Chapter 1

I cried the year Bighead Xiao took Yang Yuehua as his concubine.

Country folk knew nothing of vows to share one lifetime with one person. But every man in our village had only one wife. Everyone lived out their lives as a pair.

Only mine wanted another woman.

I fought with him. “I married you at fifteen. When your mother was bedridden, I cared for her until she died. When your father died, I wore mourning at home for him. Now you want a concubine? How can you do this to me?”

Bighead Xiao squatted on the ground, clutching his enormous head. “Then what do you want me to do? Take this woman, and we get a whole city without losing a single man. Is keeping my trousers tied worth more than my brothers’ lives?

“Huang Cuiying, we’re not in the village anymore. Your man’s a general now. He’s responsible for his soldiers.”

It wasn’t only him. Everyone we knew urged me to agree. Even Wang Xinghua, who’d bickered with me for ten years, came.

Her eyes were red. “Cuiying, accept it. Another battle means so many more men won’t come home. My Changgui might be one of them. I know it hurts. But if you swallow it this once, I, Wang Xinghua, will follow you and work like an ox for you all my life.”

I crouched in the kitchen and cried all night. The next day, I agreed.

Yang Yuehua arrived in a bright red bridal dress. This time, Wang Xinghua couldn’t swallow it. She and a group of villagers dragged me into the bridal chamber, pointed at Yang Yuehua, and cursed. “Don’t you know the rules for a concubine? Who gave you permission to wear such bright red?”

The villagers were angry on my behalf. When I married Bighead Xiao, my entire bridal dress hadn’t been as fine as the veil over her head.

Yang Yuehua’s maid was furious too. “Do you think our young lady wants this? If the world hadn’t fallen into chaos, you wouldn’t even be worthy of seeing her face!”

While she spoke, Yang Yuehua lifted her veil herself, without waiting for Bighead Xiao, and looked at us coldly.

The sight of her face silenced everyone.

What a beautiful face, the face of a young lady from a wealthy household. So young, so distinguished.

Becoming Bighead Xiao’s concubine was a loss for her.

Xiao Hu and I had been the most ordinary pair of farmers in our little mountain village.

We were introduced at fourteen and married at fifteen. His family was poor. Mine was not only poor; I was its sole survivor.

Yet as a young couple, even bran and vegetables had tasted sweet. If he found sweet bean pods on the road, he’d tuck them away and bring them home for me. I was always pushing the rice from my bowl into his. I teased him about his big head and called him Bighead Xiao. He would say nothing, just gaze at me sweetly, then throw himself at me the next moment.

We were dirt-poor peasants, but we were happy. Then the recruiters came, and everything vanished.

I was seventeen that year, and Bighead Xiao was eighteen. He packed two old outfits and went off to war, looking back with every step.

The world grew more chaotic, and food grew scarcer. Both my parents-in-law died. Alone, I tore off a length of white cloth and wore mourning in Bighead Xiao’s place as I laid them to rest.

Families that still had men fled the village. Only we women and children whose husbands had been taken away stayed together, clinging to a faint hope.

Heaven was merciful. After I waited five years, Bighead Xiao came back.

Looking at his parents’ memorial tablets, he bawled like a child. When he finished crying, he bowed his head to the ground before me. “Wife, I’ll remember what you’ve done for the rest of my life. Come with me. I’ve rebelled. We can’t stay in the village.”

By rebellion, he meant that a bunch of soldiers who received no food or pay from the court, yet were forced to kill ordinary people, had run away together. Everywhere, people were planting a flag and rising up. They followed suit.

Many of those soldiers came from our village. Bighead Xiao was the best fighter there. Somehow, he became the leader of those few dozen men.

Unlike displaced refugees, soldiers had blades. At first, they only seized a town, killed a few corrupt merchants, and used their grain to make porridge and settle the refugees.

Perhaps because we women had known hunger, we made our porridge thicker than elsewhere. More and more refugees gathered, until they too were recruited as soldiers.

One town gradually became two. Two towns became one county, then three counties, until at last we had to attack a city.

Yang Yuehua came from that city. Her father, Yang Rong, was the commander defending Mo City.

A whole city, with towering walls. Bighead Xiao nearly scratched his head bald trying to work out how to take it. But our army had come this far. It could only keep going.

Yang Rong was the first to yield.

He thought he couldn’t win, and he greatly admired Bighead Xiao.

He sent someone to negotiate. If Bighead Xiao spared the city’s people and took Yang Yuehua, he would surrender with the entire city.

No woman wants to share her man. What I hadn’t expected was that Yang Yuehua didn’t want this either.