Spring Isn't Over Yet

Lu Huai had a beloved. She was clever, bright, and spirited.

The day he returned to the capital to resume his post, they agreed to marry when he came back. But when he returned with betrothal gifts, he found the courtyard long since burned to the ground, and a body in the ashes.

Grief-stricken, Lu Huai refused to believe it was her, even though all the neighbors swore it was.

She had promised to wait for him to come back and marry her. How could she break her word?

Lu Huai had hated, resented, and been angry with the woman who broke her promise. More than anything, though, he worried about how much pain someone as afraid of pain as her must have suffered, dying alone in the fire, and how cold the road she had to travel must have been.

Just as he seized his father's position as prime minister and no longer wanted to keep her waiting,

his half-brother appeared before him, holding her hand. With all the earnestness of a young man in love, he declared that he wanted to marry her.

The woman he wanted to marry was none other than Lu Huai's beloved, who had supposedly perished in a fire three years earlier.

New novel now available: Madam Man

Blurb: After Qin Shu led his troops into the imperial city, he never expected someone to present him with an old acquaintance.

An old acquaintance who had once tried to climb to wealth and glory, and twice brought him to the brink of death.

He did not refuse. After all, no one could turn down the sight of an old acquaintance wagging her tail and begging like a dog beneath him.

From then on, the Qi family lost a Madam Qi, and the palace gained a low-ranking Court Lady Song.

People often heard her pleading and sobbing from inside the palace where Court Lady Song lived, along with the sound of porcelain shattering. They saw the emperor scold and punish her in public, her old wounds layered beneath new ones.

As time passed, it was hard not to pity her.

More often, though, people complained that she should have been more resolute and taken her own life, proving herself a chaste woman who would serve no two husbands, and sparing the emperor the shame of being condemned for forcibly taking a minister's wife into the palace.

More regrettable still was that the brilliant, exceptionally gifted Grand Tutor Qi, once the most talented man in the capital, had married such a shameless, cowardly woman who clung to life.

Everyone hoped Song Man Niang would die. Not one person wanted her to live.

Theme: If you want something, learn to fight for it yourself.