“We are not concerned about that.” Emperor Jingren found a comfortable position in the empress’s arms and stayed there, rather with the attitude that he might as well at this point, though his expression remained prim, as if he still sat above Jinluan Hall, maintaining his imperial dignity in the face of his courtiers.

But the empress knew he was relaxed. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have stayed so obediently where he was.

Looking at the unfailingly proper young emperor, the empress simply didn’t know how best to treat him. It was his first time having this feeling, of loving a person so much that he didn’t know what to do, so much that just looking at him made him happy. When he saw him sleeping soundly, he felt glad, but he also wanted to kiss him dizzy, until nothing remained in his eyes but his own reflection. He wanted to steal the young emperor away from the realm and all of creation, but he couldn’t stand to see him bereft.

This kind of adoration was completely new to him. He had never felt it before, and he would never feel it again.

“Can we leave the business of the selection until the New Year’s celebrations are over?” the empress said suddenly. “For now, I’d like for us to be an ordinary husband and wife.”

“Husbands and wives don’t act like this.” Emperor Jingren frowned. “You certainly do not follow the adage of a couple treating each other with the same respect as honored guests. Forget it. As you like, then.”

Receiving Emperor Jingren’s endorsement, the empress laughed softly.

After this, it really was just as the empress said. Until the fifteenth, unless the sky was falling, nothing could bother Emperor Jingren as the empress kept him all to himself.

Emperor Jingren, thinking of the suffering of the children of the border, had permitted the empress the licentiousness of intimacy during the day on the first day of the year, but, being proper to the point of rigidity, he couldn’t wish for a repetition. Though he and the empress loved each other, they still had to maintain decorum. What happened between a husband and wife in their bedchamber, at night, with the lamps extinguished, was no one’s business but theirs; no one could say anything else about it. But the empress liked to do it in broad daylight, and even if it was nighttime, he liked to leave the lights on. This put Emperor Jingren in a difficult position.

It wasn’t that he was shy or embarrassed: what he was worried about was that the empress would be exposed. No matter how many times the empress said that with his abilities, nothing would happen, Emperor Jingren still thought that there was always someone more powerful out there. The empress couldn’t be unmatched.

But the empress was obstinate on this point. He thought that they had a rare break until the fifteenth, and they had to make the most of it. It was a pity that Emperor Jingren couldn’t just leave the palace, or else he would have taken Shen Junrui out to have some fun.

This idea occurred to the empress early on, but Emperor Jingren would never agree. Then came the seventh day of the year, with snowflakes floating through the sky, the whole palace painted white, a single color filling all of heaven and earth, all things reduced to their simplest shades: it was dazzling and beautiful.

Emperor Jingren ran to the top of an artificial hill in the imperial gardens, but he couldn’t see the palace in its entirety. In the midst of his joy, disappointment flashed through his eyes.

The empress, seeing the rare excitement in the young emperor’s face, at last committed an act of irreverence that had long been on his mind—

The empress abducted the emperor and took him from the palace!

It was done without alerting anyone. The empress first ordered an imperial physician to diagnose the emperor with a sudden cold that required rest, then ordered Eunuch Lian to stand watch outside Zichen Hall and not let anyone disturb His Majesty. Then he changed into a guard’s clothes, hung a token of passage from his waist, and took another guard, one who was feeling unwell, out of the palace with him.

Su Huailing relied on luck, while the empress relied on power. With his position and his abilities, it couldn’t be easier to leave the palace. Even if someone had recognized him as the empress, no guard would have dared stop him, so the empress, with an immobilized Emperor Jingren in tow, left the palace and the city with the two of them astride a single horse, all the way to the tallest peak in the capital’s outskirts.

After consigning the horse to the care of the post station at the foot of the mountain, the empress hoisted Emperor Jingren onto his back and dashed lightly up to the summit. He moved with extreme speed, somehow even faster climbing a mountain with a person on his back than he had been riding a horse across level ground. Very soon, they attained the peak. That was when the empress finally tapped some of Emperor Jingren’s acupoints, allowing him to move. The young emperor flexed his muscles.

In the wake of his abduction, Emperor Jingren glared furiously at the empress. After a while, he finally managed to say, “What a wonderful horse you are, to make it up the mountain so fast!”

Coming from him, this was already a very cutting remark to level against the empress.

But the empress didn’t care one bit. Smiling, he took a fur coat from a bundle and wrapped it around Emperor Jingren. He said, “If it pleases Your Majesty to ride, I will happily spend my life as a horse.”

Having gone from famine to feast in the past few days, Emperor Jingren picked out something suggestive in these words. His face flushed red with anger.

Before removing Emperor Jingren from the palace, the empress had requested permission to do so, but Emperor Jingren had refused to grant the request; even though he did want to go out to see the snow, he knew that an emperor could not be willful. He had great self-restraint.

But his self-restraint had received no return but the empress’s impertinence. He had actually bribed several people in order to abduct the emperor from the palace. Even Eunuch Lian had been smiling as he wished the two of them a good trip. And the person who had diagnosed him was Imperial Physician Chen. Hadn’t he been the empress’s enemy? Why was he now the empress’s accomplice? When he got back, he would…

“They all know I’m doing it for Your Majesty’s good,” the empress said, interrupting Emperor Jingren’s thoughts. “With this new year, Your Majesty is only twenty-three. You’re still a child.”

Emperor Jingren looked dubiously at the empress. “At thirteen or fourteen, one can marry and have children, become the backbone of a household. We are already three and twenty, married five years, and ruling the empire for five years. Anyone else would say a four- or five-year-old was a child. How can we be a child?”

The empress signed inwardly. Twenty-three was at best a recent college graduate; of course that made one still a child. But Emperor Jingren bore the weight of an entire country on his shoulders. It really made one ache for him.

“Naturally Your Majesty is a mighty ruler, capable not only of supporting an entire family but of bearing responsibility for all of Xia’s millions. But, Your Majesty, in front of me, I hope you will always be only a child,” the empress said tenderly. “I hope Your Majesty will get angry, be willful, make unreasonable demands. I hope Your Majesty can treat yourself a little better, that you can indulge yourself on occasion.”

The empress continued, “But Your Majesty never indulges. You are like a well-behaved child, desperate for the steaming hot bun in front of you, staring at it hungrily, but holding back and saying nothing to the adults, going home to nibble on cold bread. But I don’t want Your Majesty to repress yourself like this. Your Majesty can be a wise ruler, while I will fret on Your Majesty’s behalf and satisfy Your Majesty’s wishes.”

Taking Emperor Jingren’s hand as they stood at the summit, he turned him to face the capital and look down.

“Your Majesty, look! Here is your realm. Here is your imperial capital.”

From the high summit, the whole capital was visible at a glance, silvered by the snow. Everyone was keeping to their homes, away from the cold, making the city as still as a painting. A blanket of thick white snow covered the fields in the outskirts; when spring came and flowers bloomed, the snow would melt and soak into the earth, nourishing it, and this would be another year of plentiful harvests.

Gazing upon the silver-cloaked world, Emperor Jingren felt an immense surge of emotion. Now he felt that he was a mere speck of dust in this world, now he felt that this realm was so beautiful that anyone would willingly work till the last breath left his body for its sake.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” said the empress in his ear.

Though this was a wonderful feeling, so wonderful that Emperor Jingren had forgotten his anger at the empress’s impertinence, he thought that this conduct could not be encouraged, so he put on a deliberate show of indifference and said, “It’s all right.”

“A timely snow promises a rich harvest,” said the empress emotionally. “May this be another year of favorable weather and prosperity.”

“May it be so,” said Emperor Jingren. “But we must still make preparations in case of disaster. The Ministry of Public Works has a vice-minister skilled in the management of floods. When spring begins, we will send him to establish safety measures. The work to prevent flooding must be done before the rains come.”

This was where Emperor Jingren far exceeded other emperors. He didn’t wait until disaster struck to think about how to alleviate its effects. He would rather forestall than amend.

“Don’t think about those things here,” said the empress. “You think more than enough. At a time like this, you should only consider what is in front of you.”

What was in front of him? In front of him, he had the imperial capital at his feet, he had the empress at his side; these were everything to him.

“What is in front of me is good.” A faint, happy smile appeared on Emperor Jingren’s face. As reserved as he invariably was, even a smile like this was an expression of delight.

“Your subject wife will perform a sword dance for Your Majesty,” said the empress.

It was a long time since he had referred to himself as “your subject wife” when they were in private. This form of self-address gave Emperor Jingren an awkward feeling, but now it made him remember all the times he had watched empress perform sword and spear dances.

With the sword he was quick and graceful, with the spear he pierced the air, with the saber he dyed the battlefield with blood. Different weapons had their own different kinds of beauty, and all were hues of soul-shaking splendor; unlike the surface-level beauty of clothing and adornments, the empress’s beauty was full of majesty.

Why did this come to mind now? That early morning, when he had woken to find that the empress wasn’t next to him in bed, he had walked out to the training field and seen him, his hair flying, his every gesture easy and free.

Emperor Jingren had felt that moment in his heart.

First impressions between people are mostly determined by eyesight. It was then that the empress had appeared before his eyes and stolen into his heart. He had been baffled by his bearing, unable to resist satisfying his every wish, unwilling to give up the empress on any account.

No matter how many times he saw the empress train, it would never be enough.

As the snow fell, the empress in his black armor amid the pure white was a slash of color that rent heaven and earth, imprinting his figure on Emperor Jingren’s heart, so that it could never be forgotten.

Winter was cold, and the empress couldn’t stand to let Emperor Jingren stay outside too long. After a little while on the mountain, they went back down. Emperor Jingren’s feelings during the descent were very different from his feelings during the earlier forced ascent. He rested peacefully against the empress’s broad back, watching snowflakes fall from the sky, watching as the mountaintop was shrouded in white. He thought that there was no color more beautiful than this.

In this fine mood, Emperor Jingren didn’t punish the empress’s accomplices, Eunuch Lian and Imperial Physician Chen, when he returned to the palace, and he certainly didn’t blame the guards who had let them leave the palace. This made Eunuch Lian, who had been terrified lest he end up out of the game, even more certain that the empress was the only one who could succeed in the end. The empress had promised before that, once he had the reward money, he would share some with Eunuch Lian. Recalling this, Eunuch Lian thought that this was all worth it, no matter what.

The snow lasted a day and a night, and after that the weather remained good. On the fifteenth of the first month, the full moon was truly bright, dimming the stars. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The fifteenth was a day of great bustle. For the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth, curfew in the capital was lifted and a lantern market opened. Everyone went out in high spirits to enjoy themselves.

In the palace hung the lanterns sent by the officials, each one of them exquisite. The whole palace was lit up as bright as day.

Upon the opening of the lantern market, Emperor Jingren had ordered the Five City Wardens and the Imperial Guard to pay careful attention to anything that might cause a fire. It would be a terrible thing if a blaze occurred in the midst of such festivities. The holiday made it all the more important to take precautions.

Emperor Jingren and the empress left the palace again, but this time they weren’t sneaking out; Emperor Jingren was taking the empress out incognito.