The two matrons exhaled when they saw the girl's eyes flutter open. They hadn't even noticed they were sweating until the cool air hit their damp foreheads.
No one expected what came next.
You Fangyin's gaze sharpened the moment she woke. Something hard and deliberate moved behind her eyes. She wrenched herself free from their grip and screamed with everything she had left.
"Help — help me —"
The matrons lunged to smother her mouth. "What are you screaming for, you fool!"
Too late.
The sound carried. In this quiet corner of the estate, two raw, desperate cries rang out and didn't stop echoing. A passing maid cutting through the shortcut heard them, turned the corner, and saw You Fangyin collapsed on the ground, dress soaked through, hair plastered to her face. She didn't wait to understand what she was seeing. She just screamed.
"Someone fell in the water! Someone fell in the water!"
The matrons went pale.
The chrysanthemum viewing party had been running in the outer garden for the better part of the afternoon. It wasn't far. Within minutes, the path was crowded — estate servants, banquet guests, all of them pressing forward to see.
Yan Lin had been mid-conversation with Shen Jie when the commotion reached them. He wouldn't have moved for just any rumor, but when someone said a girl had gone into the lotus pond, and he remembered which direction Jiang Xuening had walked — he was already moving before he'd finished the thought, cutting through the crowd without stopping to ask questions.
He spotted her before he reached the water's edge.
She was standing. Upright, at the rim of the lotus pond, untouched. The tension left his chest so fast it almost made him dizzy.
Caring makes you stupid, he thought.
Then he looked again.
You Fangyin had burned through the last of her strength with that scream. She managed two steps toward the pavilion before her legs gave out and she hit the ground. Her dress was still soaked from the pond, clinging to her, and now she was lying on the stones while people across the water stood under the covered walkway pointing and whispering.
Jiang Xuening watched the crowd and understood what You Fangyin had done, and why.
If you don't make noise, you disappear quietly. No one even knows to look.
She understood that.
She pulled off the gold-embroidered coat she'd layered over her moon-white dress and draped it across You Fangyin's shoulders. Then she turned to face the crowd across the pond — the guests, the servants, everyone gathered and staring — and said, flat and cold:
"What are you all standing around for. Have you never seen a matron punish a servant girl? A slave turning on her master? Move."
Silence.
Then the kind of silence that follows a thunderclap.
The three matrons standing nearby stared at her. Even You Fangyin looked up.
Jiang Xuening had shed the outer coat, and now she stood in only the long moon-white skirt, sash tied at the waist, spine straight, expression unreadable. There was something in her bearing — cold and precise, like plum blossoms in hard frost, like moonlight on still water — that made the descriptions in the plays You Fangyin used to listen to feel suddenly insufficient.
The tip of You Fangyin's nose went tight. Tears fell before she could stop them. She had no words. She couldn't find a single one. She just looked.
Across the pond, Yan Lin had seen and heard all of it. His eyes moved from Jiang Xuening's slight, straight figure to the young men standing around him, and he registered what they were actually looking at.
His brow pulled down without him meaning it to.
"Alright," he said, voice flat. "A girl went into the water. What are a group of grown men circling around to see? Go on."
There was muttering, but people moved. This was the Earl of Qingyuan's estate, after all, and nobody knew exactly who the girl was or what her status was. It was easier to leave.
Yan Lin stayed back.
Shen Jie watched him.
After a moment, Yan Lin pulled off his outer robe and handed it to Qing Feng without looking at him. "Take that over. The weather's turning. She has no coat now." His voice was clipped, impatient, like he was annoyed at himself for thinking of it. "Some girl of unknown background, don't let her catch cold."
Qing Feng took the robe and privately thought: Miss Jiang Er will probably be too cautious to accept this. But the young master's temper was not something to test in a moment like this, so he crossed to the other side of the pond and held the robe out.
Tang'er looked at Jiang Xuening, uncertain.
Qing Feng kept his voice low. "If the Second Miss doesn't take it, I'll have to bring it back, and explaining that to my master will be — difficult."
Jiang Xuening glanced at him. Then she said to Tang'er: "Take it."
Qing Feng breathed again. He bowed and withdrew.
The crowd thinned until only the Qingyuan estate servants remained nearby.
Jiang Xuening looked at You Fangyin — shivering, soaked, face drained of color — and turned to the three matrons.
"It's not my place to speak on household matters," she said. "But if discipline goes so far it kills someone, what virtue do you think that leaves behind?"
The matrons had almost come apart when Jiang Xuening called them out in front of everyone. They'd barely swallowed the humiliation. But then they'd seen the young Marquis's servant cross the pond to bring her his master's robe — and swallowed harder. Picking a fight with this girl would cost more than they could afford.
They kept their heads down.
"Get her back to her room," Jiang Xuening said.
"Yes. Yes, of course."
They helped You Fangyin up and moved northeast through the courtyard. Jiang Xuening paused, then followed.
Tang'er trailed behind, confused.
Jiang Xuening herself couldn't have explained why.
See it through? Send the Buddha to the West? No. She wasn't that generous, and she knew it. Waiting for something? She had already been given more than any person deserved. Rebirth was not a gift that came twice.
Maybe she only wanted to see it. The room. The place You Fangyin had been living.
The side courtyard was where women without status or favor were kept. The one at Qingyuan Bo's estate reflected that plainly. Even the servants' quarters at her own family's house were better appointed than this. Inside: a bed, a wooden screen, a table, two chairs. A sewing basket on the kang table with unfinished needlework still threaded through it. Everything spare, everything clean.
A young maidservant — practically still a child, still growing into her face — stood frozen in the corner when they all came in. She had no idea what to do with her hands. One of the matrons had to bark at her before she remembered she could fetch hot water and dry cloth.
Jiang Xuening looked around the room and said nothing.
There were no stray books. No small luxuries. No clocks, no curiosities, nothing from the world outside these walls.
The strange, suspended feeling she'd had earlier — the feeling that had carried her through the last hour — began to settle. It sank down and became ordinary. Real.
She turned and looked at You Fangyin directly, maybe for the first time since this life began.
Because there were guests in the house, changing clothes wasn't easy. You Fangyin had only removed Jiang Xuening's coat and let the young maid wrap a thin blanket around her. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap, watching back with a pale face.
Her features were fine enough. Willow-arched brows, almond eyes, a small mouth. But there was no light behind any of it, the way a wooden figure carved by someone learning the craft looks almost right but not quite alive. Dull. Careful. Like someone who had learned to make herself small and never stopped.
A teardrop mole beneath the left corner of her eye.
The elders always said that mark meant a life of feeling too much and suffering for it.
Jiang Xuening looked for something on this face. Something she recognized. Something that matched.
She found nothing.
Gone. Really gone. The You Fangyin from before doesn't exist here.
You Fangyin had never been looked at that way.
The woman who had saved her was searching for someone else in her face. You Fangyin could feel it. The look held something like grief, and something like acceptance, and something like a person watching the last door close.
She wanted to speak. She pressed her fingers together under the blanket and tried to find words. Nothing came.
Jiang Xuening blinked. She turned to the servants hovering in the doorway.
"Out."
They looked at each other. They didn't understand, but they didn't argue. The young maid slipped out with them.
Only the two of them were left.
You Fangyin finally found her voice. It came out thin. "Thank you. For saving my life. Thank you —"
Jiang Xuening reached out and brushed a strand of wet hair from her cheek. Her touch was light, almost absent, the way you might touch something you thought you knew and were trying to remember.
"Don't thank me," she said quietly. "Saving you cost me the one thing I was holding onto most in this life."
You Fangyin went still.
Jiang Xuening let her hand fall. After a moment, she smiled — small, directed at no one, at herself mostly.
"But you didn't want to die. I could see that. And since I've already walked through hell once, what's left to be afraid of? Might as well live fully. Might as well make it mean something." She paused. "So that at least no one can say I was humiliated."
She shouldn't have said any of that. It belonged to her alone. But grief doesn't wait for a better moment, and she was only a person after all.
You Fangyin stared at her with wide eyes and understood almost none of it.
Jiang Xuening looked back, and something in her chest went very quiet.
Not even close.
There was so much she could have said. It had all been there a moment ago, pressing at the back of her throat. Now it was gone, folded back down into the place where she kept things she didn't know what to do with.
"Tang'er." She straightened and called toward the door. "Come in. Bring the money."
Tang'er came in with a small purse — three hundred taels in silver notes, some coins. She glanced at Jiang Xuening, hesitated, then held it out.
Jiang Xuening opened it, looked at the contents, and set it on the table.
"We were brought together by something today. Take this money. Give your aunt a proper burial — she was buried alive, and she deserves better. Whatever's left, keep for yourself. Use it to live."
You Fangyin's face crumpled.
She hadn't said a word about the aunt. She didn't know how this woman knew. The tears came before she could stop them, but the sound didn't. She cried the way people cry when they've spent a long time learning not to make noise. Mouth open, shoulders shaking, completely silent.
It was worse than sound.
She didn't dare cry out loud. She had just lost an aunt in this household. By hanging, in a room not far from here.
Jiang Xuening sat with the weight of that for a moment, then rose. There was nothing left she could say. She walked to the door.
She stopped at the threshold.
One hand on the doorframe, she looked back.
"Three days from now, in the morning, there will be a merchant named Xu Wenyi outside the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Guild Hall in the East Market. He'll be moving a lot of raw silk. If you have money and any will to get out of where you are, go. Negotiate the price yourself. In two weeks it will be worth three times what you paid. If you're careful with the rest, it should last you a while."
She stood there a moment longer, looking at the girl wrapped in a thin blanket on the bed.
The You Fangyin from before — the one who didn't exist here — had started with borrowed money and sheer nerve. She had thought fast and moved faster. This one was different. Softer. Slower to see what was in front of her. She probably couldn't replicate what the other had done even if you handed her the method and the map.
Jiang Xuening knew that. She gave the guidance anyway.
She didn't expect anything from it.
She lowered her eyes, turned, and walked out. Tang'er fell into step beside her. The side courtyard fell behind them, and then the sound of the estate swallowed the silence of that small room.
You Fangyin sat alone. She watched the door long after they had gone. Then she looked down at the purse in her palm.
Slowly, she closed her fingers around it.