Grandfather and I returned to the capital in late spring, through days of drizzling rain.
He rode the old gray donkey he kept, holding our only umbrella, a green oil-paper one.
I had no straw rain cape, only a bamboo hat.
My clothes were soaked through.
“Grandfather, aren’t you always saying how much you care for me?
Why don’t you get down and let the donkey carry the luggage?”
He glanced at the enormous bundle on my back, narrowed his eyes slightly, and stroked his beard with an inscrutable smile.
“Grandfather, does the old donkey matter more than your granddaughter?”
I gave its rump a light tap.
It lifted a hind leg to kick me, and I dodged aside.
Through the misty rain, Vermilion Bird Bridge looked exactly the same, as though Grandfather and I had never been away for six years.
Something caught his attention.
He scratched the donkey’s neck, and off it bolted as though it had lost its mind.
I stood frozen on the bridge, at a loss.
Even a donkey mattered more than I did.
Ah, well… I shifted the bundle to my other shoulder.
Just then, a sedan chair was set down before me, an utterly ordinary little blue one.
The curtain slowly lifted.
The man inside scarcely seemed to have changed in six years.
White as snow upon the mountain, bright as the moon among the clouds.
That was what the emperor had said of him before the assembled court when he took first place in the imperial examinations at twenty.
“Wen Sheng…” Song Jin spoke my name softly.
His brows were like distant mountains, and his eyes always held a veil of mist, leaving his thoughts impossible to read.
He was the youngest official of the second rank in Great Wei, the Censor-in-Chief whom His Majesty trusted most, and the upright official the common people praised.
To me, though, he was only a part of my past I could not speak of.
Only the past.
That was all!
