7

JI YUE’S MISERY had only begun at dinner. When the banquet was over, the girls filed silently back to the virgins’ palace. The moment the door was shut, they rounded on her. While the girls at her table hated her for spoiling their chances with her miserable actions, the others were angry that the emperor had spent time with “a dirty pig like her!”

Nothing about her was sacred. Her body, her hair, her smell were all fodder for insult. For one insane moment she thought the eunuchs might help keep the rancor under control, but to her dismay, they merely egged the virgins on. This was their entertainment. Plus, they had no wish for the bitterness to be turned back on them.

In the end, Ji Yue stopped defending herself. No one wished to hear her side, anyway, and she was too miserable to try to speak reasonably to anyone, much less the shrews that surrounded her. She simply wanted to go to her bed and cry herself to sleep. But she was blocked on all sides. No one would let her pass out of the main room. She had to wait it out, doing her best to ignore every hateful word.

But then someone recalled that the emperor liked her hairpin. Another screeched that the pin was hers and she ran at Ji Yue, her claws extended to regain her property. She succeeded. She ripped out the butterfly pin and took a handful of cemented hair as well.

The pain shredded the last of Ji Yue’s patience. She had two brothers, she knew how to fight. So she grabbed the girl’s arm with one hand and balled the other into a fist, slamming it into the girl’s stomach. Her attacker crumpled to her knees, but the hairpin was still gripped tight in her fist. “That was my great-grandmother’s!” Ji Yue said, and she went to pry it out of the shrew’s fingers. She’d just managed to grab hold of one tiny wing when the first blow fell.

Clearly, someone else had brothers. A hard, compact fist slammed into her side. As Ji Yue began to drop, she saw a small foot in a bright red shoe fly toward her face. She twisted, taking the impact on her shoulders, but that only exposed her face on the other side. Blows began to rain down. She had no idea who attacked her, only why. Tonight she was the scapegoat for everyone’s frustrations. As blow after blow fell, each more vicious than the last, Ji Yue could only curl into herself and pray. Surely it would end soon.

He saved her. Somehow she knew it would be him. Not the emperor, as she might dream, but the man who plagued her awake and asleep: Sun Bo Tao, Master of the Festival. She heard his voice, a deep, angry bellow that cut through all the high screeches.

She felt no more blows, only a dull ache from head to toe. The pain would grow worse later, but she already knew that nothing had been broken. The girls had been intent on a beating, not murder. The master was still bellowing, and she heard the noise of people withdrawing. Then she felt his hands, large but oh so gentle, on her back.

“Where are you hurt, Ji Yue? You must tell me. I cannot help otherwise.”

Deep in her spirit, she wanted to answer. She’d never had a sister, and she had naively believed that some of her fellow virgins would be her friends. She was a foolish, foolish woman to have thought such a thing. She knew that now.

“Chen Ji Yue, you must answer me!” His voice held a tinge of panic, so she opened her eyes to look at him.

“Once many years ago,” she said, “I was climbing to reach something I was not supposed to have.” She blinked away her tears. With his help, she began to uncurl, wincing as she moved. “I don’t remember what it was. A sweet perhaps or, more likely, my father’s brushes. But it was too high and I was too small, so I fell and broke my arm.”

“Ji Yue, where are you hurt?” He brushed his thumb across her cheek and it came away smeared with white paint and black charcoal.

“The pain was unbearable,” she said, retreating to the memory of her mother’s arms wrapped about her, and her father’s voice, high and threaded with panic. “I screamed until my throat hurt as much as my arm, and still I did not stop.”

“Ji Yue…” he murmured, clearly frustrated. He was running his hands down her body-her arms and her ribs, then her legs. There was nothing familiar in his touch, simply a quick pat everywhere to check for breaks.

She leaned forward and touched his arm before he reached her big feet. “This was a beating,” she said. “Nothing more.”

He froze. “I have already summoned the women’s doctor.”

She shook her head. She did not want to see that woman again or go into her examination room. “Send her away. I would know if something inside were broken.”

He shook his head. “Not always,” he said grimly as he handed her a cloth for her face. “Have you been beaten before?”

She wiped the worst of the paint from her face then pulled the now broken board from her hair. “Once by my father for practicing my brush strokes upon his fine paper. And once by my brother’s tutor for doing his homework for him.”

He frowned. “You did your brother’s homework?”

She shrugged, then immediately stopped. Already her back was beginning to swell. “I was bored. And I didn’t think the runt would claim my work as his own.”

He smiled. This close, she could see the way his brow puckered when he was worried, and how his smile smoothed the furrows away. “Can you stand?”

She nodded. He gripped her hand, but there was something between their palms. He pulled back and turned her hand over. The mangled butterfly hairpin lay in her palm. She had ripped it back from the lying bitch who’d stolen it.

“I am sorry,” he said. “It was a pretty piece.”

It was mutilated beyond repair. The jade stones were broken or missing and the gold wire was twisted. She looked at the misshapen thing in her palm and something inside her broke. She began to cry, and once the tears began, they would not stop.

He tried to speak to her. She couldn’t understand the words, but she heard his tone. He sounded much like her father had that day long ago when she’d broken her arm: alarmed, anxious and completely uncertain what to do. In the end, Bo Tao simply swept her legs out from under her and carried her from the virgins’ palace. She didn’t know where he was taking her, and frankly she didn’t care. His arms were larger than her father’s, his voice was deeper than her father’s, but the comfort was the same. His touch was just as tender, and she wanted nothing more than to be held by him forever.

Then he stopped walking. He stood still for a moment while she listened to the steady beat of his heart. She liked the regular rise and fall of his broad chest. Then he eased down on a bench, gently resting her on his lap.

“We are alone now,” he said. “You can cry as much as you like.”

She smiled and wished she could rub her face against the skin on his neck, but his collar prevented it. “I am done crying,” she said, her voice raw. Instead, her mind was consumed by the feel of his arms, the warmth of his body and the strength that surrounded her so completely that she thought she could never be harmed again. “Don’t leave me yet.”

He tightened his grip around her. “Are you sure you don’t need to see the physician?” he asked. With her ear pressed to his chest, his voice was a deep, echoing rumble like the sound of thunder in the distance.

“I am fine so long as you hold me.”

He didn’t answer, except to lean back enough to settle her even more deeply into his arms. She smiled, happy to think of nothing beyond him. But that thought led to others. Her heart beat harder, and she remembered another time when his hands had been on her body, when his chest had been pressed tight to her back, and his hands…

“Where are we?” she asked by way of distraction. She knew they were in a bower of sorts. She could feel the breeze, but in the darkness, she could see little more than the stone bench upon which they sat.