Gao Yunyue × Ren Shiming Side Story: The Jade Hairpin Wandering
[Part Two: Spring Stream, Moon Rising]
Qu You had sent a letter back from the border, along with it two dried apricot-blossom bookmarks.
Gao Ze was receiving newly successful scholars in the front hall, laughter and cheerful talk drifting through now and then.
Gao Yunyue sat behind the screen, grinding ink and moistening her brush, but had no idea what to write. The laughter outside grated on her nerves, though she couldn’t very well vent her irritation openly.
She rested her chin on her hand, lost in thought, until she heard a familiar voice.
“…Your student greets Lord Gao.”
“Ha, it’s Yuechu — get up, no need to stand on ceremony with me, you and young Master Zhou are cousins by marriage, you may call me Uncle. I’ve read that essay of yours — brilliant composition, truly capable of governing heaven and earth!”
“Lord Gao flatters me. In the past I couldn’t tell loyalty from treachery, and caused a great deal of trouble because of it. Looking back now, I feel nothing but shame.”
“You’re still young — correct your faults when you have them, and guard against them when you don’t. Your elder brother is a man of outstanding character, so naturally you’re no worse.”
“If I can be even a tenth as good as my brother, I’d be perfectly content, Yuechu would.”
“…”
Gao Yunyue thought belatedly that she hadn’t paid any attention to the results of the spring examinations — had she known he would be sitting for them this year, she should have gone to watch.
She sat up straight, still fretting over what to write, but no longer felt as restless as before. Without meaning to, she began listening closely to the conversation beyond the screen.
The young man’s voice was warm and low, just as it had been that night at Fanlou, though carrying now more humility and generosity of spirit.
She listened to every single word of it.
Gao Ze hadn’t received many scholars that day, and since Ren Shiming was Zhou Tan’s cousin and spoke with unusual eloquence, Gao Ze kept him a while longer to talk.
The other scholars in the hall gradually took their leave. Qu Xiangwen had originally intended to wait and leave together with Ren Shiming, but seeing him hesitate, went on ahead alone.
Gao Ze showed nothing on his face, but felt puzzled inside. Not until Ren Shiming finally rose to bid farewell did his gaze drift briefly toward the screen at the side.
He maintained his gesture of cupped hands in respect, yet for some reason seemed lost in a moment of distraction.
The setting sun cast his shadow onto the screen, faint and indistinct, impossible to make out clearly, but Gao Yunyue sensed his gaze and rose to her feet without thinking.
Gao Ze glanced over more than once, somewhat surprised.
He cleared his throat, and only then did Ren Shiming come back to himself, bowing again with a touch of embarrassed shame. “Lord Gao…”
Gao Ze asked instead, “Does Yuechu have an old acquaintance here?”
Ren Shiming slowly shook his head, then gave a light nod.
Gao Ze’s gaze fell on the shadow behind the screen that had risen to its feet at some point, and his expression cooled slightly.
After a moment’s hesitation, Gao Ze said slowly, “This screen is plain white, bearing only a pattern of green mountains and flowers. I’ve been meaning to have a verse inscribed on it. Yuechu… do you have any thoughts?”
Gao Yunyue stared down at the blank sheet of paper before her, not moving at all.
An eerie silence fell over the room.
Not until Ren Shiming spoke again, his voice carrying a slight tremor, light and gentle: “…The man in the mountains, fragrant with sweet flag and angelica.”
Gao Yunyue pressed her lips together, not even realizing she had begun to smile.
She murmured under her breath, “Smooth-talking flatterer.”
After seeing him off, Gao Ze walked back with his hands clasped behind him and found his daughter sitting properly at the desk behind the screen, writing.
He leaned in closer and saw she was copying out “The Mountain Spirit.”
“…The man in the mountains, fragrant with sweet flag and angelica, drinking from the mountain spring, sheltered by pine and cypress.”
“You long for me, yet doubt arises…”
Gao Ze found this rather puzzling, and rather amusing as well. “When did you make the acquaintance of this old friend of yours? He’s got my own daughter second-guessing herself and lost in thought.”
Gao Yunyue glanced at him, pretending not to understand. “What is Father talking about? Your daughter doesn’t quite follow.”
Gao Ze shook his head with a sigh. “Tsk…”
He turned and walked off, muttering to himself, “The young man could still use more effort — if we’re to make this match, it would spare us a great deal of trouble. I only worry that a young girl’s springtime heart may grow too restless, and in the end it’ll be a case of unrequited devotion — the blossoms drift on regardless, the water flows on regardless…”
Gao Yunyue couldn’t help herself and called after him, indignant, “He’s not like that at all!”
Gao Ze couldn’t hold back and burst out laughing. “Let’s hope so!”
Ren Shiming placed first in the highest examination tier. Gao Ze had originally intended to have him and Qu Xiangwen enter the Six Ministries together by way of the Qiongting Academy, but he requested instead to remain at Qiongting, devoting himself to the compilation and editing of classical texts.
Going from Qiongting into the Six Ministries, then out to a provincial post before returning to the capital, was the path of a first-rank scholar — most of the men in the Council of State had entered by this route.
Among these steps, Qiongting was a necessary stage, but since it dealt only with documents and classical texts, it was a respected yet not particularly powerful post.
Gao Yunyue met privately with Ren Shiming a handful of times.
He was scrupulously proper about it — he’d invite her to “Carefree Wandering” at Fanlou, or she’d invite him to “Celebrating Spring’s Bounty,” and they’d sit across the table from one another.
With maids and servant boys always present, Gao Yunyue sat stiffly upright, lifting her teacup with two fingers, only managing to steal a glance at him while hiding behind the cup as she drank.
“Why did you choose to go to Qiongting?”
The golden bells at the eaves chimed softly in the summer breeze. It was evening, the setting sun spilling over the flowing crowds below.
The noise of the world outside was gathered up into that small bell and released again, sweet and clear.
Ren Shiming held his cup in one hand, gazing out the window, somewhat lost in thought.
Only after hearing her question did he turn his eyes back to her, answering quietly, “My brother and I are different.”
Gao Yunyue lowered her eyes and said nothing.
“My brother carries mountains and valleys in his heart — husband and wife, teacher and student, love and duty, the common people of the realm, the bones scattered along the endless river… I’ve watched him make his way forward, greedy beyond measure, yet everything he seeks is never for himself, and so he wears himself thin for it. I admired him without end, and once dreamed greedy dreams of my own.”
Ren Shiming gave a bitter laugh, then changed the subject. “…But after the Lantern Tower affair, I realized I could never become the person I’d imagined in my heart. The common people, the whole realm — in the end it was all too distant and abstract to me. To take revenge on my brother, I would have abandoned them all without a second thought. Thinking on this, I tossed and turned through the night, and it struck me — that feeling, for me, weighed far too heavily…”
“A man who cannot cultivate himself has no place holding high office.”
Gao Yunyue opened her mouth, about to say something, when Ren Shiming’s gaze met hers directly, and he continued softly, “But to me, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
The maid and servant boy couldn’t follow what they were saying. The golden bell kept chiming.
Ren Shiming suddenly drew a fierce-looking Nuo mask from his sleeve and set it on the table.
Then he rose and bowed deeply, as if to take his leave.
Gao Yunyue’s eyes landed on the purple grapes in the glass dish beside her. On impulse, she plucked one off, recalling how he’d looked the first time they met, and tossed it at him.
“Hey.”
Ren Shiming caught it with one hand, turning it over and over between his fingers.
He looked up, breaking into the same spirited, carefree smile he’d worn the very first time they met.
“I ascend the white sedge, gazing far into the distance, awaiting my beloved at dusk’s approach.”
“Why do the birds gather among the duckweed? Why is the fishing net caught in the treetops?”
After the young man’s figure vanished from sight, Qiuzhi couldn’t help but lean in and ask curiously, “Miss, what did that last line he recited mean?”
Gao Yunyue didn’t answer, only curled her lip and cursed him half-heartedly, without much sincerity at all: “Shameless flirt…”
He’d all but said it outright — I long for my beloved, yet dare not speak it — how much more clearly could he have meant it?
As the New Year drew near, Gao Ze received Ren Shiming’s formal marriage proposal card.
Gao Yunyue went with her mother, as usual, to Xiuqing Temple to pay respects to the Buddha, and on the way down the mountain they encountered an old Daoist priest by the roadside. Seeing that he was thinly dressed, Madam Gao felt a pang of pity and had a maid bring him a cloak.
To their surprise, the old priest accepted the cloak but insisted on repaying the kindness, and cast a divination for Gao Yunyue through the carriage window.
Gao Yunyue watched as, after examining her birth characters, he began sketching marks in the sand, and asked curiously, “Master, what sort of divination method is this? I’ve never seen the like.”
“Not Master — Daoist,” the old man corrected insistently, then continued, “The Purple Star method, the Three Harmonies and Four Transformations… ah.”
He suddenly looked up, glancing behind Gao Yunyue with an expression tinged with pity, muttering under his breath, “Kan represents water, harm lurks unseen… and here it meets the stars of calamity and mourning — most inauspicious, most inauspicious…”
Gao Yunyue couldn’t make sense of what the old priest meant and was about to ask further, but he offered no explanation, only shook his head, and pulled a peace talisman from his sleeve, pressing it into her hands. “A debt for a coat — I’ll see that you keep your life. Never let this talisman leave your body, remember that, remember it well.”
He thrust the talisman on her and turned to leave at once, not even accepting the copper coins Madam Gao had prepared for him. Gao Yunyue stared at the plain talisman in confusion. “Mother, this…”
Madam Gao glanced at it. “Never mind — it’s all fate. If he wants you to keep it, then keep it.”
…
Having fled the Gao residence and fallen into the Bian River, the peace talisman drifted from her sleeve, floating past her eyes in the current.
It was only then that Gao Yunyue suddenly understood what the old priest’s words had meant.
Voices tangled and overlapped around her, chaotic and fragmented.
“Ah Yue, you must live!”
“Father, Mother…”
“You are my daughter. I watched you grow from an infant in swaddling clothes into the graceful young woman you are now, and I always believed you deserved the finest man in the world. I only misjudged someone, and now there’s no turning back… Your mother and I will use every last bit of strength we have to carve a path for you out of this bloodshed.”
“…Go west, find the husband you trust, let him shelter you. If you wish to know the truth of what happened, ask him. We are mired too deep in decay and corruption to save ourselves, but I believe his choices will open a clear path for the world.”
“Ah Yue, conduct yourself with integrity, cultivate yourself, do not grow arrogant, do not lose heart. When you hold a high position, do not become reckless and forget yourself; when you fall into poverty, do not use your low station as an excuse to flee from what’s right… this is what I taught you and your brother. From now on, your father cannot protect you any longer. You must… take care of yourselves.”
Gao Yunyang shielded her as they fled from the back garden of the Gao residence.
He wrapped her head to toe in a black cloak, hurrying through the panicked night, but somehow — whether through betrayal or otherwise — pursuing soldiers soon tracked them down along the Bian River.
Gao Ze had already relented and promised that come spring, Gao Yunyang could join the army. He had dreamed of becoming a great general since childhood, but in the end, the only heroic act he ever accomplished was protecting his sister.
“Ah Yue, run!”
Gao Yunyue lifted her head slowly, feeling blood trickle drop by drop down her cheek. Gao Yunyang was already covered in blood — outnumbered in the clash with the armed soldiers, he had taken severe wounds.
She was shoved forward, stumbling and falling helplessly into the pitch-black waters of the Bian River.
In that last instant, she saw only a crimson blade pierce clean through her brother’s chest.
“Search down there, fish the body out!”
“Yes, sir!”
“…”
Gao Yunyue couldn’t swim. Once she fell into the Bian River, she sank steadily downward, carried by the undertow.
Perhaps dying here wasn’t so bad, she thought.
Her parents and her brother had all died unjustly — there didn’t seem to be much reason left to keep living.
But she never expected someone to grab her arm.
Gao Yunyue startled badly, opening her eyes in alarm.
Even the pursuing soldiers couldn’t possibly have caught up this fast!
Before she could make out who it was, they pulled her close, cupped her face in their hands, and breathed deeply into her mouth.
The lips were ice-cold — there was nothing carnal in the contact at all.
Finally regaining enough strength to look, she found the face achingly familiar.
Ren Shiming wrapped an arm gently around her waist, paddling a few strokes with the current before swimming hard upstream, bringing her up beneath the shadow of a dark bridge arch.
“Ha—”
Gao Yunyue let out a long breath. She had held her breath so long that hallucinations of death had already begun to appear before her eyes.
Ren Shiming wiped the water from his face and carried her onto a small boat that had clearly been prepared in advance.
Gao Yunyue trembled in his arms, soaked through, unable to say a single word. Ren Shiming held tightly onto her shoulder with one hand, as if trying to pass some of his own strength into her.
The two of them drifted for a while with the current before a long pole reached out and stopped the little boat. In the dim lantern light, Gao Yunyue caught the scent of “Spring Tidings in Snow.”
“Sister Chun…”
Ye Liuchun rarely wore men’s clothing, but seeing her in such a state, she abandoned all pretense and rushed over to look her over from head to toe, asking urgently, “Are you hurt?”
The moment she finished asking, she caught sight, in the dim lantern light, of the long gash across Gao Yunyue’s face.
The wound had just been soaked in river water and was red and swollen.
Ye Liuchun startled, immediately pulled out the medicine she carried with her, and sprinkled some over the wound.
Gao Yunyue, still trembling, turned her gaze toward Ren Shiming, collapsed weakly to one side.
Ren Shiming raised a hand, cupping it feebly in a gesture of thanks toward Ye Liuchun, then explained quietly to Gao Yunyue, “I knew something was happening at the Gao residence today, but there was nothing I could do openly — I could only lie in wait in secret and pull you out when I had the chance… I’m sorry.”
No wonder someone had come to save her the instant she fell in the water — her brother must have known she couldn’t swim, and, having spotted Ren Shiming hidden nearby, had felt safe enough to push her into the Bian River.
She wanted to shake her head, but with Ye Liuchun applying medicine, she could only reach out and grasp the hem of his robe to express her gratitude.
Ren Shiming rose from the ground, knelt before her, and silently clasped that hand.
Ye Liuchun hid the two of them at the Spring Rain House for the time being.
But Gao Yunyue knew this protection couldn’t last forever.
Ye Liuchun’s friendship with Song Shiyan wasn’t enough to guarantee his leniency, though fortunately Song Shiyan had no idea of her relationship with Ren Shiming — Ren Shiming had not yet formally taken office, and it was put about that he had gone traveling far away, which for the time being kept his family from being implicated.
Song Shiyan fabricated the Chunming Poetry Case and arrested Bai Shating.
She couldn’t stay in the capital any longer.
Ye Liuchun entrusted her to Ren Shiming and Ai Disheng. Before parting, she clasped her hand and said a great many things. Only after they were on the road the next day did Gao Yunyue learn that, to save Bai Shating and to buy her time to escape, Ye Liuchun had willingly entered the Crown Prince’s household, becoming Song Shiyan’s concubine.
She remembered how, the first time they’d met, Ye Liuchun had seen through her disguise at a glance and had drunk her wine with a smile.
Meeting again later in the garden, Qu You had eagerly taken Ye Liuchun’s hand, asking her to sing a new tune, and Ye Liuchun had glanced at her with a knowing smile.
She’d known then that Ye Liuchun had certainly recognized her.
She’d never worked up the nerve to ask about the identity of that masked young man that day, holding stubbornly to her belief that they would surely meet again.
Now Ren Shiming was right there at her side, but the gentle-hearted sister who had once cared for her so tenderly was gone.
Once you entered the palace gates, it was as deep as the sea.
Father, mother, brother, sister — she had nothing left but herself, at most a distant friend far away.
And the… friend beside her.
Gao Yunyue thought, in truth, she’d never really been a gentle, virtuous sort of woman.
In the past she’d always held her head too high, never sparing a glance for people she didn’t like — even with her closest family, she’d bickered more often than she’d shown tenderness.
As for the man beside her now…
She had never lorded her status over him because of who she was, but deep down, she’d always felt he was marrying above his station by being with her.
Now that her family had fallen and she’d lost everything overnight, she showed none of it on the surface, still treating him just as she always had — sometimes even losing her temper at him over trivial things.
Ren Shiming took it all without complaint, never once speaking a harsh word to her.
Perhaps the reason she acted this way… was fear.
Ever since Ren Shiming had pulled her from the water, Gao Yunyue had carried countless questions in her heart, but she never dared voice them.
—Now I have nothing left to give you. Worse still, one misstep, and your career, your future, even your family, could be dragged down into ruin along with me.
—I have nothing left at all — no family, nothing to rely on, not even the beauty I once took such pride in. What lies between us has never gone beyond what propriety allows…
Do you still want to travel far away with me?
She should have asked long ago, but she didn’t dare, and could only keep testing him with her terrible temper, searching again and again through forced pride for some proof that he wouldn’t abandon her.
They left the capital and traveled west.
Song Shiyan hadn’t given up the search for them, and had even guessed they might be heading toward Ruo Prefecture. To avoid the pursuing soldiers, they didn’t dare stay at inns, hiding by day and traveling by night.
The soldiers at the city gates questioned passersby half-heartedly, holding up portraits that didn’t much resemble either of them. Gao Yunyue discarded the medicine Ye Liuchun had given her, letting the wound on her face swell and fester.
Ren Shiming didn’t notice at first, only realizing something was wrong when he saw she refused to take off her wide-brimmed hat even while resting. He snatched the hat from her and saw the long, angry red scar left across that once snow-white, beautiful face.
Gao Yunyue grabbed the hat back and hastily put it on again.
“…Just say I have a rotten sore, festering on my face — those checking us won’t want to look closely, out of disgust.”
Through the gauze curtain, she heard the man before her let out a very quiet, choked sob.
Gao Yunyue had always thought Ren Shiming was a talkative sort by nature, but after their circumstances had turned upside down, she realized he wasn’t actually so fond of talking after all — when his grief reached its peak, like her, he found himself unable to say anything at all.
She leaned in and embraced him. Ren Shiming wrapped his arms around her waist and wept without restraint.
He said nothing, but she understood what his tears meant.
After that, the two of them began to talk more.
On quiet nights with no danger nearby, when Gao Yunyue grew too tired to walk, he’d carry her on his back and speak quietly to her about things he’d never told anyone else.
“Ah Yue, do you know… I’m actually not a good person. I’ve always been cold-hearted by nature, always thought myself the cleverest person alive, always suspicious of the brother who treated me best in this world — I even betrayed my own conscience to work against him.”
Gao Yunyue tightened her arms around his neck, listening in silence.
“Afterward I asked myself countless times — why could Father and Ah Yang trust my brother without hesitation, while I couldn’t… I think I was always too afraid of losing things. Losing something hurt me so much that I had to pick up a blade and fight, just to feel some kind of relief.”
She said softly, “Knowing one’s fault and correcting it — it’s never too late.”
Ren Shiming let out a small laugh, and only in that laugh could she connect the carefree, spirited young man of years past with the person before her now.
“You’re the same way too, Ah Yue,” Ren Shiming said earnestly. “I used to be cold and distant even to the people closest to me, saying things I didn’t mean, and I only regretted it later, when it was too late. But it’s really just one honest sentence — it’s not so hard to say, once you say it.”
Gao Yunyue felt a bittersweet ache in her chest.
Against his back, she heard the wind, heard the quiet hum of the night, heard the man’s faint, labored breathing, and wanted to say “thank you,” but still couldn’t get the words out.
Days of fleeing had drained their money and their strength. As they neared the western border, the days grew endlessly long, the desert stretching boundless before them. Even when they met kind locals willing to guide them, both of them were worn to exhaustion.
Sunlight fell on the scar across Gao Yunyue’s cheek, bringing with it a sharp, stinging pain.
Ren Shiming found some cloth strips and bound her securely to his back, walking step by difficult step. Sensing her drifting toward sleep, he forced himself to stay alert and kept talking to her, his voice scattering into the wild sand on the wind.
“Ah Yue, before you knew me, did you have any funny stories? Would you share one with me?”
“After that Lantern Festival night, I searched for you for so long, but I never found you… did you ever look for me?”
“That line of Chu verse I recited to you — do you actually know what it means?”
“When I sent my marriage proposal to your household, I was worried sick… I know your father wants you married off soon. Choosing me — was that really your own wish? If it wasn’t, I would never use the debt of saving your life to pressure you… a woman doesn’t have to marry to find her own wide world, there are so many, many roads still ahead of you.”
“Ah Yue, you have to hold on.”
“Ah Yue…”
Ah Yue.
Amid the hazy pain, Gao Yunyue let a tear fall. It traced across the wound, the sting jolting her a little more awake.
“Wait… wait until we reach Ruo Prefecture…”
“Wait until the world is at peace again…”
She let her tears fall freely, feeling for the first time in her life that she was being completely honest. “…It was my own wish. I want to marry you, because I love you — Yuechu, ever since that first meeting on the night of the Lantern Festival, I’ve loved you… what about you?”
Ren Shiming froze for a moment, then broke into a smile, his lips cracked and dry from thirst splitting further, a tearing pain spreading across them. He tasted blood.
“Me too.”
After returning to the capital, Ren Shiming accompanied Gao Yunyue to search beneath the city walls for Song Shiyan’s remains.
The carriage that had come speeding at him had crushed him to pieces. She patiently gathered up his scattered bones and flesh, discarding only a bloodstained garment, then set them alight and burned them in the wilderness.
She had once been a young noblewoman of an official household who, before the upheaval in the capital, had never even seen a corpse with her own eyes. Now, with her hands stained red-black with blood, she felt strangely calm, only retching violently, pale-faced, after the burning was done.
The scar on her face, after long care, had finally healed, but because treatment had come too late, it left behind a mark that would never fully disappear.
She joked that she was a flawed piece of white jade.
Ren Shiming, however, said that jade was only perfect because of its flaws.
After Song Shixuan ascended the throne, he cleared Gao Ze’s name posthumously and granted Gao Yunyue the title of a princess of the second rank.
She returned alone to that now-empty house at the old Gao residence, but after two days moved out again, buying a house on the East Street where she lived together with Ye Liuchun, who had not yet married at the time.
She had just turned twenty, and yet, for no clear reason, felt as though she had already grown old.
She could no longer recall those days of being an innocent young girl. Even the noble ladies who’d once been at odds with her now greeted her with admiration and flattery, yet she couldn’t bear to face the pity in their eyes.
She was a daughter of the Gao family — she had always been the one granting favor to others. How could she stand being pitied by anyone?
That feeling only deepened after she saw Ren Shiming receive a handkerchief from a young lady at a spring banquet.
When Zhou Tan was promoted to Deputy Chancellor, Qu You, left with no choice, hosted a grand banquet at the Zhou residence. Gao Yunyue had no wish to attend such gatherings, but since it was for Qu You’s sake, she went anyway.
Zhou Tan was a minister entrusted with the late emperor’s final wishes, and now, favored greatly by the new emperor, his star was rising fast — civil and military officials alike came to the banquet. Officials’ wives and daughters of every rank strolled the garden admiring flowers and drinking tea. As Zhou Tan’s close relative, Ren Shiming naturally became a target for everyone’s flattery as well.
Growing weary of the scene, Gao Yunyue took leave of Qu You and went to stroll through the back garden’s flower corridor, which was closed to guests.
Before long, Ren Shiming came after her, but with the memory of that young lady’s handkerchief still fresh in her mind, her tone carried a note of sarcasm even though she knew he’d turned the girl down.
Ren Shiming, oblivious, kept chattering on about discussing marriage arrangements with Zhou Tan.
Gao Yunyue thought vaguely — now that both her parents were dead, whom exactly would he be proposing marriage to?
She thought of the innocent young girl she’d just seen leaning against her mother’s side, thought of how she herself used to be surrounded by attendants, carefree and untroubled, thought back to those years, her thoughts spinning in confusion.
“A humble girl of jade…”
“Dares not aspire to noble virtue.”
She didn’t even know what she was avoiding.
The day before Ye Liuchun’s wedding, she invited Gao Yunyue and Qu You to her residence to drink.
Neither Gao Yunyue nor Qu You held their liquor well, and after just a few cups they were thoroughly drunk, the three of them sitting together in the garden corridor, gazing up at the moon.
Qu You said, eyes half-closed, “Tomorrow, Sister Chun will be married off… I should be the youngest of us three, so why am I marrying last while she goes first?”
Gao Yunyue laughed. “Then don’t get married — divorce quickly and come keep me company instead.”
Qu You, flushed from drink, glared at her. “No way, my husband, my husband…”
She trailed off without finishing, and Ye Liuchun laughed instead, waving her round fan at her. “Ah Yue, as for you — Yuechu clearly has feelings for you, and he’s a good man, and you have feelings for him too, so why do you keep putting off answering him?”
Gao Yunyue rested her chin in her hand, thought for a moment, and answered, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Qu You braced herself against a nearby pillar, struggling to her feet, and said to her, “What are you afraid of? You avoid Ren Yuechu the moment you see him. If you don’t like him anymore, just say so — no one will blame you.”
“I don’t know,” Gao Yunyue repeated blankly, closing her eyes, then opening them again. “I can’t even imagine what it would be like to marry. In the end… right now I only hold the title of a princess of the second rank. Whenever I go out, everyone pities me, and Ren Yuechu pities me too… and there’s no one left to stand behind me. If things go wrong down the road, will I even have the chance to regret it, and who would help me then…”
Qu You stamped her feet in frustration in front of her, glancing around to make sure there were no servants nearby before raising her voice to scold her. “Bah, bah, bah, what nonsense is that? Do you think the rest of us are dead?”
Whenever she got excited, she tended to throw around heavy words like “life” and “death” without thinking. Ye Liuchun rapped her on the head with her fan. “What are you saying? Watch your words.”
Qu You covered her mouth, then wiggled her eyebrows at her. “I’m telling you, Gao Yunyue, what are you afraid of? The sky is vast and the clouds are high in this world. Your great enemy has been avenged — you should be living freely and joyfully…”
Ye Liuchun, sitting beside her, added, “That’s right. I heard you went to see Old Master Ai before, wanting to do something you actually enjoy… what other people think doesn’t matter. Living your own life well is what matters most.”
“…”
Some time later, Gao Yunyue suddenly received a small wooden box.
Bo Ying spent every day at the Imperial Medical Institute, seen only rarely, like a mythical dragon showing neither head nor tail. Old Master Ai wanted her to learn more, hoping she could one day command the commercial networks of the realm and become one of Song Shixuan’s right-hand aides.
That day a light rain had fallen. A servant boy, soaked through, ran in from the front door and set the wooden box he’d been cradling on the desk before her.
“Head Proprietress, someone asked me to bring this to you. He says he’s waiting outside the door — if it pleases you, go out and see him.”
Gao Yunyue acknowledged this and opened the box in confusion, only to find a familiar jade hairpin inside.
She had never cared for gold or silver ornaments, finding them vulgar, and whenever she went out, she preferred lake-blue robes paired with a long jade hairpin. On the day her family fell, she happened to be wearing this very hairpin, and so it had traveled with her all the way to Ruo Prefecture.
When she’d reunited with Qu You, the long hairpin had slipped from her hair and shattered on the ground of the western frontier.
Ren Shiming had gathered up every single fragment and pieced them back together, one by one, until the hairpin was whole again, not even the tiniest speck of jade dust missing.
She had never imagined she’d see it whole again, just as she’d never imagined she could look back calmly on the person she used to be.
A girl who wore a jade hairpin would always grow up eventually, and there would always be someone to piece her shattered self back together and place it into her own hands, then wait beneath the eaves on a rainy day, hoping for her arrival, just as before.
Gao Yunyue grabbed an oil-paper umbrella at hand and hurried out of the shop, and sure enough, there stood a man in a deep blue-green robe beneath the eaves, gazing distractedly at the falling rain.
The raindrops formed threads, the threads wove into a beaded curtain, and he stood behind that curtain, waiting for her to draw it back and meet him.
Hearing the sound of her approach, he startled slightly and turned his head.
That burst of flame that had once flared before them on the Lantern Festival night, in front of the carriage, vanished at once.
Back in her maiden days, Gao Yunyue had imagined countless times what circumstances she might be in, should she ever meet someone she loved, when she finally revealed her feelings.
This moment, here and now, was more beautiful than anything she had ever imagined.
The rain hung faintly blue in the sky…
Beneath the eaves, the rain whispered on, and the one she had long awaited had come at last.
Author’s Note:
Ps: The crown prince is quite busy even after death — his flesh and bones were collected by one person, and later even his clothes were taken by someone else…
- “The man in the mountains, fragrant with sweet flag and angelica, drinking from the mountain spring, sheltered by pine and cypress. You long for me, yet doubt arises.” — Qu Yuan, “The Mountain Spirit,” from the Nine Songs
- “The blossoms drift on regardless, the water flows on regardless — one and the same longing, two places of idle sorrow.” — Li Qingzhao, “A Cut Plum Blossom Branch”
- “I ascend the white sedge, gazing far into the distance, awaiting my beloved at dusk’s approach. Why do the birds gather among the duckweed? Why is the fishing net caught in the treetops? Angelica grows by the Yuan River, orchids by the Li — I long for my beloved, yet dare not speak it.” — Qu Yuan, “The Lady of the Xiang,” from the Nine Songs
- The old priest’s mutterings draw on The Mysterious and Subtle Purple Star Astrology and Ni Haixia’s Heavenly Chronicles (a friend of mine has been very interested in these lately, and so have I — I read a bit, didn’t fully understand it, and used it loosely here, so please don’t take it too seriously…)
- “A humble girl of jade, dares not aspire to noble virtue.” — Sun Chuo, “Song of Green Jade”