chapter 1

chapter 1

Everyone in Chang’an was talking about the extraordinary event.

Shen Linzhang had been simple-minded for three years. Yet the instant he saw General Huo riding toward him, clarity returned to his eyes.

Their gazes met as though they had been parted for a lifetime.

In the next breath, Shen Linzhang vaulted onto a horse, robes flying, and rode after her.

Before the day was out, storytellers had already turned it into a romance.

A block struck the table in the teahouse, and the room fell silent. The storyteller’s voice rose with martial fervor, then softened with yearning. He began with Shen Linzhang’s youthful fame and carried the tale through Huo Feiying’s incomparable splendor.

They had ridden side by side across battlefields, sharing life and death amid flashing blades.

The listeners thumped the tables and cheered, praising them as a match made in heaven.

By tacit agreement, everyone forgot about me—Shen Linzhang’s lawful wife.

They forgot that I had married him when the House of Shen stood on the brink of ruin, then cared for him in obscurity for three years.

The moment Shen Linzhang entered my room, I knew something had changed.

His stride was steady, his presence utterly unlike the man I had known. He placed a letter of divorce before me.

“I had no control over losing my memory. Now that I have recovered, our marriage can no longer be counted as valid.”

“We will divorce today. We can still be friends afterward.”

My hand paused over the medical book I had been leafing through. My gaze rested on a passage explaining the difference between star anise and poisonous false star anise.

Their fruits looked almost identical.

Yet one was a spice, while the other could kill.

Staring at those few lines, I thought of someone else. Grief needled through my chest until I could barely breathe.

In the end, you only look like him.

You are not him.

Shen Linzhang seemed to mistake my silence for heartbreak. His voice sharpened.

“You grew up in a rear courtyard, like a caged bird. You are unbearably dull.”

“The woman I love is a valiant general like Feiying.”

Each word cut like a knife.

He had not even changed his clothes, yet he seemed to have shed one skin and stepped into another.

“Did recovering your senses erase all memory of the last three years?” I asked quietly, with the faintest edge of mockery.

Three years ago, Shen Linzhang had suffered a crushing defeat at Mayao City and been gravely wounded. His thoughts and actions regressed to those of a young child.

The physician said a clot in his head had taken his memory.

He forgot his identity, his parents, and even how to wield a sword.

The brilliant young general who had once pointed his blade at the heavens became, overnight, a fool who could not remember his own name.

When news of the defeat reached Chang’an, the emperor flew into a rage and laid every fault at Shen Linzhang’s feet.

The great clans were skilled at reading imperial favor. One after another, they severed ties with the Shens.

The House of Shen fell from the clouds into the mud, becoming a calamity everyone hurried to avoid.

Only I begged my father to let me marry Shen Linzhang while the family reeled beneath the storm.

“Begged” was too generous a word.

I had been back at the Ning residence for three months, and Ning Qimei had thrown tantrums for all three.

She was my full-blooded younger sister, but she refused to acknowledge me.

The emperor had betrothed the legitimate daughter of the Ning marquisate to the Second Prince. If I returned to the family register, she would become merely the second legitimate daughter, and I—the elder sister recovered halfway through our lives—would take her place in the marriage.

She refused.

So did I.

I had returned to my birth family for one purpose alone: to marry Shen Linzhang.

Father scolded me with an icy face, saying I had brought trouble the moment I came home.

“The Shens have incurred the emperor’s displeasure. If you marry into that house, where does that leave the Nings?”

His voice was an icicle in deep winter, sharp enough to hurt.

At last, suspicion darkened his eyes. “Have you and Shen Linzhang been carrying on in secret?”

I shook my head. We had not.

I merely owed someone a debt.

His unruly younger brother had inherited their father’s martial ambition from childhood. He had trained with blades and swords and grown into an exceptional young man.

That younger brother was the one person he could never stop worrying about.

Madam Shen had believed a Daoist priest who said a marriage might dispel her family’s misfortune. Without the name of a Ning daughter, marrying into the Shen household would have been all but impossible for me.

Father could withstand my stubbornness, but not Ning Qimei’s tears.

In the end, I entered the House of Shen as the Nings’ adopted daughter and became Shen Linzhang’s wife.

I cared for him for three years and brewed his medicine every day.

He once plucked the brightest begonia in the courtyard for me. When I was ill, he kept watch beside my bed through the entire night.

Back then, his eyes were clear as a child’s. He said his wife was the best wife in the world.

Now his mind was whole again, and the first thing he wanted was to cast me aside.

Shen Linzhao, is this the boy you called unruly but good at heart?

He is nothing of the sort.

He is not worth one ten-thousandth of you.

I lowered my eyes to the letter on the table. The ink had not yet dried; he must have written it the moment he returned.

His brow furrowed, his tone civil but distant.

“I will give you all of the Shen household’s income from the past year.”

“You are only an adopted daughter. The Nings may not take you back after you leave. This money will keep you comfortable for the rest of your life.”

Then his voice lifted, as though he were bestowing alms.

“Will that be enough?”

I closed the medical book and walked toward the bed.

A bright moon hung high in the sky.

Shen Linzhao, you once told me the moon shone brightest over one’s homeland.

But you never told me the moon of home could be so cold.

With my back to Shen Linzhang, I spoke so softly that my words nearly dissolved into the wind.

“Leave it there. Come collect it tomorrow.”

His signature was already on the letter, every stroke powerful and assured, just like the man he had become.

Once I added mine, he could take it to the authorities and dissolve the marriage.

Thereafter, we would go our separate ways and seek our own happiness.

The April sun was warm when Madam Shen summoned me.

I had been moving the medical books into the courtyard to air them. A breeze turned their pages, releasing the faint scent of herbs.

Yaozhou never had weather this pleasant. Sandstorms raged there throughout the year, blotting out the sky. You could take off your headscarf and shake three pounds of dust from it.

Shen Linzhao had guarded these books as though they were his very life. If I tried to read one without permission, he would pretend to hit me.

“Li Cuicui! Get your filthy hands off my treasures!”

His name, Linzhao, sounded as pure and lofty as a sunlit breeze. His temper was anything but.

He threatened to hit me over every disagreement. A wrongly written character earned a beating. So did oversalting the food. Killing one of the precious herbs he had painstakingly raised was an even greater crime.

He was forever exasperated with me.

“You are so hopeless that you are ruining this young master’s reputation as a sage physician!”

Whenever he said that, I rolled my eyes and called him a quack behind his back.

“You treat people like horses and call yourself a sage physician? Ugh!”

He would whirl around, seize whatever lay closest, and charge after me. If nothing was within reach, he balanced on one foot, pulled off his shoe, and hurled it.

“You little wretch! So you’ve finally rebelled!”

Shrieking, I fled into the herb garden.

The sickly patch of yellow-green herbs was another of his treasures. Afraid of trampling them, he dared not chase me too hard.

Thinking I had won, I grew bolder and pulled a face at him.

He flung his shoe, clenched his fists in impotent fury, and roared, “Your master is expelling you from his school!”

At the time, I thought I had outrun him.

Only later did I learn that he was lame. Without his shoe, he could not run far at all.

Shen Linzhao, you always longed to hear me call you Master. I was too proud and insisted on using your full name.

Now I stand where you once stood and look upon the scenes you once saw.

The skirts women wear in Chang’an are narrow and binding. I can no longer run in them.

Master, will you come back and strike me one more time?

Use a willow switch or a feather duster. No matter how much it hurts, I promise I will not dodge.

…

Incense curled from the gilded beast-shaped burner inside Madam Shen’s chamber.

She had not looked so well in a long time. Her brow was smooth, her smile radiant.

Shen Linzhang had recovered his memory and received an imperial summons. The House of Shen would surely rise again before long.

She beckoned me closer.

During my years in the household, I had seldom seen her. After losing his memory, Shen Linzhang recognized no one but me and followed me everywhere.

Madam Shen had collapsed in General Shen’s arms and wept until her heart seemed ready to break. Even I was moved by her grief.

But Shen Linzhang had decided that I was the only person he knew, and he would not leave my side.

Red candles burned high on our wedding night.

He lifted my veil, innocent bewilderment in his voice.

“Big Sister, are you my wife?”

For one instant, I almost believed Shen Linzhao had returned.

The same upturned phoenix eyes held three parts sharpness beneath their boldness.

The brothers looked far too much alike.

So alike that, in that moment, I could not help mistaking the man before me for Shen Linzhao.

I once asked Shen Linzhang why he trusted me so completely when we had never met.

He sucked on his forefinger, tilted his head, and thought for a long while before pointing at my eyes.

“Because Wife’s eyes sparkle. They are full of Zhang’er.”

Then he seemed to grow unhappy. He lowered his head and muttered, “Father is sad. He says Zhang’er cannot uphold the family.”

“Mother is sad. She says she will have no one to rely on in her old age.”

“Only Wife has eyes full of Zhang’er.”

Was that why he avoided his parents?

Did he stay away because he could not bear the heartbreak beneath their expectations—or because he hated his own helpless, childish state?

My throat tightened and my eyes stung.

Everyone called him a fool, but he understood everything.

A parent’s love could carry a price.

My own parents favored Ning Qimei in the same way.

Their affection always contained a measure of profit.

Ning Qimei’s beauty and polished speech destined her to marry the higher-ranked Second Prince and win the Nings a place among the foremost clans.

That was a burden no village girl like me could carry.