Ye Zhiqiu is twenty-four and unmarried.
It’s not that she can’t find a husband. She was engaged at eighteen, but her betrothed broke it off; at twenty, another match was arranged, only for the man to back out at the last moment. The broken engagements became the talk of the city, and after she spent three years mourning her mother, everyone knew what to think: the Ye family’s daughter was a lost cause.
On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, her father summoned her to the ancestral hall. Before a stick of incense had finished burning, she was turned out of the Ye family home.
She took little with her: a string of plain silver abacus beads, a ledger she knew by heart, and a secret no one else knew.
Lu Yan is twenty-eight, an assistant minister of the Court of the Imperial Stud, and unmarried. The court calls him a principled scholar from a humble family with a brilliant future ahead of him.
No one knows that his birth surname is Song. Fifteen years ago, his mother died at Jialan Ferry in Nanpu.
He spent ten years climbing to this position, but not to become an official.
A marriage contract binds two people, each with their own designs. He wants her ledger and connections; she wants his official status and protection. Four chains lock them together, and neither can leave.
This is no marriage. It is a game of chess.
On the board lie salt permits, the throne, an old case, and an anonymous letter from an unknown source.
The question is, when did the players become the pieces?
