Favored consorts all regarded the Cold Palace with deep aversion and avoided it whenever possible, yet Nalan Xuan moved through the place with practiced familiarity.
Life in the Cold Palace meant never again having clothes placed into your hands or food brought straight to your mouth. No one cared what your former status had been, and no one feared whatever authority you once possessed. The only people who ever left the Cold Palace did so as corpses. There were few servants here, just enough to maintain the bare minimum of cleaning, and whether they actually performed their duties was something no one bothered to investigate. In the Cold Palace, servants were still servants, while those once called “masters” lived worse than servants. Shut away from daylight, clinging to former status while still forced to live according to a servant’s moods, they had to do everything for themselves. Those who could endure it were worn beyond recognition long before three or five years passed. Those who could not might go mad in three or five days, and afterward no one cared whether they still resembled a human being.
Two or three palace attendants, men and women alike, had set up a small stove at the corner of the corridor. They clustered around it laughing as they watched something cooking in the pot. Hearing movement behind them, the attendant closest to Nalan Xuan turned around impatiently. “Who is it? In weather this cold, why aren’t you staying put instead of coming here to ruin this lord’s mood?”
Even as he spoke, his gaze traveled upward from the bright yellow hem embroidered with phoenix patterns. The instant he saw that color, his heart began pounding. Very few people in the palace were permitted to wear such pure imperial yellow, and fewer still could wear phoenix embroidery. His heart leapt into his throat. Then he finally saw who had come, his legs gave out, and he collapsed completely onto the ground.
The two attendants by the stove had their backs to Nalan Xuan. Seeing their companion’s reaction, they laughed until they doubled over. “Hey, boss, what’s wrong with you? Why are you sitting on the ground in weather this cold? Did you see a ghost?”
Unable to speak, the fallen attendant could only keep shooting them frantic looks. Unfortunately, the other two were far too numb to understand what had made him change color so drastically, and their teasing came in wave after wave.
“Enough, quit fooling around. You jump at everything all day long. This is the Cold Palace. Who in their right mind would come here? You think this is the Imperial Garden, somewhere masters from every palace stroll through for a bit of novelty? Come on, stop staring and eat. I specially asked someone to bring this in from outside the palace. It’s fresh.”
“Hey, I’m telling you, keep that up and you’ll squeeze your eyeballs right out.”
With a chuckle, the two reached a natural agreement and jointly ignored the man who had collapsed directly in front of Nalan Xuan.
“Where is Selected Woman He staying?” Nalan Xuan spoke, cutting through the trio’s back-and-forth.
They turned around impatiently, only for every face to transform with uncontrollable shock. “E-Empress…!”
“Where is Selected Woman He staying?” Too lazy to care about their panic, Nalan Xuan frowned and asked again.
“Replying to Your Majesty the Empress, the second room on the east side.” Nalan Xuan followed the direction indicated by the only woman among the three. It was an utterly inconspicuous room, with an obvious spiderweb hanging in front of the door.
Leaving the three attendants staring at one another, unsure what to do with themselves, Nalan Xuan headed straight toward Selected Woman He’s quarters.
He pushed the door open and stepped across the threshold. The room was lifeless and gloomy as a tomb. A few streaks of light leaked through the windows, illuminating clouds of dust and blurred masses of floating lint. The air was damp and stale, heavy with the smell of mold, making Nalan Xuan frown. Forget ventilation, the place might not even have been cleaned. Neat webs had been spun into every corner and crevice. The room was as cold as the outdoors. He instinctively pulled his heavy cloak tighter around himself and took a couple of tentative steps, leaving two footprints edged in pale dust where his feet had landed.
Hearing movement inside the room, the mound beneath the blanket on the curtainless bed shifted. A clear female voice sounded from beneath it. “You’ve miscalculated the time. It’s still too early for lunch.”
It was indeed too early for lunch, but rather late for breakfast. From the scene before him, she had clearly grown accustomed to not receiving three full meals a day. Once the cherished daughter of her family, once a princess consort, once the mother of a nation, she had somehow fallen to this state despite having committed no fault, all because of a single sentence from the person who shared her pillow, with no chance to argue and no right to resist.
Receiving none of the response she expected, He Yilan sat up wrapped in the blanket. Ink-black hair spilled from her collar like a waterfall. It had probably gone unwashed and uncombed for a long time and was now tangled together, dry and disordered. Her deep, pool-like eyes were utterly still, cool and distant. The instant she clearly saw who had come, her entire body and spirit seemed to freeze. Yet she quickly smoothed away the reaction and relaxed again, looking at Nalan Xuan as he approached step by step as though he were an old friend reunited after a long separation.
Though she had fallen so far, the pride in her bones remained, as did the air of someone accustomed to looking down from above. Young ladies raised in great households often went to one of two extremes: some were so pampered they could not endure the slightest hardship, while others were proud, aloof, and stubborn enough that no one could humiliate them into bending. He Yilan was clearly the latter. Even amid a room full of dirt and dust, the radiance, backbone, and pride in her bearing could not be hidden.
“You… have you been well?” Nalan Xuan knew he had no standing to ask such a thing. He bore full responsibility for the state this woman was in today. He was certainly no merciful soul, and more than one or two people had died unjustly at his hands. Yet compared with the innocent, inexperienced girl she had been back at the marquis’s residence, the woman before him now possessed a calm self-command that was difficult not to respect.
The moment the words left his mouth, Nalan Xuan found himself ridiculous. If anyone could answer “well” under circumstances like these, it would be either self-deception or self-torment. And the obvious answer, “not well,” was hardly something he needed eyes to be told. Why ask a pointless question?
Nalan Xuan had used countless people. In the past, he had never seen anything wrong with it. Survival belonged to the fittest, the weak were prey to the strong, and naturally the strong had the right to dominate everything weaker than themselves. If the weak were used by others and came to some miserable end, then all they could do was pray for their own luck. But after everything he had experienced, both the situations he controlled and those that escaped his control, after struggling through using and being used, deceiving and being deceived, Nalan Xuan had come to understand just how efficient it was to exploit emotion, especially extreme feelings such as love and hatred, and just how despicable and shameless it was. Once, he had regarded such methods as a kind of supreme glory, and being called unscrupulous as praise from those who simply lacked the skill to compete with him. After all the turns his life had taken, however, he could no longer see it quite the same way.
If there was anyone toward whom Nalan Xuan now felt even the faintest trace of guilt or regret, perhaps there was only one person: He Yilan. He understood the silent despair and death of the heart that came when deep love was exploited, and he understood the blazing fury that followed. Some people chose to hate the world and repay tooth for tooth, eye for eye. Others exiled or even destroyed themselves in search of release. Yet He Yilan was clearly neither. The feeling she gave Nalan Xuan could be summed up in a single word: waiting.
Even if he could begin again, Nalan Xuan would still choose the same path and the same outcome without so much as knitting his brows. He Yilan had indeed helped him greatly, all because of “love.” That had been his good fortune and her misfortune. He did not regret it. It was only that, reunited with her at this moment, a fleeting trace of guilt passed through his heart.
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