting for you in the capital.”
Until, in the Golden Hall, the emperor hurled a decree of marriage at my face. “Marry the chancellor’s daughter, or watch her die.”
On my wedding day, with ten miles of red bridal finery, she stood in white atop the highest palace wall and shot an arrow through the curtain of my bridal sedan.
Tied to the arrow was a lock of hair she had cut off.
Inside the sedan, I clutched that lock as blood soaked through my wedding gown.
Thirty years later, a blank tombstone stood on a cliff in the northern borderlands.
In the spring rain of Jiangnan, I closed my eyes, holding the talisman she had given me.
The history books record: “General Qin Yu, who guarded the nation, and Princess Xiao Jin never married and died on the same day.”
No one knew...
Our coffins lay side by side, our fingers intertwined, just as they had when we secretly held hands for the first time as girls.
“I can defend ten thousand miles of rivers and mountains, but I couldn’t protect you.”
“I can read the hearts of everyone under heaven, but I can’t figure out how to love you openly.”
→ Click to uncover the forbidden love omitted from the history books
→ See how they loved each other on the edge of a blade and inscribed their devotion in the margins of history
