Chapter 7
After leaving the boat and changing to a carriage, I finally reached Minzhou three months later.
A fine drizzle was falling when I entered the city.
I was still wondering where to find Xiao Yi when I heard people talking by the road.
“Prince An is back!”
“Prince An and his princess have returned to the residence!”
A buzzing filled my head.
His princess?
I followed the stream of people and finally saw him beyond the crowd.
After five years apart, he was much thinner than before, and there was greater composure in his face.
In his arms, he held a boy of three or four.
The boy clutched his robe, calling him Father in a little child’s voice.
A young woman stood beside him, calm and serene.
She straightened his rain-dampened collar, then took a handkerchief from a maid and wiped the drops from his shoulders.
Xiao Yi did not move away.
He merely frowned at the growing throng of displaced people and quietly urged his princess to go inside.
Standing among the crowd, I suddenly felt cold.
Xiao Yi.
His Highness Prince An.
The reigning emperor’s full younger brother.
Nobody knew that he had been my husband, and I his first wife.
Five years.
Long enough for him to marry again. Long enough for a babbling infant to grow old enough to call him Father.
Xiao Heng had not lied.
In my second year of captivity, he told me Xiao Yi had taken another wife and had a child.
At the time, a joyous announcement had arrived from the princely residence in Minzhou.
Xiao Heng threw it before me and forced me to write his letter of congratulations myself.
I did not cry.
I simply wrote, stroke by stroke:
“May Prince An and his princess live in harmony and grow old together.”
Xiao Heng stared at it for a long time, then suddenly tore the letter to shreds.
He told me I wasn’t convincing anyone.
Now it seemed there had been nothing wrong with those congratulations.
Through the veil of rain, Xiao Yi seemed to sense something and suddenly looked in my direction.
I instinctively stepped back.
Someone squeezed past in front of me, blocking his view.
I turned away.
I had come to Minzhou to find my husband.
But my husband had ceased to exist five years ago.
Xiao Yi was another woman’s husband now, and someone else’s father.
I found lodging at a clinic in the south of the city.
There were many displaced people, and many sick among them. The clinic was looking for help.
The proprietor wasn’t very good with money. Whenever he earned any, he bought medicine for the poor, and his son often called him a wastrel.
But he always said:
“When has anyone ever earned enough? A full belly is enough for me.”
“More displaced people every day. We help whoever we can.”
“Poor souls, all of them. Who would leave home if they could still make a living there?”
He watched me write prescriptions, his gaze a little critical.
Only after seeing one of my prescriptions break a child’s high fever, and my needles save a woman in difficult labor, did he set his doubts completely aside.
“Who would have thought it? So young, and such a good physician.”
I smiled. “It’s been a long time since I treated anyone. I’m terribly nervous.”
By day, I treated the displaced.
At night, beneath a tiny flame, I wrote out from memory, page by page, the medical books I had read in the palace.
Many remedies existed only in unique copies held by the Imperial Medical Bureau. Physicians outside might never see them in their entire lives.
Since I had made it out of the palace alive, I had to leave those remedies behind.
The princely residence put up one relief notice after another, yet less and less grain actually reached the people.
Another day passed.
As I took a patient’s pulse, I heard a tall, thin man cursing, spittle flying.
“What rotten luck, having a prince like ours.”
“Look at the chaos outside! He’s the prince of this fief. Disaster strikes his own lands, and what has he done for us besides hand out a little watery porridge?”
“The relief money from court never arrives, the officials below him are fat as pigs, and the people are so hungry they’re selling their children. But Prince An’s residence? A few days ago, they bought dozens of cartloads of silk and jewels!”
I stood there, my ears ringing.
Every word was a fine needle, piercing my heart in a dense swarm.
Instinctively, I wanted to defend him.
To say Xiao Yi wasn’t that sort of man.
Once, if he saw someone shivering beside the road, he would take off his own cloak.
If patients couldn’t afford their medicine, he would quietly wave them away, then pay out of his own pocket, leaving the silver beneath the medicine cabinet.
He had been so gentle, so softhearted. How could he watch his own fief come to this?
But the words rose to my lips, and I swallowed them one by one.
I had not seen him for five years.
For those five years, I had been trapped behind palace walls, unable even to hear clearly what was happening outside.
I did not know what he had been through since.
Nor did I know what sort of man Prince An had become.