On the day her kingdom fell, she hid in a dry well and listened to the rebel army’s horses thunder past outside.
She had been the most honored princess of the Great Liang dynasty. In a single night, she became the lowliest servant in Northern Shuo.
The head matron of the palace wanted to sell her to a brothel, the crown prince wanted to use her as a pawn, and everyone wanted to take a bite out of her. But she refused to accept her fate. With an abacus, she balanced the accounts of corruption, calculated where people’s loyalties lay, and worked out a way to survive.
At the execution grounds, the man who had destroyed her homeland shouted, “Hold your blade!”
She thought he only wanted to use her.
And he did use her: he made her his strategist, had her open trading houses, and set her against the crown prince. But at some point, the ruthless Fourth Prince began bringing her candied fruit in the dead of night, waiting outside the window of the Ministry of Justice’s prison until dawn, and giving up the throne within his grasp for her sake.
“I don’t want the throne anymore. Now, will you marry me?”
Clutching the white jade hairpin he had given her, she wept beneath the sweeping snow.
From princess to servant, from strategist to marquise.
In four years, she traveled a road most people could never walk in a lifetime.
The sharpest weapon in this world isn’t a blade. It’s a person who can read the human heart with perfect precision.
And the thing she wanted to calculate was never the amount of silver she had
It was who should rule this world.
