Chapter 3, how about I make you my empress?

When Lin Yuan jumped out of the car, she had already turned into a snowman.

The snowstorm raged for days, and the double-shafted cart got stuck in the snow three or five times. Several times, we had to get off and push the cart, and even our eyelashes were covered with fine snowflakes.

Pushing open the door, I was greeted by the warmth of the firewood. Much of the snow had melted, and my face was wet, as if streaked with tears.

Qin heard the kitchen door creak open, turned around, and a stack of freshly baked flatbreads fell to the ground.

Lin Wu, holding a cup of pepper wine, was about to eat it along with the flatbread when he saw this. He cursed, "Hey, you spendthrift..." After Lin Yuan choked up and called out "Father, Mother," the ceramic cup in his hand rolled off the table with a gurgling sound.

Their faces were also soaking wet.

Lin Yuan casually brushed off the mud and grass scraps from the flatbread and stuffed it into her mouth.

In any case, it's much tastier than a pancake frozen solid in the snow.

The Qin family was very pleased.

The tears of reunion after a long separation had long been dried by the fire in the stove.

She was rolling out dough again and boiling water to make a bowl of soup dumplings for her daughter whom she hadn't seen for almost five years. She also took out the dried meat that she had originally planned to eat on New Year's Day, as well as a jar of thick honey. She also wanted to make a plate of honey cakes and rice dumplings.

Lin Wu had drunk quite a bit, and his voice was a little louder. He called out to his new wife, "Stop busying yourself! Our daughter has finally come back, why don't you come and keep her company?"

Qin wouldn't listen: "Ah Yuan is really craving this!"

Lin Wu laughed so hard that even the thatched roof of the kitchen shook: "Have you forgotten that A Yuan came from the palace? What hasn't she eaten? Why are you still thinking about your food?"

Madam Qin smiled and playfully scolded, "Only by drinking soup and broth can you ward off the chill of this strong wind and heavy snow. New Year's Day is almost here, and our daughter is coming home; of course we'll be enjoying a sweet and delicious meal!"

There's another line: No matter how good the food is in the palace, it can't compare to Mother's taste.

Lin Wu chuckled, "Your mother's skills are probably no less than those in the palace."

He began to happily reminisce with A-Yuan about the glorious years when Qin Shi worked in the kitchen of a wealthy family when she was young.

Qin's face was reflected in the blazing fire: "Don't mention it, it happened so many years ago."

Then, changing the subject, she added, "Before, I made pork, venison, and even bear paws..."

Lin Yuan responded heavily, munching on a flatbread, her nose stinging with tears.

Qin had worked as a kitchen helper in a wealthy household. Her skills in making flatbread and soup dumplings were hardly evident, but her stature certainly demonstrated them.

In Lin Yuan's memory, her mother was plump with a rosy complexion and a roll of flesh around her waist, like a bunch of purses tied around her waist.

Her father, Lin Wu, used to be a blacksmith. Perhaps because of that time, he spent every day facing the red-hot furnace, and his face became perpetually ruddy.

As for his figure, it was inflated by age and the food his mother made.

The two men's plump figures appeared longer and thinner in Lin Yuan's eyes, their temples also turning white.

She ate a piece of flatbread, a sip of noodle soup, and a bite of honeyed treat, yet her stomach seemed never to be full.

"I heard the Empress has been deposed. Your father and I are so worried we can't sleep at night. Sigh, you were just four or five years away from leaving the palace. If you were to perish because of the Empress's deposition, what would we do?"

As Qin rubbed her hands, which were covered in wheat flour and sorghum flour, she choked up again as she spoke.

She turned her head away and wiped her face, revealing a few more gray hairs at her temples.

Lin Wu picked up the conversation: "Your brother also inquired around in Huaiyang, and said that His Majesty is quite reasonable. He said he didn't harm the palace servants who served him, and now," he hiccuped, "he's even sent them home. This is a blessing in disguise." Saying this, he cheerfully raised his earthenware cup and took a swig of wine. "Even the fortune teller said that our A-Yuan has always been a lucky person!"

He squinted his reddened eyes, looked at the walls surrounding the kitchen, and peered through the walls out. The wind was blowing more smoothly, and the snow was auspicious.

Qin patted A-Yuan on the back and said, "Eat slowly, eat slowly, as if you're not going to have another meal."

Her eyes narrowed into slits with laughter, and what she seemed to be saying was, "Eat more, eat more! You've lost weight, you've lost so much weight!"

In my mother's eyes, no matter what a child becomes, being thin is always the most noticeable thing.

Lin Yuan is thin.

So when her parents moved with her to Yongheli in Dongping Township, on the western outskirts of Chang'an, the neighbors all exclaimed: "How could the Lin family have given birth to such a beautiful girl?"

She was incredibly thin and radiant.

She was already a beauty at just eight years old.

Even if he's holding dried cow dung in one hand and a bucket of swill in the other, the villagers will stop and sigh, "With that kind of appearance, he could even go to the palace when he grows up."

Years later, as Lin Yuan stood in the corridor of Weiyang Palace, holding servants' clothes to be washed in one hand and a chamber pot in the other, she would recall the words of her neighbors.

When these villagers saw Lin Yuan's ten-year-old brother, Lin Yu, their clicking sounds grew louder: "With such looks, if he wore silk clothes with dragon and python patterns, he could probably be mistaken for a king or emperor!"

Lin Yu's parents smiled and ushered her inside to study, their faces turning even redder.

Lin Yuan took these words to heart.

She came into Lin Yu's room and paced back and forth.

He asked after a while, "Brother, what do you think is in the palace?"

After a while, she answered herself: "They said that there is an emperor, empress, princess, and empress dowager in the palace. Everyone in the palace wears silk clothes and lives in a very big house."

She stretched out her arms to show the size, but they weren't enough—"It's bigger than our main house, woodshed, kitchen, pigsty, cowshed, and yard all combined."

“It’s even bigger than the village head’s house,” she emphasized.

The li zheng was the highest-ranking official she knew, in charge of nearly a hundred households in Yonghe li, and his residence was twice the size of her own home.

Lin Yu didn't recognize the village head, so he unfolded the scroll a little longer.

Lin Yuan leaned close to Lin Yu's ear and blinked, "In the palace, there are huge kitchens and countless cooks."

Then she added, "There are thousands of bushels of millet in the granary." Seeing that Lin Yu was unmoved, she changed "thousands of bushels" to "ten thousand bushels," and then, after thinking for a moment, changed it to "ten thousand thousand bushels."

She nudged Lin Yu's arm as he held the scroll and asked the most important question: "Brother, do you think the people in the palace can eat honey and malt sugar as soon as they open their eyes in the morning?"

Seeing that Lin Yu didn't care about the food for the people in the palace, she smiled shyly: "Do you think I would be able to eat like that if I entered the palace?"

After thinking for a moment, he added two more sentences: "Eat as much as you want, you don't have to wait for holidays or festivals. You can eat breakfast and dinner every day."

Lin Yu didn't like eating honeyed bait and maltose; he buried his head in his book, not even lifting his eyelids.

Lin Yuan reached out and covered the words on the book: "Ayu, answer me quickly!"

Lin Yu was so annoyed by her that she finally lifted her eyelids and said, "Yes, of course you can."

Lin Yuan let go of his hand, feeling a sweet warmth in her heart, as if she could already see countless candies before her eyes: "Really?"

"Hmm." Lin Yu lowered his eyes, expressionless, and turned the page of the Sima Qian's book, the First Emperor's edict, which ordered the death of Prince Fusu.

"You can do it if you become Empress Dowager, Empress, or Princess."

The Empress Dowager is the emperor's mother, and the princess is the emperor's daughter.

Lin Yuan was not old enough to be the Empress Dowager; she was merely a princess in her blacksmith father's heart.

In terms of value and importance, it probably can't compare to a boar.

After all, a pound of pig is worth twenty coins. When the pig ran out of its pen, the father immediately grabbed some feed of millet husks, bean dregs, and fodder, and ran after it.

She ran out of Yonghe Lane, and her father would just laugh and say, "Where have you been running around again? There's honey bait for today's meal, so let's not leave any for A-Yuan."

So she tilted her head and asked, "Then, how can one become empress?"

She then asked, "Can someone from Yonghe Village become an empress?"

Lin Yu's voice was cool: "If I become emperor, I'll be your empress, okay?"

Lin Yu would certainly not become emperor.

In Yonghe Lane, there are probably only beekeepers' hives with a queen bee, and anthills under the crumbling walls of the market with termites that reign supreme.

Lin Yuan twitched the corners of her mouth, and the candy in front of her transformed back into the peeling paint on the wall.

She rested her head on the desk, looking dejected, and asked Lin Yu, "What story is my brother reading?"

Lin Yu told her the story of Xiang Ji, a man from Xiaxiang, who watched the First Emperor tour Kuaiji and cross the Zhejiang River.

The villagers had never seen the emperor, otherwise they would know that the emperor did not always wear silk clothes embroidered with dragon and python patterns.

At least, when Lin Yuan first met Xiao Xun, he was dressed in plain white.

As white as snow.

Lin Yuan thought she had frozen silly and her vision was blurry, and that the plum blossoms in front of her, whose branches had been broken by the weight of the snow, had become the people in front of her.

"What are you looking at?"

The person who emerged from the melting snow also had a cold voice.

As Lin Yuan spoke, she accidentally bumped into a plum branch, and snow and plum petals fell all over her.

She said tremblingly, "Because of you, you... are beautiful."

*

Xiao Xun's face was as cold as ice.

The Xuan Room instantly turned into an ice cellar.

Li Shun was fined three months' worth of monthly allowance for failing to deliver Lin Yuan's letter to the emperor in a timely manner.

"Where did Lin Yuan go?" Xiao Xun asked in a deep voice.

"Your Majesty, Ah Yuan, oh no, Lin Yuan, Lady Lin, must be going home to visit her family." Li Shun blurted out in a panic, "It's almost New Year's Day, she'll go home to visit her family, and she might be back in a couple of days."

Li Shun only heard the emperor before him utter the words "Lin Yuan has left the palace" in a cold voice. He did not know the full story of the letter and assumed that the favor Lin Yuan had requested was merely a visit to relatives.

It's just a trip home to visit relatives, why is Your Majesty so angry?

He recalled Wang Fu's melancholy gaze at the ice under the eaves before leaving the palace, and he couldn't help but shrink his neck, his collar not covering the back of his neck, where it was chilly.

"Where does she live?" Xiao Xun asked, taking a breath.

"Your Majesty, it's in Chang'an, yes, oh, it's in the western suburbs of Chang'an." Li Shun thought hard for a while.

"Where in the western suburbs? What county? What township?"

"This servant...this servant does not know."

"Aren't you neighbors?" Xiao Xun stood up in disbelief and pressed, "Didn't you say you were friends who would share joys and sorrows?"

Li Shun choked.

They were neighbors.

However, that happened when Lin Yuan was six years old and Li Shun was seven years old.

Although it is called a "village", it is actually a remote corner outside Chang'an City where refugees live.

The so-called "neighborly dwellings" were several thatched huts built there by an unknown nobleman in the city, specifically to accommodate refugees. They were lined up one after another, stretching for nearly a mile, with several rammed earth walls in the middle.

They came from different places, yet lived under the same roof.

The thatched shed had been crumbling for years, leaking rain and wind.

Li Shun clicked his tongue, pondering, "Is this what Lin Yuan meant when she told His Majesty, 'to share the hardships'?"

The child didn't realize it tasted bitter.

Six-year-old Lin Yuan was holding a clay pot to catch the rain that leaked from the thatched roof, drip-drip-drip-drip.

She said, "Do you know what it sounds like when the King of Qin struck the earthen jar?"

Li Shun didn't know who the King of Qin was, so he asked Lin Yuan. Without turning her head, Lin Yuan replied, "He's just someone with the surname Qin."

Li Shun knew quite a few people with the surname Qin; there were at least ten Qin family members coming and going in their thatched hut alone.

But he didn't understand why this woman surnamed Qin was beating the earthenware jar.

If he went to smash the earthenware pot, his mother's scolding would follow, saying he was a spendthrift son, and that the earthenware pot he smashed when his father died wasn't enough? Was he in such a hurry to send her away too?

The curses soon joined the cries, much louder than the sound of the earthenware pot.

He hissed.

So, could it be a brothel? He guessed that this Qin woman must be very rich to be able to afford a brothel.

He licked his lips, picked up the earthenware pot, and watched the raindrops connect into lines.

Does this sound like the water when the chicken soup boils?

As he listened, his mother's incessant coughing that never stopped every night seemed to lessen, and he was no longer afraid.

The following spring, Lin Yuan's family moved away.

Six months later, Li Shun's mother died, and he became an orphan.

He followed the other refugees, eating tree bark and gnawing on white mud. When the wind and rain blew, he would close his eyes and occasionally hear the sounds of the wind, people, cows, pigs, and earthenware jars inside and outside the huge thatched hut.

Li Shun entered the palace as a palace eunuch at the age of thirteen. Three years later, he recognized Lin Yuan at a glance among the newly selected palace maids in the inner palace.

...

Xiao Xun ordered someone to immediately summon the Imperial Attendant and instruct him to find out the place of origin of the palace maid, Lin.

After the guard acknowledged his leave, he walked to the west-facing window, pushed open the lattice window, and looked out at the wind and snow.

Li Shun remained kneeling on the ground, mentally calculating how long Lin Yuan had been gone: four days, three days?

How many days does it take to travel from Longshou Mountain to the western suburbs of Chang'an and back?

With such heavy snow, the horse must be trudging through the snow. Won't that delay our journey?

—Lin Yuan is still a palace maid. How can she ride in a carriage?

She's thin and sensitive to the cold; could she have gotten sick on the way?

Lin Yuan, Lin Yuan, please come back soon.

Just then, the palace doors moved. A long beam of light shone in.

Turning my head, I saw a figure emerge from the dazzling snow light.

Tingting, graceful and slender.

Beneath the white fur coat, a deep blue robe of sky and water.

The snow light dimmed, and what shone brighter were a pair of eyes even more radiant than snow water.

In that instant, Xiao Xun also turned around, breathed a sigh of relief, and his heart, which had been hanging in suspense, returned to its original place.

He called out, "You're back."

A note from the author:

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