After ordering Yan Xu to leave, Emperor Jingren didn’t return at once to his bedroom. Instead he sent a secret guard to call over Jing Xixian, the most capable deputy commander in the Imperial Guard. After questioning Deputy Commander Jing, he felt he had a better idea of how things stood. Then he told everyone to withdraw, while he returned to his room.

He had felt refreshed and energetic upon getting up in the morning, but after listening to Yan Xu’s report, Emperor Jingren once again looked weary. The empress quickly told him to sit down and made him a cup of tea.

Emperor Jingren drank some tea, then sighed, frowning. “That Yan Xu… We personally chose him to be the commander of the Imperial Guard. How can he be so crude? When we chose him, we thought…”

At this point, Emperor Jingren knocked on his head. He fought to remember the circumstances under which he had chosen Yan Xu. He had an impression that Yan Xu was very loyal and very steady; this was why he had always trusted him. But today Emperor Jingren had discovered that sometimes loyalty alone wasn’t enough. Yan Xu’s wild ideas were sufficient to imperil the whole capital if he once put them into practice. This type of willfulness couldn’t be excused. One must perform the duties of one’s station—this was true for the emperor and the civil officials, but it also applied to military officials.

And yet…he couldn’t remember.

The empress stopped him from knocking on his head, holding his fist in her hand. Without Emperor Jingren’s permission, she sat down facing him and said in concern, “Your Majesty, are you striking your head because you have a headache? It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have beguiled you into drinking so much.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Emperor Jingren. “We got excited and started sharing our drink with you. And it isn’t that we have a headache. It’s just…”

Emperor Jingren looked earnestly at the empress. Reason and emotion both told him that he could trust this person. So he continued, “It’s just that ever since that day we hit our head, some of our memories have been confused. Don’t laugh at us for this. When we woke up that day, we were startled when we saw your face. We suspected that we had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers had found a man to impersonate our empress.”

“Oh?” The empress raised her eyebrows slightly. “Then how did Your Majesty determine that I was the empress?”

“It’s strange, but though our memories were confused, we still had some impressions. Our impression of the empress was of an upright and stern person, magnanimous, from a military family, with impressive martial arts skills, rather taller than the average woman. You fit our impression perfectly, but…you surpassed our imagination a little. Then the empress dowager came. We still remembered our mother’s face. Our mother displayed no ill-feeling toward you, so we determined that you must be the empress.” Emperor Jingren spoke candidly. Though it might be angering to say you didn’t remember your own wife, given the empress’s temperament, not only would she not be angry, she would probably worry about his health instead.

Sure enough, after she had heard him out, the empress said in concern, “Apart from remembering the empress dowager’s appearance and not remembering my appearance, what other people did Your Majesty remember or not remember?”

Emperor Jingren thought back over the past three months and replied, “When we first woke, we were a little frightened. We couldn’t remember your face, or Imperial Physician Chen’s, or your maid Xiahe’s. Then our mother came to visit us. We remembered most of her maids. Strangely enough, when we went to see the pure consort, we had forgotten her extraordinary face, but we had some vague memories of her maids, Cuihu and Lühu.”

The empress took a deep breath. A little expectantly, she asked, “And…Eunuch Lian, the other four consorts, Imperial Concubine Lin, Commander Yan, and…Grand Secretary Lin and Chancellor Li, people you see often, did you remember them?”

“You’ve asked just the right questions,” Emperor Jingren said wonderingly. “We had completely forgotten Commander Yan’s face, but we remembered both Grand Secretary Lin and Chancellor Li.”

The empress didn’t ask anything else. Instead, after staring at Emperor Jingren for a while, she suddenly said, “Your Majesty, I have a family heirloom that is supposed to have the power to clear the mind and protect against evil. It was part of my dowry and came with me to the palace. Your subject wife wishes to present it to Your Majesty.”

“As it is a family heirloom, it would be more appropriate for you to keep it,” said Emperor Jingren.

“But I’m worried about you, Your Majesty. I can keep you from being injured by an enemy, but these evils… I am powerless to stop them.”

Emperor Jingren was very touched. Just managing to squeeze the empress’s hand in both of his, he said, “We are very happy to receive such care from you, Jinyi.”

The empress smiled comfortingly and lifted an object from around her neck. It looked like a pendant, hanging from a plain red cord. The pendant was glittering and translucent. Emperor Jingren looked at it for a while but really couldn’t figure out what it was made of.

“This object… What material is it made from? It seems like jade, yet it isn’t. It’s so clear and shining. It looks very beautiful. There are many precious objects in our treasury, but we have never seen a material like this,” Emperor Jingren said, fascinated.

“It’s supposed to come from beyond the heavens. It was found when a meteorite fell from the sky, in the distant past. I have never seen its like in this world either. I will put it on you.” Holding the pendant, the empress put the cord around Emperor Jingren’s neck with a touch of eagerness.

She looked at the pendant for a while, then glanced at Emperor Jingren. Then she looked at the pendant again, and at last appeared a little disappointed.

The empress had always been very shrewd. She only ever displayed her happiness around Emperor Jingren, not her worries. Emperor Jingren rarely saw negative emotions on her face. Seeing her current expression, he asked in concern, “What’s wrong?”

The empress shook her head and said with a slightly bitter smile, “I really thought that Your Majesty would recover your memories once you put on the pendant. But nothing happened. I was being naive.”

This reassured Emperor Jingren. He comforted her: “We are pleased to have your gift. We will keep it with us always, and think of your care for us.”

According to the tenor of Emperor Jingren’s recent interactions with the empress, when Emperor Jingren said something like this, there ought to have been an immediate growth of warmth between the two of them, and they might have become a little carried away. Emperor Jingren was too controlled to let something like an open display of licentiousness occur in broad daylight, but a little cuddling was still possible.

But there was no such response from the empress. Her eyes kept glancing toward Emperor Jingren’s neck, looking at the pendant, expression a little disappointed and unwilling, as if she regretted giving the pendant to Emperor Jingren.

The empress covered it up well; an outsider would hardly have noticed any change in her. But Emperor Jingren was acutely sensitive, and he understood the empress well. Naturally he understood what the empress was thinking.

But now, even if she regretted it, Emperor Jingren still didn’t want to give the pendant back. She had kept it with her always, and now she had given it to him. Emperor Jingren loved the empress. Naturally he didn’t want to return it.

He was a generous person. If he had seen anyone else wearing such an expression, he wouldn’t have blamed them, and he wouldn’t have kept their precious possession. He was a ruler. He could have anything he wanted. There was no call to hang on to a thing that belonged to someone else. But not this time. The empress had given him something she had worn close to her body. He didn’t want to give it back.

“Jinyi, are you fond of jade?” Emperor Jingren suddenly asked.

After a pause, the empress said, “Jade improves the temper. Naturally I like it.”

“All right.” Emperor Jingren nodded and silently noted it down, planning to give the empress something nice from the treasury after they returned to the palace.

After this, the two of them didn’t speak of jade again, and the empress’s gaze left the pendant. Emperor Jingren took the opportunity to hide the pendant inside his clothes.

They chatted indolently and eventually ended up back on the subject of Su Huailing. Once that woman was mentioned, Emperor Jingren felt a headache coming on again. Every emperor likes an auspicious omen, and they are even more apt to believe in fortune, good and bad. Su Huailing had already been determined to have extremely good fortune. If he killed her, Emperor Jingren was worried it would incur some natural disaster. But if he didn’t use the woman’s good fortune, someone else might. What then?

“It really is troubling.” The empress nodded. She also couldn’t come up with a solution.

Emperor Jingren sighed. “If she had the education of an ordinary highborn lady, she wouldn’t have made so much trouble with her good luck. But instead she’s an uneducated… Wait, we’ve got it!”

Emperor Jingren’s eyes lit up. He said to the empress, “Since this woman has done all these things because she’s uneducated, then why don’t we teach her?”

“Oh?” the empress said curiously. “Does Your Majesty want to ask some palace matrons to teach her palace etiquette?”

“It’s not like I want her to join the harem. There’s no point in teaching her palace etiquette,” Emperor Jingren said. “We want to get some people with sinecures in the Ministry of Justice and have them teach this woman the law.”

The empress considered this, then said approvingly, “That’s a good idea. But why does Your Majesty want her to learn the law, instead of finding a female instructor to teach her the three obediences and four virtues necessary for a lady? What is the use of teaching a woman the law?”

“She dared to speak to our face of bearing everything herself, and to make distinctions among the people we wished to punish. Very likely she thinks that etiquette is beneath her. Teaching a person like that the rules of etiquette might well have the opposite of the desired effect and make her disdain them even more. Luckily, she still has some sense of right and wrong. She doesn’t want to get other people in trouble. So we wish her to know how many people she harms with her reckless behavior. And we are not going to spare those people just because she wants to bear all the responsibility!”

After hearing this, appreciation appeared in the empress’s eyes. She bowed her head low and said, “Your Majesty is wise.”