Shen Zhaoning, Princess of Great Liang, was born into a prestigious family with a century of history. She could compose poetry at seven and was celebrated throughout the capital by twelve. She was meant to marry her childhood sweetheart, the young prime minister Gu Changyuan, and live a smooth, carefree life. But an imperial edict arranging her marriage swept her from the misty rain of Jiangnan to the windswept northern frontier. She became a pawn in a political marriage between Great Liang and Beishuo, bound for the man known at court as the “Asura”: Xiao Yan, Prince of Shuozhou.
Rumor had it that Xiao Yan was a ruthless killer, his face marred by old scars and his temper violent. Some even said half his face had been destroyed on the battlefield, and that he wore a black iron mask every day. Shen Zhaoning thought she was marrying nothing more than a soldier. But when she lifted her bridal veil, she saw a pair of eyes so calm they were almost indifferent. They belonged not to a brute, but to a blade hidden in its sheath.
Shuozhou was bitterly cold, and the prince’s residence was austere. Xiao Yan treated her with polite distance, never crossing a line, but never drawing close either. Shen Zhaoning thought this was all her life would amount to, until one day she accidentally stumbled upon Xiao Yan removing his armor alone in the dead of night. His body was covered in hideous old scars, and he was murmuring to a portrait. The person in it was unmistakably the girl Shen Zhaoning had been in her youth.
At last, Shen Zhaoning realized that this political marriage was far more complicated than she had imagined. And the taciturn man, still as a mountain, carried a secret greater than the snowstorms of the northern frontier.
This was a game of strategy played with a nation as the stake and lives on the line. They were both people pushed forward by fate. Amid court intrigue and the ravages of war, a marriage that began as a transaction would become the one attachment neither could ever bear to relinquish.
