Pei Yan took my father and me back to the estate.
He didn't ask. He simply told Uncle Fu to make up the east courtyard, and walked my father in himself.
Uncle Fu cried while he cleaned. He cried from noon to dark, cried until I had to tell him to stop before my father decided there'd been a death in the house.
"My lady..." He sniffed. "Three generations of that shop..."
"It's burned. That's that," I said.
I said it briskly. I thought I sounded quite ordinary.
Then I turned away and had to stand still in the corridor for a while, because my legs wouldn't lift.
My father slept from early evening.
He slept like a man who had been awake for three years.
I sat with him an hour, listening to him breathe, and then I went out.
I couldn't sleep.
I wandered around that empty house, and in the end I found myself sitting in the bridal chamber with a candle in my hand, looking at the false blue-and-white vase.
The habit is in my hands. I've never managed to break it.
Except that now I had nothing left to look at.
I grew up inside a storeroom. Open in the morning, shut at night, read the ledgers to my father after. People carried things in, I looked, I named a price, I wrote it down.
Now the storeroom was ash.
All I had in my hands was a false vase, in a room with fourteen forgeries, in a house with forty-one.
"What number are you up to?"
Pei Yan was in the doorway.
Still that robe with the burn at the shoulder. He hadn't changed it. Probably he had nothing to change into.
"I have nothing left," I heard myself say, hoarse. "Three generations. Gone in an hour."
He came in and set a medicine box on the table.
"I have forty-one forgeries," he said. "Take the lot."
I looked up at him.
Then I laughed.
And then I cried.
I cried very badly — hiccupping, snotty, streaming, nothing about it fit for a countess.
He didn't say anything.
He just pulled the chair around, sat down in front of me, opened the box, and took my hands.
They were blistered all over. Where I'd held the bronze handle of that first chest, the skin had come away.
He worked the ointment in. Very slowly.
Then he bent his head and blew on it.
"What are you doing?"
"Uncle Fu says blowing on it helps."
"Uncle Fu lied to you," I said. "Blowing does nothing at all. Burned skin stays burned."
"I know."
He went on blowing.
I sat still.
I have spent my whole life pricing things. I know how much rice a tael buys, how many months of medicine a jade bangle buys, what turns a profit and what doesn't.
I sat there letting a man do something completely useless to my hands, and I couldn't work out a single figure.
"Pei Yan."
"Yes."
"In the fire — why didn't you take the chest?"
He was winding cloth around my hand. He didn't look up.
"I don't know how to price things," he said. "For three years I've put a price on everything. I've been wrong every time."
He tied the knot.
"Last night I didn't have to think."
I didn't ask him anything more.
I sat there looking at the knot he'd just tied — badly tied, crooked, exactly like that packet of malt candy.
Then I snatched the box off him.
"Hands out."
"I don't—"
"Hands out."
He put them out.
His were worse than mine. Where he'd fisted my collar and dragged me out of the smoke, the whole palm was raw. Where he'd carried my father, there was a long burn up his wrist.
I put the ointment on.
And I noticed something.
I have read objects with my eyes my whole life. I look, I tilt them under a lamp, I hunt for wear.
That night, for the first time, I read something with my hands.
My thumb went across the base of his index finger. Then the middle one.
Callus. A thick one, hard, sitting on the second joint.
That is not a swordsman's mark. A swordsman's callus is in the palm, at the root of the little finger.
This was a brush. Held constantly. Held for years.
"What do you write?" I asked.
Pei Yan was silent.
"Pei Yan. Three years of writing what, to get hands like this?"
It was a long time before he answered.
"I copy it out."
"Copy what?"
"The Wangsha supply ledger," he said. "Twentieth year of Jinghe. I copied it when I was seventeen. I know it by heart."
"Once a month, I write it out. Start to finish. Then I burn the paper."
"And the next month I write it again."
My hands stopped.
"Why do you burn it?"
"Because if it exists, someone can take it."
"Then why write it?"
He raised his head and looked at me.
And he said something so quietly that I will remember it for the rest of my life.
"Because I'm afraid I'll forget."
I sat there in the middle of the night, in a room full of forgeries, holding my husband's callused hand.
Three years, every evening, I sat by a lamp reading a ledger aloud to a blind man, and learned it without noticing.
Three years, every month, he sat writing out a ledger and burning it, so as not to forget.
The two of us, each carrying in his head a book that no longer exists anywhere on earth.
I thought I had married a piece of merchandise.
He thought he had bought an eye.
And all the while, on that wedding night, two people in the same trade had been sitting across a table from each other, and neither of us knew it.
"Pei Yan."
"Yes."
"Read it to me."
He froze.
"What?"
"The Wangsha supply ledger," I said. "You read. I'll listen."
"What would you listen for? You wouldn't under—"
"I'm a merchant," I cut in. "Just read. Start at the beginning. Anything I don't follow, I'll ask."
Pei Yan looked at me for a long moment.
Then he began.
"Twentieth year of Jinghe. Third month. Twelfth day. Received four thousand shi of grain, forwarded from Hedong prefecture. Loss in transit, three hundred and twenty shi..."
He read in a very level, very even voice — the voice of a boy of seventeen copying a ledger under a lamp in a garrison, getting through it so he could go to bed, with no idea that in twenty-one days there would be nobody left in that garrison at all.
I sat and listened.
I listened all night.
Near dawn, when he reached the ninth month, his voice began to slow.
I knew he was coming up on the tenth.
I put out my hand and laid it over the back of his.
"Stop," I said. "Leave that part for another day."
Outside the gate a sedan chair came down.
Then Uncle Fu running in, out of breath.
"My lady! Master Wei — Master Wei is here!"
