When I first met her, snow was falling on her temples, reminding me so much of the person who had leaped from the city wall years ago. She raised her eyes to look at me, ice crystals clinging to her eyelashes, but her gaze did not have the familiar aloof curve I knew.
"Your subject Su Wan greets His Royal Highness the Crown Prince." Her voice was softer than the one in my memory, yet it still made my fingertips tremble.
A crack appeared on the ice of Taiye Pool, and I heard myself say, "Stay by my side."
She always wore moon-white gauze skirts, so I had all the white fox fur cloaks in the imperial storehouse brought over. When she lowered her head to pluck the zither strings, I would suddenly pinch her chin, forcing her to lift her face—these were not the eyes. Shen Yue's eyes should have held the shattered stars of the Milky Way, not this gentle, watery sheen.
"Has Your Highness practiced new calligraphy scripts again today?" She held up the piece of "Bright as the Frosty Moon" I had just finished and brought it closer to the candlelight. The scent of ink mixed with the agarwood in her hair, stinging my throat with a metallic taste of blood. That was the scent Shen Yue loved most during her lifetime, and I had ordered it burned in her bedchamber for three full years.
"Grind the ink." I snatched her wrist, and the cinnabar brush left red dots blooming across her palm. "Write the two characters for 'Eternal Night.' Whenever you write them well enough to look like the real thing, you may stop."
Her eyelashes fluttered violently, but she merely curtsied and answered, "Yes." Her wrist bones pressed against my palm, so thin it made me angry—Shen Yue always used to talk about slimming her waist, yet she would eat honey-pickled kumquats with shining eyes whenever I brought them to her.
On the night of the Winter Solstice, she ran a high fever. I pushed open the charcoal brazier by the window, watching the sparks splatter against her pale face. "Shall I call a physician? When Shen Yue fell from the city wall back then, do you know how long she suffered?"
Delirious from the fever, she suddenly grabbed my fingertips with astonishing strength. "So Your Highness only ever saw me as a replacement..."
The dripping of the water clock suddenly became deafening. I flung her hand away, and the ink-stone jade paperweight crashed down onto the *Precepts for Women*, kicking up tiny specks of dust. "You think you're worthy?" Yet the very next day, I still had the ice-patterned porcelain in the warm chamber replaced with her favorite intertwined branch lotus pattern.
By late spring, she had mastered Shen Yue's slender-gold calligraphy. I pinched the note she had just written, watching the characters "Wishing to follow the moonlight and shine upon my lord" tremble slightly in the breeze. She knelt at my feet, a begonia petal falling into her hair. "Has Your Highness ever, for even a moment... regarded me as anyone else?"
I should have laughed at her foolish infatuation. Yet a bloody taste suddenly welled up in my throat, just like that year when I carried Shen Yue through the entire main street, her blood soaking through my dark-colored cloak. Driven by an impulse, I cupped her face and kissed away the tear mole at the corner of her eye—Shen Yue had no tear mole, but the shattered light in this girl's eyes right now made my heart palpitate.
The disaster struck with terrifying suddenness. As the flash of an assassin's blade swept past, she suddenly lunged forward, and I caught the scent of agarwood in her hair—so faint it was almost imperceptible. Blood stained her moon-white tunic, and I scooped her up in my arms, running toward the Imperial Hospital, hearing my own voice trembling beyond recognition: "Su Wan, if you dare to die..."
"So it turns out I wasn't a replacement..." Her blood-stained fingers stroked my brow, and she laughed through her tears. "The 'Eternal Night' Your Highness spoke of—this subject in the end will never wait for dawn." The body in my arms gradually grew cold, and I suddenly remembered when I first met Shen Yue, she had also smiled and said, "Has His Royal Highness the Crown Prince ever seen the darkest night right before dawn?"
Now the eternal night had truly arrived. I sat in her empty bedchamber, looking at the wet ink on the desk—she had never finished writing the two characters for "Eternal Night," and the final stroke dragged out so long, like an unfinished period left behind in my life.
The ice on Taiye Pool was melting once again. I touched the jade hairpin she always wore and suddenly started to laugh—so from the very beginning, what I wanted was never a replacement, but the girl who would warm wine for me on snowy nights and secretly slip candied fruit into my hands while I reviewed state memorials. Only by the time I understood, she had already turned into a shower of rain in the spring night, gone forever beyond recall.
"Shen Yue... No, Su Wan." I raised my wine cup to the empty air, and the wine splashed onto the grey bricks, leaving dark stains behind. "The most foolish person in this world is probably me."
The wind rose outside the window, sweeping away the leftover notes on the desk. In a daze, there seemed to be the faint rustle of robes, and I jerked my head up, only to see a courtyard full of falling blossoms and the candlelight of the west window that would never shine again.