Chương 2: Lìchūn: Novice 2

By the time they return from the storehouse, the light outside has thinned to the colour of old rice paper, and the air is beginning to take on the crisp edge of early evening. The journey itself had been blessedly brief. The storehouse sat only two lanes down and one terrace lower, a long, plain building with wide doors and a steward at the front table whose expression suggested he had already answered the same question too many times.

They had presented their tokens, received a sack of rice, a bundle of greens, a little salt, a stoppered jar of oil, and three hard little cakes of dried bean paste that Wu Cailan had examined with open suspicion. Tang Mingxia had asked two careful questions about allowance periods and collection times; Wu Cailan had asked whether anyone had checked whether the greens were half-rotten before handing them out; and the steward had looked at them both with equal dislike.

Now the three of them stand in the small kitchen area of their residence with the provisions arranged on the counter between them. The rice is well kept, the greens are a little bruised at the stems, and the oil smells faintly of sesame when Wu Cailan pulls the stopper out and sniffs it.

"Sesame oil," Wu Cailan says, setting it down. Tang Mingxia looks at the little clay jar thoughtfully.

"We should decide how much to use. If the allowance is meant to last three days, then wasting it tonight would be unwise."

"I wasn't going to drink it."

"No," Tang Mingxia says after a moment.

"I only meant that we should be careful." Wu Cailan shrugs and reaches for the rice.

"Careful is fine." She loosens the tie on her sleeve and folds it back before taking the narrow clay pot from the shelf. It is clean, though there is a faint old-water smell clinging to it, and she rinses it twice from the jar before adding rice. Her hands move more easily now that there is something ordinary to do. Tang Mingxia watches for a few moments before stepping closer.

"What should I do?" The question is stiff, but not unkind. Liu Yinhua glances at her, then at the greens still bound together on the counter.

"Those should be washed," she says.

"The ends may need trimming." Tang Mingxia's eyes lower to the bundle with the grave attention of someone being handed a formal document.

"With the small knife?" she asks. Wu Cailan looks up from crouching by the hearth. Her mouth opens, then closes. Whatever she had been about to say, she appears to think better of it.

"Yes," Liu Yinhua says.

"Only the bruised parts." Tang Mingxia nods once and takes the knife, and it is strange to watch her frown over the greens. The girl's fingers are very neat, and the jade hairpin at the back of her head has not slipped once, even after the walk to the storehouse. She cuts too slowly at first, then too much, and Liu Yinhua has to stop herself from correcting her immediately.

Wu Cailan, for her part, has coaxed the hearth alight with a twist of kindling and what looks like a little scrap of oiled cloth from her own bag. She is rough about it, but competent. The flame catches low and steady, and the light turns the underside of her jaw copper.

"There," Wu Cailan says, sitting back on her heels.

"Fire." Liu Yinhua does not let her hands shake. It was only fire. A small household flame in a sect kitchen, obediently contained beneath a clay stove. Nothing like the rush that had torn through silk hangings and painted screens. Nothing like the heat that had leapt too quickly for anyone to understand. Nothing like the sound of people shouting her name, or perhaps not her name at all. It had been hard to tell with the smoke and the coughing. The pot settles onto the hearth with a soft scrape.

On the walk back from the storehouse, she had seen the looks again, just a few sidelong glances. The quick measuring glance at her face, then her robe, then her lack of ornament and then a faint curl of a mouth when someone decided she was no one of significance. The sect is not the Tower, she reminds herself. It does not smell of face powder, incense, spilt wine, hair oil, or the bitter medicine used when a girl could not afford to be ill.

It smells of wood smoke, raw greens, and mountain air seeping through the badly fitted paper door. The sect is not the Tower. Tang Mingxia sets down the knife. Her trimmed pile of greens is small enough that Wu Cailan stares at it for a moment.

"You cut half of it away," Wu Cailan says. Tang Mingxia's shoulders rise, then settle.

"You may do the next bundle, then."

"All right." That answer seems to wrong-foot her. Tang Mingxia blinks once, then pushes the remaining greens across without another word. Liu Yinhua bends her head over the pot so neither of them can see her amusement. The rice will take time, and her bag is still sitting untouched beside the sleeping mat in the little room. Tomorrow, there will be lessons, rules, instructors, names to remember, faces to measure, and Liu Yinhua doesn't want to spend time organising her room or her thoughts after it.

Liu Yinhua leaves the porridge to thicken under Wu Cailan's occasional stirring and Tang Mingxia's overly careful supervision, excusing herself with a polite murmur about putting her things in order. Neither girl stops her. Wu Cailan only grunts, eyes on the pot, and Tang Mingxia nods politely. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Her room is not far enough away for privacy in any true sense.

The door is thin, the walls thinner than she would like, and the sounds of the kitchen come through easily: the dull shift of the clay pot, Tang Mingxia asking whether the greens should be added yet, Wu Cailan telling her not unless she wants them boiled into pond weed. It is ordinary enough to be strange. Liu Yinhua lowers herself beside her travel bag and unties the cord. There is not much inside.

The sect had not taken her things, though she suspects that had less to do with kindness than with the fact that none of them had looked important enough to confiscate. A few folded inner robes. A comb. A narrow packet of hair oil wrapped in cloth. Two pairs of stockings. A little sewing kit. Beneath those, wrapped carefully in old silk, is the mirror. The bronze is cool when she finally lifts it free. It is not large, and it is not particularly fine by the standards of the Moon-Viewing Tower.

Mama Xue would have dismissed it as sentimental clutter if she had known Liu Yinhua kept it. The handle is plain, the back chased with a worn pattern of cranes and cloud-vines nearly rubbed smooth by years of handling. Around the rim, where the metal has darkened with age, her thumb finds the same shallow nick it always has. Her mother's mirror. There are very few things in Liu Yinhua's life that have ever belonged to her without question, and even this had come to her through dead hands and other people's stories.

Her mother had used it. Her mother had carried it. Her mother had looked into it and seen a face Liu Yinhua had no memory of, except in fragments given by women who had always softened themselves when speaking of the dead. A beautiful woman, they had said, but unlucky. A woman in her profession being with child was not a boon for business. None of them had ever said it, but Liu Yinhua could read well enough between the lines to sense bitterness. She knows it is her fault.

Liu Yinhua has grown older than some of those memories now, and still she does not know whether any of them were true as she turns the mirror in her hands, tracing the rim with one fingertip. By rights, it should have been lost, and she could say that about quite a few things now. Suzhou should still be close enough to reach by turning her head, but the distance sits in her body like an illness. She had not truly understood it while Tang Mingxia spoke of roads, li, and mountain passes. Weeks, the girl had said.

Weeks by mortal caravan, less by sect beast or flying carriage. The man who came for her had not explained any of that. He had arrived at the holding cell after dawn, when the smoke had thinned enough that sunlight could enter through the high barred window in a grey, dirty slant. Liu Yinhua remembers the sound of keys first, then the silence of the guard who opened the door, and then the cultivator standing beyond him in robes the colour of banked coals with a red glass token hanging at his waist.

He had looked at her once, but not with any motivation that Liu Yinhua could discern. There was nothing in his gaze that reminded her of the men who visited the Moon-Viewing Tower. Not even a trace of how Mama Xue had looked when Liu Yinhua was brought back through the smoke and shouting, her expression no longer lovely at all. The cultivator's gaze had been brief and cold and measuring, examining her the way a physician might look at a fever, or a swordsmith at flawed metal.

"Liu Yinhua," he had said, and she had been on her feet before the door had even fully opened. There had been questions, perhaps, though she remembers them poorly. Her age. Her name. Whether she could stand. Whether the pain in her chest worsened when she breathed. None of the questions were deliberately cruel, but neither was kindness immediate in them When she asked where she was being taken, he had said, "The Vermilion Glass Sect."

When she asked whether she would be returned, he had looked at her for a moment longer.

"No." It should have comforted her more than it did, but outside the holding cell, Suzhou had been furious with the morning. Men shouted in the street, someone else cursing officials, cultivators, Heaven, and every girl in the Moon-Viewing Tower in the same breath. The air still smelled of wet ash and burned lacquer. It clung to Liu Yinhua's hair, her skin, the borrowed outer robe thrown over her shoulders, and beneath it all was the sour stink of fear. She had not seen Mama Xue again.

The carriage waiting beyond the courtyard had not been a carriage in any ordinary sense. Its lacquered body was narrow and dark, with red glass set into the corners and a pair of slit windows screened from within. There had been no horse or ox or even a driver, only the cultivator stepping in after her and settling opposite with a stillness that made speech feel foolish and added a weight to the air that made it hard to breathe.

Then the world had lurched, and Liu Yinhua had bitten the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood. Suzhou had fallen away through the window in fragments: roof tiles, smoke, river light, the blackened edge of a district she could not bear to look at directly. Then the road. Then fields. Then a blur of green and brown and silver so swift that her eyes watered when she tried to follow it.

The sky seemed too large outside the slit window, and the ground moved faster than any horse she had ever watched from behind the Tower's screens. Villages appeared and were gone before she could understand them. Hills rose, folded, vanished, and rivers evaporated away into night and day. Now, in the little sect room, Liu Yinhua sets the mirror on the narrow shelf beside the comb and the hair oil, but she lifts it again before she can stop herself.

Her reflection is dim in the old bronze, but she can see herself well enough. She is the same as she was the day before, which seems so terrible a thing after all that has transpired. Pale skin and all the beauty Liu Yinhua has been desired for all her life, dark hair still smelling faintly of smoke, no matter how much she had tried to comb it clean and green eyes made stranger by the warped metal. She looks composed, which feels almost indecent after the shape of the day.

A girl should look changed after her world ends, but Liu Yinhua only looks tired. From the kitchen, Wu Cailan says something too low to make out, and Tang Mingxia answers in a tone that suggests she is trying very hard to be patient. The porridge will be ready soon, and Liu Yinhua should return before they decide to return to bickering. Still, she stays a moment longer, her thumb resting against a nick in the mirror's rim. Her mother had left her this, and the gift of her own reflection in the mirror.

Perhaps those things were more burden than inheritance, but they were hers in a way the Tower had never been hers, in a way Suzhou had never been hers, in a way even this room is not yet hers. Liu Yinhua breathes in. The air is cold, clean, threaded with rice steam and wood smoke as she lowers the mirror carefully back onto the shelf, smoothing the old silk beneath it so the bronze does not scrape against the wood. Then she wipes her eyes before any tears can form properly, rises, and returns to the kitchen.