Alexiel is beautiful this life -- she is always beautiful to Nanatsusaya, more than beautiful, glorious; but not always in ways humans can accept. The lives when men think she's ugly and yet cannot help but adore her tend to be short, not that the lives when she's beautiful to them are always longer. This life she's the third daughter of an ambitious merchant with vast white poppy fields near the outskirts of Shanghai. She marries up, the second son of an aristocrat; her beauty and the weight of the gold in her father's coffers are enough to overcome her bloodlines and the rumors that she, like many of her family, depends upon her father's wares. Her husband adores her and loathes her; cannot stop touching her, and always leaves bruises when they fuck. He thinks it's the opium that has stolen her heart away, that makes her suffer her own pleasure with dream-distant eyes and a down-turned mouth. So did her other lovers: her eldest sister's husband; a patched-robe scholar whose ambitions were as great as her father's but whose purse was not so full; a handsome servant boy who might have been her father's illegitimate son. Nanatsusaya knows better: she has seen this life after life, half-waking Alexiel, dreaming unknowing of Rosiel, longing unknowing for rebellion, war, and blood. Nanatsusaya clings jealously to her mistress and hates them all, husband and lovers. This life she's a servant who's been with Third Daughter since they both could walk: the merchant first wife called her Cherry Blossom, which was an unkindness, after the pink birthmark blotching her face. Even without Nanatsusaya's presence, Cherry Blossom would have hated Alexiel for her beauty, and loved her for her indifferent, unjudging gaze. Third Daughter sees no difference between Cherry Blossom's face and anyone else's: none of them are the face she wants to see. Quiet rainy days they sit in Third Daughter's chamber, and Cherry Blossom tamps down the powder in the pipe, holds it over the spirit lamp when her mistress's hands tremble. Third Daughter dozes after she smokes, eyes half-lidded and mouth half-open and cheeks flushed: this was how all her lovers fell to her, fell upon her, and once Cherry Blossom fell, too. She closed a rough and work-roughened hand around the curve of Third Daughter's breast: Third Daughter's heart beat quick as a bird beneath her silken skin, and her head fell back against Cherry Blossom's shoulder, an unexpected weight. She did not protest; she never did. A terrible tenderness seized Cherry Blossom's heart, terrible like the hosts of God, and she settled her mistress against her and took away her trespassing hand and satisfied herself with combing through Third Daughter's long silken hair. Each stroke freed a breath of sweet perfume. She'd dreamed of this, Cherry Blossom, long aeons before she ever had human hands: dreamed of drowning in Alexiel's long dark hair. The moments when she could pretend the looseness of Third Daughter's weight against her knees was trust and not poppy's lying sleep, it was sweet as any of those dreams still. Third Daughter dies of childbed fever six days after giving birth to a stillborn son. In another two months, she would have been sixteen. Nanatsusaya does not weep for her. As Alexiel's deaths go, it was not a bad one.