The first time I saw the Crown Prince, I was leaning over the corridor railing, cracking melon seeds. Dressed in a moon-white brocade robe, he stood beneath a pear tree, the jade pendant at his waist swaying gently with his movements, as if scattering crushed moonlight into the spring breeze.
"The young lady of the Jiang family is in high spirits." He raised his gaze, the corners of his eyes lifting slightly. He looked even three parts more handsome than the exiled immortal in the *Travelers in Spring Mountains* painting on my desk. Flustered, I hurriedly hid the melon seed shells in my sleeves, the salty residue still clinging to my fingertips, making the tips of my ears burn with embarrassment—no proper young lady of a noble house behaved as lawlessly as I did.
I only learned later that he had come that day to ask my father for my second sister's hand in marriage. As luck would have it, I had just dropped my jade bracelet in the garden and was crying uncontrollably, bumping right into him. "Here, take this." He untied the jade pendant from his waist and placed it in my palm. The warm jade pressed against my skin, still carrying his body heat. "Have a craftsman inlay a peony on this tomorrow. Stop crying."
On the night my second sister was married off to the Prince's Mansion, I sat in my boudoir drawing my eyebrows before the bronze mirror. A heavy coral hairpin weighed down my hair, and suddenly remembering that the Crown Prince had once said I looked best in goose-yellow, I rummaged through the bottom of my chest for a ruqun skirt and changed into it. While the front courtyard was filled with the deafening sounds of wedding music, I gathered up my skirts and ran toward the direction of the Cold Palace—the palace servants whispered that the Crown Prince always went to visit the deposed Imperial Consort Chen at the Hour of Xu.
"A-Yan." Hiding behind a tree, I watched him kneel before the palace gates. Rainwater streamed down his jawline, and the soaked fabric clung to his back, outlining his slender shoulder blades. So his given name sounded this lovely, like pine branches brushing against zither strings, even more enchanting than the guqin score I kept hidden inside my makeup case.
Imperial Consort Chen was his birth mother, placed under house arrest for a decade after angering the Empress. Crouching beside him with a damp handkerchief clutched in my hand, I shoved a hand warmer into his grasp. "His Highness is freezing. How can you plead for His Majesty's mercy like this?" He turned to look at me, water droplets clinging to his eyelashes, yet a fire I could not understand burned in the depths of his eyes. "Jiang Miao, you know what I want."
Of course I knew. What he wanted was the position of the Crown Prince, the balance of the imperial court, and the rivers and mountains beneath that dragon throne. Therefore, when His Majesty hinted at making me the Crown Princess, he knelt in Jinluan Hall with a spine straighter than the cypress trees in the Imperial Garden: "This subject is willing to take a daughter of the Jiang family as his wife. None will do save Miao."
The gold threads on my wedding attire chafed my neck. The instant the red veil was lifted, I caught sight of the red mole at the corner of his eye—the previous night, while I was copying memorials for him, my fingertip had brushed against that spot of vermilion, and he had suddenly caught my wrist, laughing softly amidst the flickering candlelight: "Does My Miao know that this is a parting-of-ways mole?"
The tragedy struck at the Dragon Boat Festival banquet. As I blocked that cup of poisoned wine for him, I was staring dazedly at the jade pendant at his waist—the peony had indeed been inlaid after all, and the craftsman's skill was exquisite, with petal patterns matching the floral stationery I painted down to the smallest detail. "Don't touch it!" In the instant he lunged forward, I caught the lingering scent of aloeswood from his lapels—the very scent cake I had given him last month.
The poison coursing through me felt like a blade hacking my internal organs to pieces. Sweeping me up in his arms, he raced toward the Imperial Hospital, his hair ribbon half-coming undone to reveal a newly inflicted arrow wound on the back of his neck—three days ago, when he went to the Hall of Peace and Longevity to pray for a safety talisman on my behalf, he had fallen into an assassin's ambush. "Hold on, Miao," his voice was shattered like cracking ice, "you promised to keep me company as we watched the snow over Qionghua Island..."
In the end, I never lived to see the snow fall. The last sight that met my eyes before I drew my final breath was his reddened eye rims and trembling fingertips, futilely wiping the blood from the corners of my lips. Afterward, the palace servants said the Crown Prince knelt by my bier through the entire night, rubbing the peony-inlaid jade pendant until the surface wore thin, yet never shedding a single tear.
On the day of the Winter Solstice, I returned to the estate in a dream. From afar, I saw him standing on Qionghua Island, clad in a plain white brocade robe that closely resembled the moon-white youth of our first meeting. Clasping half a broken piece of jade in his hand, he murmured toward the lake surface, "Miao, the peonies have withered. When will you come to gather my bones?"
A crack suddenly split the ice across the lake, startling a flock of cold crows. Gazing at the newly added frost in his hair, I suddenly recalled that spring day when he taught me to write "May we be of one mind, never to part," and the drop of ink that had bled outward across the rice paper—so from the very beginning, this song of gold and silk was written entirely as broken chapters.