The Huas had avoided cities for generations, obeying an ancestral edict to keep attention away from them. “Secrecy is paramount,”Hua Xiaoting had told her daughter, who passed the rule to her own daughter. “Secrecy is safety.” Over the years, they’d sold their moli fragrances only to a select and trusted group of clients, and stockpiled their riches to make themselves unassailable.
It had worked for five hundred years. But times were changing. Zhengyi could almost taste it in the air, a buzz that came from people traveling and bringing back what they’d learned. There was a curiosity that pulled as much as it pushed, and would eventually be turned on the secretive family living in the guarded compound the way photographic cameras focused on the grave faces of those who posed for them in the city studios. Her mother, who rarely left the compound, refused to believe change was inevitable. She’d only seen her first foreigner last year, and the sight had knocked her almost speechless. “Her nose,” she had whispered to Zhengyi as the woman passed. “Her hair. So white for such a young woman, and with no shine! The poor thing. She must see ghosts with those pale eyes.”
Despite her mother’s disapproval, Zhengyi wanted to know more. She needed to know more, if they were going to survive and prosper in this ever-changing modern world. She insisted on going with her brothers when they went to Nanjing, to feast her eyes—and nose—on the hectic streets where the reek of sewage competed with the aromas of cooking and hair pomades and skin creams. It was a cacophony of scents that would sometimes give Zhengyi a headache. She didn’t care. She would go home and write notes for hours, trying to make sense of all she’d smelled.
“I’ll make you a deal,” she said, interrupting her mother. Rude, but she was being scolded anyway.
“No.”
Zhengyi shrugged. “Then I will never make another perfume. How unfortunate the fifth daughters create the most profitable scents and your sons enjoy luxury.”
There was a long silence, and Zhengyi wondered if this would bethe thing to finally earn her the next beating her mother constantly threatened.
Zhengyi’s grandmother Miaoyu chose that moment to hobble into the room, dressed in her usual dowdy rough robe. She was already unsteady on her tiny shoes and broken feet; age had wasted her knees and bent her back.
“We have enough,” the old woman croaked. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was usually to rebuke Zhengyi for anything from eating too much to smiling.
“Mother,” said Zhengyi’s mother carefully. “How do you feel?” Yitong was always formal with her mother.
Miaoyu ignored her. “We have enough. Our greed and selfishness cause pain. We meddle in the lives of innocents and will be punished by the Almighty God for our arrogance and pride.”
Yitong had only beaten Zhengyi once when, as a child, she’d said she wished her grandmother were dead. Zhengyi had learned to keep those unfilial thoughts to herself, but she couldn’t prevent them from arising occasionally. Miaoyu dimmed the light of any room she entered, and although Yitong extorted Zhengyi to be kind and respectful, Zhengyi’s flesh crawled whenever she faced her grandmother and saw the emptiness behind her eyes.
Although most Hua daughters had moli that could be used for good, occasionally the gift misfired, leading to plaintive prayers and exquisite offerings to the flower-covered shrine for the Peony Goddess built in the corner of their workshop. Miaoyu was one of these. Her gift, to create devastating sadness, was one that was in demand only by evil people who wanted to spread unhappiness. It was a rule in the Hua family that those with malevolent gifts would never create or sell them.
Miaoyu had disobeyed.
Zhengyi watched her grandmother leave the room and saw her mother take a deep breath. “It’s like her moli has infected her,” Zhengyisaid. “She’s the walking embodiment of misery.”
“Don’t say such things,” admonished Yitong. “She’s paid for her error.”
“Not as much as those people did.”
“Daughter! Enough.”
Yitong’s terrible expression cowed Zhengyi into submission. “Yes, Mother.”
Her mother sighed. “It’s difficult for her to accept she caused so much death and pain. She only wanted to save our home. Her crime was to put our family first.”
Zhengyi wasn’t as certain, having heard her grandmother’s incoherent ranting about the Heavenly Kingdom promised by the Taiping Rebellion’s leaders and her hate of the country’s Manchu rulers. “She didn’t have to give Hong so much of her moli,” she said.
Yitong roused herself to defend her mother. “She rarely made it and had no idea of its potency. Plus, how could she know what he had planned?”
It had been a diabolical plan by the Taiping leader. Since the Hua scent only worked on the first person to smell it from the bottle or sachet, Hong had apparently held his breath as he decanted the moli into dozens of smaller containers, which he then had spies dressed as Buddhist monks smuggle into the besieged city. As the Nanjing commanders fell into intractable sadness so intense they dropped where they stood, the city’s defenders found themselves unable to withstand the Taiping rebels, who poured in like a spring flood, slaughtering tens of thousands.
“The screams haunt me,” Miaoyu had once told Zhengyi. “They never give me rest.” It was true. Her grandmother rarely slept.
In the register, where every eldest Hua daughter and her gift were logged for posterity, was another story of one like Zhengyi’s grandmother. Hua Haifen of the Tang dynasty had been able to create intense fear. They’d had to hide that skill, lest people try to takeadvantage of her gift during battle and cause the deaths of innocents. It was unfortunate Miaoyu had ignored that precedent.
Now Zhengyi glanced behind her mother. In the other corner of the workshop, buried in a locked chest, was their answer to those more evil impacts, although it had been too late to use against Miaoyu’s moli. Zhengyi had been trusted with this information when she turned twenty and began to contribute to the family in the way she was destined.
With an unreadable expression, her mother looked at the door through which Miaoyu had disappeared, then turned back to Zhengyi. “You spoke of a deal.”
“I did. I marry who I like.”
Before Zhengyi finished, her mother was shaking her head so hard one of her silver hairpins flew out to land on the floor. “Impossible. You can’t bring simply anyone into this family. We need to trust them.”
This was a valid concern, and Zhengyi had an answer. “I marry who I like, as long as they won’t betray us.”
