She knelt on the stone steps, waiting for her father to wake. Instead, she received news that her entire family had been poisoned overnight.
On the night of the palace coup, Empress Dowager Zhao struck at the same time: the crown prince was poisoned in the Eastern Palace, and the emperor's medicine was switched in his bedchamber. The Great Liang imperial family was wiped out in a single night. Before her father died, Ming Zhao received a blood-written secret edict and the imperial seal. She crawled into a secret passage she had secretly dug when she was seven and escaped the palace.
But she hadn't escaped to save her own life.
The secret edict bore her name. She had only one thing to do: return and seize the throne from the Zhao family.
For that, she needed a stand-in. Su Tang, a wandering physician skilled in both medicine and poison, was a master of disguise. The Zhao clan had slaughtered her entire family. The two women met in a ruined temple. Su Tang saved Ming Zhao and recognized the commander of the Imperial Guards pursuing her as the man who had killed her father. They struck a deal: Su Tang would disguise herself as the princess and return to the palace to act as Ming Zhao's eyes, while Ming Zhao would assume the name Shen Zhao and head north to enlist, building up military merit and gathering followers on the frontier.
From then on, the two women traded lives. One walked a knife's edge deep in the palace, wearing the princess's face; the other fought in the borderlands in men's clothes, killing enemies and earning distinction. They kept in touch through secret letters, using a jade hairpin broken in two as their token. Their shared enemy sat beside the throne, waiting to crush them one by one.
When the frontier general discovers that his most capable officer is a woman, when the empress dowager discovers that the princess at her side is an impostor, and when the two halves of that broken hairpin are joined again, it will be time for them to fight their way back to the capital.
