Everyone in the city agreed I'd drawn a wretched fate.
Ye Qing, only daughter of the Huichun apothecary, eighteen years old — a widow before I'd ever been a bride.
They were marrying me off to turn his luck.
It's a pretty phrase. Strip the silk off it and it comes to this: somewhere in the city a man is dying, and his family needs a girl to bow through the wedding rites at his side, in the hope that a little wedding-red might tether his fading soul a while longer.
The dying man was Xie Zhan — heir to the Marquis of Zhenguo.
They said he'd taken some rare poison half a year ago, out on the northern frontier. That the imperial physicians had thrown up their hands. That he was down to his last few breaths, waiting for Heaven to call him home.
Said.
I'd never once laid eyes on him.
"Wan'er... you truly don't blame your father?"
The night before I was carried off to be married, my father sat by the lamp honing a medicine knife that was already bright enough to shave with, and could not make himself look at me.
I knew why the Xie family had come to a shop as small as Huichun Hall.
Not because I was beautiful.
Because I was an apothecary's daughter — I knew a little medicine, and I'd be useful at a sickbed.
They had offered a bride-price fat enough to add three new rooms to the shop.
"I don't blame you." I took a large bite of osmanthus cake and answered around it. "Think about it, Papa. Marrying a dying man isn't such a bad bargain."
He looked up, stunned.
I counted the logic off on my fingers.
"Once we've bowed through the rites, I'm his wife — a marquis's heir's wife, with the standing to prove it. And if he should happen to... pass, I keep the proper three years of mourning, then ask leave to go home. The Xie estate is rich enough to choke on. You think they'll grudge one widow her dowry? I take it, come home, and open the biggest clinic in the capital."
The knife shook in his hand. He didn't know whether to scold me or weep.
"This child," he muttered. "Born with a heart bigger than the sky."
My mother died young.
I grew up in the smell of bitter herbs, watching them carry people into Huichun Hall barely breathing and carry them back out stiff and cold.
Birth, age, sickness, death — I'd seen so much of it the edges had worn smooth.
Other people fear dying.
I don't.
I only fear being poor.
So when the bridal palanquin set me down at the gate of the marquis's estate — white funeral lanterns strung up among the red wedding silk, half a wedding and half a wake — not a ripple moved through my chest.
The wedding matron handed me down from the sedan, her voice dropped almost to a whisper.
"Step softly, my lady. The young lord is resting. No one in this house dares raise their voice."
I nodded.
I stepped through the gate — and smelled it.
Not wedding wine.
Medicine.
The scent was heavy, rolling out on the wind in waves: angelica and milkvetch, a faint thread of ground rhinoceros horn. Every last one a rich, ruinously expensive tonic.
My nose — raised inside Huichun Hall — knew them all at once.
You brewed a decoction like that to wring one last breath out of a body.
So the great young lord truly didn't have long.
They walked me into the main hall to bow to Heaven and Earth.
There was no groom beside me.
Only a rooster with a red ribbon knotted at its throat, perched on a chair to stand in for the man.
Exchanging my vows with a chicken.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
When the bows were done, they led me straight to the wedding chamber.
The door closed.
A single dragon-and-phoenix candle guttered in the room, washing everything a dull, bloodied red.
Someone lay on the bed.
I sat down on the edge of it, leaving a careful space between us.
He lay on his side, turned away from me, his breathing long and slow, the brocade quilt rising and falling faintly.
His hair was black, spilled loose across the white pillow.
I waited. Nothing stirred. Sunk deep in sleep, I guessed — worn down by the sickness.
Fair enough. A man this close to the grave hardly has the strength left to lift a bride's veil.
I let out a breath and drew the red veil off my own head.
Then, without quite thinking, I reached over and laid three fingers against the stranger's wrist.
A habit of the trade.
He was my husband now. Living or dying, I ought to know which in the palm of my hand.
My fingertips settled on the pulse.
I went still.
This pulse.
I frowned and pressed a little deeper — cun, guan, chi, the three points sliding past beneath my fingers.
Deep. Even. Strong.
Steady as a war-drum.
This was the pulse of a man in the full height of his health.
Never mind dying.
He was in better shape than my father.
My hand went cold.
And in that same instant, the wrist lying quiet under my three fingers moved.
Turned over.
And closed around my hand.
The dying man rolled slowly toward me and opened his eyes.
In the candlelight I saw a cold, clean-cut face — a high, straight nose, skin a shade too pale — but the eyes were black and clear and wide awake, without a breath of a dying man's fog in them.
He looked at me. The corner of his mouth curved.
"Taking my pulse, wife?" His voice was low and rough, but every word came out clear. "How many days does the good physician give me?"
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
He knew my family name was Ye.
He knew I could read a pulse.
And the man the whole capital swore was down to his final breaths —
was holding my wrist too tightly for me to pull it free.
