Chapter 12: The Slowest Fall

 

Shen Qingwu was certainly not insane.

Back in Tokyo, the invitations descended on her like weather. Banquets from her employer. An invitation from a certain prince consort. An invitation from a certain prime minister. The Shen family's servants came again and again and again, wearing different faces but carrying the same message. Everyone in the capital was curious about this General Zhenxi who had appeared from nowhere, and everyone wanted a closer look.

Shen Qingwu ignored all of them.

Bo Rong had told her before she left: she represented the Yizhou army, and her purpose in coming to Tokyo was simply to explain the war situation clearly. Nothing else mattered. But then she watched Yang Su — who had accompanied her — get swept up immediately into a current of banquets and gatherings, perpetually busy, perpetually attending, and Shen Qingwu reconsidered Bo Rong's advice.

Perhaps he had been tactful. Perhaps what he had actually meant was not that she didn't need to socialize — only that she didn't need to. Perhaps, knowing her as he did, he had simply accepted that she was not quite right in the head about certain things, and had adjusted his expectations accordingly.

In any case, Shen Qingwu did not return to the Shen family home. She stayed instead with her soldiers at the official post station the court had arranged — clean, temporary, belonging to no one. They came and went like travelers, which was what they were.

With nowhere she was willing to go and nothing she was willing to do, her thoughts drifted, as they kept doing these days, to Zhang Xingjian.

What was he to her now? She turned the question over and found no clean answer. He was the man she had stabbed. He was the man she had sworn never to speak to again — a vow she had kept with the rigid fidelity of someone who needed it to mean something. He was the moon that all of Tokyo worshipped and a person she had once, in a different life, called by a different name.

She did not know what he was to her now. She only knew that not knowing was making the restlessness worse.

---

She slipped away from everyone — the guards, the servants, the whole apparatus of watching eyes — and found herself, without having entirely decided to go there, standing among the old trees of the Zhang family compound.

She touched the jade pendant under her clothing. Cool against her fingers. She had touched it so many times in the years at the border that it had become a reflex — a way to find stillness when her thoughts ran too fast. Bo Rong had given it to her. Bo Rong had said it would help her calm down.

Hidden in the branches, she touched it again now, and turned her question over slowly.

What was the so-called moon, really?

She had constructed a logic for herself: if she could prove that Zhang Xingjian was utterly ordinary — mediocre, insubstantial, not worth the weight she had given him — then she could finally clear the gloom from her chest. She could set down what she was still, inexplicably, carrying. Bo Rong kept telling her she needed to learn to let go. This was letting go, in its way. The systematic dismantling of a myth.

She was still turning this over when the window below her creaked open.

The master of the Zhang residence had woken up.

---

Shen Qingwu waited motionlessly among the branches, listening. No sounds of activity. After a moment she shifted carefully and looked down.

She stopped.

Zhang Xingjian was leaning against the open window in a loosely draped cloak, his black hair only half-tied, the rest of it falling over his shoulders in the unhurried way of someone who had not yet decided whether to be awake. In one hand he held a book. In the other hand — she looked twice to confirm this — he held a cheap flatbread. The kind sold at any street stall for coins. Crumbs were falling onto the open pages of the book. He did not appear to notice.

He read for a while. Then his eyelashes drooped — long and slow, like something swinging to a stop — and he yawned. The book stayed open. His chin found his hand. His eyes closed.

He was napping.

Shen Qingwu looked at him with an expression of profound disdain and tried to sit up straighter. The movement was slightly too sharp. A bird, startled from its roost nearby, burst upward from the branch in a flurry of wings and banked down directly toward the open window below.

She had no time to correct the situation. The bird dove straight for the flatbread, its beak catching a sliver — and catching Zhang Xingjian's finger along with it. He startled, opened his eyes, and tilted his head back, his gaze drifting upward with the glassy, unfocused quality of someone newly woken.

Shen Qingwu flattened herself against the tree trunk.

Below, she heard his voice — easy and unhurried, with the particular warmth of someone who does not hold grudges against birds: "You want some? I'll give you everything. But..."

A maid's voice cut in from inside the room: "Third Master, Second Madam said there are no sweets today. If you feed the bird, you won't have breakfast."

Shen Qingwu absorbed this from her hiding place. Sweet cakes. He kept sweet cakes for a bird. She filed this away under strange hobbies without further comment.

"What else is there?" Zhang Xingjian asked.

The maid hesitated. "Only spicy soup is left. But my lord can't eat spicy food."

"I'm fine with anything," he said.

Shen Qingwu frowned at this, very slightly. She had heard the hesitation in the maid's voice — not the hesitation of someone delivering neutral information, but the specific kind that expected resistance and received none. Yet his reply had carried no discomfort, no reluctance, nothing. Either the information about spicy food was false, or he had made his peace with the constraint so completely that the making of peace was no longer audible.

She shifted position to see better. Through the sparse light and the leaves she caught him in pieces — a white robe, a wrist emerging briefly from a sleeve, the easy unguarded quality of a person who believed himself entirely alone. The morning light was thin and clean. He sat as though the world outside his window had nothing to do with him, and the effect was — she registered this without wanting to — something like clean snow. Something that did not try to be anything and was therefore, without trying, more than it intended.

She was staring. She made herself stop.

A maid coughed from inside. "Third Master, Second Madam told you not to look so... leisurely."

Zhang Xingjian's posture shifted. The easy slope of his shoulders organized itself into something more composed, more appropriate, more like the version of him the court saw. He performed this transition with the smoothness of someone who had done it so many times it no longer required thought. He understood the price of what he had, clearly and for a long time, and the payment no longer felt like loss.

The maid finished her tasks and left. In the silence that followed, Zhang Xingjian let out a quiet sigh, propped his forehead on his hand, and said to the empty room: "Finally gone."

Shen Qingwu, up in the tree, pressed her lips together.

She leaned down despite herself — and sure enough, the moment the maid had cleared the threshold, he had drifted back to the window, chin in hand, gazing out at the courtyard with the unfocused attention of someone looking at nothing and thinking about something, or perhaps looking at something and thinking about nothing. It was genuinely difficult to determine which.

The courtyard was, admittedly, beautiful. But was he going to pass the entire morning like this?

Apparently not. After a time he moved to the desk by the window and began to paint.

Shen Qingwu felt a small, reluctant flicker of interest. She had heard that accomplished young men from prominent families were cultivated in the full range of arts. She had never observed the actuality of it from close range. She was curious, in spite of herself, what his work looked like.

She watched him paint for a while. Then he drifted away from the painting. Then he ate something. Then he appeared to resume his conversation with the returned bird, which had come back to the windowsill with the confidence of an animal that had been fed here before. Then he looked vaguely at the painting again without touching it.

Shen Qingwu's patience was genuinely formidable — years of border service had refined it into something close to a weapon. And yet Zhang Xingjian's particular variety of purposeless wandering managed, within the space of a single morning, to bore it into submission. She fell asleep in the tree for half an hour.

She woke to noise. Changlin — Zhang Xingjian's formidable bodyguard — had returned, and she pressed herself back into concealment.

Changlin reported several matters. Zhang Xingjian received each one with a vague sound of acknowledgment that communicated approximately nothing.

Changlin was preparing to leave when Zhang Xingjian stopped him: "Today is a day off. I have nothing to do. Why don't you play chess with me for a while?"

Changlin said, without shifting expression: "My lord, no. There are rumors circulating in court, and that General Zhenxi has returned. You need to deal with this. Even if she is not of use to us, we cannot let her be drawn away by Prime Minister Kong." A pause, and then directly: "Third Prince, you should meet with Shen Qingwu."

Shen Qingwu, balanced in the branches above, felt a specific satisfaction move through her like warmth. He needed her. That was leverage. That was a door she could open or close entirely as she chose.

Zhang Xingjian said: "I have a headache. Don't mention Shen Qingwu. Play chess with me."

The satisfaction evaporated completely.

Shen Qingwu came down from the Zhang family compound in a state of profound indignation and walked back to the post station with the brisk efficiency of someone who has been personally insulted by a man who doesn't know she exists.

She catalogued his offenses on the way.

Half a morning given over to entertaining a bird with sweet cakes. A painting left unfinished for reasons that had nothing to do with difficulty and everything to do with distraction. Chess played so carelessly that he lost repeatedly and seemed genuinely unbothered by this. Seventeen or eighteen separate instances of losing his attention mid-game, by her rough count.

The Zhang Xingjian who lived outside the court — unobserved, unperforming, with no one to impress — was, it turned out, simply a person. An ordinary, somewhat idle, oddly charming person who fed birds from his window and napped against the sill in morning light and could not be made to care about a chess game he was losing.

She would not be resentful of someone like that. Resentment required a worthy object. He was not worthy.

She told herself this with complete conviction the entire way back to her rooms.

The next morning, she returned to his tree.

She would not admit, even to herself, what this meant. Perhaps she was bored. Perhaps she simply needed to see him fully and completely — every unguarded angle, every unperformed moment — until the accumulated image became ordinary enough to put down. In this world, Zhang Xingjian must be unremarkable at his core. She was certain of this. She would find someone better. It was only a matter of time and sufficient observation.

What Shen Qingwu did not know was that the Zhang family courtyard had its own arrangement — its own specific order — that she had not yet learned to read.

She had been there quietly for only two days when Zhang Xingjian noticed the signs: fallen leaves disturbed in a pattern that didn't match the wind, roof weeds bent and recovered too evenly.

He said nothing.

He thought: whoever it was would pay for this. And then they would never come back.

He waited.

---

Five days later, at a banquet hosted by Princess Andechang, Shen Qingwu saw Zhang Xingjian again.

Princess Andechang — the young emperor's elder sister, thirty-nine years old, still unmarried, attended by rumors that she kept several male concubines, the truth of which was impossible for outsiders to determine — was not a woman whose invitations could be declined. With the emperor too young to govern, most real affairs ran through the Princess and those around her. Yang Su had confirmed quietly before they arrived that Shen Qingwu's appointment as a female general had also required the Princess's agreement.

That agreement might have meant nothing to the woman herself — a minor administrative detail among a hundred more pressing ones. But it had mattered. Shen Qingwu was not accustomed to needing things from people, which also meant she was not accustomed to forgetting when she received them.

The banquet drew most of the nobles of Tokyo. Shen Qingwu and Yang Su moved out from the circle of military officers and made their way along the pavilions toward the lake and the more crowded ground beyond. Yang Su was talking — reminiscing about the wealth of the capital with the particular warmth of someone raised without it — and he talked for some time before he noticed he had received no response.

He looked over.

Shen Qingwu had stopped walking.

Coming from the other side of the lakeside pavilion were two people. The man moved with the unhurried ease of someone entirely at home in his own appearance — refined, extraordinary, the kind of handsomeness that required no effort and therefore announced itself all the more clearly. The woman beside him was graceful and small, moving with an elegant delicacy that made her seem like something that ought to be handled carefully.

Together they were a beautiful pair. The kind strangers instinctively compose stories about.

They sensed something, looked up, and found Shen Qingwu.

She stood on the stone embankment with her face perfectly still, the cold winter wind working through her hair and pressing loose strands against her lips. Around her the crowd had not stopped talking:

"Third son of the Zhang family and fifth daughter of the Shen family — truly a perfect match. A golden couple."

"But why haven't they married yet? The Shen girl is getting on in years. Is the Zhang family unwilling?"

"The one opposite them — is that General Zhenxi?"

"I heard she once took a liking to Zhang Yuelu at a banquet. He said afterward he was drunk and talking nonsense. Must have been awkward."

The voices carried the bright anticipatory energy of people who hope something interesting will happen and intend to watch it happen.

Shen Qingwu looked at the two of them. Her gaze found Shen Qingye and stayed there.

She lowered her eyes. Something surged through her — sharp and sudden and hot — and she pressed it down before it could reach her face.

Zhang Xingjian remained as composed as still water, his expression the pleasant calibrated mask he wore in all public spaces. But Shen Qingye's eyes had gone bright and unsteady, shimmering with something too complicated to name, and before she could stop herself she had taken two eager steps forward, her voice dropping to barely a breath:

"Sister..."

---

Through the pavilion curtains and across the surface of the pond, another pair of eyes watched the scene on the lakeside path.

The young Emperor Li Mingshu was seventeen years old. Beside him sat his elder sister, Princess Andechang Li Lingge — ten years older, the woman who had raised him with her own hands, the true engine of everything that nominally ran in his name. Both of them, at the same moment, watching the small tableau unfolding by the water, felt something sharpen in their expressions.

Their eyes had both gone, very slightly, brighter than before.