CHAPTER ONE
They say that when I was born, all the wildgeese flew down from the sky, and the fish sank beneath the waves, having forgotten how to swim. Even the lotus flowers in our gardens quivered and turned their heads away, so ashamed they were of their own diminished allure in my presence. I have always found such stories to be laughably exaggerated, but they prove the same thing: that my beauty was something unnatural, transcending nature itself. And that beauty is not so different from destruction.
This was why my mother insisted I cover my face before leaving the house.
“Do not draw unwanted attention to yourself, Xishi,” she cautioned, holding up the veil. It rippled and gleamed in the midday light, the edges glowing white. “It is dangerous, for a girl like you.”
A girl like me.
There were a thousand meanings tucked in those words, and I tried not to dwell on them, even as the old memories boiled up in response. The clucking, red-cheeked village aunties, who oncecame over to visit and marveled at the sight of me.She is so pretty, one of them had murmured.Someone of such exquisite loveliness—she has the power to topple kingdoms and overturn cities.She had meant it as a compliment. Another had sought to introduce me to her son, who was thrice my age, worked as a woodcutter like my father, and had a face that reminded me of a bitter gourd.
“Come here,” Mother said.
I stepped forward and let her wrap the veil around my head, feeling her thin, calloused fingers—worn from scrubbing raw silk in the day and scrubbing rusted woks in the evening—fiddle with the strings. The fabric fell gently over my nose, my lips, my chin, cool against the sticky summer heat. I supposed I ought to be thankful for her desire to shield me from outside eyes. Zhengdan’s mother all but dragged her out onto the streets and paraded her good looks for everyone to see. And it worked. Already, seven of the men in our village had shown up on their doorstep, bearing lavish gifts and begging for her hand in marriage. It was Zhengdan who told me this late at night, her mouth puckered in disgust, her hand clenched into a fist beneath mine.
“I’ll return before it’s dark,” I promised Mother, who I knew would start worrying long before that, even though the river was not far from our western corner of the village, and I had walked the same route countless times.
But girls like me sometimes went missing. Thoughmissingwas too soft a word for it. The truth was uglier: stolen, slaughtered, sold. Traded between men like rare porcelains. It was especially true these days, with the wounds of war still running fresh in our kingdom, the Wu breathing down our people’s necks, and our remaining soldiers too jaded and thinly spread to be bothered by trivial matters like dead girls.
“Return as soon as you can,” Mother urged, and pressed arough-woven bamboo basket into my arms, bolts of silk piled inside it.
I walked through the village alone, alert. The long veil tickled my cheek and soon clung to me, damp with sweat, but it helped subdue the less-pleasant smells of goatskin and dirt and uncooked fish. Around me, most of the houses still lay in ruins, with gaping holes in the walls like puncture wounds, or cracked stones strewn across the yard like skulls. There were black marks in the earth from when the Wu soldiers had come, fires blazing, swords swinging, our people’s blood dripping from their hands. The scene was fresh as ever in my mind, less a memory than a haunting. Sometimes at night, I thought I could see ghosts hovering over the yellow dust paths. All the villagers who hadn’t survived.
A door creaked to my right, yanking me back to the present. Voices spilled out through the cracks. A man hacked up thick phlegm. I moved faster, the basket drawn close to my chest.
As always, I heard the river before I saw it. The steady, songlike trickle of water, joined by the calling of geese from beyond the trees, its blue-sweet scent a relief. Then the elms parted, offering a clear, stunning view of the riverbank, with the grass rising and swaying in the breeze and the smooth pebbles strewn along the edges, patterned with white and gray specks like quail eggs. The place was empty, save for me—and I was glad of it. I had always enjoyed the sound of my solitude, the quiet of my own breathing. Often, when I was around other people and felt their gazes on me, I had the strange, encroaching sense that my face and body did not belong to me. As if I had been designed purely for the pleasure of their viewing.
Slowly, I unrolled the first bolt of silk from the basket and plunged it into the cool river water. Once, twice, again. Then I wrung it dry, the water running in rivulets down my wrists. The task lookedsimple but was harder than most people knew. Unwashed, the silk was rough against my skin, leaving pink blisters in its wake; washed, it was so heavy it weighed on my arms like sheepskin. I paused for short breaks between, to catch my breath and unclench my muscles. To massage the tender skin over my heart with one hand. The stranger stories claim that my mother had been washing silk on this very river when she was struck by a pearl, and soon after became pregnant with me. In these stories, I am reduced to someone barely even human, a creature of myth, but at least they would explain my ill health from when I was a child, the ache in my chest that occasionally subsided but never fully went away. At times, I imagined there was a fissure running through my heart, one I could not stitch up no matter what I tried.
Now the pain grew sharper. I winced, my brows knitting as I set the silk down with a splash. Tried to exhale. There was no fighting the pain when it came; all I could hope for was to let it pass. I was still clutching at my chest when I heard a distant yell.
It sounded like a child.
Susuwas my first thought, but that was foolish.
I straightened and squinted, my heart pounding from both pain and fear. Two figures were drawing closer down the riverbank—a stick-thin, disheveled girl at the front, pursued by a much larger man. My blood ran cold at the sight of him. His black hair was cut short in the traditional Wu style.
Monster.
An enemy in the flesh. Right here in Zhuji, in our village. On our riverbank.
“Please, help,” the girl cried, her wide eyes landing on me. She could not have been alive for more than one full zodiac cycle—around Susu’s age, if Susu had been given the chance to grow up. When she lifted her scrawny arms, I saw the violet bruises marring her sunburned skin. They looked fresh.
The girl and her pursuer were only a few yards away now. Less.
Do something.The words pressed against my mind, but they felt detached, as if another person had thought of them. My hands were still wet from the river, the cold silt stuck beneath my nails. My teeth chattered. I scanned the area for something—someone—but there was only the yellow sunlight glancing off the water and the geese soaring over the horizon and the silk crumpled within the basket.
The girl stumbled. Fell forward, knees knocking against the pebbles. The sound jolted through my own bones, and I felt a secondary pain that wasn’t mine. A cry escaped her lips, but in my ears, it morphed into another child’s cry. A familiar one, shrill with panic and confusion. Someone who needed me more than anything.
Susu. No, don’t go there, we must keep hiding.
Listen to me.
Come back.
For one moment, time seemed to divide, and I saw my baby sister, her round eyes, her soft face, made from everything good in the world. I saw the sword pierce her side. I saw her fall—
“Help!”
