After Wang Butou left, Fan Changyu sat in the wrecked house with her sister Changning, Carpenter Zhao, and his wife. No one spoke for a long time.
Finally, Aunt Zhao broke the silence: "Finding a live-in husband... how easy can that be? My whole life, I've only ever heard of a wealthy man's only daughter doing such a thing. Who from a poor family would agree to marry backwards into another?"
Fan Changyu said nothing.
Wang Butou's solution was simple: find a husband willing to move into her household. That way, even if her father's brother produced a son, the family land would remain hers. But since the Song family had broken off the engagement and her reputation as a Lone Star had spread through town, marriage itself had become difficult -- let alone finding a man willing to give up his own surname and move in.
The matchmakers she had consulted knew her situation well. None of them thought a live-in arrangement was even worth attempting. After all, a man who marries into his wife's household surrenders his ancestral name and bows his head for the rest of his life. Even the most idle local scoundrels weren't easily talked into it.
Carpenter Zhao pressed his calloused hands against his knees. His lined face seemed to age a year in the silence. He exhaled and said, "Marriage is a lifelong matter. We can't just grab anyone off the road to worship at the altar -- Changyu would suffer for it later."
Aunt Zhao felt a pang at those words. When other girls got married, their parents combed through candidates for months, checking character and background, before settling on someone worthy. Fan Changyu had no parents. She was scrambling to find anyone at all. Never mind character -- as long as the man's face wasn't crooked, it would do.
She was on the verge of tears when something crossed her mind. She looked up at Fan Changyu: "That young man you rescued -- does he have a family?"
She answered herself before Fan Changyu could speak: "He must not. You said earlier he fled south alone. There's no one left."
Fan Changyu caught the meaning beneath Aunt Zhao's words and went still.
When Aunt Zhao saw that she didn't respond, she pushed further: "He's injured and has nowhere to go, dragging himself around on that broken body. Or... would it be alright if Aunt Zhao asked him what he thought?"
The more she looked between Fan Changyu and the young man in her mind, the more she liked the match. Changyu was capable -- even if the man turned out to be useless, she could run the household herself. And honestly, the more Aunt Zhao thought about Song Yan's ungrateful retreat, the more satisfied she felt that this stranger was, by any measure, more handsome.
Fan Changyu pressed both hands in her lap. "Auntie, please wait. This is the rest of my life we're talking about. Let me think on it myself. When I've decided, I'll ask him."
Aunt Zhao knew better than to push when Changyu had made up her mind to think. She and her husband helped tidy the house, then went home.
Changning had a habit of napping after meals. Worn out from crying, she had fallen asleep on a mat, and Fan Changyu moved her carefully to the bed. Then she lay down herself, fully clothed, and stared at the canopy overhead with an empty mind.
Song Yan drifted into her thoughts. Then the man who called himself Yanzheng.
It was strange, really. She and Song Yan had been betrothed since childhood, yet she had almost no memories of him. He had always been busy -- locked in cold-room study before his county school exams, rarely seen despite the two families living in the same lane. She had only visited when her parents sent her over with something: meat one time, pastries another. Song's mother had always welcomed her warmly, saying that once Song Yan passed his exams, Changyu would live a comfortable life.
Later, Song Yan moved into the county school, where he was housed and fed. He came home even less. Fan Changyu barely saw him at all.
Once, she had followed her father into town for market day. Song's mother had sewn Song Yan a new robe and asked them to bring it to him.
It was Fan Changyu's first time at the county school. She was struck by how grand it was. After the gatekeeper passed word inside, Song Yan came out to collect the clothes. He thanked her with a blank, composed expression. A classmate who passed by smiled and asked Song Yan who she was.
"A younger sister from home," he said.
Fan Changyu was quiet the whole walk back. She could feel, without being told, that Song Yan hadn't wanted her to come.
His fiancée was a pig butcher's daughter. That was probably hard to explain to his classmates.
From that day on, she had quietly thought that if he truly didn't want the engagement, they should end it. But her father and mother admired Song Yan and believed in his future. Song's mother spoke warmly of the match in public -- she said that when Song Yan passed his exams, she would be proud to have him take Changyu as his wife.
Fan Changyu only raised it with Song Yan once, privately. He had been writing when she brought it up. He lifted his eyes -- those rarely-moving eyes -- and said: "Marriage is a major affair, governed by a parent's command and a matchmaker's word. Are you treating it as a joke?"
She took that to mean he was refusing. After that, she never mentioned it again.
Later, her parents died. Song's mother came to the house with a flimsy excuse and took the engagement back.
Maybe her father's death had consumed all her grief, or maybe there had never been much feeling there to begin with. When she thought of Song Yan now, she felt nothing at all.
As for the man she had rescued -- the one who called himself Yanzheng -- she knew even less about him. And he knew even less about her. He had been gravely injured, with nowhere to go, and she had bluntly asked whether he was willing to marry into her household. That was hardly better than pressing a man for a favor while his leg was still in a trap.
Her engagement to Song Yan had been her parents' arrangement, born of goodwill between the families. She didn't want to stumble into something just as poorly considered. But she had no other option.
After turning it over for a while, she thought: why not be honest? Why not tell the man named Yanzheng exactly what she needed -- and ask if he was willing to simply pretend?
She only needed the arrangement long enough to secure the land. After his injuries healed, he could stay or go as he liked.
If he left, she wouldn't stop him. She had pulled him out of danger; he had helped her through a crisis by lending his name. Two debts, cleanly cancelled.
If he stayed... Fan Changyu thought of his face, clear as a winter moon over fresh snow, and quietly decided that wouldn't be terrible either.
In the attic of Zhao's house, Xie Zheng had just taken a letter from his gyrfalcon Haidongqing when he sneezed.
He twisted his sword-sharp brows in irritation. He had survived a serious injury. Getting laid low by a chill was humiliating.
Haidongqing -- pure white, with talons like bent iron hooks -- gripped the window ledge and tilted his head, fixing his master with a pair of bright, knowing eyes.
Xie Zheng unfolded the letter. The moment he read it, his face went ugly. Then a cold curl settled at the corner of his mouth.
One day without confirming his death, and already that man had moved. He had sent someone to Huizhou to seize Xie Zheng's military authority -- and of course it was that person he had sent.
Xie Zheng dropped the letter into the charcoal basin in the corner and watched it turn to ash.
He sat at the head of the bed. Cold wind pushed through the open window, lifting the hair at his brow, but it couldn't move the darkness settled over his face.
The man who had taken his command in Huizhou wanted him dead -- perhaps even more than the man in the capital did. His old subordinates couldn't protect themselves right now; if they moved rashly, it would only draw the wild dogs closer. Until his injuries healed, he had no choice but to lie low and wait.
He glanced at the fresh bloodstain spreading through his shirt and his expression grew colder.
"Goo?" Haidongqing, still waiting for an order, tilted his head the other direction and kept staring.
"Get out."
Xie Zheng closed his eyes. His striking face was too pale now, and in that paleness came something rare: the look of a man who was, just barely, fragile.
Haidongqing had heard that tone before. He spread his wings and sailed out the window, apparently satisfied.
Xie Zheng had indeed caught a chill.
Fan Changyu had spent all afternoon building up the nerve to speak with him. That evening she fried two small dishes, sliced a plate of braised pig's head, and carried everything up to the attic. But when she called at the door, no one answered. She called again. Still nothing.
Worried, she pushed it open.
He was lying in bed with an unnatural flush burning across his face, completely unconscious.
Fan Changyu ran for Carpenter Zhao. After taking the man's pulse, Carpenter Zhao dug through his crumbling medical text for a good while and settled on the most conservative remedy for wind-cold. Fan Changyu went out that night, knocked on a locked pharmacy door, and waited while the medicine was prepared. She brought it back, boiled it, and got it into him. He broke a sweat soon after.
But when Carpenter Zhao wiped down Xie Zheng's forehead and changed the dressing on his wound, he noticed that the gauze was soaked through again. The wound had reopened. He frowned at it, unsettled, and said nothing.
Xie Zheng woke the next morning.
The fever had broken. His head was clear. But his throat was dry and raw.
The old couple had left a round stool beside the bed with a teapot and a stoneware cup so he could help himself. He pushed himself half upright and reached for the cup.
The door opened.
Fan Changyu walked in carrying a large bowl. "The tea's cold -- not good for the heat in your body. Don't drink it. I made you pig lung soup."
Carpenter Zhao had said pig lung soup cleared heat, eased coughing, and moistened the lungs. She had slaughtered yesterday and had a full bucket of lungs left, so she put them to use.
Xie Zheng thanked her quietly. It wasn't intestine, so he took it without inner resistance and drank.
Then his face changed.
Fan Changyu watched. He swallowed in silence. Then he asked: "You made this?"
"Yes. Why, is something wrong?"
It was her first time making pig lung soup.
"Nothing," Xie Zheng said, and held the bowl without drinking more.
He was simply having trouble reconciling this soup with the fat sausage noodles from before. It was hard to believe they had come from the same pair of hands.
"You should drink it while it's warm," Fan Changyu said. "Uncle Zhao says it's good for the lungs."
"...It's a bit hot still. I'll drink it shortly."
He expected her to leave at that. Instead, she pulled up a chair and sat down. "I don't think I ever told you my name. It's Fan -- Fan Changyu. People in town just call me Changyu. You can call me that too."
Xie Zheng gave a faint nod. He'd already heard the old woman use it. He knew.
He offered nothing further. The room went quiet.
Fan Changyu was not naturally someone who forced conversation, and the silence sat uneasily on her. But she had a reason for being here, so she pushed on. "Earlier you said your surname was Yan and your given name was Zheng. Which characters?"
"The yan of composure and rectitude," he said. "The zheng of a righteous gentleman."
He seemed to think she might not recognize the characters from description alone. He dipped a finger in the cold tea and wrote them on the round stool, stroke by stroke: 嚴正.
Each character was built from one half of his real name.
His fingers were long and fine, with clean-defined knuckles -- the kind of hands that should have looked elegant holding a brush. But the pads and backs of his fingers were mapped with scars, shallow and deep alike, and it was hard to imagine what had left them all. Even drawn with a wet fingertip on rough wood, the characters carried weight. Fan Changyu found herself staring.
"Those two," he said, as he finished the last stroke of 正.
She pulled herself back. "You studied, didn't you? Before."
His handwriting was exceptional. It surpassed even Song Yan's.
"Just a man of the martial path," Xie Zheng said. "Hardly fit to call myself a scholar."
The words were self-deprecating on the surface, but the tone beneath them was something else -- a cool, undisguised contempt for the scholarly class and everything it claimed to be.
Fan Changyu breathed out slowly. "Then what did you do, before all this?"
His brow tightened, nearly imperceptibly. She was pressing a little further than before. But she had saved his life and taken him in. It was fair enough that she'd want to know.
"No trade in particular," he said after a moment. "I ran with an escort company for a time."
To his surprise, something lit up on the woman's face. "What a coincidence -- my father ran escort work when he was young!"
Xie Zheng: "...Quite a coincidence."
She didn't ask more about the escort work. Her hands were clasped in her lap, and she looked, for the first time, genuinely nervous. "Did you ever marry?"
He looked at her. She met his eyes -- a little flustered, but she didn't look away.
He couldn't quite read what she was after. "No," he said honestly.
Fan Changyu had been pinching her own hands red. She took a breath, let the jar tip over, and said all of it at once.
"I need to ask you a favor. There's trouble at home. After my parents died, my uncle set his sights on the family land. Yesterday he tried to take the deed by force and failed, but I think he'll go to the magistrate next. If the court rules that my parents died without a male heir, the land goes to my uncle. The only legal protection I have left is to marry quickly -- and the husband needs to move into my household."
Xie Zheng's eyelid twitched.
"You're asking me," he said slowly, "to marry in?"