Chương 22: Interlude: Wu Cailan

Wu Cailan scowls at the paper. It sits on the low table in front of her, pale and expensive and already ruined by the blot of ink near the top corner. Three other sheets lie crumpled behind her, each one worse than the last. One begins with Mother and Father, then stops. One says I am well and then has a line struck through it so hard the brush tore the fibres. The third is mostly apology, which made her angry enough to screw it into a ball before the ink dried properly.

Now her fingers are stained, the side of her hand is dark with smudges, and the room smells of lamp oil and bitter ink. Tang Mingxia would know how to write it. That makes Wu Cailan more annoyed, not less. Tang Mingxia would sit down, arrange the paper, and write something correct. She would know where to put the apology, where to put the explanation, and how to make it sound respectful without sounding like begging.

Liu Yinhua would probably know too, though she would make the words softer and more dangerous somehow, the way she does when she wants a person to stop looking too closely. Wu Cailan knows what she wants to say. That should be enough. It is not. She dips the brush again, then stops before the ink touches paper. Mother and Father, The words look wrong. Too formal.

Her mother's hands are rough from washing and winter work, and her father's nails are always dark from soil no matter how hard he scrubs before festival days. They do not belong at the top of a sheet this fine, in characters copied from Tang Mingxia's careful corrections. She knows she cannot send it yet, but it may take her the entire few months to put this into words. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Wu Cailan grits her teeth and keeps writing anyway. I have arrived safely at the Vermilion Glass Sect. That much is true. I am being fed. I have a roof. I have begun training. Also true. The brush hovers. I am sorry. Her hand tightens until the shaft creaks softly between her fingers. She is sorry. She is. That is the worst of it. She is sorry for the blankets, for the coins, for leaving before dawn with a pack too heavy and a letter she had not written because writing it would have made her stay.

She is sorry for her mother opening the chest and seeing the folded space where the winter blankets had been. She is sorry for her father's face when he realised what had been sold, and then what had been stolen, and then who had done both. She had told Liu Yinhua that her mother sold the blankets. That was true enough to pass in conversation and false enough to sit badly afterward. Her mother had sold them through her.

Wu Cailan had taken them to the trader in the next village because her mother could not be seen doing it, not with her father already watching every coin after the old cultivator left. The first sale had paid for dried food, paper charms, and two days on a cart road. It had not been enough. Nothing was ever enough. So Wu Cailan had taken a little more over months. A coin held back from eggs. Three from mending. A strip of copper from the winter grain money. Her father would have noticed eventually.

Her mother would have noticed sooner. Wu Cailan stares at the line until the ink begins to shine less wetly. She could not stay, and nobody will ever pry the words from her, body or mind or spirit. Lu Xin had shown her but a taste of the world around her, the mountain three mountains over, the taste of the salt in high peaks that floated in his domain and Wu Cailan had learned to crave it. She thinks she would have gone mad on the farm after that, tied to one square of tilled earth for all of her life. I am sorry.

She adds, for the blankets. That is not enough, so she adds, and for the money. I am sorry for being the worst daughter. She scratches through the lines so hard the brush splays and ink splatters up the wall. The paper is ruined. Wu Cailan sits back on her heels and breathes through her nose. In the next room, Tang Mingxia turns a page with a soft scrape. Liu Yinhua's door is closed.

The house is quiet in the way it gets after dinner, when everyone pretends to be doing their own work and not listening for everyone else's failures. She crumples the sheet and throws it behind her with the others. Then she takes another.