The horses were startled and let out sharp neighs. Such a sinister formation was more than just a sign of ill intent; it was more like a death sentence.
Zhao Xiheng’s heart tightened as a sense of foreboding washed over her. Something had indeed happened in Pingzhou. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been left without word from the Zhenbei Wang’s Mansion ever since they departed Jinyang, nor would they have failed to encounter a single messenger from the mansion along the way.
The moment she entered the city today, she realized something was wrong. For the wedding of the Heir, Pingzhou should have been, if not jubilant, at least decorated with lanterns and streamers. It certainly shouldn’t have been this devoid of life.
Who exactly was out there?
The sounds of movement crackled outside as elite soldiers in black armor burst from the residential houses. Gripping long spears, they slowly tightened their formation, surrounding the group.
Inside the carriage, several attendants huddled together, weeping in terror. Zhao Xiheng pulled them into an embrace to comfort them. “It’s alright, don’t be afraid.”
Xiao Tao clutched her sleeve, shaking her head and apologizing through her tears. “Your Highness, I’m sorry. We’re so useless. We can’t do anything but cry.”
Zhao Xiheng stroked her hair. “Little girl, being a bit of a crybaby isn’t a major flaw.”
But Her Highness had never cried out of fear. Whenever she shed tears, it was merely a performance for the occasion.
Thinking of this, Xiao Tao bit her lower lip hard, trying to force back her tears.
Zhao Xiheng was lost in thought. She reasoned that the people outside definitely did not belong to the Zhenbei Wang’s Mansion. Whether Prince Zhenbei and the Heir were even still alive was hard to say. Since Dandong had been brought under control so quietly, it likely wasn’t the work of the Goguryeo people. Perhaps another vassal king had seized Dandong, or perhaps something had happened internally.
The guards began to draw their weapons, the metallic hum of unsheathed blades overlapping as the tension in the air grew stifling.
The people opposite them made no move to attack.
The Pingwei Jiangjun looked at the vast white expanse surrounding them and cupped his hands. “May I ask who you are?”
The snow muffled all sound, and his words didn’t carry far. He raised his voice and asked again.
He was met with silence.
Zhao Mingxin had been quietly observing the situation outside. Seeing the surrounding silence, her heart began to hammer against her ribs. she screamed a threat, “I am the daughter of the Son of Heaven! If you dare touch me, the Emperor will surely level Dandong and have you torn apart by five horses!”
“Pfft—” a disdainful sneer drifted through the hazy air.
Zhao Mingxin’s face flushed between green and white, and she moved to continue her threats.
The Pingwei Jiangjun’s thick, dark brows furrowed. He couldn’t let this spoiled princess keep talking, so he shouted, “I am an imperial envoy, escorting Princess Ming’an and Princess Jingcheng to their marriages. Pingzhou is the territory of the Son of Heaven. I hope your Excellency will stop playing ghosts and refrain from obstructing—”
Whiz—
An arrow, adorned with red feathers and a cold, glinting tip, grazed the Pingwei Jiangjun’s cheek and thudded deep into the wall of a nearby house.
The force of the shot from over a hundred paces away shocked everyone. The newcomer was no ordinary archer.
“How dare you!” The Pingwei Jiangjun clutched his face, his eyes burning with fury.
“General, we are withdrawing from Dandong,” Zhao Xiheng interrupted him.
With the situation in Pingzhou unclear, it was truly unwise to stay. Getting out alive would be enough.
“Little Princess, aren’t you being a bit naive? Is Pingzhou a place where you can just come and go as you please?”
A man’s voice drawled lazily. It was low and raspy, sounding like nails scraping against iron—unpleasant and sinister.
Zhao Xiheng’s heart skipped a beat, her delicate hands clenching into fists.
“General! The man is over there!” someone suddenly shouted, pointing to a small hill nearby.
Amidst the blinding white of the snow, a tall, slender black figure stood atop the rise. He could be seen tilting his head slightly, holding a fully drawn bow with a cold, gleaming arrow notched to the string. He appeared to be a tall, young man.
The Pingwei Jiangjun couldn’t see the man’s face clearly, but he felt as though the stranger was smiling. That sharp arrow was aimed straight at his head, and he suddenly recalled how the previous shot had been perfectly aimed and driven deep into the wood.
He swallowed hard, cold sweat pouring down his back.
An arrow pierced the air. He raised his blade to deflect it, but three arrows followed in rapid succession. The remaining two buried themselves in the Pingwei Jiangjun’s skull.
His eyes remained wide as he toppled from his horse. The crimson blood was a jarring, vivid contrast against the brilliant white snow.
The wedding procession instantly descended into chaos.
“Don’t do anything rash. There are three thousand of you in total, but aside from the men surrounding you now, there are garrison troops outside the city of Dandong,” the man said, his tone still casual and indifferent.
A deathly silence followed. After a long moment, Zhao Mingxin snapped. She suddenly began to wail and scream, “What do you want? Who are you? Have Prince Zhenbei come speak to us!”
“So annoying. Which princess are you?”
Zhao Mingxin still tried to use her noble status to intimidate him, shouting through her tears, “I am Princess Ming’an, the daughter of the current Son of Heaven! Let us leave!”
“Hmm, it’s not impossible to let you leave. Go back and tell your Emperor that Pingzhou has a new master. Qin Xiao and his son are dead. The master of Pingzhou is now Wei Li. Tell him not to meddle too much, and not to send any more envoys. And, of course, passing through in such a grand fashion like this is definitely not allowed.”
To kill only one person and let the rest return intact was an act of mercy among the warring lords.
The world was currently fractured, and the regional lords no longer obeyed the Emperor’s decrees. The original Prince Zhenbei had already established his own power base; he refused entry to imperial envoys and had even executed them before. Shunhe Di had only married off the princesses to curry favor. Now, Pingzhou had simply changed masters; the situation was no different than before. Moreover, with their lives in his hands, they had no choice but to agree.
The air Zhao Xiheng breathed was thick with the scent of blood, and Zhao Mingxin’s hysterical cries rang in her ears. She made a swift decision, keeping her voice as calm as possible. “I ask that Master Wei open the city gates and let us out. We will naturally report back to the Emperor.”
Wei Li waved a hand. “Open the gates.”
The people escorting the dowry had entered the city last, so to exit quickly, they would have to leave first. But Zhao Mingxin screamed again, “Let me go first! If anything happens to me, all of your heads will roll!”
She didn’t want to spend another moment in this place. She wanted to go home.
“Let Ming’an go first,” Zhao Xiheng said.
She sighed softly. It wasn’t that she was particularly saintly, but the new master of Pingzhou seemed to have a mercurial temperament. Even she found Zhao Mingxin’s crying annoying; if she kept it up, she would surely provoke Wei Li into changing his mind and slaughtering them all.
Zhao Mingxin was truly a useless waste who couldn’t do anything right but eat.
As Zhao Mingxin’s carriage cleared the city gates, Wei Li suddenly drew his bow and fired an arrow into the canopy of Zhao Xiheng’s carriage.
The people inside heard a loud thud and trembled in unison.
Then, Wei Li’s muffled voice came through. “The others can go. You stay.”
Xiao Tao bit her wrist so hard it bled. The other palace maids in the carriage began to wail.
Zhao Xiheng also trembled, but she reacted immediately, pushing the maids out of the carriage. “All of you, go. Follow the procession back to Jinyang.”
She didn’t know if staying behind would be a blessing or a curse. These were all young girls with long lives ahead of them; she would save as many as she could.
The maids kowtowed deeply to Zhao Xiheng and then stumbled through the snow to board the other carriages. In the face of life and death, they still chose to live.
Only Xiao Tao remained, biting her wrist and kneeling inside the carriage. “Your Highness, I said I would follow you through fire and water.”
Zhao Xiheng’s eyes grew slightly damp as she pulled the girl into her arms. Before Xiao Tao could say another word, her body went limp.
Zhao Xiheng had knocked her unconscious.
“Take her as well,” Zhao Xiheng instructed the maids as they dragged Xiao Tao out.
Fearing that Wei Li would go back on his word, Zhao Mingxin urged the drivers to move faster. Before she left, she couldn’t resist one last barb at Zhao Xiheng. “Zhao Xiheng, the Guoshi said you have a miserable fate. You must accept it!”
Zhao Xiheng wanted to crack her head open to see if it was filled with bean curd.
The people and horses hurried out of Dandong. When the city gates groaned shut once more, Zhao Xiheng felt that the surroundings had become terrifyingly quiet and frighteningly cold, making her head spin.
She had thought that being married off to Goguryeo was the worst possible outcome, but she hadn’t realized there were so many other thorny paths waiting for her in this world.
After a long silence, the crunch of snow underfoot echoed. The curtain of the carriage was swept aside from the outside with a red-feathered arrow. The cold glint of its tip was identical to the one that had killed the Pingwei Jiangjun.
She had been inside the carriage the whole way, where it was kept warm by a brazier. Now that the curtain was lifted, the freezing wind whistled inside.
The wind in Pingzhou was different from elsewhere; it was the kind of cold that seemed to peel back a person’s skin and slice into the flesh like a knife. It was like death by a thousand cuts.
The pain was terrifying, and the wind carried shards of ice that stung the eyes and stole the breath away.
Abruptly exposed to the wind, Zhao Xiheng’s eyes stung. Tears welled up and spilled over, and her body began to shake.
She had always been sensitive to the cold; she could hardly stand the mild winters of Jinyang, let alone the freezing climate of Pingzhou in the Northeast.
“Crying? Scared?”
Zhao Xiheng recognized the voice as the man named Wei Li. His tone was just as sinister as before, laced with malicious intimidation.
If she said she wasn’t scared but that the wind had merely irritated her eyes, it would probably hurt his ego.
Zhao Xiheng paused for a moment, then gave a weak, fragile nod.
She was alone now; survival was the priority.
Wei Li laughed again, as if he had discovered some wonderful new toy. “Little coward.”
He seemed immensely pleased by her fear.
Zhao Xiheng clenched her hands into fists. He was so incredibly irritating that she wanted to scream at him, but the situation wouldn’t allow it. She could only endure.
She waited until her eyes adjusted before gradually opening them to look at this mercurial new master of Pingzhou.
Some people were born with an unsettling aura; one look at them could make the heart hammer in a panic, sparking a mixture of fear and revulsion like finding a poisonous insect on one’s collar. It had nothing to do with their looks.
The man before her was young and tall with a well-proportioned build. His exposed skin was pale, and he had black hair and black eyes. He was clearly a very handsome man, and he was smiling, yet he carried an aura of eerie darkness that matched his voice.
He had piercings in the cartilage and lobe of his left ear, adorned with mysterious, chain-like silver jewelry.
She believed that anyone who saw him would feel an instinctive urge to flee. The fear and resistance he inspired truly had nothing to do with his appearance.
“Why did Master Wei keep me here?” Zhao Xiheng’s lips trembled, her face looking haggard from the biting wind.
The corners of Wei Li’s mouth curled up, revealing a row of teeth.
Perhaps if any other youth smiled like that, Zhao Xiheng would have described their teeth as straight and white. But when Wei Li smiled, the only phrase that came to her mind was “wicked sharp.” She would use the same words to describe his teeth as she would the tip of an arrow—or the fangs of a starving wolf.
“Little Princess, aren’t you being a bit naive? Is Pingzhou a place where you can just come and go as you please?” Wei Li repeated the words, drawling each syllable as he savored them.