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I. Bud
In the third month of the fourth year of the new Emperor's reign, two significant events of note took place in the trade portal town an hour’s travel distance from Fugu.
The young master of the Shi estate had gone missing. That, and the head of the Shi family had called for a teacher for his youngest ward. Whether these two occurrences worthy of the town gossip were related or consequential had mattered very little at the time. Every bit of news was a morsel to chew on until there was nothing to worry at but the bone of rumor. With time, the disappearance of the Shi heir became an infrequent remark to bring up when news was torturously slow, an afterthought. After all, it was not nearly as scandalous as the sudden gall to educate a mere girl child, one of a distant, indirect family line, at best. An illegitimate child of the family patriarch, at worst.
The pickings were slim even with the hefty Shi coffers dangling before them. No school master worth his title would deign to take the post at a merchant’s manor for the task of amusing a child less than a decade away from marriage. Dedicated schools for the little mistresses of influential families have sprung up like weeds in the wake of the Emperor’s decree allowing his young legitimate daughters to attain a respectable, if modest level of schooling. His consorts were quick to follow suit with their own charges, officials extending the same privilege to their own households. It was a shyly progressive gesture yet to penetrate the rest of the reticent realm. Where the Shi estate crested, the practice was still outright preposterous.
It explained the advanced age of the tutor to have taken up the position, with bones that had seen better days and a straw backpack to match their brittleness, meeting the call after a fortnight of inquiries. The old schoolmaster was hale enough to carry his own bones, thank you very much. The straw backpack, however, remained firmly on a young, rigid back, straight as a bamboo shoot. The serious face of the littlest scholar, his young student and assistant, betrayed none of the litany of memorized orders that looped about in his head. Do not stare at anything but ahead. Speak only when spoken to. Do not turn your nose up at your new study companion. She is deserving of receiving knowledge as much as you are, an education that is equally a privilege to you both. And her family can buy yours ten times over .
The kind tone, ill juxtaposed with a stern, haughty looking face pulled He Xuan out of his reveries. He had relegated his teacher’s lengthy lecture on the place of propriety in education to the background, a droning he was well acquainted with and added little of value to the mind of the prim six year old, an old soul in a serious child’s body. Besides, the speech was not directed at him at all, made to impress their newest patron. The gentle suggestion from the estate master, however, was made to the child.
“Drawing contracts must make even the most patient one of us restless,” he started carefully, “As you will be spending quite the number of hours here, you should make friends with the koi fish in the courtyard. They do love their visitors. They will learn to greet you whenever you arrive for lessons here.”
It was the gentlest nod out of the door while the masters of their respective professions discussed business. Obedience overtook mistrust, and his feet led him to the vast courtyard past an ornate display of stone tables and pebbled paths. True to the estate master’s words, visions of red and silver leapt into the air at his approach breaking the surface of the water in a splash.
He Xuan was not an easily startled child, despite the best of efforts. But as the arch of a swooping fish caught his eye in its sparkling turn, a pair of feet collided with the back of his shoulders with none of the creature’s grace.
A pair of silk boot clad feet, but feet, nevertheless. Moreover, entangled in the straps of his pack. The voice belonging to the body attached to said feet came from far above like a squeaky voiced premonition.
“Take it off and help me down!”
Take what off? The pack? The boots?! Grabbing the ankles now inadvertently stuck to him, a frantic thought that had no place in the current situation pounded in He Xuan’s head. That pair alone must cost what his parents made in a month!
A mass of fine cotton greeted him, bellowing around his head enough to make out limbs clinging valiantly to the lower branches of the chestnut tree shading the pond. He bore the weight well, at first, no stranger to carrying his sibling and other children on his shoulders. To his relief and against his mounting worry, the person had the presence of mind to let go and scramble down in a flurry of fabric. It was his own turn to crouch down and crawl back, the admonition to “not touch anything” ringing in his head on the pain of death. Besides, this person must have been used to this. They sounded unbothered, if anything.
They also sounded terribly young.
Any icy recognition chilled the blood in He Xuan’s veins once he took his first look. The horsing around was worthy of any servant’s rowdy child, but the clothes were not. Rumpled and stained from mischief, their fine craftsmanship couldn’t be hidden from the eye. The child looked about his age, hair pulled back into twin buns that were doing very little to retain the thick locks, strands escaping here and there. A heart shaped mouth split into a sunny smile, revealing a missing baby tooth that made the grin all the more endearing. It should not belong to a young mistress of the estate, and yet, there they were.
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” the child asked conspiratorially, brushing the dust off the pants peeking from under gathered skirts, “After all, since we’re going to be study mates… We should be friends from now on. Best friends! And friends don’t tell on friends!”
You are not to address your new companion with anything but my young lady, that, of all things, had been drilled repeatedly into He Xuan’s head.
Somehow, it hit the littlest scholar just how ill prepared he had been for all of this.
II. Calyx
To the lady of the estate, she was Xiao Qing, affectionately. To the expansive crew that made up the servants in the manor, she was the little mistress. To her teacher, she was the Young Lady. To her sole study companion, she was a menace.
He Xuan, an official older brother and a quiet authority on all what made young boys mature and worldly, was utterly perplexed at the little girl he was tasked with for the foreseeable future. Her limbs were too bony, her face was too round, and no amount of braiding her hair would bind it in a respectable fashion for longer than an hour. She sweet talked the cook into giving up additional buns to squirrel discreetly away from the courtyard. She could hardly sit still for lessons, her script scrawled and blotchy. And she never stopped talking.
She filled him in in the precious few moments before their lessons.The lessons, he learned later, were not only paid for by the lord of the estate, but his schoolmaster’s patron was sending charitable stipends to the He family, some compensation for the absence of their eldest child from their business. Between lessons, she talked his ear off about all important manners of things; which cat had a new litter, where a bird’s nest had just been thatched, and what the cook brought from the market last.
And, for the past week, her favorite subject and the one He Xuan is most ambivalent on: the young Shi master.
“When Ge comes back, he’s taking me to the Mid-Autumn festival,” she declared proudly around a mouthful of a steamed bun. She often wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. He Xuan watched her, half tense, anticipating the move in advance.
“He didn’t quite say it in his letter, but how could he not? Ge could never say no to me!”
Who could? Who would? The estate lord had procured a respectable scholar for this distant relative--his illegitimate child, if the townspeople fancied that truth--himself. The maids and servants could never bear to refuse the big teary eyes of their charge. But whenever He Xuan stood his ground, his study mate would just grin and bump his shoulder.
The little mistress had been, however, consistently and thoroughly refused the outside world. No amount of cajoling or begging changed the firm stance of the heads of the estate. For a brief moment, He Xuan wondered what would be like to be the one to take her to the festival instead of the young Shi heir.
The bun like many others remained uneaten, rewrapped to join everything else in his bag.
III. Unfurl
The Shi estate had never been a tranquil place.
Master Shi’s acquaintanceship spanned a network of contacts long and wide; merchants, officials and makers. He entertained like a noble lord, his feasts generous and stretching long into the night. While the little mistress’s birthday was always lost in the fanfare of one event or another, with a nod kind in gifts and modest in celebration, the guests for everything else were hosted on bigger ceremonies.
The preparation for a particular event generated an entirely different buzz on the estate’s grounds.
The inner courtyard was alive with activity, feet big and small hurrying to accommodate the estate’s newest honorable guests, making sure nothing was amiss before their arrival. The intended party was resting half a day away, not in a great rush on their part. The significance of this ebb and flow in excitement and reception was lost on the smaller parties of the estate.
“It’s the matchmaker and her newest clients,” Shi Qingtong had offered an exclamation with little ceremony, taking the chance to slip away and play to her heart’s content, for once. Her hair, worn loose today, bouncing against her back as she swung to and fro on the aged swing.
“Third auntie says they’ll be here for a week. A whole week!”
He Xuan had been memorizing the newest book gifted to him by the little mistress’s guardian for his ninth birthday when the two were shooed away from the hall. Sitting cross legged on the grass, nose but all buried in the pages, it was still more interesting than whatever his young companion was prattling about that day. Until then.
“Who’s getting married? The young master?”
he looked up briefly, brows furrowing at the blur of motion before him. The young master of the Shi estate had proudly declared, with definite finality, his intention to become a cultivator, forsaking a pre-set life of business and social thriving. It was the talk of the town for a while, for lack of better entertainment. Something twisted in He Xuan’s guts at the alternative. With the young heir secluded in the mountains for the foreseeable future, He Xuan wasn’t sure how he felt about the implication of that announcement.
The little mistress looked too excited.
“Don’t be silly!”
With slender arms that betrayed the strength of her grip, she hauled herself off the seat of the swing, feet planted firmly on the plank to swing faster, “The other young master! Young master Qingxuan. The one you’ve never met!”
Haven’t met , He Xuan corrected her silently. She spoke of the second son as if he were a phantom. With that, a little loss of interest felt suspiciously like relief.
“The one who lives with our relatives in the capital!”
Her short outer robes flap and twist behind her, wings lost to the wind.
“He’s tall! Taller than you even! Almost as tall as Ge!” never mind she hadn’t seen the older young master in years now, “And he has his very own horse, and he gets to leave the house whenever he wants. In fact, our relatives take him on trips all the time. He’s even seen the emperor's palace.”
Something cool and damp interrupted He Xuan’s entranced listening; the dirt gathered underneath one hand twisting in the grass beside him when he wasn’t looking. And something bitter coated the back of his throat, very much unlike the sweets they had not long ago. The spark of utter joy in the little mistress’s eyes… He couldn’t place for once.
“Who cares what he gets to do? He’s not marrying you, obviously,”
The words were out before he could regret them, satisfying and cruel all at once. His heart was pounding in his chest with something akin to dread.
She laughed, and a thousand bells rang in the wake of that noise in his ears. The little mistress swung faster and faster until the motion slowed to a natural stop. Her legs dangled along the plank as her hands held her up firm by the ropes, her hair a bird nest not unlike those she used to rescue.
“I guess he’s not.” she agrees, sagely, all but swallowing back a grin, “but I can’t marry a boy, anyway.”
The cryptic remark is a step up from the mind-bendingly annoying habit of hers, holding secrets over He Xuan’s head until he gave in to ask where the new squirrel family was populating in the estate, what Cook was making for their afternoon snacks. And now… Whatever this was. Holding out valiantly, studying the volume in his hands with exaggerated concentration, he allowed the silence to settle between them. She often squirmed with impatience, her little secrets an itchy patch to pick at.
Whatever he expected her to spill, it remained dormant. Her heels dragged along the grass as she moved.
“But I would marry you, even if you’re shorter than me and don’t even have a horse.”
IV. Tuck
Two months into his tenth year, their lessons were getting fewer and farther in between.
The old scholar was getting on in years, the colder months hardly kind to his joints and back. The hour long trips to the estate at the outskirts of town did his aging body no favors, even with the carriage sent dutifully to his home, a gesture of deference less and less extended with every snowfall. For his part, He Xuan regarded the decreased trips with muted disappointment.
The compensatory stipends for He Xuan’s companionship still arrived with due regularity even with the scarcer lessons. While the old scholar had accumulated enough to thatch his roof and rebuild his walls, He Xuan thought of the money set aside for his eventual departure to the capital with no small amount of guilt. His hours away from home had meant one less pair of hands around his family, one less person to set up at the market and one less child to take care of his parents’ needs. When time would come to set out for a broader education than what this town could ever offer him, his absence would be marked by semi-permanence.
The very thought of attending the Imperial College in a few years’ time was budding inside him with a quaint sense of anticipation and dread, tided over only by the lessons that were strained now by impromptuness and irregularity. Before their latest lesson, the little mistress had greeted him with a snowball to the face, and it had been the first time He Xuan allowed his young mind to stray away from guilt.
That winter, before the snow had melted, Master Shi passed away.
V. Blossom
He Xuan had arrived at the imperial college with all the apprehension a life of teetering on the edge of poverty had prepared him for. Of the faces he’d seen in his morning lessons, some rarely, if ever, turned up two days in a row. In his fifteen years of life, he’d learned early on to get by without most privileges. It was only his exposure to numerous peers--in age alone--that he realized how shallow his perception of his own circumstances were.
The privilege to let the days roll by without setting foot into the college’s courtyard. The privilege to drink away a small family’s income worth night after night, and the fortune to languish at bank side banquets while He Xuan whittled his nights away, poring over scripts and grinding ink. He wore the ink stains bleeding into the skin of his fingers to bed every night, hardly fading before they blotched his hands anew as soon as he stepped into the bookshop that had coveted his skills as a copyist--or rather, his youthful, sharp eyes and steady penmanship. He Xuan hadn’t needed to consult his quick, numbers inclined mind to realize his painstakingly accumulated savings would not last him his first year away from home. And so he went to bed with ink burrowed under his nails and ghosts of script scribed crowding his dreams.
That afternoon, he was the face missing from the day’s lesson. The menial tasks of the shop had fallen to him, an endless shuffling of crates and boxes while his master--a not so aged shopkeeper and an idle dilettante--humored and patronized the shop’s latest clients out front. He Xuan normally treated this daily occurrence with mild interest on his part, inferring what little he knew from voices alone.
Today, the ground of patrons sounded to have any significant amount of money of their own. It was not unheard of for sons and daughters of affluent families to swan about with full pouches, only that their feet would take them to fine restaurants rather than musty bookshops. While he could hear no servants in tow carrying their purchases, some female voices were certainly among that group, lilting high and mild.
Raising the hem of the flaps separating the dusty backroom from the front of the shop, a sea of white greeted him. Young cultivators in uncomplicated robes filled the room with an array of dispositions that ranged from polite boredom to sincere questioning curiosity. Not one fold distinguished the young men from the young ladies, identical in garb down to the emblems embroidered in shades of green. He Xuan’s eyes alighted, then transfixed on the most outspoken of the bunch. Their arms folded un-delicately before them, the simple, if expensive jade crown valiantly holding their shock of hair in place, strands escaping here and there.
An obituary notice had arrived at his household instead of his monthly stipend. All He Xuan could remember was white. The white of the snow blanketing the ground he navigated, offering in arms. The white of the banners obscuring the main gates. The white robes too somber on the little mistress’s body, the dead quiet too somber for her quick, cheerful countenance. The white of her eyes against blood red rims.
“The sheer disrespect… His illegitimate child at the vigil, of all people--”
“The wife is not long for this world, either. Would she have let this--”
“The son, his first born, to have allowed this farce to take place--”
He could see the strain of white seams against narrow shoulders as she sat rigid, back to the door, eyes trained forward, a nauseous blend of grief and anger betrayed by the fabric bunched in her fists. For the past year, every time he’d stepped into the estate, he’d chance on a different distant relation. Now all of them had gathered like crows among white, tongues clucking with morbid glee.
If only she would have him take her away from here. He was only a few years away from entering the Imperial College, and a few years more from taking the prefectural exams. Not even the specter of her relations could refuse a civil servant, when the time came. His family would welcome one more daughter, and they would be charmed by her incessant chattering. Miao’er would have a new friend…
By the time the snow had melted completely, the white seeping into dirt and green, both of the young master of the estate and the little mistress were gone from the Shi manor for good.
And yet, the figure arguing with his employer stood bright as day, bickering over the finer points of the newest volume of poems to hit the shop. He must have been staring for when the young cultivator caught his eye, they winked .
The young student ducked back behind the inadequate flap, the skin of one hand blanching around the edge of his writing slab.
“How are you this shameless?!”
“If I’d have known we’d be wasting our day off listening to you brag about your poetry knowledge, we’d have left without you, A-Qing.”
It was the tip of a deluge of further complaints from the equally restless cultivators. The blood thudding in He Xuan’s ears had abated by then. By the time he had recollected himself, the shop was empty of customers once more, their voices ringing loud still a few steps away from the entrance, fading away by the moment.
VI. Secund
“We’re finally the same height! Who would have thought, A-Xuan?”
The pitch of their voice was just high enough to be heard over the bolt sliding in place, locking the shop door securely. It was high enough to override the rabbiting of his heart in his chest. At first glance, it could have been the elder Shi sibling standing a few paces away, but that person--an adolescent the last time He Xuan had laid eyes on him--had not possessed the easy going demeanor of the youth before him. The relaxed slope of their shoulder and the bright, kind eyes.
When they had last parted way by way of death and grief, He Xuan had been the more impoverished of the two. Now, he stood a few seasons away from thriving, his old friend a mere merchant’s poor ward. Bolstered by the knowledge and possibilities against his nerves and against the fact his study companion had blossomed into something brighter and more different, He Xuan steeled his heart.
“I’m taking the prefectural exams next year!”
He Xuan’s exclamation stutters the burst of his friend’s own greetings, silenced a second time by his next declaration.
“Only in a few months! It won’t be long until I make it as a civil servant. I know I can make it in any ministry if I put my mind to it. So… So please wait for me, until then!”
He Xuan’s heart sank at the subtle flash of pain in his friend’s eyes at the proclamation, a moment before it passed to be replaced by something akin to pity marring those pretty features.
“...I can’t marry a boy, anyway.”
Something hollowed out the young scholar’s heart at the realization, at the possibility, pangs gnawing at the emptiness it left. The soft roundness that had started to take the shape of sharper lines and the shape that was just starting to cast its androgyny away.
“That’s still a few years away,” they murmured, he murmured.
He Xuan could see the shade of the little mistress slipping away with age. And yet, the smile was still the same, corners curving into dimples at the promise He Xuan was already suspecting was futile.
“Alright, I’ll wait for sure!”
The knot in He Xuan’s guts eased just as breath turned shallow in his throat.
“You are my best friend, after all.”
Shyness ghosted over his oldest friend’s mouth for a quick moment, bottom lip pressed into teeth before it broke into a wide grin altogether, as warm as the brilliant dusk settling around them.