Fan Changyu stepped out of the new house with two thick quilts in her arms. Something felt off. She glanced up and swept her gaze along the top of the courtyard wall. Two large black shapes instantly dropped below the rim.
Fan Changyu: "..."
She would know Fan Da and his wife even if they were burned to ash.
So the two of them had heard about her taking a husband and were scared she had grabbed some stranger off the road to fool them. They had spent the better part of the night climbing ladders to eavesdrop over the wall instead of sleeping.
Outside the Fan family courtyard, Fan Da and his broad, bear-built wife Liu each stood on a wooden ladder, heads craned over the wall, speaking in hushed tones.
"See, I told you! That girl just found someone to pretend!" Liu said, with the blunt confidence of a woman used to being right in her own home. "They're sleeping in separate rooms on their wedding night. What were you panicking for?"
Fan Da felt hope stir in his chest again and couldn't keep it off his face. "Look again. Keep watching!"
The two eased their heads back over the wall. They watched Fan Changyu carry a thick quilt into the side room, come back out empty-handed, then fetch a basin of water from the kitchen and bring it into the bridal chamber, as if she had only gone to the side room to deposit the bedding.
Fan Da and his wife exchanged a look.
Had they guessed wrong?
Fan Changyu walked back into the new house with a pot of hot water and did not knock. The man sat bare-chested at the table, and she watched him press a piece of ice against himself. She gestured with her eyes toward the courtyard wall, half embarrassed, half resigned.
"My uncle and aunt must have figured out I married someone without asking them. They've been listening at the wall outside."
Xie Zheng glanced back, then turned away again.
He had just taken his medicine. The pain was deep and savage, moving from torn skin along every nerve in his body, pushing cold sweat through the skin of his forehead, shoulders, back, and abdomen. Almost everything in him was occupied with holding still. Whether Fan Changyu stayed in the room or left did not register.
His shoulders and back were rigid. Sweat-damp hair was pressed flat against his forehead. Sweat gathered at his brow and fell. His teeth were clenched. He had the look of a wolf that had been beaten many times and had learned nothing from it about surrender.
It was the first time Fan Changyu had seen his injuries clearly without bandaging over them. Some wounds had dried into dark scabs. Others had torn open again, raw and wet. Beneath the fresh damage, older scars layered over still older ones.
She thought of her father without meaning to. He had carried the same kind of marks. It seemed Xie Zheng truly made his living at the edge of death.
She set down the basin, walked over, and frowned.
"Can I help with anything?"
The man half-slumped against the table did not look up. He reached behind him, picked up a medicine bottle, and held it out.
"The remaining powder. Sprinkle it across the wounds on my back."
He had been careful from the start. The medicine Haidongqing had sent with him had long since been swapped out for wound powder he had bought himself from the old man at the apothecary.
Fan Changyu took the bottle and did as she was told. The moment she touched him, the muscles in his shoulders and back locked hard as stone. He turned his head and bit down on the clothes bundled on the table.
She frowned. When he had taken medicine the last time, the reaction had not been this severe. She thought it must be the exhaustion of the wedding day piling on top of everything else, and felt a low pull of unease.
She looked at the gauze on the floor, soiled with blood and sweat, and went to the cabinet. She found plain undyed silk fabric, left over from what the family had bought for household use after her parents died. She cut it into long strips with scissors so that it would be ready for bandaging.
After a while, the tension in Xie Zheng's muscles eased. He spat out the clothes he had bitten and slowly raised his head to look at Fan Changyu.
"Better?" She set down the scissors at once.
Xie Zheng hated being seen when he was injured. At those moments he looked like a wounded stray whose life anyone could end if they chose. No matter how composed he kept his face, she had already seen him.
The habit of a lifetime had cracked. He rejected it inwardly on reflex, and only said thank you, flatly and without warmth.
Fan Changyu glanced at his wounds. She did not look at him with pity.
Maybe the pain had simply put him in a foul mood.
Xie Zheng picked up the clothes and moved to put them on. The smell of blood and sweat was unpleasant, but his upbringing would not let him sit uncovered in front of a woman.
Fan Changyu saw what he was doing and stopped him.
"You're soaked through and there's blood everywhere. Wipe it off first. I'll find you something of my father's to wear."
She had just drawn a basin of water and brought it in for exactly this purpose.
He was able to manage the front himself, but needed her to help with his back. She was considerably more careful than he ever was with himself. The wrung cloth moved slowly, avoiding each wound, wiping away dried blood and the brown residue of medicine in small, deliberate passes.
Her knuckles grazed his back now and then. They were not soft hands, but they were unmistakably different from his own callused ones, and each brief contact sent a faint current spreading outward from the point of touch.
An unfamiliar, crawling sensation made Xie Zheng's brow draw together.
Fan Changyu stopped immediately. "Did I catch a wound?"
He pressed his lips together. His expression went colder.
"No."
After she finished wiping his back, the basin water had turned murky with blood and medicine stains. She brought over the cloth she had cut and began wrapping it around him. Her fingertips unavoidably made more contact with the muscle beneath. Whether it was the medicine or the sweating, his skin ran hotter than it had any previous time she had touched him.
She stood, he sat. When she leaned down to pass the cloth around him, her long hair swung forward and swept across his shoulder and the side of his neck.
Light. Trailing. Faintly electric.
The line between Xie Zheng's brows deepened almost to a crease. He held himself still and said nothing.
"Done." Fan Changyu tied off the knot and straightened up. She had worked hard enough that a faint shine of sweat had risen on her forehead.
She dug an old robe of her father's from the chest, then picked up the basin and went outside to empty it.
The red lantern under the eaves swayed in the cold wind. The two bear-shaped silhouettes outside the wall, seeing her come out, pressed back down below the rim again, apparently convinced they were invisible.
Fan Changyu pretended not to notice. She raised her voice sharply.
"Which stray cat is stealing meat from my yard again!"
She walked toward the water tank, scooped out two extra ladles of cold water, and dumped them into the basin. Then she heaved the whole thing hard over the wall.
"Next time I'll set a trap! Filthy animal!"
Outside the wall, Fan Da and his wife were drenched from head to shoulders. They shook with cold and swallowed their shock, too stubborn to make a sound.
It was not until her footsteps retreated back into the house that Fan Da shuddered, spat several times, and wrinkled his face in revulsion.
"What in the world did that girl throw on us? What is that smell?"
His wife dragged her sleeve across her face and sniffed.
"Blood and sweat."
A beat of silence. Then both of them spat again, harder and longer.
"His mother! That's their bath water!"
The soaked jackets turned to ice in the wind. By the time they dragged themselves home, the cold had settled into their bones. Fan Da and his wife took to bed with severe chills and did not rise for several days.
Afraid of any disturbance through the night, Fan Changyu thought it through and spread bedding on the floor of the bridal chamber. Xie Zheng made no comment.
She fell asleep quickly. While he lay still with his eyes shut, working to rest, her breathing had already slowed and deepened.
By custom, wedding candles burned through the whole night of the bridal chamber. Fan Changyu had left them lit for appearances.
One of the candles guttered softly. At the small sound, Xie Zheng turned his head and looked down at the floor.
Three feet of warm candlelight lay across the boards. The woman was curled inside several thick quilts. Dark hair spread across her pillow. The skin of her face held a warm, jade-like tone in the low light.
He looked away.
When she was awake, she had an ordinary bluntness that made her easy to overlook despite the good bone structure.
Asleep, she was worth a second look.
He caught himself in the middle of that thought. His eyes opened. His brow came down hard.
What did it matter whether she was appealing or not?
He was here only until his wounds healed. After that he would leave. Whether he ever saw this woman again was uncertain at best.
He turned toward the wall and shut his eyes again.
Fan Changyu kept her own hours. She woke at the same time she always did.
She pushed herself upright and sat for a moment, confused to find herself on the floor. Changning was nowhere in the room. A man was asleep in the bed a few steps away.
She stared at him for a long moment.
Then she remembered. Yesterday. The marriage. She exhaled.
Outside, the sky was barely light. Inside, a small stub of wedding candle still burned, wax tears piled thick around the base of the candlestick.
Fan Changyu rose quietly. She had slept in her clothes, which saved her some trouble. She folded up the floor bedding, set it aside, and went out.
The wind and snow had not stopped through the night. The courtyard was buried under a thick, even layer of white. Dead branches along the walls were coated and still.
She rubbed her hands against the cold. First she fetched firewood from under the eaves and started the brazier, hung a pot of water over it to warm for washing, then took a broom and began clearing snow from the yard.
From next door she heard Changning crying. She set down the broom and went to carry her sister back.
Changning was a quiet child as a rule, but since their parents had died, she woke in tears whenever she opened her eyes and Fan Changyu was not there.
Fan Changyu settled her sister onto a stool and took up the comb.
Changning's hair had always been thin, fine, and slightly yellowish, not the thick dark hair Fan Changyu had. There were many short broken hairs that snagged and resisted. Tying two small locks took more patience than Fan Changyu had ever quite developed.
The result, as usual, was uneven.
When Fan Changyu sent Changning off to wash her face, the girl paused at the basin, looked at her reflection in the water, and called back flatly.
"Sister. My hair is crooked."
Fan Changyu coughed. "I have to get to the county office soon. No time to redo it. It'll do for today, all right?"
Little Changning was an accommodating child. She dropped the complaint without another word.
Fan Changyu refilled a basin of fresh water and brought it to the room. The man was already awake, fully dressed, sitting at the edge of the bed. He had probably been up for some time. He had likely heard most of the exchange with Changning.
She felt a flicker of embarrassment even so.
She placed the basin on the low stool beside the bed, handed him a clean cloth, and laid out what she had promised him when he first agreed to the arrangement.
"I'll go to the county office this morning to handle the property transfer and register your name in the household records. Then I'll send for a doctor on my way back."
Xie Zheng shook his head. "No need for a doctor. My injuries only need rest. They'll close on their own."
He had used good wound medicine. There was nothing left to do but wait for the flesh to knit.
Fan Changyu scratched the back of her head. "Then is there anything you need? I'll pick it up."
He shook his head again.
She felt the awkwardness of it settle over her. This was not what she had promised. It felt as though she had pressed a bad deal on him and was now trying to make it right with nothing.
She made up her mind quietly. She would not trouble him further about a doctor. But after she finished at the yamen, she would stop at the market and bring back something with enough substance to actually help him recover. Good food, at least, she could manage.
After a quick breakfast, Fan Changyu left. With Changning now living in the house, she no longer sent her sister to Aunt Zhao's. She reminded Changning before she went out that if anything came up, Aunt Zhao was just next door.
She had barely turned the corner of the alley before a street runner who had been lurking nearby took off at a run toward the gambling house.
Inside the house, Xie Zheng had found a book in the corner, opened it to a random page, and turned two leaves without reading a word. The expression between his brows was one of low, restless impatience.
He was in a genuinely bad mood.
The sound of fists hammering against the front gate split the quiet of the morning.