chapter 3

chapter 3

The Shens had been warriors for generations.

Every son of the clan built his life upon martial skill and gloried in military achievement.

Shen Linzhao was born the legitimate eldest son beneath the gaze of the entire family.

He was also born with a lame foot.

That foot meant he could never train as a warrior.

General Shen was fierce as fire. When he learned his eldest son was lame, rage consumed him. He meant to dash the useless infant to death then and there.

“A son of the Shens may be wounded. He may die. But he cannot be a cripple!”

Madam Shen wept and clung to the swaddling cloth, refusing to let go.

Her desperate pleas finally softened her husband.

General Shen swore that even with a lame leg, Shen Linzhao would be trained into a renowned commander.

As a child, Shen Linzhao dragged his bad foot through stance drills and punches. His body failed him again and again, sending him crashing to the ground.

His father watched coldly. Every failure earned the boy a savage beating.

At first, Madam Shen shielded him and begged for mercy.

Then she gave birth to Shen Linzhang.

This healthy, lively second son became the repository of every Shen hope.

Shen Linzhang was gifted. At three, he could hold a horse stance and wield a peachwood sword. Everyone’s affection came to him without effort.

Madam Shen poured all her tenderness into him.

General Shen, tired of looking at his defective heir, moved Shen Linzhao to the most dilapidated courtyard in the estate.

Without his parents’ protection, the boy gradually became an unseen shadow.

Years later, when Shen Linzhang was fifteen, he killed the son of the Marquis of Valor in the middle of a public street.

The woman being seized belonged to a merchant. The man possessed some money, but not enough courage to defy a marquis’s heir, so he meekly delivered his wife.

The woman refused to submit.

Humiliated, the young lord drew his whip and beat her in the street.

Shen Linzhang had just returned to the capital. Still dressed in silver armor, he sat astride his horse and loosed a strike from a hundred paces.

One sword.

Straight through the young lord’s heart.

The Marquis of Valor mourned his only son before the emperor and demanded a life for a life.

By this point in Auntie Yong’s story, pain had nearly stopped my breath.

I could already foresee what came next.

The Shen couple could neither punish nor cease loving their precious younger son. When they learned a life must be paid, they remembered the eldest son abandoned in a corner of the estate.

Handing him over would solve everything.

For the first time in years, they entered the ruined courtyard.

Dead grass covered the ground. Desolation met the eye.

Madam Shen had prepared endless arguments, ready to appeal first to reason, then to feeling.

She pushed open the door.

The room was empty.

Shen Linzhao had vanished so quietly that it seemed he had never existed.

The servants looked at one another. No one knew when he had gone.

An investigation finally revealed that he had survived by working in an apothecary. With his savings, he bribed a county clerk and obtained a new household record and travel permit.

Madam Shen flew into a rage. She cursed him as disloyal and unfilial, placed all blame upon him, and erased every trace of his existence from the residence.

General Shen had no choice but to select a frail young man from a collateral branch.

That boy died in Shen Linzhang’s place.

Auntie Yong told it plainly, almost calmly, as though she were only a spectator.

But every word was a dull blade sawing through my heart.

I had suspected there was more to the story. I had not imagined the truth could be this cruel.

Shen Linzhao, how much pain did you endure? How much injustice did you swallow before you cast everything aside and fled a thousand miles to Yaozhou?

There, you wove yourself a new identity. You grafted onto your own life the love and expectations that had always belonged to Shen Linzhang.

It was the obsession you could never resolve.

You deceived me.

You deceived yourself.

There had never been a debt to the Shens.

The three years I spent in this household were a farce.

I asked Auntie Yong to take me to his courtyard.

She shook her head.

“It was demolished long ago.”

Then she began urging me to submit.

Submission, she said, was a woman’s only road. So long as I remained obedient and committed none of the seven grounds for repudiation, Shen Linzhang would not cast me aside lightly.

Her words no longer reached me.

I rose and wrote a letter, asking her to deliver it to Ning Qimei.

On the fifth day, I was permitted out of the residence.

Shen Linzhang had not returned.

Madam Shen asked where I was going, her face dark.

I said the house felt stifling and I wished to browse the Butterfly Pavilion.

When she heard I was not returning to the Nings, she relaxed and allowed me to leave.

At the pavilion, I dismissed the maids assigned to watch me and told them to wait downstairs.

Ning Qimei was already seated in a private room on the top floor.

Marriage to the Second Prince had made her more stately than ever.

I came directly to the point. I wanted a travel permit and five thousand taels in banknotes.

She sneered with all the severity of a woman accustomed to rank.

“And if I refuse?”

I met her gaze. “Then I will make a point of revealing my identity. The Crown Prince’s faction will be delighted by such leverage.”

Her teeth clenched. “You!”

I had not contacted the Nings once in three years. They, in turn, pretended I did not exist.

I did not enjoy begging favors, but Ning Qimei was the only person who could help me now.

“I have no wish to become entangled in your affairs. Once I leave this time, I will never return.”

It was my promise to her—and my declaration that I was severing every tie with the House of Ning.

She remained silent for a long time before forcing out one word.

“Fine.”

I did not want to say more, yet one question escaped me.

“Three years ago, you received my letter telling you Shen Linzhao had died, didn’t you?”

After his death, I wrote to the Nings and asked them to inform his family.

Surely death outweighed all grievance. I had believed they would pass on that letter.

Shock appeared in Ning Qimei’s eyes, followed by silence.

Then I knew.

That letter had sunk without a trace, just like the sixty before it.

They had read it. They simply refused to invite trouble by speaking the truth.

He was an abandoned son of a clan. If he died, he died. Why should anyone care?

I had been the ignorant one, repaying an imaginary debt for three years.

As I left, Ning Qimei spoke softly behind me.

“Don’t blame Father and Mother.”

“They had their difficulties.”

I paused but did not turn.

Difficulties or deliberate choice—it no longer mattered to me.

The gentle mother from my memories, the woman who held me and called me her little darling, had faded beyond recognition.

I had been driven from place to place. Sold as a child bride. Employed as a maid in a brothel. Reduced to begging beside the road and fighting stray dogs for scraps.

All the while, I carefully preserved half of a jade pendant.

I dreamed countless times of the day I would find my family. I would throw myself into their arms and tell them I was the little girl they lost during the Lantern Festival.

Many people crossed my path. Most wanted to use or harm me.

Only that fool Shen Linzhao took pity on a beggar during a famine.

He caught me stealing from his apothecary, struck me with a soup ladle, and cursed me for ruining his herbs.

Then he seized the back of my collar and carried me inside.

He gave me two dark vegetable buns. They had no salt, yet they were the finest meal I had ever eaten.

I stayed beside Shen Linzhao and refused to be driven away.

He complained about me endlessly, yet always gave me the bun with salt.

When he saw my half of the pendant, he recognized it at once as a token of the Ning family in Chang’an.

He taught me to read and helped me send letter after letter to the capital.

Four years. Sixty letters.

Not one answer.

Only after Shen Linzhao died and I came to Chang’an did I learn that my family had received them all.

They had simply preferred an advantageous marriage to acknowledging me.

It no longer mattered.

On the day they helped me enter the Shen household, our accounts were settled.