"Your Excellency is joking." He wiped his face with his torn sleeve, revealing the old whip marks on his cheek. "Here I am."
"Woof!" The black dog suddenly pounced. Jiang Baichuan closed his eyes, waiting for death, but heard a "crack" sound - the dog was holding a fat gray rat in its mouth, and its tail was sweeping across the surface of his shoe.
Ji Cheng threw half a piece of jerky to Hei Gou and said as he turned around, "Tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM, the South City Gate needs 20 lame men to transport food."
Yu Chuwei fidgeted with the gilded hand warmer, the charcoal fire crackling in the copper wire shade. She looked at the newly formed icicles on the porch, but her words pierced Jiang Yuyao's heart: "Sister, you have the support of your parents twice as much. Your dowry will probably fill up three warehouses. Will I have the housekeeper harness ten carriages tomorrow to make it enough?"
"You clearly know—" Jiang Yuyao's throat tasted fishy and sweet, and her nails dug into the thin frost on the window frame. The day before yesterday, she had witnessed with her own eyes Yu Chuwei's trousseau procession stretching halfway down the street, even the toilet bucket was lacquered in gold.
Shuangyue swung her arm, snapping the crabapple hairpins on Jiang Yuyao's temples. Yu Chuwei covered her nose with a handkerchief and said, "The musty smell of this filthy land is even stronger than rotten rice." Her words drifted in the draft, but the servants on duty in the back room pricked up their ears.
Within half a day, Ziying Courtyard had become the laughingstock of the Fourth Prince's residence. The glutinous rice served at noon was caked with green mold. Jiang Yuyao stared at the greasy stains on the rim of the bowl, suddenly remembering the year she came of age, when her third brother had specially brought her a bowl carved from a single piece of jade from southern Xinjiang to serve her with iced cheese.
"It's time for the concubine to take her medicine." The maidservant slammed the medicine bowl onto the table, and the brown liquid splattered across the lotus embroidery on her sleeve. Jiang Yuyao stared at the stain—the material had been applied to her by the Fourth Prince himself on the day she entered the palace.
On the seventh day, when the charcoal basins were cleared, Xinyi Zigu arrived in the moonlight. Jiang Yuyao hurriedly hid her cracked hands in her sleeves, only to see her reflection in the bronze mirror: the rouge on her lips had been applied with a cinnabar brush, and only a plain silver hairpin remained in her hair.
"Your Highness." The moment she threw herself into the man's arms, she smelled the ambergris mixed with the styrax that Yu Chuwei often used.
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