The Golden Shuttle Crossing
Winter, the seventeenth year of the Hongzhi reign. Heavy snow falls over Wujiang.
Sixteen-year-old Shen Zhiwei kneels before her mother’s coffin, clutching the only thing her mother left behind: a golden shuttle with one corner missing.
Her mother’s final words were: “Don’t go to the capital. Don’t get involved with the Su family.”
But before Shen Zhiwei can ask why, the landlord kicks down the door. Five taels of silver, due in three days. If she can’t pay, she’ll be sold into a brothel.
She doesn’t kneel or cry. She simply grips the golden shuttle and points a knife at her own throat.
Three days later, she weaves a long-lost peony design of light and shadow from a pile of discarded silk. Everyone is asking: How could an orphan girl know a court weaving technique?
But she can only stare at the notch in the golden shuttle. Her mother traced three lines on her palm before she died. She still hasn’t figured out what they mean.
Once she has survived, she takes in the village widows and orphan girls one by one. The weaving-house owners of Suzhou panic. They cut off her silk supply, poach her artisans, and burn her tribute goods.
Then an order from the capital breaks the peace.
The order bears the seal of the Ministry of Personnel’s Chief Minister’s residence: the Su family. The people her mother spent a lifetime telling her to avoid have come straight to her door.
She must weave a hidden pattern into a wedding dress and wager that someone in the capital will recognize it.
Meanwhile, in the capital’s Imperial Dyeing Bureau, another woman stares intently at her portrait. Chu Mingyi clawed her way out of the icy water of the Laundry Bureau and stepped over countless corpses to reach the heights of power.
But Shen Zhiwei keeps her awake at night.
The day the wedding dress arrives in the capital, Chu Mingyi makes a decision
She will destroy Shen Zhiwei with her own hands.
But she doesn’t know that the golden shuttle in the hands of that Jiangnan girl conceals a secret capable of costing many people their lives.
