On a winter night in the third year of Chengqi, Shen Zhuo, the Great Yan’s foremost female strategist, was chained atop the Star-Picking Tower.
The crown prince, her cousin, whom she had devoted ten years to supporting, gently poured lamp oil over her. “Cousin, you’re too clever. So clever that I can’t sleep at night.”
The Prince of Zhenbei, her betrothed and the man she had trusted with her back, struck the torch himself. “Zhuo’er, do you know how grating the light in your eyes is whenever you offer a strategy?”
As the flames engulfed her, she saw her half-sister nestled in the crown prince’s arms, smiling sweetly.
When she opened her eyes again, she had become the most lowly concubine-born daughter in the enemy kingdom of Great Zhou, in the Ningyuan Marquis’s household: “Jiang Wanyue,” whose mother was a camp prostitute and who had been abandoned on a country estate to fend for herself.
And today was the day the marquis’s household would send someone to bring her “home.”
The writing is pretty good. It's my favorite style. It's beautiful.