He stopped.
The incense smoke drifted between them.
Nalan Meng stood absolutely still.
Inside her chest, something went bang.
It was like a firecracker going off behind her breastbone. For a moment her ears actually rang with it. She stared down at the man kneeling on the futon—at the soft white face she had learned to hate, the full red mouth that had told her a thousand lies, the long lashes that had batted at a hundred other women—and she could not make the words that had just come out of that mouth fit inside that face.
Make use of the traffic.
Make life better for the people.
Li Yuguo had said that. Li Yuguo. The same Li Yuguo who, three months ago, had gambled away the silver she had set aside for repairing the south wall. Who had once asked her, quite seriously, why the peasants didn't simply buy more rice if they were hungry. Who had never in his life said the word people except when complaining that there were too many of them in his way.
For one dizzy heartbeat, she felt something she had not felt in a very long time.
Then she crushed it.
"Hey." Her voice came out hard and cold, and she was glad of it. "You don't think I'm going to hit you again, do you? Is that why you're spouting all this nonsense?"
Because of course that was what it was. He had seen the whip, and he was afraid, and so he was saying pretty things. He had always been good at pretty things.
She had heard pretty things from him before.
Over the years, Li Yuguo had done so much. Disappointed her so many times, in so many ways, that she had long ago stopped counting. If not for his father—if not for the General of the Devil, who had carried her on his shoulders when she was three, and taught her to hold her first wooden sword when she was five, and died on a northern battlefield holding the line for her own father—she would not have lasted a single year in this marriage. She would have broken it and gone back to the army and never looked back.
But she had stayed. And somewhere in the staying, she had made her peace with what her life was going to be. A tragic fate, the fortune-tellers would have called it. A border town on the edge of nothing. A dying city with an empty treasury. And beside her, until the day one of them died, a husband who was good for nothing at all.
She had accepted it. She had told herself she had accepted it.
And yet—
Deep down, buried under all the scar tissue, so small and so stubborn that she was ashamed of it, there was still a glimmer. A single pathetic spark of hope that had never quite gone out. That one day, somehow, this worm would shed his skin. That the soft iron would finally take an edge. That her husband would become a dragon.
That was the spark that had just gone bang.
She hated it for that.
Li Yuguo saw her face change and cried out silently in his heart.
Too much. I said too much.
He had been thinking like a writer. Like a transmigrator. He had been following the standard routine—the one he had read in a hundred novels and written into a dozen himself. The trash young master wakes up one morning and is suddenly wise. He gives one good speech, and everyone around him is amazed, and the plot moves on. In those stories, nobody ever questioned it. The protagonist's family were always conveniently poor and busy and blind. His father and mother never noticed that their son had been replaced overnight by a stranger. The servants just shrugged.
But this world was not an ordinary novel.
He had just seen that with his own eyes. It had smells and sweat and incense smoke. It had a wife who had known Li Yuguo for years, and who knew—with the precise, painful knowledge of someone who had been let down a thousand times—exactly what he was and was not capable of.
A playboy who suddenly turns into a gentleman. In real life, it was far too obvious. It stank of a trick. Nobody changed all at once. A country could be conquered in a day, but a man's nature was the hardest thing in the world to change. Even if he wanted to change, he would have to do it little by little, a step at a time. That was the only way it would ever seem believable.
Fine. Little by little, then.
He let his eyes drop, as if embarrassed. He let some of the confidence go out of his shoulders.
"No," he said quietly. "It's not that. It's just—today, I went past the slums. On the south side of the city." That much, at least, was true; he had seen them from the avenue, the shacks of mud and reed huddled against the inner wall. "There were children there. A lot of them. Starving. Faces all yellow, skin stretched over their bones, sitting in the dust like—" He swallowed, and it was not entirely an act. "I don't know. I just felt sorry for them, that's all. I don't want Nalan City to be full of starving people. It's too ugly. It's too sad."
It was a weak excuse. He knew it was a weak excuse. I felt sorry for some children was exactly the kind of shallow, momentary, self-indulgent feeling the old Li Yuguo might have had—for about five minutes, before he went off to drink.
Which was the point.
He watched her from under his lashes.
The violent heat drained slowly out of Nalan Meng's face. Her shoulders loosened, just a fraction. She looked at him for a long time—and he could see her weighing it. Measuring it against everything she knew.
Yes, her eyes said at last. That sounds like him. Selfish, shallow, sentimental. Upset because something ugly spoiled his afternoon.
But—
But in all the years she had known him, Li Yuguo had never cared about the victims at all. Not for five minutes. Not for one. He had stepped over beggars in the street the way you step over puddles. It was still self-centered, this pity of his. It was still small.
But it was a first step.
She had never once seen him take a first step.
"Then tell me," Nalan Meng said slowly, tentatively, as if she were testing the ice on a pond. "You have some way to stop it?"
Li Yuguo lifted his head.
"Give me a hundred taels of silver," he said. "I want to give it a try—"
He saw her fists clench before he'd finished the sentence.
Her brows, which had begun to relax, snapped together again into a single black line. Her face went from white to an ugly, furious blue-gray. Her hand flew to her belt, and the whip came free of it, uncoiling with a whisper of leather, and she raised it high over her shoulder.
"Sure enough," she hissed. "You want to gamble again. I really thought, for one moment, that you—"
"Wait! Wait, wait, my wife, wait!" He threw both arms up over his head. "You've misunderstood! I said I want money, I didn't say anything about gambling! Where would I even go to gamble? I want to do business!" The whip hung in the air. He twisted on the futon, and his eyes fell on the two bright tablets on the highest step, and he heard himself say it before he had thought it through. "I swear! I swear on the names of my parents!"
The hall went very quiet.
Nalan Meng's arm stopped in midair.
The whip trembled there, high over her shoulder, its long tail swaying a few inches above his head. Her knuckles were white on the grip. Her teeth were bared. Every line of her body was drawn taut for the strike.
And she did not strike.
Because whatever else Li Yuguo was—and he was a great many terrible things—he had always, always been a dutiful son.
She remembered the night he came to her household. She remembered it better than her own wedding. It had been the rainy season, and the news of the General's death had only just come down from the north, and the boy had walked all the way from the old Li estate to her father's gate in the middle of a storm. He had been soaked to the bone. He had been crying. He had been, even then, a spoiled, weak, sniveling thing; he had shouted at the gate guards and kicked a servant who tried to take his bag and been an absolute jerk to everyone in sight.
But clutched against his chest, wrapped in the dry inner layers of his robe, he had been carrying his parents' spirit tablets.
And when he finally unwrapped them in her father's hall, in front of everyone, they had been perfectly dry.
He had let the rain soak him to the skin. He had not let one drop touch them.
She had never forgotten it. It was the one thing about him that she had never been able to despise.
I swear on the names of my parents.
He had never sworn that before. Not once. Not even to get out of the worst of his beatings.
Could it be that the prodigal son really had turned around?
Nalan Meng did not know. She stood over him with the whip raised and could not make up her mind, and that indecision was so unfamiliar to her—to a woman who decided in an instant who would live and who would die on a battlefield—that she found it almost frightening.
Slowly, she lowered her arm.
The trouble was not only him. The trouble was the money.
There was no money.
There had been no money for a long time. Running a city cost silver—for the guards, for the walls, for the wells, for the relief kitchens—and Nalan City had been bleeding silver for years. She had already gone to the merchants. She had already taken out a heavy loan, a sum that made her stomach knot every time she thought of it, to keep the city alive, and she had not left herself a single spare coin to spend. And then the drought had come, year after year of it. The fields had cracked and the crops had died in the ground, and she had looked at the farmers' faces and had done the only thing she could do: she had cancelled this year's tax.
Now she lay awake at night wondering how she was ever going to pay the loan back.
She bit her lip. Hard enough to leave a mark.
"I don't have a hundred taels," she said at last. "I can give you fifty. At most." She turned her face away, toward the tablets. Her voice dropped. "Nalan City can't make ends meet as it is. The people have suffered through years of drought, and the fields have given nothing. We have so many victims to feed. The pressure is too much. Fifty is all I can spare."
Li Yuguo looked up at her.
In the dim incense-light he could see her profile, and the faint white mark of her teeth on her lower lip, and for one moment—just one—he forgot to be afraid of her.
"Fifty taels is fifty taels," he said. He put his palms flat on the stone floor and bowed, low and slow, until his forehead touched the cool stone between his hands. It was the first time in this body that he had bowed and meant it. "I won't let you down again."
She gave him the silver from a small locked chest in her study—five heavy bars wrapped in a scrap of blue cloth, the last of what was left after the relief kitchens had been paid—and he tucked it into the front of his robe beside Lord Yama's letter, and bowed again, and went.
Nalan Meng stood in the corridor and watched him go.
She watched his back as he crossed the courtyard beneath the flaking painted beams. It was the same back. The same narrow shoulders, the same soft white neck, the same expensive robe. And yet somehow it did not slouch quite the way it used to. She watched it pass the dry fishpond and the cracked stone bridge, and go through the second gate, and vanish.
She did not realize how long she had been standing there until a voice spoke at her elbow.
"County master?"
It was Xiaocui, her maid—a round-faced girl of sixteen with quick eyes and a sharper tongue, who had followed her from her father's house and had never once bothered to hide what she thought of the master of this one. She had a tray of tea in her hands and a frown on her face.
"County master," Xiaocui said, following her gaze to the empty gate, "are you really still holding out hope for that waste?"
Nalan Meng did not answer right away.
The incense smoke drifted out of the ancestral hall behind her and curled past her shoulder, sweet and gray. From somewhere beyond the walls came the faint far noise of the city—the cicadas, a cart, a dog barking.
"What else can I do?" she said at last, quietly. "I always feel… that this time, he seems to have changed a little."