CHAPTER 1
I Woke Up Engaged to a Dead Man
The first thing I learned after dying was that heaven had terrible taste in interior design.
There was too much red silk.
Red curtains. Red cushions. Red tassels hanging from a carved canopy above my head. Even the candleholders were red, as if whoever had decorated the room had been personally offended by the existence of other colors.
The second thing I learned was that I was not in heaven.
“Young Miss?” a girl whispered beside the bed. “Young Miss Shen, are you awake?”
I opened my eyes fully.
The girl wore a pale green robe. Her hair was twisted into two neat knots. Behind her stood a folding screen painted with plum blossoms, a bronze washbasin, and a row of lacquered chests that looked expensive enough to pay my rent for the next ten years.
For a moment I tried to find the ordinary explanation. A hotel with a theme. A hospital with catastrophic judgment. A dream brought on by falling asleep over my phone again.
Then I reached for the charging cable that always trailed beside my bed and found a bell cord instead.
There should have been traffic outside. My apartment faced a road on which someone invariably discovered the horn at six every morning. Here I heard a broom moving over stone, two women arguing softly about hot water, and a bird repeating the same three notes with offensive confidence.
My phone was gone. The small burn on my thumb was gone. When I touched my face, the bones beneath my fingers were not mine.
The maid knelt.
That frightened me more than the missing phone.
“Please don’t do that.” My voice was unfamiliar too, lower and a little rough. “Please get up.”
She obeyed halfway, looking as though I had set a trap for her knees.
“What is your name?”
“A-Lan, Young Miss.”
She watched my face. There was affection there, but also calculation: the quick, trained calculation of someone whose safety depended on another person’s mood.
Whatever life I had entered, I apparently possessed the power to ruin hers before breakfast.
I pulled the quilt closer. “A-Lan. I need you to answer some questions. I am going to sound very strange.”
“You have been feverish.”
“Excellent. We will use that.”
She did not smile. A faint bruise darkened the base of her thumb. I noticed it because I was trying very hard not to notice that I could not remember going to bed.
There had been rain. I remembered that much. Wet pavement outside a closed shop, the dazzling sweep of headlights. I had dropped a bag. Or a book. A horn had sounded so close that it seemed to come from inside my ribs.
After that, nothing.
I wanted the world to become a hotel again.
I sat up too fast.
My head throbbed.
“Where am I?”
The maid froze.
That was never a good sign.
Within an hour I knew three things.
My name was Shen Ruyue.
My father was Minister Shen, a respected court official.
And I was engaged to Prince Xiao Jingyuan.
That last piece of information nearly sent me back into unconsciousness.
I knew that name.
I had read it.
Not in a history book. Not in the news.
In a novel.
Flowers Beneath the Imperial City had been one of those stories I read at two in the morning while promising myself I would stop after one more chapter. It had everything: political schemes, beautiful people making terrible decisions, a gentle heroine, a noble crown prince, and a villainous prince whose possessiveness eventually destroyed half the cast.
Xiao Jingyuan.
Cold. Brilliant. Dangerous.
Executed for treason near the end.
And before that?
He had a fiancee.
Shen Ruyue.
Me.
The original Shen Ruyue was jealous of the heroine, Lin Qingyao. She tormented her, helped the wrong people, and eventually died after being slowly poisoned. Her death pushed Jingyuan past whatever thin line had once separated him from madness.
I stared at my hands.
They were elegant hands. Pale, slender, completely unfamiliar.
“No,” I said.
The maid blinked. “Young Miss?”
“I am not marrying him.”
The maid dropped the comb.
By noon, my father had been informed.
By afternoon, the household physician had been summoned to determine whether I had injured my head.
The physician’s name was Qiao. He had white eyebrows, dry hands, and the remarkable ability to disapprove without moving any part of his face.
He examined my eyes, asked whether I had struck my head, and listened while I explained that some memories felt distant.
“Do you know your age?”
A-Lan, standing behind him, raised two fingers on one hand and four on the other.
“Twenty-four,” I said.
Qiao turned. She became interested in a curtain.
“And the year?”
No help arrived from the curtain department.
I admitted defeat. Qiao told my father that fevers could disturb recollection, instructed the household to reduce visitors, and left with a small jar of the tonic beside my bed. He said he wished to examine the sediment. At the time, I thought sediment was an excellent occupation for someone who did not have my problems.
My father remained in the doorway after everyone else withdrew.
Minister Shen was not the rigid tyrant I had expected from two lines in a romance novel. He was a narrow-shouldered man in a robe darned at the cuff, and he looked as though he had been frightened for a very long time.
“You recognize me?” he asked.
It was an awful question. Not because I could not answer it, but because he already feared the answer.
“I know you are my father.”
He nodded too quickly. “That is enough for today.”
He came to the bedside and straightened a cushion that did not need straightening. I looked away to give him privacy with the tears he was pretending were not there.
“About the engagement,” I said.
His hands stopped.
“If you are unhappy, we will petition His Majesty.”
I stared at him. I had prepared arguments about personal liberty, illness, and possibly an undiagnosed religious calling. None of them was equipped to meet immediate agreement.
“You would do that?”
“I would prefer not to offend a prince before the autumn grain assessment. But you are my daughter all year.”
Something in my chest hurt.
Then he added, “I would like to know why.”
I could hardly tell him that I had seen his daughter die between two chapters about a garden party. I said that I was afraid.
“Of Jingyuan?”
I hesitated. Father watched that hesitation carefully.
“He has frightened other people,” he said. “I will not pretend otherwise. But until this morning, you were generally the person frightening him.”
He told me the engagement had remained unfulfilled through military postings, two periods of court mourning, and my own insistence on waiting while Jingyuan’s western commission kept him away. Last winter the prince had returned to the capital permanently. The wedding was finally to take place after the harvest ceremonies.
Ten years of postponement. An entire relationship compressed in the book into the words his troublesome fiancée.
“Did I write to him?” I asked.
Father looked surprised. “Constantly.”
“Where are the letters?”
“I imagine he has yours.”
“His letters.”
“In the blue chest. Where you keep everything you refuse to let anyone touch.”
After he left, I found the chest beneath a stack of winter quilts. A-Lan produced the key without being asked, then looked stricken, as if knowing where it was might constitute treason.
Inside were packets tied with faded green ribbon. Some contained no more than three lines. The roads are passable. Your father says you have a cough. Listen to Qiao.
Others described snow on the western watchtowers or a village rebuilding its bridge.
There were sketches in the margins: a crooked pine, a ridiculous bird, a dog sleeping across a barracks doorway with the confidence of a commanding general.
The writing grew more controlled as the years passed. The sketches did not improve.
I found a child’s wooden whistle beneath the letters. Its edge had been repaired with a strip of silver.
For one impossible instant, I knew how it would feel against my lips.
I dropped it.
A-Lan bent to retrieve it. “The prince had it mended after the summer storm. You were so angry you couldn’t call him from the other garden.”
“When was that?”
“You were twelve.”
Twelve years of history. I had been here less than a day.
In my old world, I had occasionally complained that people expected me to answer emails without sufficient background information. I regretted that now. The universe had apparently taken it as a challenge.
By evening, Prince Xiao Jingyuan himself arrived.
He entered the receiving hall in black robes embroidered with silver thread. He was taller than I remembered from the cover illustration, sharper too. The kind of man who looked as if smiling had been prohibited by imperial decree.
His gaze landed on me.
I suddenly understood why fictional women made stupid decisions.
Fortunately, I was not a fictional woman.
At least, I had not been yesterday.
“Your Highness,” I said, standing.
“Ruyue.”
He said my name with disturbing familiarity.
I folded my hands before me. “I asked my father to cancel the engagement.”
“I heard.”
“I think it would be better for both of us.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me for so long that I began mentally drafting my will.
Finally he said, “Why?”
Because you become an obsessive political disaster and I die before thirty.
“I have reconsidered.”
“After ten years?”
I blinked.
He took one slow step closer.
“You were fourteen when you demanded the engagement,” he said. “You threatened to climb the palace wall if the emperor refused.”
I stared at him.
That had not been in the book.
His voice lowered.
“You were never the one who wanted this marriage more.”
Something in his expression changed -- not anger, exactly. Something quieter and more dangerous.
I had entered a story I thought I knew.
And in the first day alone, the villain had already gone off script.
He remained by the receiving-room table while a servant poured tea. I had expected a threat, perhaps an imperial decree flung at my feet. Instead he moved the cup away from the table’s edge before I could knock it over with my sleeve.
The small, habitual movement unsettled me.
“You remember nothing?” he asked.
“Some things.”
“Which things?”
Your execution. The sentence describing your face when they told you she was dead.
The way I had closed the book and gone to work the next morning, irritated by traffic, while your entire world remained destroyed between the pages.
“Not enough,” I said.
His gaze moved to the shaking fingers I had hidden in my sleeves.
“Did someone speak to you?”
“Several people. It has been a social day.”
“About me.”
There was no humor in his voice. I saw, suddenly, the outline of a fear that had nothing to do with my wishes: someone had reached me, someone had hurt me, and he had not known.
“No one threatened me.”
He studied my face as if deciding whether that assurance was usable evidence.
Then he took a folded paper from inside his robe and placed it beside my tea. It was an invitation to Princess Anning’s poetry banquet in five days. My name had been written in her own hand.
“You should rest,” he said. “Anning can endure being disappointed.”
“Did you bring that here to tell me not to go?”
“You once told me that invitations delivered by other people sounded optional.”
I could not help it. I smiled.
His face changed so quickly that I nearly missed it. Not happiness. Recognition, painful in its intensity.
I stopped smiling.
He saw that too.
At the door, he turned back. “If you truly wish to end the engagement, tell me yourself. No invented illness. No intermediaries.”
“And you will agree?”
The silence lasted long enough to become an answer.
“I will listen,” he said at last.
It was less than I wanted. More than the book would have allowed him.
That night I put the whistle back in the blue chest and lay awake beneath the aggressively red canopy. I had no proof that death in this world would return me to mine. I had no proof there was a mine left to return to.
Outside, someone shut the garden gate. A-Lan settled onto a pallet in the outer room, despite my telling her there were perfectly good beds elsewhere. She said she would sleep better where she could hear me.
I listened to her breathing and tried to recall the story in order.
The poetry banquet. Qingyao’s jade pendant. The prince’s jealousy. A woman who became ill and died off the page.
I knew the broad road. I did not know where the pits were dug.
Before dawn, I made a decision of such comprehensive stupidity that it could only have come from a person who still believed knowledge was the same thing as control.
I would give him a reason to let me go.
