By the time Xue Liangui came back to himself, there was nothing left to argue about. The table was gone. Every piece of furniture the Ding family owned was fine mahogany, but the table they had set out for a craftsman's wages looked like it had been pulled from a pigsty. And now they were calling this an even trade.
Could a servant's missing table hold up a rich man's son's wedding? Of course not. The Ding family had planned this all along. They never meant to pay.
Liangui cursed himself. Even his daughter Ranran had warned him not to take the job. But the wages sounded generous, and generous wages had a way of making a man deaf to good sense. He took the work. Now he sat with nothing to show for it.
Ranran watched her father's face cycle through shame and fury. She kept her voice low. "Dad. Don't waste breath on people like the Dings. Save your energy. Their second son is sitting the provincial exams soon enough. What goes around comes around."
Her parents were not listening.
Qiao Lian was not built for quiet suffering. She was the kind of woman who considered letting the rice jar run dry a personal insult. She set down her ladle, stripped off her apron, and walked out the door toward the village chief's house. If no one would give them justice, she would drag justice back herself.
Liangui, anxious, told Ranran to stay and eat. Then he hurried after his wife.
Ranran called after them from the yard: "Mother! If you have to go, speak softly. Tell them the pot won't boil. Praise the second son's good character. Say he'll pass the examination for certain!"
Qiao Lian did not look back. The second son of the Ding family was a known lecher. She would sooner swallow river mud than praise him.
By the time Ranran had changed her outer shirt and stepped outside, her parents were already gone. She moved to follow them.
Then she stopped.
A man was standing in front of her house.
He was tall enough that she had to tilt her head back just to try to see his face. He wore a pale, well-worn blue shirt and a wide-brimmed curtain hat with a thick veil hanging down, covering everything below the brim. The autumn breeze moved through the chrysanthemums along the fence. The veil stirred. His face stayed hidden.
He was waiting for someone. She could not tell who.
Before she could decide what to do, the door of Granny Huang's house next door flew open. The old woman appeared with a bucket of pig slop and heaved it at a large man standing in her yard.
"First they come to steal people, now they come to trick them!" she shouted. "Immortality! Eternal life! My whole family already lives long enough!"
The large man she had drenched stood there a moment in stunned silence. He had been accompanying his master on a retreat in the mountains and had not passed through the village in months. Clearly things had changed. He had only knocked to ask for water, and mentioned almost in passing that he was looking for a young man called Langjun who had expressed interest in studying the Tao. He barely got the words out before the swill hit him.
He had been practicing for years. He knew the water-avoidance technique. He recited it silently, but his control was still rough, and the sour slop landed on his face without apology.
His name was Yu Chen. He had pride enough not to strike a foolish old village woman, but not quite enough to stand there dripping. He widened his eyes, snatched the bucket from her hands, and crushed it flat with one palm.
Granny Huang yelped, slammed her door, and went quiet.
Ranran had seen all of this. She was about to retreat into her courtyard when a tall woman stepped around from behind her and blocked the way. The woman had thick brows and a soldier's bearing. She pressed her fists together in a formal greeting.
"Little sister. Could we borrow your bucket? My brother needs to wash his face."
The swill-covered man turned and looked at Ranran. The look was not cruel, but it was not a request either.
Ranran paused. Then she nodded. "The water tank is in the yard. Help yourself."
As the large man moved past her toward the courtyard, she turned and bolted. Strangers in her house, parents gone to the village chief's. The obvious move was to run to the chief herself and get the young men of the village organized.
She made it three steps before her legs stopped obeying her.
They turned on their own and walked her back through the gate, which swung shut behind her as though caught by the wind.
Ranran stood in her own courtyard and stared at her feet. They had carried her home completely against her will.
The tall man in the curtain hat was standing in the yard. He appeared to be watching her through the veil.
Ranran understood, in the way one understands lightning, that something had just moved her. She pressed herself along the courtyard wall, picked up the wooden bench her father always sat on, carried it carefully to the stranger, and said, with great attention to courtesy: "Please, sit down. I'll fetch some hot water for washing."
She rolled up her sleeves and went into the kitchen. She lifted the lid off the iron pot and ladled out hot water without being asked twice.
The woman, Yu Tong, raised an eyebrow watching this. Her master had just used a restraining technique to drag the girl back into the yard. By any normal measure, the girl should have screamed. Instead, those wide wet eyes had made one quick rotation around the situation and landed on the sensible path: cooperate, flatter, stay fed, stay alive.
While Ranran was adjusting the water temperature, Yu Tong asked quietly: "How old is she?"
"Almost sixteen," Ranran murmured, not looking up.
Yu Chen washed his face. Ranran stood to one side, studying the visitors with careful attention. These ones had not shaved anyone's head or cut anyone's hands, which was already an improvement over recent strangers.
Then the large man announced he was hungry.
Yu Chen was not yet at the stage of Bigu fasting, the point in cultivation where a practitioner no longer needs food. He had enlisted young in the army, been assigned to protect someone called Su Yishui, and followed his young charge into the mountains to cultivate the immortal path. Twenty years of practice and he still needed three meals at regular hours. He was not ashamed of this, but he was hungry.
Ranran had no real options. She brought out what she had cooked and watched Yu Chen and Yu Tong sit down to eat.
Then she realized she was hungry too.
She had always known this about herself. If her time came, she wanted to meet it with a full stomach. Mengpo soup was bad enough without drinking it on an empty gut.
She could not leave. The food was disappearing. This was, she decided, a disadvantage.
Ranran slipped into the kitchen, pulled out another pair of chopsticks, added a bowl of rice to the table, and sat down with them. There was a small shyness in the way she settled, but no real hesitation.
She ate with intent. Her eyes moved around the table with expert precision, and every thin strip of bacon hiding in the fried green beans found its way into her bowl before anyone else noticed it was there. When her eyes met Yu Chen's, she gave a brief, sheepish smile and went back to eating.
Yu Chen watched this with irritation. He glared at her. She never looked up long enough to receive the glare.
At the edge of the courtyard, apart from the table, the man in the curtain hat stood still. He had not eaten. He looked at the dianthus growing in the corner of the yard, a corner of vivid red blooms, lush and full, though this was not the season for them.
He turned his head slowly. "Who planted these?"
Yu Chen looked at the girl with her face buried in her rice bowl. "Hey. He's talking to you."
Ranran lifted her head just enough to be heard. "I planted them."
Her father's carpentry work was hard on his eyes. She dried the blossoms and made them into tea for him.
The man in the hat looked at the flowers a moment longer, then moved toward her and crouched down to her eye level. She was sitting on a small stool. He was not a small person. The effect was considerable.
Ranran looked up at him and, because she did not know what else to do, held her rice bowl out in his direction. "Would you like some?"
She noticed, as she did this, that his hands were extraordinary. Long fingers, white as pale jade, the kind of hands she would expect on a court painter or a scholar of great refinement. She found herself wondering what the rest of him looked like.
At that moment a gust of wind came through the yard and lifted the man's veil.
For just a moment, she saw his face.
It had no clear shape. The bridge of the nose and the architecture of the brows and eyes were blurred into something that did not resolve, as though someone had taken a face and rubbed it nearly smooth. Only the jaw and mouth remained fully formed. It was the kind of face that lived in children's nightmares, the face that appeared at the edge of firelight and refused to make sense.
Ranran's body tilted backward off the stool. The man caught her by the arm before she hit the ground.
He did not replace the veil. He took off the curtain hat entirely, let her see the full ruin of his face, leaned in slightly, and said: "Why. Do I look frightening?"
Ranran worked her mouth for a moment. She was an honest person by nature. Praise required something to attach to, and most of the usual attachment points were not available. She searched.
Then she found her footing.
"Uncle," she said, with complete sincerity, "your jaw is very clean and well-shaped. And your mouth is beautiful. Really. I can't find anything frightening about you. Not yet."
The rice in Yu Chen's mouth left his mouth at speed and landed on his sister's head.
He had served Su Yishui for two decades. He would have sworn under any oath that no flattery existed capable of dressing up that curse-ruined face. He and Yu Tong had long ago learned never to mention the subject. Su Yishui himself never removed the hat without cause.
And yet here sat a girl with oil at the corner of her mouth, looking at that face with autumn-lake sincerity, finding a jawline and calling it beautiful, and meaning every word.
Su Yishui straightened up. Something in his bearing had shifted, though it would have been difficult to name exactly what.
"A true companion is rare," he said quietly. "Someone who does not flinch at my face is rarer still. I practice in the Western Hills. If fate has put us in each other's path, come study the immortal way with me."
Ranran waved both hands. "My constitution is poor. Always has been. I am an ordinary person. This kind of path is not for me."
Su Yishui replied, without hurry: "A weak constitution is exactly the reason to walk this path. To extend one's life. To remain young." He paused. "Look. Does my jaw not appear quite young?"
Yu Tong's mouth fell open.
Her master had been quiet and correct since childhood, even before the curse took his face. Female disciples had tested him. Demons had flirted with him. He had never shown the expression of an ordinary young man, not once, not even briefly. He did not make jokes. He did not seek approval.
He had just asked a carpenter's daughter to confirm that his jawline looked young.
This was not her master. This was someone wearing her master's posture and speaking in a voice she did not recognize.