Chapter 25
Yun-si glanced nervously at the four guards forming a protective shield around her and Yun-yao in the streets. The tall men kept pace around them, discouraging anyone from coming too close and screening the sisters from curious eyes.
“Is this really necessary?” she whispered.
“Your eldest brother-in-law wanted eight guards,” Yun-yao said, somehow managing to simultaneously roll her eyes in exasperation while patting her rounded belly gently. “Four is the bare minimum he would accept before allowing me to come shopping with you. Consider this a victory.”
It was, in every other respect, a perfectly ordinary afternoon. The kind made for idle errands and sisterly company.
At the entrance of Golden House Books, Yun-yao stopped and turned to the guards with quiet authority. “Wait here for us.”
“Yes, Lady Wei.”
The guard saluted her and took up position outside the door with the other three immediately.
Yun-yao glided past the threshold, leaving Yun-si gaping at how the Great General’s Household Guards obeyed her sister without hesitation.
“You are good,” she said with admiration.
“You’ll be surprised what I am good at,” Yun-yao murmured with an enigmatic smile.
Yun-si’s confession had slipped out one evening over steaming cups of chrysanthemum tea, when she was at the General’s Residence to “relieve Yun-yao from the boredom of pregnancy”. She had intended to ask Yun-yao for advice about managing her dowry shops and her unusual choice of a bookshop.
She had expected shock and disapproval. After all, what proper young lady would risk her reputation by secretly penning scandalous huabens? But Yun-yao had only set down her teacup with deliberate care, her dark eyes shining with unbridled excitement.
“You’re Recluse in Clouds?” Yun-yao had breathed, gripping Yun-si’s wrist so tightly the teacup nearly toppled.
“The one who wrote Sword Lady Mei’s adventures?
That’s my favorite! Do you know how many times I’ve reread the part where she disguises herself as a merchant to infiltrate the bandits’ lair? ”
Yun-si had stared, stunned, as her usually composed sister quoted entire passages from memory with the fervor of a devoted reader. It was the first time Yun-si had ever seen Yun-yao gush like a little girl, and the sight had been both terrifying and oddly heartening.
This little expedition had been Yun-yao’s idea—“If you’re going to revive Autumn Leaf, you should know the competition,” she had said, her voice calm and measured as usual.
“Go see which authors are selling well. Study their shelf placement. And see if there’s anyone besides Moonlit Brush worth approaching.
You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. ”
So here they were, weaving through the aisles of Golden House Books, Yun-yao’s sharp eyes scanning the shelves with the focus of a general surveying a battlefield.
The bookshop was spacious and well-lit, sunlight streaming through the open skylight above a unique inner courtyard.
The shelves were meticulously arranged by genre, making it effortless to browse.
Attendants moved efficiently, restocking titles and assisting patrons with quiet expertise.
Yun-si took in the strategic placement of displays, the flow of customers and the way the most eye-catching tables sat near the entrance.
She couldn’t help but admire the precision of it all.
As they wandered the aisles, Yun-yao subtly dismissed the approaching attendants with a polite gesture, keeping their exploration uninterrupted.
“Look,” Yun-yao murmured, nodding toward a prominently displayed stack of books in blue.
“Moonlit Brush’s new collection. They’ve given him the prime spot near the entrance.
And see how there is a reading desk beside it?
Customers can sample the first chapter before buying.
Clever.” She leaned in, lowering her voice conspiratorially.
“You’ll need to do better than this if you want to lure customers away. ”
Yun-si glanced toward the back of the shop, where a doorway stood half-curtained, leading presumably to storage and cataloguing. “I need ten minutes somewhere I’m not supposed to be.”
“Now, watch and learn.” Yun-yao smiled.
She set her hand to her lower back, drew a breath, and transformed her expression into something between mild discomfort and genuine distress with an ease that suggested she’d done this before.
“Oh,” Yun-yao said, voice carrying just slightly. “Oh, my.”
Shop assistants appeared within seconds.
A chair materialized. A cushion. Someone was dispatched for tea, someone else for a cool cloth, and the entire front of the shop reoriented itself around Lady Wei, wife of the Great General, currently experiencing what was apparently a very normal and very attention-consuming moment of pregnancy discomfort.
Yun-si slipped toward the back curtain without anyone noticing.
The room was bigger than she expected. A long table dominated the center, its surface scattered with half-sorted stacks, the inkstone still damp, the clerk’s ledgers left open mid-entry. Shelves lined the wall behind the table, filled neatly with bound ledgers and books.
She didn’t dare breathe too deeply. Her heart pounded furiously as she scanned the shelves with frantic focus, searching for correspondence, ledgers, anything that might reveal the names and addresses behind the pen names.
A manuscript sat on the sorting table, waiting to be catalogued.
She almost walked past it.
Then something about the handwriting caught her eye—and she stopped.
She knew that handwriting.
She’d watched it across library tables for years. Had seen it annotate the margins of books, in notes and letters, in a dozen small unremarkable contexts that had never meant anything beyond Ting-zhi wrote this.
She picked it up, telling herself there was a reasonable explanation. Maybe Ting-zhi had decided to venture into the world of huaben-writing without telling her. Really, he didn’t need to tell her everything.
She flipped through the papers, reading them distractedly.
The strokes were unmistakably, undeniably his, that distinctive little hook he does at the end of the straight strokes, the one that Master Gu had always complained was too flowery and not steadfast enough.
The way the script was so effortlessly elegant.
The familiar paper that she had been using in his study room.
In the midst of these chaotic thoughts, she stopped. She was staring at a scene she recognized with a cold drop in her stomach: a rescue from water, a hero’s hands at a heroine’s waist. A scene so familiar it felt like it had only happened yesterday.
She found the author’s seal right at the end of the manuscript. A small stamp, pressed in red, bearing the weight of a thousand questions. Moonlit Brush.
It could not be. She had corresponded with Moonlit Brush regularly for the past few weeks. His handwriting was not like this.
Moonlit Brush.
Somewhere in the front of the shop she could hear Yun-yao’s voice, still performing distress with admirable commitment, utterly unaware that her sister was in real distress.
The light was too bright, the sounds too distant. Like a dream intruding into the room, making everything feel unreal.
She didn’t know how long she stood there. Long enough that her knees had gone numb. Long enough that the shapes of the words on the page had stopped feeling like words at all and started feeling like countless little needle wounds that bled no matter which way she turned it.
Out front, Yun-yao’s voice had shifted register, trying to hold the attention of the attendants. “I’ll take the whole series by that new author Jade Gentleman, and the new book Moon Blossoms on Mount Ye...”
Yun-si stood and managed to step back through the curtain, out into the bustle and hustle of a shop that now seemed too bright, too cheerful, too noisy.
Yun-yao was surrounded by books, pastries and tea, the small audience of shop assistants dispersing now that the crisis had apparently resolved itself, with only a few attendants scuttling to get books for her. She took one look at Yun-si’s face and the performance dropped away entirely.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.” The word came out steadier than she felt, which surprised her. “I’m fine.”
Yun-yao did not look she believed this. But she took Yun-si’s arm and turned. “Deliver everything to the General’s Residence.” she said to the shop attendants before sweeping out of the shop with perfect poise.
Outside, the guards fell into formation without comment. Yun-si let herself be steered down the street in a daze.
“The teahouse,” Yun-yao said quietly, once they were clear of the shop. “You’re meeting Moonlit Brush in—” she checked the angle of the sun, “—half an hour.”
“I’m not going.”
“Yun-si?”
“I’m not going to the teahouse.” Her voice was very flat. The particular control of someone holding something extremely heavy and unwilling to set it down in the street where anyone could see. “Help me send someone. Tell them I’m unwell.”
Yun-yao studied her for a long moment. Whatever she saw in Yun-si’s face stopped her from asking further questions in the open street.
“I’ll send word,” she said instead. “Where are you actually going?”
Yun-si was already walking, the direction clear in her heart.
“Bamboo Heart Abode,” she said.