Chapter 2

My head snapped up toward my mother.

"Mother, this isn't my fault."

I clutched at the hem of her skirt in a panic.

Even my father was staring at her in surprise.

"Alma is your own flesh and blood. And you can still bear to do this?"

"You joke, husband. Your children are all my children, and I have always treated them the same."

She pulled the hem free of my fingers and met my eyes without a shred of feeling.

"If you want to blame someone, blame yourself for not watching Alma properly."

I looked helplessly to my sister, then to my father.

But my father only nodded, satisfied.

"Anya, you truly are a virtuous wife. I did not choose wrongly."

My sister looked away from me. Her tears had dried up too.

My mother ordered them to drag me off to the family shrine.

"Your sister has already admitted her fault, and you still won't own yours. Go kneel through the night and come to your senses."

My maid Peaches hurried to hold me up and steady me toward the shrine.

The slightest movement sent a tearing pain across my back. I could barely stand, leaning my whole weight against her.

With barely a thread of breath left, I whispered against her ear:

"Go find him. Have him come save me."

Peaches did not let a single strange look cross her face. She only gave the faintest nod.

Once again I knelt in the shrine.

The pain stabbed up through my knees, wave after wave.

From the shrine doors came a small sound, almost too faint to catch.

I did not turn. I kept my back straight.

The matron my mother had sent found no fault to report and slipped away.

But still I did not dare relax.

If the matron caught me slacking, kneeling improperly, and carried word to my mother, a beating with the rod would surely follow.

Cold sweat soaked through my clothes, dried half over in my own body's heat, then soaked through again, over and over.

My vision blurred.

Memories of my childhood came back to me.

I had known good days too, once.

Back then my real father was still alive, and my mother did not treat me the way she does now.

He used to carry me on his shoulders and call me the pearl of his hand, while my mother sat nearby at her embroidery, watching us with a gentle look.

Later my father died.

My grandfather wanted my mother to remarry, to become the second wife of the noble house.

The truth was that my mother's standing fell short of a house like theirs, all the more so as a widow.

But the lord thought a woman of exactly her position suited him. Easy to control. He already had a trueborn son and daughter and had no need of other children.

And so, under the watching eyes of the whole imperial capital hungry for a show, my mother married the lord.

I was forced to change my name.

After she married the lord, my mother changed.

Everyone watched her every move, the lord included. They were terrified she would grind down her stepchildren.

The lord's first wife had been dead three years. He was buried in official business and neglected their discipline, and my little brother and sister had grown up crooked.

As the second wife, there was nothing my mother could do that was right.

Discipline them strictly, teach the brother and sister how to conduct themselves, and the old dowager who doted on her grandchildren would summon my mother to a scolding: a stepmother was a stepmother after all, grinding down the first wife's children before the woman was even cold in the ground. Let them run wild instead, and everyone said my mother was praising the stepchildren to ruin, clearing the road for her own child.

She thought on it a long time, and at last she hit upon a way to make a brutal example of one to cow the rest.

She couldn't punish someone else's children. But surely she could punish her own.

So when the sister and brother did wrong, I took the punishment, and they watched.

That way they understood exactly where they had gone wrong, and no real harm ever came to them.

It worked beautifully. The brother and sister began to heed my mother, and the old dowager and the lord alike praised her, satisfied, as a virtuous wife.

And the wounds on my body never healed for a single day.

"Mother, look! I told you she was never honest!"

The shrine doors were kicked open, and Peaches was thrown inside.