Chapter 1

After Father died, my eldest uncle took my hands and urged me to sell myself to pay for his burial.

I nodded eagerly.

Then I turned around, put my five-year-old sister on my back, and ran away.

By the time we reached Linjiang, we had gone three days without food.

My sister took some flatbreads from a street stall.

The woman who ran it came after us. “One wasn’t enough for you? You had to take two?”

“One for my sister,” she said, “and one for me.”

The woman gave a soft laugh.

I coaxed the flatbreads out of my sister’s hands and offered them back.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “She was terribly hungry. I’ll teach her better. It won’t happen again.”

My sister stared at the bread, but she was good and said nothing more.

She had always listened to me.

The woman didn’t take it. She pushed back a sweat-damp lock of hair and sighed. “Come on. I’ll give you some hot soup.”

She led us back to the stall, brought out two earthenware bowls, and filled each halfway.

“It’s hot. Sip around the edges. You can have more if you want.”

Then she turned back to kneading her dough.

My sister was famished and soon finished a whole flatbread. I broke off half of mine and gave her that too.

Once she was full, she curled into my arms and began to doze.

Her two little pigtails stuck up in untidy tufts.

We couldn’t expect a kind person to feed us every day. It was time I made up my mind.

While I sat lost in thought, a man who looked like an old village schoolmaster approached, gathered up his plain blue robe, and sat down.

The stallholder smiled. “The usual, sir? One straw-sandal flatbread and a bowl of soup?”

He nodded. “That’s right, Mrs. Xue. You’ve a good memory.”

Only then did I notice the cloth banner tied to a pole beside the stove. In black ink, it read: Xue’s Flatbread Stall.

The old man winked at me and pointed to himself. “I wrote that.”

He looked very kind.

I relaxed a little and managed to smile back.

A shrill voice drifted over from the street. “Well, well, the great Steward Zhou! You could afford ten sweet flatbreads a day. Why eat those old sandal soles?”

The old man said nothing.

A woman came fluttering her handkerchief, bringing a heavy waft of perfume with her.

She moved closer and simpered. “Brother Zhou, surely your household needs servants now and then? Why won’t you ever send a little business my way?”

I understood at once.

She was a broker who bought and sold people.

Exactly the sort of person I had been thinking of finding.

But she looked sly and untrustworthy.

His beard was white, yet she was calling him “Brother.”

The old man tucked his hands into his sleeves and closed his eyes.

She would not leave him alone. “How is your mistress? She won’t last the winter, will she?”

“If your master wants a new wife, I have several very pretty girls. If the mourning period makes things awkward, he can have one brought in quietly first.”

“Come now, Brother. Help us make the introductions. Once this one’s dead, the new mistress is bound to reward you.”

Steward Zhou still said nothing.

The woman smiled, looked down, and took a packet of melon seeds from inside her clothes.

She cracked a few in quick succession, her eyes roving until they landed on me and lit up. “Oh, look how you’ve worn out those shoes! Fleeing trouble somewhere, are you? Come with me. I’ll find you work!”

She reached out to drag me along.

The old man coughed and opened his eyes sharply.

Mrs. Xue hurried over. “She’s a distant cousin of mine, here for a few days.”

The woman snorted through her nose. “Tell that to a fool. Get back to your flatbreads. You can’t poach a broker’s business.”

She squeezed my upper arm and smiled. “You must be thirteen by now. If work sounds too hard, you could become a concubine!”

“Old Master Lu is turning eighty. They measure the gold and silver in his house by the bushel, and he’s looking for another little wife.”

My heart pounded.

If I didn’t want my sister and me to starve, would I have to deal with people like this?

That great blood-red mouth looked as though it could swallow me whole and leave not even a bone.

“The county magistrate mentioned you a few days ago,” the old man said coldly.

“You helped the Xu girl run off with a man, didn’t you? He’s looking to haul you in for questioning. Abduction, he called it.”

The woman froze.

She gave a couple of dry laughs, then vanished like a gust of wind.