— Xie Zhan.
I never believed there was any such thing in this world as made to fit.
People talk of a pair fashioned by Heaven, of a bond decided in a former life. I don't believe it. I believe only in what I arrange with my own hands.
Half a year ago, when I learned I'd taken Ice Silkworm, I plotted out every move in advance. I needed a physician who could name a poison the entire imperial college was blind to. I traced the antidote herb, and it led me to a little shop in a crowded street, called Huichun Hall.
I sent a man in feigning illness, to have his pulse read. The old shopkeeper, Physician Ye, saw nothing. But his daughter, standing behind the counter, took one glance and named the "cold thread in the pulse" exactly.
At the time, to me, she was only a scalpel. A scalpel that fit the hand, sharp, and beneath anyone's notice.
I arranged an entire switching of the bridal palanquin — no. This time there was no switch. This time all I needed was a lawful, upright pretext to bring that scalpel into the estate. "Turning the luck" was the best pretext of all. Her father coveted a bride-price fat enough to add three rooms to his shop; I needed a wife no one would trouble to suspect. Fair and square.
On the day I fetched her, I sent men to follow the palanquin.
They came back and reported: all along the road, the Ye family's daughter, married off to a dying man, showed no grief and no worry — she only stopped to buy two skewers of osmanthus cakes, and sat in the palanquin and ate them clean.
Hearing it, for the first time in half a year, I felt something stir in me, very faintly.
I thought: this one is interesting.
I did not know that this very "interesting" would, in time, overturn the whole board I'd laid.
On the wedding night I lay with my eyes shut, playing a gravely ill man sunk in a stupor.
Then I felt small fingers, faintly cold, feeling out my wrist.
Not trembling. Not shy.
Taking my pulse.
My bride, on her wedding night, the first thing she did was not weep for her fate, but diagnose her husband.
I nearly laughed aloud.
In that instant I knew — I hadn't merely picked up a good blade. I'd picked up someone who would never let me rest.
Everything that came after lay beyond all my reckoning.
I never reckoned that every morning I'd send a man out to the street for osmanthus cakes, only to set them on her table and then deny it flatly.
I never reckoned that on that night in the smoke-filled courtyard, when I heard her fall, I would cross the threshold without allowing myself half an instant's hesitation — though I knew perfectly well that smoke was enough to kill me.
In all my life, Xie Zhan had never gambled his own life for anyone. On the frontier, a broken bone I set myself; rotted flesh I cut away myself. I always calculated, always kept a road back.
Only that once, I calculated nothing.
It was only when I woke to find her shaking and scolding — "you still owe me the biggest clinic in the capital, you don't get to die before you've paid" — that I understood.
The blade I had chosen had, at some point I never noticed, cut its way into my own heart.
After Xie Chong was taken away, everything came into the light.
He bowed his head and confessed before the three high courts: fifteen years ago, hungry for the marquisate, he had nursed Ice Silkworm inside his own elder brother — my father — grinding him to death over half a year, disguised as sudden illness. Then he had threatened an innocent physician into silence, held the regent's seat fifteen years, and waited for the day he could pass the title to his own son rather than return it to me.
When I won my honors on the frontier, he knew he could wait no longer, and reached again for the same old trick.
Only this time, the blade he'd looked down on was the very thing that could unwind the thread of ice.
His Majesty judged Xie Chong guilty of fratricide and usurpation, stripped him of every rank and office, and exiled him to the far frontier, never to return to the capital as long as he lived. His son was stripped of the heir's rank and reduced to a commoner.
And I was given back the marquisate that had rightfully been my father's.
Standing before my father's spirit tablet, I lit a stick of incense.
Fifteen years I had believed him taken by Heaven's will. It turned out he was murdered by his own brother. I had no chance to repay him in life, only in vengeance.
But at least he could rest now.
I went to Huichun Hall to see her father.
The moment he saw me he dropped to his knees, trembling, begging pardon — for failing to save the old Marquis that year, for fifteen years of concealment.
I raised him up.
"Physician Ye," I said. "Ice Silkworm has no cure in its final half-year. Even my own wife, a step slower, could not have saved me. That you couldn't save my father that year was no fault of yours. And those fifteen years you held your tongue — that was to keep your daughter alive. In return, your daughter kept me alive."
"You owe the house of Xie nothing. The house of Xie owes you a word of thanks."
The old man wept like a child.
Nanny Xu's son, I took into the estate and had him schooled. His mother had gone to her death to protect him; he in turn was the one who brought her killer into the light. I couldn't bear to leave him with no one. Nanny Xu, in the Yellow Springs below, might rest a little easier for it.
As for the Ice Silkworm in me — after three months, she unwound it entirely.
The day she drew the last needle, she read my pulse a long while, then let out a breath and pronounced, like a smug little sage-physician:
"Clean. From now on you'll have a hard time dying even if you try."
I asked her what she wanted, for saving my life.
She didn't want gold, didn't want silk, didn't want the jewels in the marquis's vaults.
She only folded her arms, lifted her chin, and demanded exactly one thing.
A clinic. The biggest in the capital.
I bought it for her.
Right in the busiest stretch of Vermilion Bird Street, three rooms together, the signboard lacquered in red. She wrote the three characters herself and hung them up: Huichun Hall.
Still her father's old name.
On opening day, she was hard at work reading pulses, writing prescriptions, scolding some old man who drank too much and wouldn't watch his mouth, her sleeves rolled high, her face brighter than I had ever seen it.
I sat by the counter and quietly pushed a plate of osmanthus cakes across to her.
This time, I didn't deny it.
She shot me a glance, the corner of her mouth curving, took one and put it in her mouth, and said nothing.
But the rims of her ears went red.
To this day the people of the city still tell it: how that year the heir to the Marquis of Zhenguo lay dying, and married in a girl to turn his luck. And how, no one quite knows why, he not only failed to die but grew strong as an ox, raised an uproar that shook the court, and in the end opened the biggest clinic in the capital together with his wife.
Now and then someone teases me, cups his hands and asks:
"My lord Marquis — weren't you supposed to be dying, back then?"
And I look across the counter at the one bent over a pulse — sleeves rolled high, brows faintly knit, muttering curses at a patient who won't do as she's told.
Just as she has always been. From that first wedding night, to now.
I smile.
"I was dying, truly," I answer. "But she wouldn't allow it."
