She saw Jiang Manlin again a month later.
Manlin's personal maid came to find her. Miss Jiang was dying, the maid said, and wanted only to see her once.
It was snowing heavily that day, and the sky was a dull grey. The car was stuck in traffic, so she got out and trudged through the snow to Jiang Manlin's house. Manlin lay in bed, thin as a withered branch, her face ashen. The doctor who had been called said she had taken a deadly poison and there was nothing to be done.
The moment Manlin saw her, she reached out and gripped her hand with all her strength. A last flicker of brightness crossed her eyes. "Qingqing, I thought you wouldn't come." She had already vomited a great deal of blood, and it had dried in a red stain across the white sheet. Now she was gasping for breath, tears running down her pale cheeks. "Qingqing, I envy you so much. I envy you so much..."
Manlin's other hand was working its way under the pillow. A needle was still taped into it, and the doctor, afraid she would tear it loose, hurried to stop her. But she held on to her last breath and forced her hand beneath the pillow anyway. At last, with great effort, she drew out a green jade mandarin duck pair, joined head to head.
She laid it in Lan Qingqing's palm. She let out one last, laboured breath, her lips gone grey, and a bleak smile came over her face. "Qingqing, these ducks were broken long ago, weren't they? But I watched him mend them, piece by piece, with my own eyes..."
"He loved you so much. Even in his sleep, it was your name he called. But the more he loved you, the less he could come near you. He didn't want you to end up... like me."
"Qingqing, he couldn't bear to hurt you. He never could."
The mended mandarin ducks were back in her hands. The doctor drew the bloodstained sheet over Jiang Manlin's face, and Qingqing was ushered out of the room. The noise around her was overwhelming. Holding the jade ducks, she went down the stairs in a daze and out through the door. Outside, snow filled the sky and the ground, and the wind was rising.
In her pink cloak, she walked slowly forward through the storm.
The wind whipped the snow up and flung it against her face, cold enough to blur her sight. The melted snow collected in her eyes, warmed there little by little, and rolled down her cheeks. Yet the hands that held the jade mandarin ducks were hotter than her tears, hot as burning coals.
The first time she had met him, she had just learned that Jiang Manlin was being forced by their master to go and drink with a local gentleman. Nothing good could come of that. If Qingqing had not been the star of the troupe, one the master still treated with some consideration, she would probably have ended up the same way. But she had been furious. She had slipped away from the master and gone to the restaurant, walked into the wrong private room, and unleashed her temper on him.
Whenever he told the story afterward, he would burst out laughing. "In all my life, that was the first time I ever met a woman so fierce!"
Now all of it seemed like a story from a past life. It tore through her mind like the howling storm around her. The people passing by had nothing to do with her. A group of newsboys were shouting themselves hoarse, selling the day's papers, their voices straining against the roar of the wind. The wind was too loud, and their cries broke into scattered fragments...
"...Yu Mingxuan, son of a general's house, blood spilled at Huping..."