Gong Pingru claimed her stomach was acting up and peeled away before we even left the hall. Consort Ji walked with me as far as Jinghe Palace, muttered something about temple bells giving her a headache, and shut her courtyard doors. I was left alone with a sputtering candle and that worn copy of The Book of Songs. I traced the deep red marks in the margins until my breathing stopped shaking.
The candle hadn't even burned an inch when Head Eunuch Decai appeared at my door, soundless as a draft.
"Your Ladyship," he bowed. "The Emperor summons you to Yangxin Hall."
Auntie Jin Se and Hong Yu practically tore my clothes off in their frantic silence, stripping the banquet robes, reapplying powder, brushing my hair until my scalp stung. Then they shoved me into the soft-sided sedan. On the rocking ride to the Emperor's residence, my pulse was the only thing loud enough to reach me.
Inside the warm, incense-thick study, Wei Zhang was folded over a mountain of memorials, face buried in his arms as if he had dropped where he sat. Decai left me at the threshold and vanished, sealing the doors behind him.
I took a breath. I crossed the thick carpet on light steps, unwrapping my fox-fur mantle to drape it over his shoulders—
A hand shot out and locked around my wrist like iron.
Before I could even gasp, he used my own momentum against me, swiveling in his chair and yanking me off-balance. I fell directly into his lap, the breath knocked entirely out of me.
"Got you," he murmured against my neck.
I could smell the sharp tang of wine on his breath, cutting through the cedar-smoke of incense. My face ignited. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
He didn't move his hand from my waist. He just leaned in, his lips brushing the shell of my ear, his voice dropping into that dark, low register that sent a shiver straight down my spine.
"Bao Niang. You are my Bao Niang. Not Little Lan."
The tight, rusted knot of jealousy from the banquet finally loosened. I laughed, short and breathless, and looped my arms around his neck. "Yes. Wei Zhang's Bao Niang."
His chest hitched. Laughter warmed my collarbone. His lashes brushed my skin. Then he pulled back an inch and dragged his face into a paper-thin mask of imperial sternness.
"Such insolence. Who gave you permission to use my name like that?"
"Then what should I call you?" I whispered back.
"Call me 'husband.'"
He didn't wait for my mouth to form the word. He stood up, sweeping me off my feet. I let out a startled, undignified sound as he kicked the inner chamber doors open and carried me toward the dragon bed.
* * *
When I woke, the side of the bed where he had slept was already cold. He had gone to morning court.
Auntie Jin Se and Hong Yu were waiting by the bed with identical expressions—eyes pinned to the floor, jaws locked, radiating the desperate determination of servants pretending they hadn't seen or heard a thing. They loaded me back into the sedan. I rode back to Jinghe Palace in a thoroughly aching, sleep-deprived daze, trying to reconstruct the exact timeline of the night before without turning completely red.
I was lying face-down on my own bed, groaning softly as Hong Yu rubbed oil into my lower back, when the imperial decree shattered the morning silence.
I knelt on the floor to receive it. The phrasing was standard palace boilerplate—gentle in conduct, refined in character—but the promotion was not. I had leaped straight from Imperial Concubine to Senior Consort. Bao. Senior Consort Bao.
Decai read the edict with a grin that threatened to split his face in half. I signaled Auntie Jin Se to pass out heavy silver to every eunuch in the entourage. When Decai came forward to give his personal congratulations, I leaned in and asked under my breath: "This title, 'Bao'—is it a commendation? Or is it my name?"
Decai lowered his eyes. "To His Majesty, Your Ladyship, it is both."
The gifts flooded the courtyard. Trays of jade Ruyi scepters, towering bolts of tribute silk, boxes of carved ivory combs. I barely glanced at them. Nothing on those trays held the weight of the red-inked Book of Songs he had given me in the dead of winter.
Except for one small, unassuming wooden box at the end of the procession. Inside sat two solid catties of candied sour plums. I stared at them and burst out laughing. He had heard me lie to the Dowager last night about eating too many plums, and he had sent a mountain of them to make me swallow my own excuse.
Jinghe Palace hadn't seen this many visitors since it was built. Empress Wang arrived first, her grip on my hands warm, her congratulations sounding unnervingly genuine—she didn't ask a single probing question about the night before. Then came the endless, exhausting parade of mid-ranking consorts. Finally, in the late afternoon, the newer girls arrived.
Noble Lady Yu—Yi Yan—came with her friend from the south, Qian Ruixin. Where Yi Yan was calm and observant, Qian Ruixin was loud, restless, and utterly unguarded. As the daughter of a provincial military officer, she seemed to think my father's rank made us blood sisters.
She practically bounced on the chair, asking if she could come visit me when she was bored. My back was still throbbing, but I smiled and told her she was always welcome. The raw, unmasked admiration in both their eyes made me feel faintly fraudulent. I had Hong Yu dig out some quality jade bracelets from the new gifts and pressed them into their hands.
Yi Yan, sensing my fatigue long before her friend did, gently took Qian Ruixin by the elbow, reminded her that others were waiting, and steered her out the door.
* * *
By evening, the endless parade of congratulatory gifts finally stopped. My courtyard doors had barely closed when Gong Pingru and Consort Ji pushed them open again, inviting themselves to dinner. Gong Pingru already treated Jinghe Palace like an extension of her own quarters, and she tolerated Consort Ji well enough. We drank warmed plum wine and talked as the winter wind rattled the lacquered window frames.
Three cups in, Consort Ji's careful palace mask finally slipped. She grabbed my sleeve, her eyes red and swimming with real tears, and began to weep messily about how she couldn't bear to let me go.
Ah. Right.
I was now Senior Consort Bao. I outranked her. That meant either I forced her out of the principal suite of Jinghe Palace, or I packed up and moved to a new palace entirely.
I patted her hand and assured her I wouldn't dream of displacing her. Gong Pingru, swirling her wine cup with calculating slowness, pointed out that the principal suite in her own palace happened to be vacant. She suggested I simply move in there.
I laughed. I asked if she thought I owned the Forbidden City and could just take pavilions the way hungry people snatch bowls at a market stall.
Gong Pingru gave me a long, flat look. "You're not us. The Emperor treats you differently. If you ask for a specific palace, he's not going to say no."
I deflected, asking what the rest of the inner court was saying today. Gong Pingru snorted—a distinctly un-ladylike sound, likely aided by the alcohol. "They're terrified. And furious. You've always had the most lethal family backing in our intake, but when months passed with no summons, they thought you'd been safely shelved. Then last night happened. You bypassed every intermediate rank and landed straight at Senior Consort. They feel like they've been ambushed."
I stared into my wine. My feelings for Wei Zhang were a live wire under the skin. Hearing them taken apart as political capital made my stomach twist.
Gong Pingru eventually staggered back to her own quarters. The second the door clicked shut behind her, Consort Ji's drunken haze vanished entirely. She leaned across the table, her voice dropping to a whisper:
"She's pregnant."
The porcelain cup slipped through my fingers and shattered on the floor.
"Are you certain?" I demanded.
"Nine out of ten," Consort Ji murmured, her eyes dark and completely sober. Then it hit me. The banquet last night. The plate of preserved plums—brutally sour, the kind of sour that makes your jaws ache—that Gong Pingru had devoured all evening after I swapped our plates.
They hadn't just been a lie I used to avoid the Dowager's food. They had been precisely what Gong Pingru's body was craving.
I sat in candlelight long after Consort Ji left. I had always known this day would come. I still wasn't prepared for what it did to my body: a cord pulling tighter around my throat, notch by notch.
"My Lady, come to bed. You need your strength to deal with the relocation decree tomorrow." Hong Yu was at my elbow, her voice gentle but firm, deliberately ignoring the shattered porcelain at my feet.
I exhaled a long, shuddering breath. Stop it. Gong Pingru is your friend. She's carrying a royal child, which is a matter of life and death in here. I needed to warn her to stop drinking immediately.
The decree arrived at noon the next day. I was to relocate as the principal resident of Ganquan Palace. Noble Lady Yu—Yi Yan—was assigned to the east wing of the same courtyard.
Ganquan Palace was a double-edged sword: dangerously close to Yangxin Hall, which meant I was also terrifyingly close to the highest-ranking consorts. Every step I took there would be counted.
Before packing, I dragged Gong Pingru into my inner room and summoned a trusted imperial physician. When his fingers lifted from her pulse, the diagnosis was absolute: nearly three months along. Gong Pingru stared at the doctor in genuine shock. Given her chronically irregular cycles and natural thinness, she had honestly believed she was just developing an appetite for sour foods.
The panic was immediate. A three-month pregnancy in the inner palace was a massive, walking target. I grabbed her shoulders and told her she had to announce it immediately to secure the Dowager's protection, or she wouldn't survive the week.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. For a fraction of a second, an expression crossed her face that I couldn't read. I thought it was simple terror.
It wasn't until years later, when the dust had settled and the blood had dried, that she finally told me the truth about that day. She hadn't been shocked. She had known she was carrying for a long time.
"Then why didn't you tell me?" I had asked.
"Because you terrified me," Gong Pingru had replied evenly. "Of all the women in that palace, you loved him the most. Which meant you had the most reason to want my baby dead."
I had stared at her, genuinely appalled. "Did you think I was some kind of deranged assassin? That I was going to slit the throat of anyone who looked at him?"
"Given your family's military background," she had said, not smiling, "I calculated it as a necessary precaution."
I had called her a paranoid lunatic. She had agreed. And that was when I finally understood we had survived.