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The sun climbed higher, and the icicles under the eaves dripped water onto the ground. Seven or eight burly men with coarse, fleshy faces shoved aside the peddlers and porters in their way and swaggered toward Fan Changyu's shop. The man in the lead had a broad, square face and a short beard, and he looked vicious, though he walked with a limp. It was Master Jin, the leader of the gambling house enforcers, who had made trouble at Fan Changyu's home again and again. "I want to see which gutless fool is doing business on this street and dares to skip paying tribute to your grandfa..." The rest died in his throat when he saw Fan Changyu standing at the shop door with her arms folded. The few lackeys behind him, who had all been thrashed by her, changed color together. Their good legs began to ache faintly. That couple struck harder than anyone they had ever met. Was the other leg going to be broken here today? The lackeys limped back half a step without meaning to...

Xie Zheng rose with a dark face, threw on a robe, and had barely limped out the door on his crutch when he saw Fan Changyu coming down from the attic. She held an oil lamp in one hand and, in the other, a gyrfalcon with its feathers beaten into disarray from all its flapping. She was a little surprised to see him. "Did we wake you?" The gyrfalcon, drooping from the slaps it had taken, cried out pitifully the moment it saw its master. This time it didn't dare shriek. The cry was as faint as a chick's, the feathers on its head stuck up, and the glossy sheen it had had before was gone. Xie Zheng was silent for a breath. "This is..." Fan Changyu held up the bird with a broad grin. "I kept seeing this gyrfalcon around, and I'd just bought an old hen, so I tried setting a trap. I really caught it!" An ordinary hawk or falcon could only carry off a chick, but this gyrfalcon was huge. Its wingspan was nearly a meter, and its strength was startling...

Fan Changyu carried the laundry basket out of the room and sighed. He had most likely seen it. Since he'd already put it away, she would simply pretend the whole thing never happened. It was still early, so she went out again and bought two plump pigs and a chicken at the market. Before it became a pot of tonic soup, the chicken had a more important job: she meant to use it to catch that gyrfalcon. Her father had been a butcher, but he was also a fine hunter. She had gone up the mountain with him to hunt wild boar and trap hares, so she knew how to set a few traps. She considered putting one in the yard, but worried that Changning might touch it by accident and get hurt. In the end she climbed up through the attic to the roof, tied the old hen there, and laid out her father's trapping gear beside it. Only then did she go back down, satisfied. One pig would be slaughtered tomorrow. The other she would slaughter today and cure into preserved pork. Preserved pork was, as the...