The carriage rocked and swayed, sitting in it was thoroughly uncomfortable. But Zhao Xiaojin didn’t dare say so, even if she did, no one would understand her.
She’d only been standing outside her extracurricular class waiting for the car, when somehow, after pacing back and forth with her head down, she looked up to find herself standing in an unfamiliar place.
A dirt road, dried yellow, and fields stretching out in every direction.
She was a little scared, but she kept walking forward along the only road there was.
Her mom and dad must have noticed she was missing by now, right? The family car would be arriving soon, and if the driver couldn’t find her, they’d call the police.
But she hadn’t been kidnapped by someone, she’d been transported somewhere else entirely. Would they even be able to find her?
Maybe they’d search for a while. And when they really couldn’t find her, they’d give up.
In the past, her mom and dad had always been busy with their business and never had time for her. These past two years, ever since her mom had given birth to her little brother, they’d had even less time. If anything, her extracurricular classes had only multiplied, after the usual English, mental arithmetic, swimming, and dance, they’d added drawing and Olympiad math on top.
Every day, aside from sleep, she had no free time at home to speak of. Even the times she got to see her mom and dad were spaced days apart, sometimes she wouldn’t see them once in a whole week.
They all lived under the same roof, and yet time always seemed to keep her and her parents apart.
Zhao Xiaojin walked alone at an unhurried pace along the dirt road. There wasn’t a single person around, just blue sky and white clouds everywhere. Suddenly she wasn’t scared anymore, walking on like this didn’t seem so bad.
It was only that everything that happened afterward came so fast, as if it had all been arranged within a very short span of time. It was happening to her own body, and yet it felt just like watching a television with the sound off, there was no way to change the plot playing out inside it.
Zhao Xiaojin was dragged back by a dark, sturdy woman, her clothes swapped out for a filthy, worn set, the gold bracelet on her wrist taken away.
Once she could move and speak again, she cried and begged the woman not to lock her up, but in the end she was still shut into a small room, given nothing the whole time but half a bowl of strange-tasting porridge.
About a day later, Zhao Xiaojin heard a large group of people arrive outside. The woman said something to them that she couldn’t make out, then dressed her in a new set of red silk clothes and pushed her outside.
Once outside, she realized she might not just have changed places, perhaps even the time itself had changed.
Zhao Xiaojin was only nine, and didn’t understand a great deal, but she’d watched enough videos on her phone to recognize plenty of related things.
That large crowd of people, men and women both, were dressed in a way that resembled people from the Qing dynasty palace on TV, but also quite different from what she’d seen in dramas. At the very least, what they wore had fewer colors and fewer patterns than in the shows.
She couldn’t understand a word these people said, and in turn, that woman from before hadn’t understood her either.
In the end, the eunuch leading the group stared at her for a good while, then broke into what looked like a satisfied smile. She was stuffed into a pitch-black carriage, and the ride lasted most of the day.
Curled up in the carriage, Zhao Xiaojin was terrified.
Had she been sold off like this? Where would she be taken next?
Unable to come up with any answers, Zhao Xiaojin spent a long, frightened stretch of time before slowly dozing off against the side of the carriage.
As the sky was just beginning to lighten, Li Rongjing, the head eunuch of Yikun Palace, quietly appeared outside the gate of the pox-avoidance quarters with his men.
Inside lay the Eleventh Prince, whose fate hung uncertain between life and death.
The young master had recovered his health a month ago and come here to be inoculated against smallpox. Although he and the consort were staying at Changchun Garden, they had never stopped praying for his blessing. Fortunately, the imperial physicians had said the prince’s condition was good, he’d already made it through the pox eruption and the fever, and just needed a period of rest to finish recovering.
But who could have expected that three days ago, after he fell asleep, the young master never woke up again? The imperial physicians had taken turns examining him, but none could figure out what was wrong, all they could do was shake their heads.
The consort truly couldn’t think of any good solution left, and so this business of using a marriage to counter the young master’s misfortune and “chase away the bad luck” had come about. No one knew quite how the consort had managed to persuade His Majesty.
Yesterday, before dawn, Li Rongjing had taken his men and begun searching from the areas nearest Changchun Garden, looking for a girl close to the Eleventh Prince’s age, with a good birth-chart reading, and blessed with good fortune from birth.
The consort had already sent Zhang Qiyong to check the registered maidens of the Imperial Household Department and the candidate maidens among the Eight Banners.
But in such a rush, where would they find so many eligible girls to choose from?
From yesterday until now, without stopping, he’d only managed to find this one barely passable candidate. In ordinary times, such fortune would never have fallen to some country girl.
She was the niece of a farm woman from a manor in the south, come to visit, fair-skinned and clean-looking, if a bit timid. She hadn’t said a single word since they’d first laid eyes on her.
Li Rongjing arrived at the carriage where the girl called Jinzi sat, and gave a light cough.
He waited a moment, but there was no movement at all from inside.
“Miss Jinzi, Miss Jinzi?” Li Rongjing called out, opening the carriage door as he spoke.
A lantern’s dim yellow glow reached in first, revealing the tiny curled-up figure inside the cramped carriage. Looking closer, Miss Jinzi’s small, round, palm-sized face was scrunched tight with worry, looking utterly frightened.
Probably having some kind of nightmare.
Li Rongjing had thought about giving her a few pointers, but he didn’t have the patience for it right now, so he simply rapped his knuckles against the inside wall of the carriage.
After three knocks, “tok, tok, tok”, he waited a few more breaths, and sure enough, Miss Jinzi was starting to wake.
Even though he’d already seen her face yesterday, Li Rongjing still felt that, aside from her rather crude name and her humble background, everything else about this girl called Jinzi was made up for by that pretty little face of hers.
A girl of this age still had features that hadn’t fully filled out, a bit of baby fat still on her cheeks. Eyes that had never seen the ways of the world, clear and glassy like glazed grapes.
Perhaps because Jinzi came from the south, where the land nourished people so well, her skin was especially pale. Like the jade porcelain kept by the consort’s side, glowing faintly, the kind of thing you’d hesitate to even touch, afraid your hands might soil it.
“Now that you’re awake, listen carefully, and remember what I say.” Li Rongjing didn’t miss the flash of confusion and fear in the little girl’s eyes when she woke and saw him, but he saw no need to comfort her over it.
“Once we go inside in a moment, don’t look around carelessly and don’t say anything out of place. No matter what state the young master is in, just stand properly to one side. If you’re truly blessed with good fortune and the young master happens to wake, then serve him well. There will be plenty of days ahead.”
When Li Rongjing finished speaking, the girl still sat there, unmoving, as if she hadn’t understood a word.
“Never mind. I don’t expect you to understand anyway, consider it a good deed on our part.” She was, after all, just a little girl from a Han family, it was only natural she wouldn’t understand any of this. He urged the men to help her down from the carriage.
At the start of the hour of Mao, the gates of the pox-avoidance quarters opened, and Li Rongjing led his men inside.
Zhao Xiaojin followed behind, stepping over the threshold of the pox-avoidance quarters. When she’d first been woken, the sudden sight of a lantern right in front of her face, and behind it the eunuch who might have just bought her, had genuinely given her a fright.
But now, walking into a place that looked something like a park, she found herself curious again. Even in the Qing dynasty, this had to be the kind of place only a great household could afford. That man was dressed like a eunuch, so, could this be where a prince lived? Or even the emperor?
The worry in Zhao Xiaojin’s heart eased a little. She copied the person ahead of her, keeping her head down, not daring to let her eyes wander.
Since the sky hadn’t fully brightened yet, every few steps in the courtyard there stood a small pavilion about her own height, with a candle lit inside. But the light didn’t reach far, it only lit the ground right beneath her feet.
Every so often, she’d follow the person ahead through another gate, each one guarded by someone standing watch. By the time Zhao Xiaojin lost count of whether it was the fifth or sixth gate, the group ahead stopped again.
This time was a little strange, because after the leading eunuch exchanged a few words with the gatekeeper, he simply stood beside the gatekeeper instead of going any further.
The gatekeeper knocked, and someone emerged from behind the door, wrapped up so thoroughly that only their eyes showed. This person mumbled a few words to the gatekeeper, then waved for her to go in.
So, she was the only one going through this door?
What lay behind it?
Was it Bluebeard’s hidden bride, or a Snow White who would never wake?
No, that couldn’t be right. She was just a little girl, there was no way she could be Snow White, since she had no way to wake a sleeping princess with a kiss.
Zhao Xiaojin had no time to keep guessing. Once through the door, everyone inside was wrapped up so tightly she couldn’t even tell whether they were men or women.
Had someone caught some kind of contagious disease?
Had they brought her here to be some kind of experiment?
Zhao Xiaojin knew full well there was nowhere to run, but she couldn’t help feeling anxious, reluctant to keep walking forward. She’d already caught a heavy whiff of medicine, the sharp, bitter smell of traditional Chinese medicine, so strong that if she didn’t hold her breath, it felt impossible to breathe at all.
She quietly pinched her nose shut and took small sips of air through her mouth, which helped a little.
But the next moment, someone pushed her into a room. Candles burned everywhere inside, and despite the weather not being cold at all, a charcoal fire was lit as well.
The smoke from the candles, the smoke from the charcoal, and the bitter smell of the medicine together made it even more unbearable than it had been outside.
The adults who’d been in the room fell silent one by one, as if by some agreement, and quietly filed out. Left behind, she was pulled behind a folding screen, facing a bald little monk lying on the bed.
Behind her, the door shut with a sharp “clap.”
No one told Zhao Xiaojin what she was supposed to do, or what she wasn’t supposed to do. It seemed she’d been brought here simply to stand in this spot. No, to stay here with this little monk.
Either way, she clearly couldn’t leave. Zhao Xiaojin looked over the furnishings in the room, thinking of pulling up a chair to sit on. But looking around, there wasn’t a single chair. Besides sitting wherever on the floor, the only other place to sit was the edge of the bed.
He was asleep there, not likely to wake anytime soon. If she sat at the far end of the bed and rested a bit, that should be fine, right?
Zhao Xiaojin looked at the fine blanket pulled up to the little monk’s neck, leaving only his smooth bald head exposed, and slowly inched closer to the bed. His eyes were closed, his lashes long, his brows the same faint color as his lips.
Was he sick? There were faint marks all over his face.
Zhao Xiaojin sat at the foot of the bed, guessing wildly.
She had no idea who this little monk actually was, or why he was lying here. If he had a eunuch attending him, his status surely wasn’t low. And yet, the people surrounding him were all covering their faces.
Looking at the marks on his face, surely this wasn’t some contagious disease, was it?
Did they even have vaccines back in the Qing dynasty? Would the shots she’d had before hold up against something like this?
Zhao Xiaojin suddenly remembered a video she’d watched once. A young master from some great household had been dying, so his family had rushed to find him a bride to marry in a wedding ceremony, to counter the bad luck. What was funny was, apparently the bride was often married off to a large white goose or a rooster instead.
This was called chōngxǐ, using a wedding to chase away misfortune.
Thinking of this, Zhao Xiaojin looked down at the red clothes on her own body, and realized she was very likely being used as just such a little bride, meant to drive away bad luck.
But, could a little monk even get married?
She didn’t understand, so she looked further up along the blanket.
And there, the little monk whose eyes had been closed just a moment ago, was now watching her, looking rather puzzled.