Chapter 6
Dragon-and-phoenix candles, wish-granting scale, nuptial wine—everything was proper except the little sedan entering a side gate at midnight. Yunqi had taken pains.
He offered me fragrant Yuluochun wine. I refused. I would drink nuptial wine with only one man, and he was dead.
“Still angry over the beating?” Yunqi asked. “I may indulge you, but know your place.” He seized my wrist and forced the wine between my lips. I choked; he smiled. As my wedding robe fell, he surveyed my back like his territory. “I feared scars. It healed well. I would grieve if such lovely skin were damaged.”
I owed that unscarred skin to Xizhou. After he brought me home, I hovered near death for days. When I woke, Doctor Zhang said only the finest healing powder—fifty taels a vial for six months—could erase the lashes. I shrugged. Free of the brothel, I no longer needed beauty.
Xizhou counted fifty taels from a jar beneath his bed, including copper strings not yet exchanged. Holding the warm porcelain bottle, I remembered that kindness always had a price. Innocents did not live long. I arranged the coquettish expression patrons loved. “Are you being so good because you want me? One night, perhaps, since you’re handsome. But you could never afford a wife like—”
A warm bowl of his wontons replaced the bottle in my hands. With the patience one used on an unreasonable child, he said, “Xiangsi, do not demean yourself. You have a long life ahead. I do not want you to regret it.”
For once my quick tongue failed. I had arrayed an army, ready for every attack; instead my enemy looked at the moon and invited me to admire it. The broth smelled delicious and my stomach growled. Since I had eaten his food, I let him win once.
Now, under Yunqi’s amused gaze, I stepped close and let practiced desire fill my eyes. “Do you ache for me, or only because you might lose the pleasure of touching this skin?”
He laughed and lifted me. “That sharp tongue is what I love.”
His heat made me tremble. He had been my first patron and my only one. At fifteen I had reclined above the hall while he lay below with a beauty, proud and drunk. Amid flying handkerchiefs, his gaze found mine and his lips shaped my name. My heart had stirred once, then gone cold. Aristocratic sons were promiscuous: the more he desired my body, the more he despised my birth.
Acts once familiar now turned my stomach. He was wild in bed and seemed intent on crushing me into himself. I stared at the swaying canopy. When he tried to kiss me, I turned away. He forced my face back. “Do not play tricks with me.”
He tolerated no refusal. My nails scored his back. At the peak he clutched me, murmuring my name, while I bit my lip against my body’s treachery and stroked the rough wooden carving in my hand—the beast neither dog nor pig.
I imagined a winter afternoon: me beneath the eaves, Xizhou in the yard, Ah Huang nearby, the rasp of his knife in the quiet. I had believed the courtyard and the man were the beginning of my remaining life. Instead heaven had mocked me again. He lay beneath the earth while I staggered through the mortal world, never to meet him however far I wandered. My grip tightened until my knuckles whitened.