Chapter 1

It was a year of famine, and there was nothing to eat at home.

Once Father and my younger brother had been fed, there was nothing left for Mama or me.

Three days earlier, Father had tried to sell me for grain. After asking around, he learned that the wealthy Zhao family wanted a child bride for a few sacks of buckwheat flour.

They wanted her for their lame second son.

Second Young Master Zhao had been born with his bad leg, but he blamed everyone else for it.

Why should other people have two sound legs? Why should he have everything in the world except that?

So he broke his pageboy’s legs. Then a maid’s. He did not even spare the Zhao family’s big orange cat.

He cut off one of its legs with a pair of scissors. The cat clawed his face bloody and fled into the wasteland that very night.

I happened to be digging for wild greens there. Rain whispered through the dark, and the cat’s cries sounded like a baby wailing.

I could not bear to leave it, so I carried the big orange cat home and hid it in our woodshed.

“Da Ju, Da Ju…” I had no food to share, so all I could do was make it a nest from the cleanest dry straw I could find. “Never go back to the Zhao house. Stay with me from now on, all right?”

The cat could not understand my words, but it knew I meant it no harm. Da Ju licked the back of my hand, then went back to cleaning its blood-soaked wound.

Who would dare marry a boy like Second Young Master Zhao?

Mama refused with everything she had. She clung to Father’s arm, only for him to shove her to the ground.

Sharp stones sliced her palm. The bloody gash looked just like Da Ju’s wound.

It hurt so much to see her like that that I cried, “Mama, I’ll go to the Zhao house. They have food there. I’ll be living well, so please don’t worry about me!”

Mama would not give up. She tried to lunge for me again.

In the end, Father tied her up in the donkey shed.

An old donkey had once lived there, worked to the bone its entire life. At the very end, it had been nothing but skin stretched over bone. It died in its harness, still turning the millstone.

Now Mama was the one tethered in its place.

She, too, had labored for this family without a moment’s rest. And after all that, she could not even protect her own daughter.

Father dragged me to the gates of the Zhao estate. Girls for sale were everywhere.

Most had been brought by their fathers, each man hoisting a little girl up for inspection.

When their daughters needed lifting up, these fathers did all they could to grind them down. Now, when they should never have lifted them at all, they raised daughters for sale while keeping their sons.

Father greeted several cousins from his branch of the family. “You came without telling me? Always hiding the good opportunities from your own kin!”

I had grown up with their daughters. Some still had tear tracks on their faces. Others wore no expression at all.

We were only eight or nine, and already we had learned to submit to our fate.

Not to be outdone, Father seized my collar and thrust me forward.

The Zhao steward took one look at me, sucked on his pipe, and curled his lip. “The pork hanging in our smokehouse for three years has more meat on it than this girl.”

Father panicked. He hurried to the well, hauled up a bucket, and forced me to lift it. Then he tugged at the steward’s sleeve.

“Look again, sir. She’s thin, yes, but strong. She can do the work of two maids!”

From far away came Mama’s sobbing cry. “Xu Erniu, let go of my daughter!”

I turned. Mama was running toward us with a sickle in her hand. Her wrists were a web of wounds, blood dripping all along the road.

The cuts had plainly been made by the sickle. She must have been so desperate to save me that she had hacked through the ropes without caring how badly she hurt herself.

Mama was a gentle woman. She could not bear to watch a chicken or sheep being slaughtered. Even a story about a hungry beggar made her quietly wipe away tears.

Yet for me, she did not fear pouring out her own blood. The only thing she feared was seeing me thrown into a den of wolves.

That day, she fought like a madwoman, swinging the sickle. Her hands shook uncontrollably, but she planted herself in front of me all the same.

All I could see was Mama’s slender back.

“Yuanyue, don’t be afraid. Mama’s here…”