Fan Changyu was out the door before the neighbors lit their stoves.
Tucked inside her jacket: just over three hundred wen and a silver hairpin her parents had bought her years ago, the kind that cost more than two taels when the family still had money to spend. She had one plan. Pawn the hairpin, pool the cash, buy a pig.
The pawnshop keeper examined the hairpin with the flat expression of a man who had disappointed people for a living. Three fingers. Three hundred wen.
"This is solid silver," Fan Changyu said, "and you're offering three hundred wen?"
"Silver, yes. Light, though. And the style is old." He set it on the counter. "I'll go to five hundred. Not a wen more."
"One tael. Nothing less."
He slid the hairpin back toward her. "Then take it home."
She picked it up and walked out.
He called after her before she reached the street. One tael, he said. First sale of the morning, consider it charity. She walked back in without a word and left with the silver.
Her next stop was the cooked-food street, where she moved stall to stall with the unhurried manner of someone just browsing. She was not browsing. She was building a price map.
Roast chicken and goose dominated most of the stalls. Braised pig-head meat was the volume seller, running about forty-five wen a catty once you cut through the opening price. Pig ears commanded sixty wen, rare enough to fetch a premium. Offal, though, was practically worthless. Most shops didn't even stock pig organ water. If someone wanted it, they could haul it away for under ten wen a bucket.
That detail she filed away.
Past the food stalls, the street opened into the livestock market. The smell hit first: animals, mud, manure, the damp cold of a winter morning that hadn't quite warmed. Farmers stood beside their tied pigs and sheep in short brown coats, speaking to each other in the clipped shorthand of men who had done this every week for decades.
A young woman in an apricot-colored jacket drew stares. Animal dealers called out to her. She walked past all of them.
She knew better. Her father had brought her here since she was small. Dealers marked their prices up and haggled their quality down. The real finds came from farmers selling their own stock, men who had driven an animal to town themselves rather than accept whatever the dealers offered at the farm gate.
She had nearly finished her circuit when she spotted the old man in the far corner.
He was thin and dark-complexioned, the kind of quiet that came not from patience but from not knowing how to push himself forward. At his feet stood a pig that was everything her father had ever told her to look for: round haunches, thick tail, solid frame. The animal was muddy. It was early. Nobody had stopped.
"How much?" she asked.
The old man blinked, then steadied himself. The dealers, he said, had come out to the countryside and offered ten wen a catty. He had driven the pig to town himself. For her, twelve wen a catty.
Twelve wen. The dealers here were asking eighteen, nineteen. Even the most stubborn farmer she had watched that morning had only talked one of them down to fifteen.
"I'll take it," she said, before anyone nearby could hear the price.
The market scale put the pig at ninety catties. She handed over one tael and eighty wen, tied a rope to the animal, and headed home.
She made good use of the walk back.
The butcher shop her family had run for years sat on the meat market street with its doors still shuttered, its threshold claimed by a neighboring vendor's crates. She had looked at it on the way in and felt the particular ache of something that used to be yours. She did not stop long. There would be time for that.
On the road home, pig in tow, she did what her father would never have done: she advertised. To people who recognized her, she announced that the shop was reopening tomorrow, that the pig she was walking was fat and would be dressed fresh, that they should come early for the best cuts.
A restaurant cook she knew from her father's regular customers was heading home with a basket of ingredients. He looked at the pig, looked at her, and put down a two-hundred-wen deposit on the spot for twenty catties.
She arrived back at the alley smiling, bamboo switch in hand, pig announcing its own presence to every household within earshot.
Up in the attic at the end of the alley, the man she had pulled out of the cold the night before sat half-propped by the window.
He had been watching the falconer's bird circle above the rooftops when the sound reached him first. Then he saw her: the same apricot jacket from the night before, bright against the grey stone and melting snow of the alley, walking with the easy confidence of a woman who had just gotten exactly what she came for.
Behind her, on a rope, was a pig.
He had grown up around women who could recite poetry and embroider silk. He had met soldiers' daughters who could ride. He had not, in all his years, seen anything quite like this.
He listened until her younger sister's voice rang out from the courtyard — Sister, where did you get such a fat pig? — and heard the answer, unhesitating and pleased: I bought it, of course. Then he closed the window and shut his eyes. He needed to heal. He needed to do it quickly.
Fan Changyu got the pig settled in the side shed, then turned her attention to the bucket of organ water the Chen family had given her the day before. She hauled it out, rinsed it at the well, cleaned it twice. The pig itself would wait until morning. Fresh pork sold only same-day, and she was already past the morning market. Tomorrow she would start at first light.
Tonight, she would braise the organ water.
Not to sell, not exactly. She had walked the cooked-food stalls that morning and understood the problem clearly: buyers had choices, and an unfamiliar stall selling unfamiliar braised meat was easy to walk past. Braised organ water cost almost nothing and nobody paid for it. But given away free with a pound of pork, it became something else entirely. It let people taste her braise before they committed to anything. If the flavor was right, they would come back for the pig's head meat, the ears, the cuts that actually turned a profit.
She built the fire, filled the pot, chose her spices with care. Her mother had taught her to cook many things, and Fan Changyu knew she was ordinary at most of them. Braised meat was different. She had been stealing pieces of braised trotter from the kitchen since childhood, picking up the method by instinct long before she had the vocabulary for what she was learning.
The kitchen knife came down on the cutting board with the weight and certainty of a woman who had spent her life around the slaughter shed. Watching her, you would have moved out of the way.
An hour later, the smell had climbed through the floorboards, through the walls, out into the alley. Neighbors paused and sniffed and wondered whose pot it was.
In the attic, the man who had eaten almost nothing since he was carried in rolled his throat and said nothing. He lay still and waited for his strength to come back.
It was taking longer than he would have liked.