Daylight poured through the doors and windows, filling the room. The young woman's vigor and youth were impossible to dim. She spoke as if stating the obvious. "Of course it's a pity. How many Marquis of Wu'an have there been in the hundreds of years of the Great Yin Dynasty?"
Fan Changyu counted on her fingers. "He recaptured Jinzhou, the throat of the northern frontier. He also took back the twelve commanderies of Liaodong, ground that cost countless loyal ministers and famous generals decades of fighting. People argue about what happened at the battle of Jinzhou, but when the Northern Jue captured that city years ago, didn't they slaughter the Central Plains people inside its walls?"
"General Xie died on his feet to keep his dignity, and the Northern Jue still hung his body from the wall. The court officials call the Marquis of Wu'an cold and brutal, but weren't the soldiers and civilians who died in Jinzhou sixteen years ago just as innocent? How can those men wave away the crimes done to the dead with nothing but clever words? Without the Marquis of Wu'an, who knows if anyone could have held the northwest at all?"
Xie Zheng had heard plenty of righteous condemnation over the battle of Jinzhou. This was the first time anyone had spoken in his defense.
Something shifted in his chest, and he found himself looking at the woman in front of him differently. "You speak boldly."
Fan Changyu blinked at him, confused. "How officials choose to talk is their own business. We common folk aren't fools. The Marquis of Wu'an may have been ruthless in war and politics, but he isn't the monster those scholars make him out to be. We don't curse the corrupt officials who bleed us dry, but we curse the Marquis for killing his enemies too well. What kind of twisted thinking is that?"
Xie Zheng said nothing for a moment. "People use his name to frighten children at night."
Fan Changyu answered, a little sheepish. "My father looks fierce enough when he's slaughtering pigs. People in town use his name to scare children too."
Xie Zheng had no response to that.
He pressed two fingers to his brow, silent for a while. Strangely, some of the bitterness and gloom sitting in his chest eased.
At midday, Fan Changyu lit incense before her parents' memorial tablets. Xie Zheng, remembering she'd mentioned her father earlier, glanced at the tablets set on the altar table against the wall.
Once he read the names clearly, he asked, "Is your eldest uncle named Fan Daniu?"
Fan Changyu looked surprised. "How did you know that?"
"Your father's tablet," Xie Zheng said.
Fan Changyu looked at the three characters carved into her father's tablet, Fan Erniu, and understood at once.
"My father's given name was Erniu," she said. "He got lost as a boy and only found his way back to the family once he was grown. Later the people in town started calling him Fan Laohu, and the nickname stuck."
Xie Zheng gave a faint nod, his gaze moving to her mother's tablet. There was no surname carved there at all, only the single name Lihua, the kind of name a country girl might carry.
"Did someone else choose your names, yours and your sister's?" he asked.
This couple didn't seem the type to land on names like Changyu and Changning.
Fan Changyu set the last of the dishes on the table. "No, my mother chose them."
Speaking of her mother put a flicker of pride in her eyes. "My mother was remarkable. She could read and write, and she knew how to blend fragrances and press powders. Other butchers' families reek after the killing is done, but ours never did. Our clothes came out of the wash carrying whatever scent my mother had mixed for them."
Xie Zheng's cool eyes showed a flicker of surprise. "Was your mother's family wealthy?"
Reading and writing was rare enough on its own. Knowing how to blend fragrance and press powder was rarer still. To have both should have marked a woman from an established household.
Fan Changyu shook her head. "I never met my mother's parents. She was someone my father met years ago when he worked as a caravan guard. Not a young lady from a rich family. Just a maid in someone's house."
Lihua did sound like a maid's name.
Though if she'd served in a prestigious household, it wouldn't be strange for her to have picked up those skills.
"It's a shame I didn't get any of it," Fan Changyu went on. "I tried to learn my letters alongside her, but staring at a book always gave me a headache. Never got the hang of the fragrances or the powders either. I'd have another way to earn silver if I had."
Xie Zheng thought of her swinging a stick at grown men and said, with something unreadable in his tone, "Perhaps your talents simply lie elsewhere."
Fan Changyu nodded, agreeing readily. "I think so too. If I hadn't learned pig slaughtering from my father, someone might have taken our house by now, and Ning'er and I would be out on the street."
Little Changning was wrestling a meatball with her chopsticks. At the word "street" she looked up, her eyes round as grapes. "Ning'er doesn't want to live on the street."
Fan Changyu reached over and dropped the meatball into her sister's bowl for her. "We won't live on the street. One day we'll even buy a big house in the county town."
Satisfied, Changning went back to her battle with the food in her bowl, chattering now and then between bites.
Against the sisters' chatter, Xie Zheng barely spoke once he started eating, the very picture of the old saying about staying silent at meals and at rest.
His table manners were refined, nothing like Fan Changyu's.
Slaughtering pigs was hard, physical work, and she ate accordingly, more than most women bothered to. She scooped her rice straight into a large bowl, and Changning copied her, burying half her face in the bowl to do it.
The two of them, big and small, moved in perfect unison.
When they finally set their bowls down, both sisters let out a satisfied sigh, as if the meal had somehow tasted better for the effort.
It was the first time in Xie Zheng's life he had watched women eat like this, and his expression showed it.
In the afternoon, Fan Changyu went to find Carpenter Zhao to repair the broken front door, then took her silver to the market to buy pigs. The wedding trouble with Fan Da had kept her new meat shop closed for three days, and if she didn't reopen soon, the reputation she'd built on her braised offal would count for nothing.
Before she left, Xie Zheng stopped her. "Since your mother could read, do you have paper, ink, a brush, and an inkstone in the house?"
"We do," Fan Changyu said. "Do you need them?"
"I'd like to borrow them."
Fan Changyu dug out the four treasures of the study her mother had bought long ago. They'd sat unused for years. The paper had yellowed, the inkstone had a deep chip in it, and the brush had frayed until it looked more like a broom.
Xie Zheng stared at the set laid out before him and said nothing for a moment before he thanked her.
Still better than scratching words onto cloth with a burnt stick.
Fan Changyu didn't ask what he wanted them for. She assumed a literate man laid up with a bad leg might simply be bored, and wanted to practice his calligraphy.
Once she'd gone, Xie Zheng ground the ink and began writing. The ink was poor quality and refused to mix evenly no matter how much water he added.
He resisted the urge to fling the frayed brush and ink stick out the window and kept at it, finishing an essay before Carpenter Zhao had the front door fixed.
He asked the old carpenter to take the essay to a nearby bookstore. "The spring examinations are coming, so essays should sell well right now. Would you be willing to see if a shop will buy this one?"
Carpenter Zhao couldn't read a word, but he could see fine brushwork when it was in front of him. "Young man, are you a scholar?"
"I studied a little as a boy," Xie Zheng said, "and picked up more knowledge traveling as a caravan guard. Now that I'm hurt and short on money, I thought I'd try earning some silver with my writing."
With the imperial court weakening and unrest spreading through the northwest, an essay like this, once it circulated, would stir fresh outrage against the Wei family among the scholars of the realm, giving that father and son plenty to answer for and no time left to hunt for him.
There were also messages he could pass to his old subordinates buried in the writing itself.
A gyrfalcon showing up in a small town would draw far too much attention, and if it fell into the wrong hands, it would bring nothing but trouble.
Hearing him talk this way, Carpenter Zhao's eyes went misty. "You're a good lad. That girl Changyu has had it hard. If she pulled you out of the wilderness when you were hurt, that's fate between the two of you. Seeing how much you care for her puts her grandmother's mind and mine at ease…"
Xie Zheng realized the old man had mistaken his need for money for concern over the butcher's daughter. He tried to think of a way to correct him and came up empty, so he said nothing at all.
To Carpenter Zhao, the silence looked like confirmation.
It left Xie Zheng more unsettled than before, worried now that Fan Changyu might draw the same conclusion. When she came home that evening, he made a point of acting colder toward her, though his face rarely showed much to begin with, and Fan Changyu was thick-skinned enough not to notice any difference.
That night, after making up the bed in the north room and putting her sister down, Fan Changyu went to the kitchen to braise pork for the next day's sale. Remembering that Xie Zheng was hurt and might feel the cold, she scooped the last of the glowing coals from the stove into a charcoal basin and carried it to his room.
She'd lived in that room for over ten years and hadn't broken the habit of walking straight in. The moment she pushed the door open, she found him half undressed, tending his wounds again.
This time she had no room left for embarrassment, because his entire back was smeared with blood, and it had soaked into his white undergarment too.
Earlier that day, when she'd offered to help with his medicine, he'd turned her down. She'd assumed the wounds hadn't reopened much. She hadn't expected this.
Xie Zheng's brow tightened the instant the door swung open, and he reached to cover himself, but a pair of warm, strong hands landed on his shoulders and stopped him.
The touch sent a shiver through him, and his frown deepened. He tried to shake off her hand on instinct, but she held him in place, and he couldn't move.
His breath caught. Something close to bewilderment crossed his eyes, though he couldn't tell if it came from her strength or her nerve. "You…"
"You what? Don't want to live? Is it really so hard to let someone help clean a wound?"
Looking at the raw, open cuts across his back, Fan Changyu didn't bother softening her expression. She had no idea what he thought he was proving by refusing help. His wounds kept splitting open again, and every time they did, it cost more silver to fix.
She took the medicine bottle off the table and shook it over the cuts, muttering as she worked. "A grown man, and this fussy about a little help."
A muscle jumped hard at Xie Zheng's temple. Her hand was still on his shoulder, and half of it burned like a brand. "Men and women shouldn't touch like this," he said, his voice tight.
"I carried you back from the wilderness myself. If we're talking about touching, we've done plenty of that already."
The words left her mouth and the room went quiet.
Fan Changyu heard herself and winced. She'd never had patience for books, and yet somehow this man always made her reach for careful phrasing. She scratched her head, irritated with herself. "I didn't mean it like… ugh."
Before she could say something even more mortifying, Xie Zheng cut her off, his eyelid twitching. "I understand what you meant."
"Good," she said quickly. "As long as you understand."
Worried he might read something into it anyway, she gritted her teeth and told a flat lie. "Don't worry, I have no designs on you. I haven't gotten over my former fiancé yet. We grew up together. He was handsome, sharp as anything, the only one in the whole county to pass the provincial exam. How could I be over a man like that?"
The moment the words left her, goosebumps rose along her arms.
Xie Zheng's expression went strange in a way she couldn't quite read. "My condolences," he said.
Fan Changyu blinked.
Song Yan wasn't dead.