The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Eighteen
Four years later, on the morning she turned eighteen, Tang Shuyao stood in the ancestral hall with her hair loose down her back.
Her grandmother, seventy-four now and nearly deaf, held the comb.
Her father, home from the border for the first time in three years, held the bronze pin.
Zhengyu, twenty-three and broad as a gatepost, stood by the door and tried not to cry.
"Kneel," said grandmother.
Shuyao knelt before the tablets of her ancestors.
Her grandmother combed her hair three times, and gathered it, and twisted it up into a high braided knot.
Her father slid the pin through.
It was plain bronze, with a tiger's head.
"A woman grown," he said gruffly. "Gods help the empire."
"Gods help the man who tries to marry her," said Zhengyu, and her grandmother hit him with the comb.
The guests waited in the hall beyond.
Shuyao rose and went out to them in a dark green robe with a gray sash, and the room went quiet.
She was five feet and seven inches now.
She had an archer's shoulders and a soldier's walk, and not one person present would have called her pretty.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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