I glanced between them, stunned. I’d wondered about the couple’s relationship to the spirit. I just hadn’t realized how close the relationship was.
“She’ll get peace when that cursed family confesses their crimes,” growled the baker. “What they did to our child demands punishment.”
“And you would punish her along with them?”
“Of course not! But this is justice. Forhersake, we must all endure.”
His wife laughed, the sound breaking into a sob. “You can’t even say her name, can you? This town, that family—they all treat her spirit as if she was never a living, breathing girl. At the very least,weshould remember her. Remember her as shewas, not as a curse but as our daughter.”
The baker seemed to deflate, his entire body sagging. He looked around the room, and his eyes settled on the flowers, long dead. Finally, he murmured, “I can’t let her go yet.”
My chest tightened. I knew exactly how he felt.
The baker’s wife reached out and rested a hand on his arm, her own tone softening. “You must. Vengeance belongs to the heavens, laogong. Honor is ours to give. Honor and love.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said, staring at the floor. “I failed her as a father.”
His self-condemnation was not unlike the guilt I felt about my mother’s passing and my father’s illness. I understood his reluctance to act when all he’d been awarded was loss. But—
“It’s never too late to right a wrong,” I said. “If your daughter has even a chance of obtaining peace, shouldn’t you try?”
After a pause, he nodded, eyes still lowered. Resigned. “Tell her, then.”
His wife lifted her head to return my stare. Her gaze was proud and unabashed as she said, “Her name was Liu Chunhua.”
Liu Chunhua had indeed married into a family well above her status. But rather than marrying for wealth, she’d married for love. Unfortunately, her husband came from a military family loyal to the governor of Wen. They expected grandchildren who could uphold the family legacy. Namely, they wanted sons.
Aware of their already existing disapproval, Chunhua sought out medicines and miracles from the best wisewomen in hopes of pleasing her in-laws. She became obsessed with the desire to produce a son, an offering that would ensure her place in the family.
But after months of struggle, Chunhua gave birth to her greatest nightmare—a baby girl with blossom-pink cheeks.
Chunhua was devastated; she refused to eat or drink for three days. As a result, her newborn daughter grew deathly ill. And by the time Chunhua woke from her melancholia, it was too late. The child had passed.
The town was told that the infant had died in the womb. But Chunhua knew the truth. Grieving her loss and driven mad by her in-laws’ reproachful eyes, she escaped into the nearby forest in the middle of the night. There, she tied a rope around her neck and hanged herself from her favorite oak tree, with no one but the animals to witness.
She died with sorrow in her heart and hate on her lips, her body swinging, forsaken, from the bough.
“Chunhua has become a ghost story,” said Mistress Liu, “to warn children and drunks away from the forest. But that family knows the truth, and so do others in the village. Yet they’ve tried to simplify her into a single nameless spirit born of unjustified hate. Her husband’s family won’t even acknowledge their part in her death, least of all admit that the spirit is Chunhua. We had to learn the truth from a loose-lipped servant who conveniently disappeared once the gossip sparked.”
“We never saw our grandchild either,” said the baker. “We would’ve loved her, no matter what. But that damned family—they were so obsessed with birthing soldiers that they drove our poor daughter to want the same. This war with Sian is important, I know, but I never imagined our sweet Chunhua would die for it.”
I studied the baker and his wife, both weary. Guowei rested a hand on his wife’s shoulder, to comfort and be comforted. She bit her lips as if to keep them from trembling.
Both grieving for their abused child.
One terrified of letting her go, the other desperate to do just that.
No matter how many times I faced the loved ones of the dead, their anguish always felt newly fresh, a current slamming into my soul. This was why I never liked lingering for long after the burial ceremony. The less I saw, the easier it’d be to remove myself from emotional distractions. For how could a single person—a stranger—bear all that grief and still serve the dead without going mad?
This time, I’d seen too much. I’d unintentionally glimpsed the soul behind the corpse, and what I saw was a human crying for relief.
The realization reminded me of Ren, who was the first “corpse” to speak to me, to tell me what he wanted. Such a human thing, to want. To want safety. Freedom. Peace. To want for self and for others.
I looked at the two souls before me now, knowing full well that there would never be enough apologies in the world to balance the wrongs they’d been dealt.
But there was something I could do, something to lessen the suffering they wanted to escape. I was a priestess of death, after all.
“I’ll save your daughter,” I said, sounding braver than I felt. “I promise you.”
