Chapter 9 The Rabbit Lantern
Those days felt stolen.
He always appeared in my study on time at the hai hour.
We would split-copy a scroll of the Nan Hua Jing under the candle. His characters were sharp as a sword. The tip of my brush always carried an unconscious softness.
"This Xiaoyao You of yours is more pedantic than Grand Tutor." He knocked my forehead with the brush shaft, then when I frowned, clumsily rubbed it smooth for me. "Forget it. Tomorrow I will handle him for you."
I looked at his serious profile and suddenly said, "Xiao Huai An, do you still remember the Shangyuan lantern festival in the twenty-second year of Changle?"
His hand grinding ink paused. "I remember. You insisted on buying that Rabbit Lantern, then got squeezed apart by the crowd, and even shed tears."
I lowered my lashes.
In truth I had not cried that day. I had only watched him hold the Rabbit Lantern and search for me in the crowd for three hours. Lamp oil dripped on the back of his hand and raised blisters, and he did not notice at all.
Back then there had been only me in his eyes, like a piece of uncarved jade.
"Why ask about that all of a sudden?" He held my hand.
"Nothing." I drew out the hand he was gripping and rolled up a painting I had just finished, a lone angler on a cold river. "I only feel that some scenery is not enough even seen once."
He did not press further. He only hung that painting in his own bedchamber and looked at it day after day.
I had a feeling he had read the lone boat in the painting. I did not think he had read the struggle in the eyes of the one in the boat.