'You have disgraced us!' someone hissed.
Ji Yue turned and was startled to see her fellow virgins glaring at her. 'What?'
'He came to our table to talk with us, and you coughed all over him. It is no wonder that he rushed away. He must fear a plague from you!'
Ji Yue blinked. 'What?'
'He will think we are like you! He will think we keep company with upstart women who challenge his authority!'
'I did no such thing!' she cried.
'You do it even now! Oh, we are ruined because of you!'
Ji Yue looked from face to face. She had just spent a delightful two hours at the banquet with these girls. They had laughed together and shared stories of their homes. And now each one spit into their napkins at her and turned their faces away. Even Li Fei would not look at her.
'My chances are my own,' she finally said. 'They will not affect yours.'
'Ugly and stupid,' Fan Mei Lin said. 'She will bring us all down with her.'
Ji Yue said nothing. Their minds could not be swayed, and worse, she feared they were right. Men's minds did not always remember details. The emperor might very well attribute her actions to one of them, but she doubted it. Especially since each girl would take pains to remind the emperor that it was Ji Yue who had insulted him so.
No one would remember that she had tried to compliment his statecraft, not insult it. He would only know that she had created discord in his home, and that was a sin that could never be forgiven, especially in the Forbidden City. In short, she had not only failed to impress the emperor but had turned every virgin against her.
Chapter 7
JI YUE'S MISERY had only begun at dinner. When the banquet was over, the girls filed silently back to the virgins' palace. The moment the door was shut, they rounded on her. While the girls at her table hated her for spoiling their chances with her miserable actions, the others were angry that the emperor had spent time with 'a dirty pig like her!'
Nothing about her was sacred. Her body, her hair, her smell were all fodder for insult. For one insane moment she thought the eunuchs might help keep the rancor under control, but to her dismay, they merely egged the virgins on. This was their entertainment. Plus, they had no wish for the bitterness to be turned back on them.
In the end, Ji Yue stopped defending herself. No one wished to hear her side, anyway, and she was too miserable to try to speak reasonably to anyone, much less the shrews that surrounded her. She simply wanted to go to her bed and cry herself to sleep. But she was blocked on all sides. No one would let her pass out of the main room. She had to wait it out, doing her best to ignore every hateful word.
But then someone recalled that the emperor liked her hairpin. Another screeched that the pin was hers and she ran at Ji Yue, her claws extended to regain her property. She succeeded. She ripped out the butterfly pin and took a handful of cemented hair as well.
The pain shredded the last of Ji Yue's patience. She had two brothers, she knew how to fight. So she grabbed the girl's arm with one hand and balled the other into a fist, slamming it into the girl's stomach. Her attacker crumpled to her knees, but the hairpin was still gripped tight in her fist. 'That was my great-grandmother's!' Ji Yue said, and she went to pry it out of the shrew's fingers. She'd just managed to grab hold of one tiny wing when the first blow fell.
Clearly, someone else had brothers. A hard, compact fist slammed into her side. As Ji Yue began to drop, she saw a small foot in a bright red shoe fly toward her face. She twisted, taking the impact on her shoulders, but that only exposed her face on the other side. Blows began to rain down. She had no idea who attacked her, only why. Tonight she was the scapegoat for everyone's frustrations. As blow after blow fell, each more vicious than the last, Ji Yue could only curl into herself and pray. Surely it would end soon.
He saved her. Somehow she knew it would be him. Not the emperor, as she might dream, but the man who plagued her awake and asleep: Sun Bo Tao, Master of the Festival. She heard his voice, a deep, angry bellow that cut through all the high screeches.
She felt no more blows, only a dull ache from head to toe. The pain would grow worse later, but she already knew that nothing had been broken. The girls had been intent on a beating, not murder. The master was still bellowing, and she heard the noise of people withdrawing. Then she felt his hands, large but oh so gentle, on her back.
'Where are you hurt, Ji Yue? You must tell me. I cannot help otherwise.'
Deep in her spirit, she wanted to answer. She'd never had a sister, and she had naively believed that some of her fellow virgins would be her friends. She was a foolish, foolish woman to have thought such a thing. She knew that now.
'Chen Ji Yue, you must answer me!' His voice held a tinge of panic, so she opened her eyes to look at him.
'Once many years ago,' she said, 'I was climbing to reach something I was not supposed to have.' She blinked away her tears. With his help, she began to uncurl, wincing as she moved. 'I don't remember what it was. A sweet perhaps or, more likely, my father's brushes. But it was too high and I was too small, so I fell and broke my arm.'
'Ji Yue, where are you hurt?' He brushed his thumb across her cheek and it came away smeared with white paint and black charcoal.
'The pain was unbearable,' she said, retreating to the memory of her mother's arms wrapped about her, and her father's voice, high and threaded with panic. 'I screamed until my throat hurt as much as my arm, and still I did not stop.'
'Ji Yue…' he murmured, clearly frustrated. He was running his hands down her body—her arms and her ribs, then her legs. There was nothing familiar in his touch, simply a quick pat everywhere to check for breaks.
She leaned forward and touched his arm before he reached her big feet. 'This was a beating,' she said. 'Nothing more.'
He froze. 'I have already summoned the women's doctor.'
She shook her head. She did not want to see that woman again or go into her examination room. 'Send her away. I would know if something inside were broken.'
He shook his head. 'Not always,' he said grimly as he handed her a cloth for her face. 'Have you been beaten before?'
She wiped the worst of the paint from her face then pulled the now broken board from her hair. 'Once by my father for practicing my brush strokes upon his fine paper. And once by my brother's tutor for doing his homework for him.'
He frowned. 'You did your brother's homework?'
She shrugged, then immediately stopped. Already her back was beginning to swell. 'I was bored. And I didn't think the runt would claim my work as his own.'
He smiled. This close, she could see the way his brow puckered when he was worried, and how his smile smoothed the furrows away. 'Can you stand?'
She nodded. He gripped her hand, but there was something between their palms. He pulled back and turned her hand over. The mangled butterfly hairpin lay in her palm. She had ripped it back from the lying bitch who'd stolen it.
'I am sorry,' he said. 'It was a pretty piece.'
It was mutilated beyond repair. The jade stones were broken or missing and the gold wire was twisted. She looked at the misshapen thing in her palm and something inside her broke. She began to cry, and once the tears began, they would not stop.
He tried to speak to her. She couldn't understand the words, but she heard his tone. He sounded much like her father had that day long ago when she'd broken her arm: alarmed, anxious and completely uncertain what to
