Chen Baoxiang, none the wiser, had already swept Xie Lanting off to a deserted spot to one side.

“A certain Lady Ji attended the banquet today. She said she has some evidence in her possession regarding Lu Shouhuai — cases of him beating servants to death and harming civilian women. Take a look — might it be of use?”

“Lady Ji?” Xie Lanting’s expression turned serious as he took the documents and leafed through them. “Is this the same Lady Ji who came forward earlier to file a complaint against Cheng Huaili?”

“It seems so.”

“Why would she give these to you?”

“I have no idea.” Chen Baoxiang scratched her head. “She originally intended to give them to Zhang Zhixu, but there are too many guards around him — an ordinary person can’t get anywhere near. So she could only bring them to me instead.”

She spoke with a puzzled, innocent air, without a single crack in her composure.

But Xie Lanting skimmed through a few pages of the testimony, and looked up again. “Something this important — if it fell into the wrong hands, all her efforts would have been wasted. If you have no connection to her, how did she come to trust you so completely?”

Chen Baoxiang stared at him. “The way you say that — it’s as if I’m the one refusing to befriend her. She’s the wife of a fourth-rank official. If I had a friend like her, I’d be showing her off to everyone.”

Xie Lanting pressed his lips together, closed the documents, and said, “I’ll look into this carefully when I get back.”

Chen Baoxiang asked with a teasing tone, “Lord Xie — do you have a bias against me? Every time we speak, you seem to suspect me of something.”

“Absolutely not.” Xie Lanting waved his hands vigorously. “If I said that out loud, those two would never let me hear the end of it.”

“Which two?”

“Never mind.” He cleared his throat lightly. “I’ve worked in criminal investigations for years — I’m naturally a cautious and suspicious person. I overthink things about everyone and everything involved in a case. I’m not singling you out, my lord, so please don’t take it to heart.”

Chen Baoxiang waved generously. “Say no more. If you’re still not at ease with me, feel free to have people stationed near my courtyard as well — to listen and watch. I have nothing to hide.”

Having been given such an opening, Xie Lanting could only bow his head in embarrassment and express his gratitude. After all, though Chen Baoxiang’s conduct was sometimes eccentric, she had never once been implicated in any case.

“Oh, by the way.” His gaze shifted. “What do you think of Xu Buran and Fengqing — the two of them?”

“Both quite good.” She answered.

“Not good or bad — I mean, do you think they have any exceptional qualities?”

Exceptional qualities.

Chen Baoxiang thought it over. “Fengqing is wealthy, generous, kind-hearted, has excellent taste, and is good-looking. Lord Xu is also quite tall.”

Xie Lanting: ?

Seriously — by the time she got to Xu Buran, all that was left was his height?

He shook his head with a sigh. “No wonder he said there was no need to yield.”

“What did you say, my lord?”

“Nothing.” Xie Lanting waved a hand. “You still have two more days of banquet ahead of you. I’m busy with affairs, so I won’t be coming again after this. Once the case has a result, I’ll come find you and Fengqing.”

“Safe travels, my lord.” Chen Baoxiang smiled and waved him off.

Back in the small courtyard, the flowing banquet continued. The mountain of gifts were swiftly sent to the nearby pawnshops, converted into gleaming silver, which was then converted into enough food to fill bellies and brought back to the table.

Han Xiao sat beside Chen Baoxiang, torn between joy and worry. “Sister, do you have enough silver left?”

Chen Baoxiang counted her banknotes, and smiled. “Before, I thought I’d be waiting in Shangjing for a very long time, so I needed a great deal of money.”

But now it seemed that perhaps the wait wouldn’t be so long after all.

The wicked would be brought down; retribution was coming. She felt certain she would see her wish fulfilled before long.

“Lady Ji left early — she said she’d come to see us again when there’s a chance.” Han Xiao looked a little puzzled. “She seemed to be crying just now. But why? She was dressed so finely. It couldn’t have been from hunger, could it?”

“Of course not.” Chen Baoxiang patted her on the head. “She simply saw me and was reminded of someone she had known long ago.”

“Someone from the past?”

Chen Baoxiang gave a small nod.

Ji Qiurang had been Grandmother Ye’s closest and dearest friend. They had grown up together, attended the same academy, and shared the same ideals — yet when they came of age, they had each taken a different road.

Grandmother Ye had stubbornly pressed on along the path of officialdom, speaking out on behalf of the people. Ji Qiurang had married instead — and resigned from the position of female official in the Three Departments she had only just been promoted to, so she could make a home for her husband.

Chen Baoxiang had always thought Grandmother Ye must have resented Lady Ji. Why else would she have never once mentioned this person in all the years they were together?

Yet when she was sorting through Grandmother Ye’s belongings, she had found an enormous collection of Lady Ji’s handwritten letters.

Two hundred and four letters in all — neat and tidy, every single one intact, not a single one missing.

She herself couldn’t read, so she could only listen as another literate person read the names in the signatures aloud, and read to her of a friendship forged side by side in the bloom of youth, and of the letter-writer’s deep remorse, and of memories yellowed with age.

Her impression of Lady Ji was that of a very fragile shadow.

And yet this fragile person — when the chance came to file a complaint against Cheng Huaili — had dragged her elderly body before the Petition Drum and beaten it ceaselessly for three full hours without rest. Even when she was dragged away, even when she was ignored, she had kept on gathering evidence from every direction she could.

This birthday banquet had been Chen Baoxiang’s own idea — she had sent the invitation herself, with a peony tucked inside, the flower Grandmother Ye had loved best.

Lady Ji arrived quickly. When she saw the letter Chen Baoxiang held out — one that had been written but never sent — her gaze lingered on it with a love that was also a piercing grief.

“She never once wrote back to me.” Lady Ji’s voice broke into a sob. “Seventeen years. Not once.”

“Did she resent me until the very end?”

Chen Baoxiang felt as though she had been struck by a dull, heavy blow.

Scenes she had long been forcing herself to suppress came scattering loose from the edges of her mind.

Surging floodwaters. Crowded masses of people. Sandy earth beneath dying hands.

And beyond the walls of the frontier city — a grave mounded high.

All the noise and life around her receded. Chen Baoxiang felt as though she were still sitting at the edge of Grandmother Ye’s grave, small and still, not even daring to cry aloud.

“Wherever Grandmother is, that is Baoxiang’s home.”

“How could our Baoxiang have no one who wants her — Grandmother wants her. Grandmother likes our Baoxiang best of all.”

The stooped silhouette dissolved into sand-laden wind and scattered away, bleeding into the corners of her eyes as something she could never clear away. She had wanted to carry Grandmother Ye back to Shangjing — the city Grandmother had yearned for all her life — had wanted to bring her to see the old friend she had murmured about in her final moments.

But in the end, it had been too late.

Chen Baoxiang asked Ji Qiurang quietly, “What was Grandmother Ye like when she was young?”

“Oh, her.” Ji Qiurang let out a tearful sigh, then curved her lips into a smile. “She was a force of nature who feared neither heaven nor earth. Born into a family of scholars, yet she loved practicing martial arts above all else. She used to ride all over Shangjing causing trouble, until Old Master Ye had to break a branch off a tree and chase her with it.”

“She studied poetry and literature a little too, but not nearly as well as she took to martial arts. That was mostly because her elder brother was always forcing her to study. Every bone in her body was one of pure defiance — she never gave anyone what they wanted.”

“She made her raucous way through life until she was sixteen, when she passed the examination and earned the position of chief official at the Bureau of Martial Enforcement.”

“Glorious in her prime, the talk of the town, all eyes looking up wherever she went — I thought she would live her whole life with that kind of brilliance.”

But afterward.

What came after — Ji Qiurang couldn’t even think of it without tears threatening to fall again.

She pushed a small box toward Chen Baoxiang. “These are some of her things she left behind in Shangjing from those days. I’ve kept them for many years, always thinking she’d come back for them someday.”

“But now… take them. Keep them for her.”

Chen Baoxiang listened, and her gaze went still and distant.

The Grandmother Ye she had known had always been ill — frail and aged, like a single inch of candlelight hanging on in the wind.

But opening that box, she saw someone charging through the city in red robes on horseback, laughing with abandon as she rode off to pluck the finest peonies in Shangjing. She saw ink brushed across paper in sweeping strokes, a gathering of scholars held at bay, as she filled in verses at Zhaixing Tower, slightly drunk.

Bright eyes that held the whole world. Raising a cup and glancing back with confidence and flair: “However many people you’ve seen in your life — how many have been quite like me?”

That bright, unrestrained laughter rode the wind across the moon — and gradually faded into gray and white, into nothing.

“I thought I was the only one left in the world who still remembered her.”

— Ji Qiurang sighed. The corners of her eyes, finely creased with age, curved gently. “Thank goodness she still had you.”