Chapter 3

When I was fifteen, my sister was nineteen and my brother seventeen.

Prices soared in the capital. A peck of rice cost a tael of silver; a bolt of cloth cost two.

An ordinary family’s daily expenses now came to as much as two months’ spending before.

Long queues formed outside the rice shops every day. People stood under the eaves before dawn, cloth sacks over their shoulders, hunching into the cold wind and stamping their feet.

The moment the shutters came down, the crowd surged forward, shoving and cursing, until the shop’s rice bins were scraped bare.

It was the same at the cloth merchants’.

The coarse cloth selling for two taels a bolt scratched the hands and was dyed in dull colors, yet the maids of wealthy ladies snatched it up the moment it went on display.

Refugees, blue with cold, huddled against the walls and watched with numb, hungry eyes.

It looked less like a prosperous age than a time of war.

Out on the roads, you often saw people who had starved or frozen to death.

One day they would be curled at the foot of a wall; the next, gone. No one knew who had dragged them away, or where.

Qi Yao was leaving for the frontier with his father.

The night before he left, he climbed over the wall and stayed with me until morning.

We lay side by side on the roof, our backs against the gray tiles, looking up at a sky full of stars.

The night breeze brushed our ears, carrying the faint scent of the last plum blossoms.

Qi Yao raised a hand and pointed at the brightest star overhead. “My sister told me that’s the Northern Dipper. Wherever you get lost, look up and find it. Follow it, and you’ll always get home.”

He turned toward me, his eyes shining. “Little Fence, I’m going to be a hero like no other. I’ll come back when you turn eighteen. If you’ve really become an eagle, I’ll take you flying on the frontier. I’ll gallop below, and you’ll ride the wind above.”

“All right,” I said.

Qi Yao’s family left before dawn.

Most of the friends who used to fight for territory with us had scattered too.

Some had died young, some had gone to live with relatives, and some had set off to see the world.

Only I remained, trapped in that square little courtyard, growing bones.

The peach tree bore another crop. Big red fruit hung from its branches, gently swaying.

I couldn’t ram it with my head anymore.

My bronze skin and iron bones were still there, but my parents said I was a growing young lady and must stop running wild.

If I wanted the sweetest peach at the very top, I had to ask a servant to bring a ladder.

What a nuisance.

After a while, I didn’t even want peaches.

I let them ripen, fall, and rot in the mud.

Qi Yao wrote home when he had time.

There was so much yellow sand at the frontier, he said, that opening your mouth once was enough to fill your belly.

He told me about the first time he killed someone. His hand shook so badly when he thrust the blade in that he could barely hold it. When he pulled it out, he vomited until there was nothing left, not even bile.

But his sister was fiercer still. She had killed more men than he had.

The enemy hated her. Notices offering a bounty on her head covered their camp tents.

He always ended his letters the same way: “Wounds really do hurt. But what man of the Qi family doesn’t carry scars? Little Fence, I’m fighting my way through every obstacle on the road to becoming a hero like no other.”

I sent him a peach stone and told him to plant a tree at the frontier when he had time.

Then he could eat peaches instead of sand.

I also packed a few bottles of excellent wound medicine and enclosed a note: “This stops bleeding well. Better than what the army doctors use.”

Our letters came and went, on and off, for three years.