In the late spring of the year she turned eighteen, Tan Yao received a marriage proposal.
The suitor was Fu Jing, the youngest chancellor in the court, twenty-three years old and at the very height of power. He had never even met her.
Tan Yao couldn't understand why he had chosen her. Everyone she asked said she'd find out after marrying him. But she insisted on getting an answer before the wedding.
At last, at the Jiang family's spring appreciation banquet, Fu Jing broke off a pomegranate blossom and stood outside the pavilion, looking at her as he recited the little poem she had casually written a year earlier:
“Spring deepens, yet I cannot sleep; I push open the window and see the full moon.”
It turned out that someone in this world really could see into her heart through the lines of a poem.
