章 75: I'm Stuck With Her
It was almost dinner time. Prince Qui decided to not go around too far and went to the infirmary.
He had received reports about all of their recovering men and it was about time that he paid them a visit. To the eyes of the other, the state of the people inside could be something depressing.
Men's legs or arms suspended in the air, red splotches against the stark white of the bandages that were wrapped in various parts of their bodies. Most were asleep, some were staring into space. While others were unable to move, there were the ones who are well enough to be able to roam the place, arms on slings or their limbs casted.
Prince Qui consulted with almost everybody before he reached the end of the hall. The door was slightly ajar and he knocked twice on it.
Doctor Jinghua raised her head from her work and offered a nod to the prince. "May I help you, Your Highness?"
Prince Qui's eyes roamed the place, nothing changed from his last visit.
"Anything that I can patch up for you?"
Prince Qui shook his head. "Nothing of the sort. I think I just want to see a friendly face."
Jinghua smiled at that. "And this is the first place that you thought of?"
"Well, you're my friend."
"Of course," Jinghua said. "How's the wife?"
Prince Qui rolled his eyes. "She's very… lively."
Truth be told, Jinghua didn't like that they were talking about the princess. But she could not help it. The words just flew out of her mouth. Now she was slightly regretting it. "Marriage troubles already?"
"Our marriage IS trouble." Prince Qui sighed. "Now I have to find a way to end it."
Jinghua's ears pricked upwards. "What?!"
"I asked the Emperor if he would divorce us. He said no." Prince Qui touched his chin. "It's not like I can kill her." Then he repeated the phrase. "It's not like I can kill her," meaning differently.
"What?"
"I can't kill her because she's our most prized possession AND I can't kill her because I don't think that I can do it."
Jinghua looked at the orange-y sun through her window. "Now we're talking about morals?"
Prince Qui ran a frustrated hand through his hair. "You're right. What's another woman on my 'kill' list?"
Jinghua was alarmed. "I didn't mean it that way."
"I think you meant it that way, Jinghua," said the prince, pulling a cart in front of him. Various medical tools were on top of it, perfectly arranged. He took a scalpel. "It's fine. You don't have to take it back."
After a stretch of silence. Jinghua decided to change the topic. "What about the princess? What are you thinking about?"
He shook his head. "I have no idea what I'm going to do with her. Besides, it's not really going to matter when I'm out of those walls. It would be like she wouldn't exist at all. But for now, I'm stuck with her."
**
Shortly after his talk with the doctor, the dinner bells rang and he got back to the palace. There he found his wife waiting for him behind the closed doors.
"You're early," he commented.
"I don't think I am. It seems like you're taking your sweet time walking."
Prince Qui stood next to her and signalled the guards to open the door. "I was busy thinking. As you would be."
"And why is that?"
"The emperor declined the divorce."
Before Tianshi Xue could react, the doors opened and the words died on her lips.
====
Tianshi Xue barely ate anything over dinner. It was like ever since the invasion happened, all the bad things came to her. She was like a magnet for it.
She had a bad evening. Howin tried to give her some lunch earlier but her mind had been preoccupied with all the things that she had read earlier that day that she could not stomach anything.
Now at dinner she was mostly pushing food all over her plate while indistinct conversation about the state entered from one ear and exited on the other.
"Princess Yingyue," said the emperor and she lifted her head from her plate, shocked. "Are you that upset because I cancelled this afternoon's party?"
Party?
Oh right, they were still on the week-long celebration of her marriage to the prince. She bowed her head. "Apologies, Your Imperial Majesty. I didn't think that I looked that disappointed. I merely don't have an appetite for this evening."
"To cheer your spirits, let's start tomorrow's party early. Two hours before midday."
I want to sleep, said the voice inside her head but her lips smiled. "Thank you so much for your kindness, Your Imperial Majesty. I'll be sure to enjoy tomorrow's festivities."
Then the emperor resumed to ignoring her.
Oh heavens, her mind sighed.
The last thing that she wanted to do was celebrate her un-divorce-able marriage.
—
Tianshi Xue didn't want to make a scene in the palace halls so she waited until they were inside the comforts of the bedroom that she finally talked to Prince Qui.
"What do you mean he's not agreeing?!" she put her hands on her waist in fists.
"He said no," said Prince Qui and walked past her to their closet.
Tianshi Xue quickly followed on his heels. "You have to do something!" she said as the prince opened one of the closets. "We can't stay married!"
"I know," he said. "Don't worry, something will come up that the emperor will be forced to divorce us. When that time comes, he will be left no choice but to say yes."
"I don't want to wait."
She saw that the prince's lips quirked upwards in a smirk. "What's so funny?"
"Nothing at all," he said and started pulling the bottons of his uniform. "It's just that you'd really make a poor soldier. You won't even make a good leader. You let your emotions get the rise out of you."
She crossed her arms over her chest. Okay, she took those words as a personal attack. What did he mean that she would make a poor leader? She had million followers on social media. People looked up to her! "So I just have to sit and watch and stay married to you?"
Prince Qui shrugged off his uniform and pulled the shirt off his head and Tianshi Xue ripped her eyes away from the ripped muscles on his back. A small part of her mind imagined running her hands over his smooth skin. Or even at his long hair. She ignored it and was disgusted with herself.
Prince Qui said, "One of the things that they teach you in warfare is to wait. Wait for a weakness because no fortress or army could keep a hundred percent indestructibility all the time."
"I don't know about warfare."
Prince Qui turned to her, shirtless. "Well, I heard that you like reading books. Haven't you encountered anything that has soldiers and war in it? There are about thousands of books about it."
The princess might've known something about it. But Tianshi Xue was an actress. She was not a fan of books. What she read were thick binders of scripts. And on TV, no one was a fan of war so no one produced anything about it. "That's it then? We're going to wait?"
Prince Qui closed his closet and walked towards the bathroom. "So much impatience," he grinned then disappeared behind the door.
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