In the year that Li Jiayi was born, the first child of the empress, there was much rejoicing. The streets of Bianjing were decorated with red banners. Decorative pennants streamed in the air, fluttering merrily in the breeze, and the prosperous streets were full of the smell of roasting meat and frying dough.

Her naming day was attended by many. Work was halted and a general holiday was called. Officials and lowly citizens alike came to cast their eyes on the new princess as the royal family emerged from the Palace City to stand on the steps before their people. From the top of the steps, towering above the crowd, the empress looked beautiful and regal in her phoenix robes, their voluminous silk folds hiding the more generous contours of her newly postpartum body.

Liang Zhi, the emperor’s true and legal wife, had often been in poor health. It was rare to see her outside the palace, and beneath the overcast sky, her skin carried a certain unusually beautiful pallor, like the sorts of porcelain ware that are so white that they’re tinged by blue. Nevertheless, she had been cherished and well-looked after during her pregnancy. Her husband had doted upon her, making sure she wanted for nothing—not entertainment, fine foods, nor care, and her attendants had been diligent. She’d been attended to by doctors day and night, and under such care, she had blossomed. Liang Zhi might have been a strange night-blooming flower, like those evening glories that only turn their faces toward the moon, but she had bloomed nevertheless. Her pregnancy had been a healthy one, and as she stood before the empire she shared beneath her husband, swaying only ever so lightly on her feet, she was able to stand firm. Her face was full and beautiful as she looked down at her child with joy.

The little daughter who would be named Jiayi hadn’t grown into the full flowering of her strangeness yet. She was oddly quiet and docile as a baby, and was widely praised by the nursemaids who raised her as an obedient, sweet child, surely blessed by heaven. She rarely cried and didn’t fuss, though she didn’t seem to be simple-minded. Instead, she looked at everything around her with a keen and quiet interest that nearly seemed to belie intelligence beyond her age.

On the day when she was named, Li Jiayi looked as beautiful and quiet as a little porcelain doll. Her black eyes were deep and full of a clear luster, and her skin was pale and smooth as glass.

The whispers wouldn’t start up until later, as she grew and grew and her strangeness began to grow with her, the whispers that all had the same refrain—

How did the emperor, who was clearly a man, have a yaojing daughter?

The most insidious reply to this refrain, and the most dangerous for Li Jiayi’s mother, was that she had sneaked around behind the emperor’s back and got a child by another. Some of the more jealous concubines partook in such rumors, spreading them throughout the Western Palace. The emperor was furious when he got wind of them and quashed them with a vengeance, lest they reach his darling wife’s ears and upset her.

Fortunately for Liang Zhi, she was much beloved, and her husband would hear no word against her. He was absolutely certain in her faithfulness, for she had never given him any reason to doubt her. Despite her innate frailties, it had always been clear that she loved her husband very much.

Cooler heads, such as the advisors and scholars who served the emperor, were equally satisfied, though not by affection. Even the most suspicious among them, when thinking with a rational mind, would conclude that there was no such thing as infidelity in this case. The emperor’s wife was simply too sickly to venture beyond the Western Palace. To suggest that she was sneaking out to have trysts was simply absurd.

The other rumors, the deeper and darker rumors, those that traveled underground and only among those in a certain know—those were harder to quash. They were serpentine and slithery. They bloomed in dark corners, and who could refute what they didn’t know? These seldom reached the emperor’s ears.

Those rumors suggested that Liang Zhi, the emperor’s beloved wife, was yaojing herself.

After all, where had such a girl come from? With such a frail constitution and an obscure background, who was to say she hadn’t been raised by the spirits in the woods? Perhaps the reason for her suffering was an act of heaven.

Liang Zhi didn’t live much longer. She didn’t live long enough to see her beloved daughter grow into the apple of the emperor’s eye, to see her develop into her features, her mother’s frail loveliness so delicately mixed with the more fierce qualities of her father’s looks. Li Jiayi had no one to speak to of her suspicions as she grew. Unlike her mother, who was content to keep to her pet birds, to song and art and delicate things, Li Jiayi was cursed with an active mind.

She had no one with whom to share her suspicions, but Li Jiayi, an inexplicably full-blooded yaojing born to a human father, one who would never wither, never die, even as her half-siblings and family perished, did believe that her mother was one of the yao. She doesn’t believe her mother was cursed—by the heavens or by anyone else—but she does think that she was a stranger living in a strange and foreign land, a land hostile to her, one that poisoned her slowly. A slow kind of death caused and endured for love.

Li Jiayi has always found that puzzling.

Despite her nursemaids’ fears, Li Jiayi grew up without any of the frailties or deficiencies that characterized her mother’s body. She has always been, in all ways, healthy and strong. Almost as if her pale and doting mother, who seemed to get frailer and more transparent every year, had taken every last scrap of vitality in her body, every last trace of magic, and put it into her daughter.

But such a thing would be so hard to endure—so horrifying and painful—that it was hardly worth dwelling on. After all, what mother, what woman, could love her family so much?

Book Tie-In

Li Jiayi also appears in The Fox and the Rose.