The Vow That Followed Me
They say if no man ever dares approach a girl, it's because in a past life she was the beloved of an emperor — one who vowed to execute anyone who came near her. YN laughs it off as a meme. She has a simpler explanation: she's guarded, she's thirty-three, and after the betrayal six years ago she keeps the door locked from the inside.
On the night she and her chosen family are meant to see an &TEAM concert, YN drowns trying to save a kitten from a Taipei canal — and surfaces, gasping, in an ornamental lake in an imperial garden that belongs to no century she's ever lived in. She is Lady [Kaede] now, a Hin — the lowest of the formal consorts — daughter of middling nobility, and by every rule of the court she should already be dead. Instead she is protected. She is never made to labour, never punished, never touched. The higher consorts loathe her for it. The lesser ones envy her. And no one will say the reason.
The reason is the Emperor. He is gentle with her when he should not be, and he knows things about her he has no way of knowing. Slowly YN pieces it together: the legend was not a legend. He loved a woman once and lost her, and swore a terrible vow over her memory, and YN is wearing that woman's face across the gulf of a lifetime. The love story she's fallen into was written before she was born — and she has to decide whether she can be loved as herself, and not as the ghost she resembles.
But grief this old has enemies, and a jealousy old enough to have drowned her once is not finished. As the court closes in, the water comes for YN a second time — and with it, a choice about which life she's meant to keep.
At thirty-three, YN has made peace with the wall around her heart. Six years single, an ocean from home, she has her work in Taipei, her two