The ancestral hall was dim and close and smelled of sandalwood.
After the white glare of the courtyard, Li Yuguo's eyes took a long moment to adjust. Shapes came slowly out of the gloom: the dark cedar beams overhead, black with years of smoke; the faded silk hangings on the walls; the low lacquered altar at the far end, its red gone almost brown. Two tall bronze censers stood before it, and from each one a few sticks of incense rose in thin gray threads that hung perfectly still in the windless air before they unraveled near the ceiling. Their tips glowed like coals. The heat outside could not reach in here. The stone floor was cool through the soles of his boots, and the silence had the thick, padded quality of a room where people only ever whispered.
On the altar stood the spirit tablets.
There were several of them, arranged in careful rows on a stepped stand of black wood—tall narrow slabs, lacquered and lettered in gold, each one the seat of an ancestor's soul. Most were old, their gold dulled. But two stood on the highest step at the center, newer than the rest, their lacquer still glossy, their characters still bright. Before those two, a small dish of fresh fruit had been laid out: three peaches, a handful of lychees, a cup of clear wine.
He read the gold characters, and something in this body's chest gave a dull, painful lurch.
Li.
Nalan Meng walked past him into the hall without looking back.
She did not stride now. She moved quietly, almost softly, her boots barely sounding on the stone, and at the altar she stopped and drew three fresh sticks of incense from a box, lit them from the censer, and held them before her face in both hands. Then she knelt on one of the round straw futons before the tablets, and bowed until her forehead nearly touched the floor, and when she straightened again her voice was low and even and very formal.
"Father-in-law. Mother-in-law." She placed the incense in the censer. "Your daughter-in-law has not been able to manage her husband. It is my failure. I beg my parents-in-law to forgive me."
Li Yuguo stood frozen in the doorway.
Her failure.
He had expected screaming. He had expected the whip. He had expected, at the very least, to be hung from a locust tree and smoked like a ham. He had not expected her to kneel in front of his parents' spirit tablets, in her scandalous crimson silk and her silver helmet, and take the blame onto her own straight shoulders.
He did not know what to do with that.
So he did the only thing he could think of. He walked forward and knelt on the futon beside hers.
The straw creaked under his knees. It was old and flattened, worn into two shallow hollows by years of kneeling, and his knees found those hollows on their own—sank into them with the ease of long habit, as if this body had knelt here a great many times before. Of course it had. His wife had just said so.
He looked sideways at her.
She was kneeling perfectly straight, hands resting on her thighs, her eyes fixed on the tablets. The incense smoke drifted across her profile. In this dim, quiet light, without the sun blazing on her and the crowd cowering around her, she looked younger. Nineteen. A girl, kneeling at an altar.
And as he looked at her, the plot came back to him.
It came the way memories come in a dream: not in order, but all at once, layered on top of each other. His own notes, scribbled at a plywood desk. The chapters he had published. And underneath them, warmer and more painful, something else—the real Li Yuguo's memories, rising up through the flesh like water through sand.
Li Yuguo was the King of Soft Rice. Everyone knew that.
What everyone seemed to forget was whose son he was.
He was the only son of the Li family—and the Li family had once been very great indeed. His father had been a general. Not just any general. The General of the Devil, the soldiers had called him, because on the battlefield he fought like something that had climbed up out of hell, and for twenty years he had been known as the First God of War of the Haotian Kingdom. Barbarians on the frontier had used his name to frighten their children.
And at his side, through every one of those campaigns, had ridden another man: the Third Prince of the royal house. General Changsheng. The Ever-Victorious.
The two had sworn brotherhood in blood on some forgotten battlefield, the way men do in stories like this, and they had fought back to back for the rest of their lives, south and north and south again. The kingdom had called them the Haotian Double Heroes. Where one went, the other followed. What one began, the other finished.
That was why.
That was the only reason a useless, soft, preening young man like Li Yuguo had been permitted to marry a prince's daughter. Not his face. Not his talent. Not anything he had ever done. When the General of the Devil fell, his sworn brother had taken his orphaned son under his wing—and bound him to the house of Nalan the surest way he knew. He had given him his ninth daughter.
Li Yuguo's knees ached a little in their hollows.
And what did he do with her?
Nothing. That was the answer. Nothing good.
From the very beginning, the marriage had been a hollow thing. Whether it was Li Yuguo's cowardice or his incompetence—or simply that, standing next to a woman like Nalan Meng, any man with half his weakness would have felt like a worm next to a tiger—the two of them had never once shared a room. Never shared a bed. She slept in the east wing. He slept in the west. They were husband and wife in name, on paper, before the ancestors, and in no other way at all.
And so Li Yuguo, humiliated and frustrated and panicking at his own uselessness, had gone looking elsewhere.
He had flirted with the daughters of good families. With merchants' wives and shopkeepers' sisters. He had sent poems and bribed maids and arranged clumsy little meetings in teahouses. And the saddest part—the part that had made readers laugh out loud—was that he had never once succeeded. Not one time. Because at the most critical moment, just when the girl was blushing and his hand was creeping toward hers, the door would slam open.
And there would be Nalan Meng.
And then there would be a beating.
He remembered some of them now, with the vividness of a body that had suffered them. The broken teahouse table. The long night tied to the locust tree. His face pressed into the mud of a stable yard. The consequences of being caught by Nalan Meng were always serious—but even through the pain, even in the original Li Yuguo's resentful, self-pitying memories, he could tell that it was never really the anger that cut the deepest.
It was the disappointment.
She had wanted to divorce him. Of course she had. Any woman would have. It would have been easy—a prince's daughter could break a marriage with a word. The only thing that had held her back, all these years, was respect. Respect for the dead. For the two newer tablets on the highest step. For the General of the Devil and his wife, who had been her father's brother and sister in all but blood.
If it weren't for them, she'd have thrown me out years ago.
He looked at the tablets. They looked back, gold and silent.
And then he remembered how her story ended.
He wished he hadn't.
Half a year from now—give or take, he had never been precise with timelines—a young man would arrive in Nalan City. A disciple of the True Yuan Sect, with wheat-colored skin and a sealed bloodline and a destiny so heavy it bent the world around it. Ye Qiong. And behind Ye Qiong, the way a storm comes behind its first gust of wind, would come everything else: his rivals, his enemies, the old grudges and the hunters on his trail. The protagonist's halo did not only attract treasures. It attracted disaster. Wherever Ye Qiong went, cities burned.
Nalan City burned first.
And Nalan Meng died defending it.
He had written that scene. He remembered writing it, late at night, quite pleased with himself. The Luo Sha Nv on the city wall with her great sword in her hands and her silver helmet gone, her black hair loose in the smoke, fighting on long after any sane warrior would have fallen—holding the gate alone so the people behind her could flee. He had given her a good death. A heroic death. The readers had loved her; some had even cried. Such a tough, fierce, sexy woman, one comment had said, and the author kills her off for a side quest. Truly a monster.
He had been proud of that comment.
And the funniest thing—the cruelest thing, the thing he had thought was so clever—was Li Yuguo.
Because Li Yuguo had only woken up at the very end. Only in the last moment, watching his wife fall in front of him, had the King of Soft Rice finally understood what he had been married to. Who she had been. What she had carried for him, alone, all those years. He had wept. He had screamed her name. He had finally, finally wanted to become steel.
And it had been far too late to matter.
Li Yuguo knelt on the flattened straw and stared at the girl beside him, and he did not feel clever at all.
Half a year.
Maybe a little more. Maybe less. Once Ye Qiong and his group appeared, the end of Nalan City began, and nothing in the story could stop it.
Unless he started now.
And even if he started now, it might already be too late.
He looked at Nalan Meng again—really looked, the way he had not been able to on the avenue, with the sun in his eyes and her body filling his vision. The straight back. The hands resting on her thighs, which he saw now were rough across the palms and scarred on the knuckles. The faint gray shadows under her eyes. The fine lines of strain at the corners of her mouth, that had no business being on a nineteen-year-old face.
This woman, he thought, is not having an easy time.
He thought of the faded lacquer on the mansion gate. The slipped roof tiles patched with cheap clay. The weeds in the forecourt. The tired servants. He thought of City Gate Avenue, and how beneath the noise of the merchants there had been all those beggars in the shade, and the sour shrunken canals, and the stray dogs too weak to bark.
Nalan City was not a rich city. He had written it as a border town, and in truth, it was barely that. It was more like an overgrown village with a wall around it. The roads outside the main avenue were packed dirt. The wells were failing. The granaries he had glimpsed were half empty. Everything was rudimentary; it would not have been an exaggeration to call most of it dilapidated.
And she was trying to hold all of it together, alone, with a useless husband hanging off her neck like a stone.
"Tell me."
Nalan Meng rose from the futon. She did it slowly, smoothly, with the same unhurried grace with which she had dismounted, and she took three more sticks of incense from the box and lit them and set them before the two newest tablets, one for his father and one for his mother, before she turned around.
"Why were you near the city gate again today?"
Her voice was quiet. Her eyes, looking down at him, were completely indifferent.
That was the worst part. Not angry. Not even disappointed anymore. Just—flat. Empty. The eyes of someone asking a question she already knew the answer to, and had stopped caring about long ago. As if she had given up on Li Yuguo so completely that even her contempt had worn out.
The look pulled him out of the past and dropped him back into the cool, dim hall.
Think, he told himself. You're a writer. Write your way out.
"That's right," he said. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips. "I—I was thinking. I think we can save Nalan City."
There was a pause.
"What do you mean?" said Nalan Meng.
He made himself sit up straighter on the futon. He made himself meet her eyes.
"Nalan City is on the border of the Haotian Kingdom," he said. "Everyone treats that like a curse. But it's also an advantage. A huge advantage. We're on the only road to the capital. Every merchant coming up from the south has to pass through our gate. Every caravan. Every cart of silk and tea and salt." The words came faster now; he could hear his old self in them, the man who had spent years building worlds out of exactly this kind of logic. "There are so many of them coming and going, and right now they just pass through. They pay the gate tax, and they drink and they gamble and they leave. If we could make use of that traffic—really use it, instead of just letting it flow past us—it might be able to make life for the people of Nalan a little better."