Face-Slapping22 min read
I Married a Blind Prince — and My Ring Gave Me a Mission
ButterPicks13 views
I woke up to someone roughly shoving me. “Put the lady in the bridal sedan now, or the auspicious hour’s ruined!” a rough voice barked.
I hit my head and tasted blood and fireworks. Somewhere outside, drums and firecrackers announced a wedding. I forced my eyes open and pushed the red veil aside. A carved wooden sedan. Red wedding robes. I was in someone else’s body.
I reached for my face and froze. The hands that clasped mine were thin and elegant—nothing like my real hands. “This isn’t right,” I whispered to myself. I was a pharmaceutical researcher three time zones and a century away when I last checked. Anticancer trials, lab nights, and grant deadlines—none of which should end with a bride’s sedan. Died in the lab from sleep deprivation and woke up in a robe? Classic transmigration story, except I hadn’t read that many novels lately.
A memory not mine slid into my head like a cold wind. I tasted it: I was Matilda Liu, daughter of the Chancellor of Tianqi, raised into uselessness by a treasure-hunting stepmother and petted by a family that called me simple. My sister had been lifted into the emperor’s favor; I had been called ugly, fed poison over years, and promised to an unwanted match. My groom was said to be the blind Prince—Silas Calhoun, the so-called Sightless King, the man on whose arm I had been forced into this life.
The sedan stopped. The wedding curtain was thrown open. A leathery woman shoved me out into the hall. I tried to struggle, but whatever had been used that night to drink me under—something like a dream-dulling poison—still clung to me. They made me bow, fumbling and dazed, as the hall watched me like a puppet on strings. When they tossed me into the bridal chamber, I tore off the phoenix crown and ripped the thick red silk off my shoulders like it was a straitjacket.
I had one clear priority: food. Hunger gnawed in a way lab starvation never could. I tore into the fruit and red dates on the tray, stuffing pieces into my mouth like someone who had been starved through centuries. A metal mirror sat on the dresser. I glanced up and froze.
“Who is that?” I hissed at the reflection. The face in the brass looked sicker-than-sick, freckled and scarred and wrong. It was the other Matilda Liu—an ugly girl by court standards, the one I’d just slipped into. My mind clicked into problem-solving mode. I wasn’t the original Matilda, but the body’s memory lived like a shadow. The original’s past, her poisoned face, her humiliation—this was the puzzle I had to solve.
“Shh,” a soft male voice said from the doorway. “Don’t make a sound.”
Someone walked in—tall, statuesque, his robes that color of purple dusk. He moved slowly; his eyes had no focus. Even blind, he carried the authority of a general. Silence fell like a frost in the room.
“You’ll be in the palace tomorrow,” he said. “Be prepared.”
He spoke like a blade. I choked on a peanut and, in the reflex of fear and hunger, hacked so hard the peanut flew and landed smack on his face. Of course I did. If he could not see, he could not be embarrassed, right? I tossed the remaining snacks away and tried to act composed. He smelled cold—iron and sandalwood—and wore his silence like armor.
When he left, someone else slipped in: a man in white who grinned like a knife. “Cousin, your new wife is interesting,” he said. “I brought a salve.”
Silas—his name was Silas Calhoun—turned coolly to him. “Keep the medicine. Leave.”
“Bah,” the white-clad man mocked, then vanished into shadow. The sedan door slammed. I sat on the bed and breathed. The drug fog lifted slowly. I rummaged through my buttoned memory and found the answer I least expected.
My ring finger prickled. A tiny ring I had never felt before flashed into my vision with faint, laser-bright letters. My team had called it "the medical space"—a prototype storage ring with a database and a toolkit, a pocket lab, and an aide that could replicate small medical tools. In my world, it had been an impossible dream. The ring's message scanned into my mind: SPACE RING ONLINE — It has appeared in a strange world. Quest: collect Snow Lotus, Mist-Flower, Valley Toad, Moon-Frost Blossom. Return home upon completion.
A mechanical voice whispered, cold and efficient: “Owner, the inter-world search mission has begun. Locate four rare herbs—Snow Lotus, Mist-Flower, Valley Toad Fungus, Moon-Frost Blossom—and you may return.”
My mouth must have hung open. I was a scientist; this was my life’s work turned into a fairy-tale. If this thing was real, the herbs sounded exotic—and potentially real remedies might exist here. The ring pulsed like a heartbeat. The quest was simple, lunatic, and very specific.
I scoured the bridal room for the antidotes stored in the ring. I mixed a salve and ran it over my pocked face. It took hours, but the toxins were chemical, and a chemical antidote from my ring's stores began to dissolve the black nodes. When sleep finally took me, it was exhausted and triumphant.
At dawn, a squawking voice yelled outside: “Mistress, wake! The prince waits!”
“Tell him we’re leaving,” I muttered, dragging myself upright. My maid, Harriet Cook—my only faithful attendant—was the one who had stuck with me. She had her old loyalty or old fear; I could not tell. I had to be careful. In this world, people trusted appearances. I could not let old reputations ruin the leverage the ring had given me.
We traveled to the palace. Silas sat indifferent beside me. The hall hushed when we bowed. The emperor—Forbes Collins—arrived with the empress of the hour, Arabella Bradley, seated in a reverent hush. People whispered as we entered. One famous cousin—Jamie Ikeda—goaded the audience with, “See the two? Looks like the pair suits the pair.” Her voice was honey-venom. The court cooed.
“Your Majesty,” I said, bowing because that was expected. When I rose, Forbes Collins’ gaze snagged on my face and wavered.
“You—Matilda Liu? You are Matilda Liu?” Forbes asked, disbelief raw in his voice.
“I am,” I replied levelly. “This morning I woke to this face.”
“You’re…not ugly.” His tone surprised me; it was not the derision I’d expected. Rumor had it he preferred scandal and pranks. “How did you heal overnight?”
My head buzzed. I could feel a faint thrill of power. “I dreamed of a physician who taught me. I woke and I remember how.” I didn’t say the rest—not yet.
Forbes frowned. “You claim to have a dream doctor? That borders on chicanery.” He looked toward Silas, and though the prince's eyes seemed empty, his voice cut the air: “We will accept the woman. Tomorrow she will present tea in the palace.”
The palace moment went sideways when a cup of tea splashed on me—deliberately—pulled by someone’s malicious hand. The servant who wiped at the fallen veil unloosed my face to the court. Everybody gasped.
“But—” Arabella breathed. Jamie stammered. And Arabella moved a hand to my brow like she wanted to hide something.
Then a quiet voice came, and I answered because the ring whispered: “I can heal burns, too.” I lifted my head and said, “It’s only a spill, nothing.”
The court watched. Arabella stared, and Forbes Collins’ gaze flicked like a hammer. “She healed herself of ugliness overnight?” Forbes snarled. “This is a trick.”
“Check her,” he demanded.
Silas stepped forward, one slow measured stride. “If she’s a fraud, I will of course punish her. If she saved herself in a dream, we must verify.”
I did not flinch. Dreams had never been useful in lab reports, but they had given me facts. “Ask the palace healers,” I said. “You will find nothing that proves I used witchcraft.”
They muttered and checked and reported: nothing malicious in the tea. Forbes gritted his teeth, suspicious. “Stay in the palace. Prove yourself by treating the dowager Empress. If you can help her, you may remain.” He said it like a test. For a moment, I saw the outline of opportunity.
I did not know then how quickly the court’s favors could snap like brittle ice.
After court, I tried to leave. Harriet stood dead-sober. “Mistress,” she whispered, “the maid who spilled the tea—she’s gone to fetch a doctor from my old employer. They say you stole something from your mother—something called Snow Lotus. They want to search you.”
I smiled, the smile that hides teeth. “If they search, they will find nothing. But I will get my Snow Lotus. I’ll be done here faster if I can show real proofs.”
“Prove?” Harriet looked worried.
“You’ll see,” I said.
I turned my head to the ring on my finger. The tiny device chimed: NEARBY: SNOW LOTUS DETECTED. Location: Chancellor’s private store. It pulsed like a secret heartbeat.
The chancellor’s store—Olga Okada’s private cabinet—was a nest of gilded things and false floors. I crept in like a shadow. I wormed into cupboards and stacked boxes until my fingers closed on something that glowed with an impossible cold: a white lotus, crystalline. It was Snow Lotus. My palms trembled.
But I wasn’t the only person after it. A guard spooked and moved, and something darker moved faster: Brooks Donnelly’s cold, efficient bodyguard, the one they called Cold-Sedge. He slipped out with a small box. My ring screamed: NEARBY DETECTED: SNOW LOTUS — PROXIMATE.
“You missed it,” my ring said dryly.
I chased. I watched Brooks step out into the corridor and vanish into a garden, Snow Lotus hidden inside his clothes. I had been outmaneuvered. I cursed softly and ran after him, only to watch him scale a wall and leave with the lady-like speed of the palace’s shadow hunters.
I was angry, but not defeated. I had found some proof, and the ring had told me more: Moon-Frost Blossom scents flickered in the same house. There would be more to find.
Back in court, the Tang family—Calhoun Gordon, the arch-manipulator—had the gall to accuse me of theft. His wife Olga Okada styled the face of fake grief, and Jamie Ikeda and Arabella Bradley whispered to the emperor. I spoke calmly, and the emperor asked the impossible: “If you stole it, what does the box look like, what is in it, and where was it? Tell us and we will spare your punishment.”
It was a trap: name it wrongly and they would say I fabricated. Name it right and they would claim it was planted.
“Snow Lotus,” I said slowly. “A white lotus that is crystalline—hard to keep fresh. It was kept in a small sandalwood box. Your mother must know where it was kept. If you cannot tell me details you will not have cause.”
The emperor’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re lying, we will punish you.”
“If no evidence is found, then my sisters-in-law and mother shall be considered liars.”
They agreed.
The house was turned inside out. The palace searched like a plague of locusts, but found nothing. The Snow Lotus did not appear. The public started to murmur. The emperor left with a thunder in his chest. The sisters looked convinced. The court murmured.
Then—a lull. The accusation had been loud. Nothing was found. The emperor scowled and left. In the court’s stillness I watched the lines around Calhoun Gordon’s eyes twist. He was not a man who liked losing face.
I had not known all the pieces of their plot, but I had my ring and my wits. If this were a chessboard, my enemies had left a queen with a weak flank.
When the dowager Empress—Forbes Collins’ grandmother—complained of headaches, the palace doctors shrugged. They were luminaries and stagnation personified. The ring pinged with a single new phrase: DOWAGER — SUBDURAL HEMATOMA RISK — ACUPUNCTURE INDICATED.
I did not hesitate. I asked to see the dowager. Her entourage patted the floor like a nest of tigers. “Why do you want to see the Dowager?” Arabella hissed.
“For you to stop asking me to be humble,” I said. “I can help.”
They wanted to refuse, but the emperor had the tilt of interest. The dowager was in the inner chambers, eyes tired and pale.
“Madam,” I said, simply. “Do you often have headaches? Has the pain blurred your vision?”
She blinked. No doctor had asked that question. “Yes,” she admitted. “Lately my sight has blurred and pain has come at night.”
“Then I will try acupuncture. If you prefer, I will have a house-down doctor verify.”
They did not trust me, but they wanted hope. The dowager allowed me in. I took out the ring’s needles—clever rods of silver I had once made in the lab for scaled-up sterilized acupuncture—and placed them with nerves as if following a map. Every insertion was measured. The dowager’s brow slackened. The attendants held their breath. After the last needle she opened her eyes and smiled, surprised.
“This woman has done the impossible,” a chambermaid whispered. Word spread like light. The dowager’s recovery ricocheted across the palace. Arabella, who had been eager to discredit me, found the warmth of favor cooling beneath her feet.
From that day, I was both hated and needed. I was a novelty: a woman who healed the dowager with pins. I began to be called into private rooms. I treated small burns, reflux, and a fever in the crown prince’s stable boy. The ring sang each time I needed a reagent. Slowly, the edge of my isolation dulled.
The Tang family, meanwhile, simmered. Olga Okada’s face went from radiantly angry to ragged. Calhoun Gordon’s smile contracted. Jamie and Arabella nudged the emperor, whispering and twisting. The court was a living, breathing trap, and they had both started it and smelled their own doom.
I planned carefully. There is a cruel grace to showing people their true faces when they never expected the day to come.
I asked the emperor for a public verification: a morning when he would come to inspect the chancellor’s family holdings and the state of the court. I requested the emperor bring his retinue—and he came, flanked by a thousand eyes and ears. I requested that the dowager attend, wearing her improved composure as proof. I cultivated a small rumor that Calhoun Gordon had stockpiled forbidden botanicals. The court, alive to the slightest scandal, gathered.
Calhoun Gordon arrived with his daughter Jamie Ikeda beside him, her face a mask of longing turned sour. Olga Okada had the face of a woman who eats young fruit but wants the ripest still. They took their places beneath the high roof, and the crowd parted with a sound like a single held breath.
I stood, small and unmoving, at the center of the hall. I met Calhoun Gordon’s eyes. He did not know how to read me.
“I would like to ask the court to lend me the floor,” I announced. “I have several things to say about truth.”
The emperor looked at me. “Proceed.”
I slowly produced a small sandalwood box stolen from Calhoun Gordon’s private chest by a thin-fingered maid I had bribed to work for me the night the Snow Lotus was “lost.” I had spent a day watching the palace servants place items back into the wrong boxes, and a day more burying the clues so that the chancellor would feel secure and reveal himself.
“Forbes Collins,” I said. “Before all your lords and ladies, I proclaim that your chancellor’s family has been trafficking in forbidden herbs and in deliberate poisonings. They attempted to frame me for the theft of Snow Lotus and for the poisoning of my face. This box is evidence of that plot. I ask the court to examine it.”
A murmur went through the crowd. Calhoun Gordon smirked, sure of himself. “This is slander,” he spat. “Bring forth your proof, woman.”
I nodded toward the guards. Two palace clerks stepped forward and opened the box. Inside was a single Snow Lotus, preserved in starch and hidden under a false bottom. Another clerk pulled a coiled scroll and unspooled it under the lamp: the ledger where Olga Okada had written payments for “chemicals” and “compositions” labeled for “face correction.”
“Forbes Collins,” I said. “This ledger details the items your house ordered to disfigure and poison a girl who was inconvenient. Here are the receipts. Here are the dates and the signatures.”
“Lies!” Calhoun Gordon barked. “Fabricated!”
“Is it?” I asked, and signaled the dowager to stand.
The dowager rose slowly, her hair tied in the simple braid I had left in her ear. She walked over to the box, touched the Snow Lotus with an unsteady hand, then looked at the crowd.
“I had headaches and dimming vision,” she said quietly. “Miss Matilda treated me, and I thought at first she was a witch. But I was spared pain. I saw the truth in her hands.” She lifted her chin. “If the chancellor has ledger entries proving this—”
“That ledger is real,” I said, and pointed to a name scrawled in a shaky hand under the receipts. “See the initials. These are the books where Olga Okada requisitioned the compounds. Ask anyone. They were delivered by the same man who delivered my poison several months ago.”
Calhoun Gordon’s face drained. He tried to swallow a reply and found the words packing like oil in a bottle. The hall leaned in.
I let the silence pull the noose. “Calhoun Gordon,” I said softly. “You sent a woman to ply your poison. You attempted to replace the chancellor’s favored heir with your petty intrigues. You have also withheld this Snow Lotus. In front of the court, you stand accused.”
The crowd’s reaction was a sound like a wave breaking. Noblewomen gasped; eunuchs fanned themselves; the scribes began to write, their quills scratching quickly. A few servants in the back nodded; some began to whisper; one man lifted the corner of his robe and drew out a small mirror to look at his own face as if he had been betrayed by a family member. No one expected such clear evidence.
Calhoun Gordon’s smugness flickered. “You have no proof this is mine,” he barked. “This box could have come from anywhere!”
“Then go on your knees and swear with an oath,” I said. “If this is not yours, then you will preserve your honor. If it is yours and you have lied, you shall be punished as a traitor to the court.”
He laughed then—an unbearable, patronizing laugh that did not hide anything.
“Enough!” Forbes Collins’ voice cut through like a sword. “Bring the ledger forward. Inspect it.”
They did. For a moment the world seemed to slow. The ledger bore Olga Okada’s handwriting in a style only the house treasurer would recognize. Calhoun Gordon’s mouth fell open.
“No!” He nearly shouted. “This is forgery! You planted this!”
“You, sir, forged your own destiny,” I said.
The hall did not simply murmur now; it swelled. Servants came forward and pointed at Calhoun Gordon, at Olga. The chancellor’s family’s face of etiquette was flayed by accusation.
“You call me a liar?” Olga shouted, rage spattered across her face.
“Answer!” someone in the crowd demanded. A dozen heads turned like wind-driven reeds. The city’s gossiping maw had its face in the hall like a beast.
For a moment Calhoun Gordon was everything a privileged man is—he raised one hand and tried to command the room. Then, as the ledger lay open and the evidence spoke like a witness, his hands dropped. The color left his face and his mouth quivered.
“You— you idiots,” he hissed. “Guards! Remove her! Arrest this woman!”
A dozen guards moved. I turned my face to the crowd. “Remove me, if you must,” I said. “But before you do, watch.”
At my nod, the palace clerk pulled another document from his chest—a ledger portion lodged in his sleeve. Paper unfolded and spread in the light to reveal letter after letter: bribes for medicine; lists of people to bind; names of patients who had inexplicable reactions. The hall smelled suddenly of a dozen truths.
Calhoun’s eyes hardened from indignation to fear in less than a breath. He had been arrogantly secure. Now he looked like a man standing on the edge of a cliff. His denial was instantaneous and instinctual. “You falsified this,” he screamed. “You worked with the palace clerk!”
Silence held until a small servant began to sob. Then another—an old kitchen woman—stepped down and spat bile-bitter truth. “My mistress used poisons in small sachets,” she said, voice cracking. “She told me she meant to age the young woman’s face so she would never rival the family.”
Calhoun Gordon’s face tilted from angry to insane. “This is slander!” he wailed. “It is slander! I will die before being humiliated like this.” He had moved so fast from denial to anger and now stumbled as disbelief took him.
The crowd’s reaction changed—first shock, then delight—then anger that a man who had dressed himself in learning and power would be exposed as petty and cruel. Scribes thrust their pens forward like spears; someone snatched a scrap of paper and began to write down everything. A woman reached for her fan to calm herself but used it to clap instead.
Calhoun Gordon’s wife, Olga Okada, went white. She tried to deny the ledger, clinging to some unreal thread. Her eyes darted; for a moment she almost smiled—then flinched. “You—” she said to me, voice brittle with rage that turned into fright. “You cannot do this to me.”
“Stay calm,” I said. “If these are lies, explain them. Tell us where you obtained the Snow Lotus. Tell the court where it was kept.”
The old ledger’s page by now had been shown to the emperor. Forbes Collins’ expression had darkened the color of old iron. “You will kneel and swear,” he said. “If you have lied, you will take responsibility.”
Calhoun Gordon’s arrogance was now gone. He shuffled back on his knees and fell, then rose like a string pulled; his knees buckled and he hit the floor with a dull sound that echoed. He crawled and bent at his knees in public, and his voice turned thin.
“Spare me—spare me!” he cried. Shock made the sound of his protest small. “I beg—no—please!”
The once-proud chancellor had collapsed into the raw animal he hid beneath the robes. His face shifted from the arrogance of a man used to command to the desolate pleading of one who had been unmasked. Denial had broken into terror, and terror had become pleading.
Olga Okada dragged herself down to her knees beside him, fingers clawing at the carpet. She begged in hoarse gasps—“Please, Your Majesty—have mercy. I did it for my children. I only wanted more. Forgive me.”
The crowd did not fall silent with pity. Instead, a hundred hundred tongues snapped sharp with accusations. Servants who had been pushed aside by Calhoun’s edicts came forward whispered horrific truths. Some laughed like people released. Scribes wrote with furious speed. The dowager watched, face set. Arabella Bradley’s jaw worked; Jamie Ikeda’s eyes bloomed with both guilt and cunning. They had all misjudged me. The tide turned.
Forbes Collins raised his hand. “Guards,” he said. “Calhoun Gordon is guilty of procuring illegal compounds and of conspiring to harm a subject. You will strip him of titles and make public the ledger for the city to see. Olga Okada, you will be removed from court and confined until the trial. Their daughters will be kept under supervision until cleared.”
“No!” Calhoun pleaded. He tried to crawl forward to me, to slap shoes feebly against marble. “I did this—no— I swore to maintain the family—please—my daughters—”
One of the crowd hurled a cup across the floor. It shattered. Someone began to shout for the chancellor’s robes to be torn. Others began to sing. A wave of hands rose to record—scribes, then grooms, then people who kept lists and wrote for gossip. The court—always hungry for a scandal—erupted into that primitive delight that comes when a predator is captured.
Calhoun Gordon’s confusion hunched him. He moved from smug to shocked to denial—blood boiled in his throat—then to collapse. He began to mutter names, then to beg. “Please—Magistrate—Your Majesty—spare me—” His voice was tiny now. He was on the floor, the robe wrinkled and filthy. The crowd’s eyes were bright with triumph.
The daughters were in tears: Jamie Ikeda’s face crumpled as witnesses told of false letters and staged slips. Arabella Bradley paled as she realized the court might decide to punish her by excluding her privileges. Olga Okada shouted for mercy, then for the right to be allowed to see her daughters, then for a priest, then nothing at all except the blank sound of someone truly terrified of consequences.
A few officials tried to intercede, but Forbes Collins was a man in charge of his own stomach now: he wanted justice to show that the palace would not hold power captive. “Let it be written,” he said. “For the protection of all, let the ledger be published. Let this be a lesson to anyone who would play at death and poison in the name of gain.”
The crowd applauded. A clerk read sections of the ledger aloud—dates, names, sums. People leaned forward. One by one, the chancellor’s friends turned their faces away. The spectacle became a near-religious affair in which public shame served as moral instruction. You could feel scent of old money and the vinegar of petty revenge in the air.
Calhoun Gordon wept and begged, then collapsed to his knees fully. “I will do whatever you ask,” he sobbed. “I will pay fines. I will be stripped of my title. Please—spare my family.”
Olga Okada’s voice braided with his, “Please show mercy. My daughters—”
People shrank from her like the sieve of time was sifting them. Scribes took notes, chambermaids blinked. The dowager lifted her fan as an older woman who had witnessed more cruelty than most. The emperor’s guard came forward with a ledger certified by imperial seal: the records would be placed in the public archive. For the first time in memory, a household of court grandees had been publicly indicted.
After the spectacle, the crowd did not simply disperse. They clustered, whispering. Some took careful notes. Others spit venom. Servants stole looks at the chancellor’s daughters. Someone began to hum an obscene tune. The whole palace sang with intrigued, horrible liveliness.
By the end, Calhoun Gordon had gone from a sneering man with power to a broken figure. He fell to his knees, then to his face, then to pleading. He had changed in scale from a man who gave orders to one who begged for mercy. “Please—” he repeated, the word small and pitiful. “Please—” and the crowd heard it.
I watched and felt nothing like triumph. My face was warm, and the ring was cool and steady. I had not wanted cruelty for its own chocolatey joy; I wanted the truth to be visible, and to stop these people from hurting others. In the end, their faces told me what I had suspected for a long time: the powerful wield their power like knives. Exposing them does not make you noble—it only saves the next potential victim.
The court’s punishment was public, humiliating, and effective. Calhoun Gordon and Olga Okada were stripped of titles and placed under house arrest pending a public trial. Their daughters were confined; Jamie Ikeda’s future was broken like a snapped string. Public servants and the populace crowded to see them carted away. They begged, stammered, clutched at robes, shook their heads, and tried to hide their tears. The gallery murmured, some women pointing, some men recording scribes writing down every detail. Some servants even plucked their own pens to copy the ledger’s pages for themselves.
They went from the comfortable to the humiliated. The scene had followed the arc: arrogance, shock, denial, collapse, begging. The crowd recorded the fall with the hungry attention of a thousand small watchers. People took this as a moral: the palace would not tolerate private vendettas disguised as inheritance, and the nobles knew better than ever now to walk carefully.
After the ordeal, the emperor glared. “This court will publish a full record. The archives will not be lost to you, Calhoun.” He turned to me. “Matilda Liu—you have our gratitude and proof of your innocence.”
I bowed. “Your Majesty, the truth is sometimes heavy. I am glad the court sees it.”
Silas, quiet until then, inclined his head as only a man who keeps his feelings in a box can. For the first time I saw a faint thing—maybe approval, maybe a crack of respect—cross his slow features.
The storm faded, but the palace’s hum remained. The ledger’s pages now lay in the court's hand. The Tang family—Calhoun Gordon—had been forced to kneel publicly, their faces peeling like fruit. They had gone through the stages everyone is meant to go through: smugness to shock, denial to collapse, and finally begging. The gallery had reacted with astonishment, gossip, applause, and the scratch of pens. The public punishment had been fulfilled: the villains’ pride had been broken when they had thought themselves untouchable.
The next days were a blur of tiny victories. The dowager’s favor grew, and the court spoke of me as a woman who knew both herbs and needles. Silas grew less icy; occasionally he would say one word that sounded like concern. After the public punishment, he came to my room.
“Why did you expose them?” he asked quietly while I wrapped a bandage.
“To stop them from hurting someone else,” I said. “And to get back what was taken.”
He sat in the shadow like a statue and answered with the blunt thought of a soldier: “You are dangerous.”
“I know.”
He made some sound like a breath that might be a laugh. “You do what you want. You keep your head. I will watch.”
“Is that a promise?” I teased.
He looked at me without irritation. “If it keeps my house from being ridiculous.”
After that, the ring’s little pulses came with new hints. Snow Lotus had been found and moved by Brooks Donnelly to protect it—Silas had ordered its retrieval in such a way that only he or his men could take the risk. Moon-Frost Blossom’s scent twined in his house and the secret bronze door in his chamber regarded me like a riddle. The ring’s guidance made the whole palace a map I could read. I kept moving, stitching short victories together: getting small, stealthy pieces of herbs, applying them, learning the palace’s schedule. Every small success made the ring sing like an eager child.
Days slipped. Silas and I had more time together, brief and sharp and awkward. He had a way of sliding his words under the skin like cool needles. “You are not the woman they remember,” he said once. “You are not like them.”
“Who are they, who are you?” I shot back. “I’m me. I am a modern scientist in a silk dress.”
He did not laugh. “You are someone else to me. Dangerous and smart. I like it.”
I tried not to blush. The world we inhabited was treacherous; loving—or being loved—was always a risk that could be used against you. But in a palace that made hunting men of state into sport, it was the only place to learn to fight. I had a ring. I had knowledge. I had a plan.
I kept my plan close: find the four herbs, finish the ring’s quest, and go back to my lab and my mice and my messy grant reports. The palace was a stage; I would play the role the ring had given me long enough to collect what I needed. I would be a scientist-vigilante in crimson silk if that’s what it took.
“You’ll succeed,” Silas said once in my garden. He was blunt, but that was warmth. “You have the look of someone not afraid to buy trouble.”
I smiled. “And you have the look of someone who will get in trouble if he helps me.”
He put his hand on the rail and the sunlight made his wedding band dull. “If it helps you get what you want, do it quietly. I dislike drama.”
“Noted,” I replied. “Then stay asleep on the big days.”
“You provoke me.” He only said it like a fact.
And so I moved like a shadow and a physician. I borrowed herbs from kitchens and tested tinctures in secret. I picked pockets politely after leaving bowls of decoction in exchange for information. I trained the palace’s needle in my hands and wielded it like a scientist who had learned again to be precise. The ring hummed at my finger like a clock. It told me where the next herb scent breathed. I followed, quietly and where I could.
Weeks became months, and the court’s memory of the Tang family’s downfall dulled as new scandals came. But the ring waited. Snow Lotus was in Silas’s house and the Moon-Frost Blossom's scent—weak but persistent—whispered from behind a bronze door in his room. The ring told me to learn how to open it.
I learned to wait. I learned to poke at the door’s seam like a patient when I woke at night. I learned that a man who cannot see notices things—sound, weight, the breath of someone behind him. I slipped through the night like a cat, leaving traces that I could control. I let Silas think he had caught me in moments and then watched his eyes change like clouds. We traded insults with the intimacy of two spurned generals. He watched me, and I made sure what he saw would be the face I chose to show.
I did not realize then that my small victories would become a bond.
One night, the ring sang with a different insistence. Moon-Frost Blossom, the ring said, pressed against the back of the bronze door like a memory. I felt both the danger and the chance: open the door and gain what I needed for the quest—maybe the final herb. The ring’s cold voice said, “Owner, the Moon-Frost Blossom is behind the bronze door. Expect traps. Proceed at risk.”
I looked at Silas asleep, his breath even and steady. The palace held its sleep, and the night kept my secrets. My fingers danced the motion I had learned in my lab: press a point; slide a finger; turn the hidden catch. The bronze door moved with a sigh and a sound like unlocking a chest. Inside, a small room glittered.
There the Moon-Frost Blossom sat in a glass case, a blossom of translucent blue petals dusted with frost that did not melt. I reached and the ring hummed like a delighted little mouse. The herb smelled of stars.
I had it—Snow Lotus and Moon-Frost Blossom. The Valley Toad Fungus and Mist-Flower were left. My chest loosened. I was close to finishing the ring’s mission. I almost felt like laughing.
Almost.
Because no triumph goes unchallenged.
When I turned, a rough hand closed around my wrist. “I thought you would try,” Silas said, words hoarse.
“I thought you would be asleep,” I snapped, angry and delighted and wary at once.
He drew me in like a shield and said softly, “Do not use my house to be a ghost of theft. If you keep stealing in my rooms, I will hold you accountable, and the court will not be so kind the next time.”
His words were meant as a threat. I answered with laughter. “You’re threatened by my needle and my ring? You are a prince—what can I do to you, steal your pride?”
He pressed his fingers into mine like an assertion. “Do not test me.”
I thought of how the Tang family had fallen. I thought of ledger pages and the hush of an empress’s smile. I thought—most of all—of the ring’s tiny glow and the road back to my lab. I had walked into a life I’d never chosen and was being forced into choices that demanded ruthlessness and care balanced like a scale. I chose to be smart. I chose to be cautious.
Silas and I did not become lovers in the bright way of romance novels. We became allies in the slow way of hemlock and antidote—sharp, necessary, and honest only when it mattered. He watched me. I played my part on the stage of a palace hungry for scandal. I used the ring to save lives, and to pry open doors. I used my knowledge to heal. Each time I did, I felt like a woman with two hearts: one filled with modern logic and one filled with the strange new warmth of a place I had to win to leave.
I was running out of time and the ring hummed in a tense way. The last two herbs were closer. The court was still unsettled by the Tang family’s humiliation. The dowager favoured me a little. My face was less pocked now, the dark toxins dissolving pixel by pixel. I had work to do: finish the quest, open the ring’s portal, go home to my lab, to my grants and microscopes and the life of fluorescent lights I knew. I wanted that life, ugly or beautiful, more than the fragile, gilded cage I had been handed.
So I kept my needles sharp, my mind cold and my ambition, scientific.
And I did not forget: in this world, villains fall in public, and consequences—if you can make the court look—are absolute.
The End
— Thank you for reading —