[chengqing canon divergence, <2k]
There had been a very short period in between arriving in Lotus Pier and becoming confined to it. The plan had never been that Wen Qing would always stay in the compound under guard; even Jin Guangyao, in agreeing to let Jiang Cheng take her out of Jinlintai in return for his silence around the circumstances of her reappearance, had said that if they were married there would be no expectation for her to be, or appear to be, a prisoner. That was before the first close call with an assassin.
Any time she ventured out after that, which was infrequent, it was always with an armed guard of senior disciples. Because there had been more assassins, of course. If the first one failed, they had to try again. Jiang Cheng was matter-of-fact about it. He established safety protocols and schedules and drilled the disciples on them relentlessly. He equipped her with defensive and signal talismans he had prepared himself, meticulously, sometimes with his own blood. He seemed to take for granted that she would want to go to market, or take a boat down the river, or forage for herbs in the forests and marshy expanses of Yunmeng, and he prepared plans for each of these scenarios and many others besides.
But she found it difficult to leave the premises. And it wasn't because of the assassins, though they provided a convenient excuse. In an odd way, the first attempt, the one that had come closest to succeeding, had felt—exhilarating. She had expected to die in Jinlintai, and she had woken up, years later, alone and alive in a changed world. Now she wasn't alone, but the world was still so strange, and she felt dislocated in it, like there was a shadow space slightly to her left, always pulling at her to return to where she belonged. The sword had come from her right and had seemed to be guiding her to that shadow space, popping her back in the socket. She had felt the rightness of it for a single pure moment, and then, as if in response, something else surged through her, burning through her meridians and down her feet into the hard earth: the urge to stay.
For that one tiny instant between the sword appearing and Zidian yanking it away, she had made her peace with both living and dying.
So she wasn't afraid of assassins. If she died, she would be taken to wherever her family awaited her. If she didn't die, maybe she would experience that moment of total clarity again. Her respect for the time of the senior disciples kept her from testing the theory recklessly, but there was a part of her that was always curious.
No, death was not the problem. Or, more accurately: It was not her own death that was the problem.
In that first week at Lotus Pier, before the assassin, Jiang Cheng had shown her around, alternating between shyness and ease with an abruptness that would have been dizzying had she been present enough to feel the awkwardness. Automatically, dispassionately, she memorized all the routes and names he told her and exerted herself at intervals to react to his conversation, making appropriate noises and facial expressions. He took care to point out places he thought might interest her, and, she realized eventually, avoided saying anything whatsoever about what he had built himself versus what had survived the Wen.
After a few days of this, he couldn’t stay away from his work any longer. And perhaps he felt that he had started to wear out his welcome, even though he was the host. In any case, once he had taken her everywhere and introduced her to everyone, he showed her how the barriers had been adjusted to recognize her energy and then took himself back to his office. She was alone, with the run of the place.
She hadn’t known what to do with herself. She was something of a failed corpse—thawing out, the blood returning slowly. Everything felt either much too close, or too far away to be real. Or rather, it was far away that was real, and she was something else.
She tried meditating, sitting on the dock reserved for her use, but confronting the flow of her thoughts was almost excruciating. She got up and followed her feet, which took her on a direct route to the cramped workroom attached to the infirmary. Yes, there was something comforting about this place. All the little jars and packets, the mortar and pestle, the small pot with the heavy handle, the fan for the flames…She had seen similar rooms too many times in too many places for this scene to bring back any one particular memory. This was simply a way for the world to be, and for her to be in it.
She ran her fingers over the familiar tools, and her mind without her say-so began making an inventory. She didn’t know how much time had passed when she came down from a state of pure focus, a list of supplies written in her own hand. The Lotus Pier infirmary was understocked. She had a purse and she knew the way to the apothecary. She left without a second thought.
Away from the workroom, the world again took on its blurry contours, through which she glided as though passing through fog. She was so removed from herself that it didn’t occur to her until afterward how odd her walk through the market had been. She should have had to return greetings from every shopkeeper and stall-owner. She should have been asked to come look at hairpins and baskets and the latest root crop. She should have had treats pressed on her to take back and share with her husband. They had all been introduced to her as the new furen of Yunmeng Jiang and had all seen Jiang Cheng, their golden boy, treating her with respect and care. Even if they did not know her, they would have wanted to show their favor for him in their treatment of his wife.
But it was only later that Wen Qing realized she hadn’t returned a single greeting on that solitary walk, not because she ignored them, but because there weren’t any. Thinking back, most people had simply dropped their heads slightly and taken a step back—no words and not really any bows either.
She only became aware of the weather—hot, sunny—when she stepped into the apothecary’s shop, where it was dark and cool. She must have been backlit in the doorway, because the apothecary greeted her amicably and generically as guniang, and it was only when she came farther in that the heavy silence fell.
As her eyes adjusted, she saw an array of customers scattered along the long counters, attended by a couple of assistants, and the apothecary in the center, frozen in the posture of accepting payment from a little old granny. Wen Qing walked slowly to a free spot at the counter and placed her list on the polished surface, then carefully rotated it so that the characters would be right-side up to someone on the other side. The whisper of thin paper sliding against wood was the only sound in the room.
She turned her head to look at the apothecary, and he dropped his eyes and cleared his throat, taking the granny’s money and telling her to take care on the way. Then he walked, not toward Wen Qing, but toward another customer already being helped by an assistant. The other groups resumed their business and one by one trickled out, to be replaced by others who were greeted and assisted right away, as Wen Qing continued to stand alone in a bubble of eerie stillness.
She heard the word Wen and focused in on a conversation. The apothecary was refusing to take payment from a man with a prescription to treat phantom pain in the leg that had had to be amputated after he had been shot in the thigh by those Wen-dogs.
“We people of Lotus Pier have to stick together,” the apothecary was saying. “There aren’t as many of us as there used to be. My own honored father and mother, my wife and son, they would want you to have this.” He smiled gently as the man left, then his face fell into an unnatural rictus as he stood alone, no one to wait on—that is, no one worth noticing.
So that was how it was. She remembered the walk through the market now, and it made sense in retrospect. She wondered, in an academic sort of way, how she could leave this place with her dignity intact. Leave the inventory there, with some money, and act as though she had meant all along for the supplies to be delivered to her later?
A familiar change came over the room. She felt all the attention suddenly snap away, sucked into a point by the door behind her, where she knew without looking Jiang Cheng must now be standing.
She was still looking at the apothecary's face and saw how it changed when he saw Jiang-zongzhu. It fell out of its harshness and took on something tender, even protective, the brow loosening, the eyelids softening, the corners of the lips tucking back into the cheeks, the start of an indulgent smile. But in the next moment the eyes dropped, the chin falling slightly, in shame, she thought. In shame and in confusion, because this man loved Jiang-zongzhu but had been harsh to Jiang-furen for the sake of his lost and restless dead.
And perhaps defensiveness. Why should he feel ashamed to honor his dead? Why must Jiang-zongzhu put him in this position?
"Jiang-furen," Jiang Cheng said sharply, and even after only a week, she knew that meant he had read the tension and was preparing to be harsh to someone on her behalf. "Did you get what you needed here?"
She knew what that meant, too. If she said yes, he would understand that these people had been good to her. If she said no, he would understand the opposite and they would lose his favor. They had treated her like dirt, which she could not and would not deny. But they were just people, and they had already known suffering—and what did it matter that it wasn’t at her own personal hands?
She couldn't take either of the options he had presented her. "I'm tired," she said instead, and abruptly felt its truth. She turned and met his hard eyes. "Let's go home."
The tension left his face at once. Home, he said without opening his mouth. Home. She took a step toward him, then another, keeping her eyes on his, on those eyes that were looking at nothing but her. He looked at her like he would never look away.
That night, after dinner, when she sat down before the mirror in her room that was not a prison, she caught a glimpse, in her own reflection, of the complicated face of the apothecary in the moment of Jiang Cheng's arrival. “Yes,” she said, and then, taking forceful hold, rotated the jagged cliffs of her thoughts until they became a smooth, flat ground.
No one had locked her up here; she could leave at any time. But she knew that she would not.
She blew out the candles and went to sleep under the gaze of her lost and restless dead.
jacobvanloon
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