Fake Daughter Is the Real Legend novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The Dowry
Ruyun looked at the old man in the gray robe for a long time.
The cart creaked on, and Shen's soldiers did not stop it.
"You may come to the Princess Court," she said. "If my grandmother allows it, and if you knock."
"Ruyun..."
"I do not live in your house, Father. I do not think I ever did."
He stood in the road with his arms at his sides until the dust of the cart closed around him.
Three weeks later the Qiao ancestral hall was full again.
The sun lay in long gold bars across the altar, and the same bowls stood on it, washed and empty.
The Grand Princess had walked in on her own feet with her cane.
She would let nobody carry her.
All the clan sat along the walls, and the elders sat on the dais.
The old Guard filled the back of the hall and spilled out the doors into the yard.
The Marquis, who was no longer a Marquis, sat in the last row with his hands in his lap.
Madam Fan was gone to the Temple of the Gray Moon.
She had left a gold pin on the altar, and nothing else.
The elder brother stood beside the Grand Princess's chair, white to the lips.
He had come to Ruyun the night before and knelt at her door until dawn.
She had let him in.
She had not said anything.
Maybe, someday, she would.
"Clan," said the Grand Princess, and the hall went quiet. "I am sixty-eight and I am going to be ninety. I will do this properly, so I only have to do it once."
A maid carried in a flat lacquered chest.
The Grand Princess opened it.
She took out three things and set them in a row on the altar.
"The deeds to the Silver Lake farms. The deeds to ten shops on the east market. And this."
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