The roads between the capital and Qizhou were well-traveled and unobstructed, but given the great distance, one trip still took roughly a month. Heading east, the route passed through numerous prefectures and counties. At every town and city without exception, there was a dense and flourishing population, lively and bustling streets and markets. Even the villages they passed through had fields stretching for miles, with men plowing and women weaving — everywhere the eye could see was a scene of peace and prosperity.

This journey home to pay her respects at the ancestral grave was both a private matter and something of an official errand. Since the schedule was not rushed, they traveled by day and rested at night, lodging in relay stations along the route. At every stop, the station managers without exception were solicitously attentive and impeccably accommodating — the food, needless to say, was also excellent, refined beyond what she had imagined. Items such as fruits from the Jianghuai region, malt sugar from the Heji area, and hundred-flower stone honey were all tribute goods. One day they passed a relay station in Weizhou, and the dishes served for the evening meal even included a course of silverfish.

This was the season when silverfish were fattest and most full of roe, but the fish were found only in the Jiangnan region. In a place like the capital, during this season, if there were fresh, live silverfish on the banquet table, it had become a way of competing in extravagance and showing off wealth. The reason was that even in Jiangnan these fish were not produced in great quantities, and they died the moment they left the water — extremely delicate. To ship them to the capital required changing the water daily, using fast boats specially assigned to travel day and night without pause. Even so, by the time they reached the capital from Jiangnan, the majority would typically have died. To eat just one mouthful of fresh delicacy required such an expenditure of human labor and material resources that it could only be called decadent excess. Precisely because of this, Madam Jiang had at some point given instructions that this item be struck from the list of seasonal tribute goods.

This place was not Jiangnan. No matter how well-appointed the relay station, it could not possibly have this kind of seasonal delicacy on hand. Pu Zhu also thought of how, at almost every relay station they had stopped at each evening along the way, the provisions had surpassed ordinary levels.

At first she had merely found it surprising, assuming the station managers were going all out in their service because she was passing through on imperial orders, and had not given it much further thought. But then that evening, preparing to bathe, she needed the bath cream, and her maidservant came to report in a fluster that the supply they had brought had been accidentally soaked in water and ruined.

The bedding and personal items such as fragrant medicinal bath cream were things she brought herself — she normally had no need for the relay station to supply them. Since her own supply was gone, Pu Zhu told the maidservant to fetch some soapwort pods that the station would have on hand as a substitute. Unexpectedly, what was brought to her was an item made in the Imperial Workshops — and what was even more of a coincidence, it was the very variety with the floral fragrance she most commonly used.

She finally found it strange and had Luo Bao go ask the station manager.

Luo Bao came back and relayed the station manager’s words.

Regarding the food — he said this place was at the entrance to a canal, where water transport was highly developed, and boats carrying all manner of goods passed through every day on their way to the capital; silverfish were expensive but not particularly rare. As for the bath cream — though it was not commonly seen outside, the station regularly received distinguished guests, and moreover, word had come a while back that the Emperor would be making his eastern progress in the spring, and this was a required route; at that time there would be even more distinguished guests lodging here, so items made in the Imperial Workshops had to be prepared in order to ensure proper service.

Though Pu Zhu still found it strange, she couldn’t very well press the matter further — asking why the bath cream happened to be the specific fragrance she herself commonly used would have crossed into something private. So she let the matter rest.

The journey proceeded in this fashion, with eating and drinking and traveling along, until finally, around the year’s end, she arrived back at her hometown.

Her grandfather had entered official service from a young age, and Pu Zhu herself had also been born in the capital. She had only returned to her ancestral home once, when she was under eight years old — the year her father died on the frontier, and shortly afterward her mother also fell ill and passed away. She had accompanied people escorting the coffin back to the old family home to erect a cenotaph for her father and have her parents buried together.

Apart from that, she had no other impression of her native place. Moreover, family members had been exiled to the frontier in earlier years because of her grandfather’s fall from grace, and they had long resented her. After she returned to the capital, there had been no voluntary contact from either side.

This homecoming was entirely different. The Pu family clan members had long since been informed of her return home on imperial orders to pay respects at the ancestral grave. On the day she arrived, they had come out a great distance to meet her together with the county magistrate, ushering her into the old family residence and treating her with great solicitousness and deference, fawning over her at every turn.

When she was small she might still have harbored resentment toward the clan members for taking out their anger on her. But now she had long since made her peace with it. Clan relatives, after all — they had suffered misfortune without any fault of their own, losing everything they had originally possessed and being forced into exile on the frontier — to call it a bolt from the blue would not be wrong. Resentment was only human. It had all passed. Since they now sincerely sought to make things right, why should she dwell on old grievances and keep them in her heart? So she treated them with ordinary courtesy.

In the first days after arriving home, each day brought visits from the female relatives of local gentry families or wealthy households, paying their respects. While managing these social calls, she was also busy with the tomb restoration work. On the day they erected the stele of imperial merit at her grandfather’s grave — the stele bearing the Emperor’s commendation — almost every official and notable in the county arrived to offer their respects to Lord Pu, reverently reading the inscription aloud, and expressing gratitude for the current Emperor’s vast and magnanimous heavenly grace. Some even composed poems and essays on the spot. The scene was festive and crowded, like a marketplace.

Pu Zhu stood to one side with a smile on her face, responding to the gathered crowd in her role as the head of the family. But when she looked toward the gravestone before her grandfather’s tomb, with its carved dates of birth and death, her heart was filled with boundless emotion.

If her grandfather knew of this in the world beyond, would he feel joy or sorrow at this posthumous “glory” bestowed upon him?

She did not know. She only knew that in her own heart, there was nothing but cold scorn. All of this, to her eyes, was like a farce.

About half a month after her homecoming, as the year’s end approached, all the various affairs gradually quieted down.

Though she felt little in the way of attachment to her native soil, both her parents were buried here, and in her heart, this place was therefore like her true home — far more so than the princely mansion back in the capital.

Li Xuandu’s return was still a long way off, and even when he was about to return, she was in no hurry to leave.

She would spend the New Year here in the old family home — and spending it alone, she still found her days pleasant and full.

On New Year’s Eve, following custom, she went early in the morning to her parents’ graves, and discovered that someone had already been there to sweep and offer respects.

She assumed it was the clan members, gave it no further thought, set out the fruit offerings and clear wine she had brought, knelt before her parents’ shared grave, silently said her prayers, then turned toward the direction where her father’s remains were actually buried and poured out clear wine, bowing in reverence from afar. On her return, in keeping with the customs of the time, she and her maidservants together inserted branches of peach wood — to ward off evil spirits — in the window and door frames, posted spring scrolls on the walls, and then took up scissors and cut out many small spring pennants of pale green silk, the color of newly sprouted leaves, symbolizing the welcome of spring, and hung them from the eaves of the front and back of the house and on the trees in the courtyard. Thinking of scenes from her childhood, a childlike impulse suddenly stirred in her. She cut out small spring pennants and pinned one in her own hair, then had the maidservants each pin one too. One said yours is crooked, another said I want to pin another one — for a while there was laughter and giggling all around.

As the saying goes: “The green smoke falls as the blade passes, the cicada-wing hair feels the coming of spring” — on a beauty’s head, wisps of spring pennants gracefully drift, welcoming the arrival of yet another new spring.

That evening, she held a lit candle, climbed up a creaking old wooden ladder, and made her way into an upper loft, to sort through her father’s effects left behind in life.

When her father died, her grandfather had for a time considered resigning his post and returning to his home region. At the time she had accompanied the coffin back, he had packed up some of her father’s personal effects in wooden chests and sent them ahead to the old family home.

She remembered the chests had contained mostly her father’s worn-out brushes and leftover ink, old yellowed books and documents, and some of his casual written notes. They might still be here.

Having nothing else to do that night, this old memory suddenly came to her, and she climbed up to the loft, wanting to find the chests and go through them.

The old family home of the Pu family was indeed an old residence — not a small place, but having stood empty for many years, it had long since fallen into dilapidation. The clan members had swept and repaired the other parts in preparation for her return, but this small loft used for storing old items had not been touched.

It must have been many years since anyone entered the place. The moment Pu Zhu stepped inside, a strong smell of dust and mildew hit her. She covered her nose with her sleeve, used the candle for light, ducked past a curtain of cobwebs drooping down toward her, and looked around. She quickly spotted the chest in a corner beneath a pile of discarded odds and ends.

She dragged it out, wiped away the thick layer of dust that had accumulated on its surface, and opened the lid.

It was much as she remembered — indeed all her father’s effects, but not much remained; many of the books and scrolls were missing. Given that it had effectively been ownerless property for so many years, they had most likely been taken away by others. What remained were some manuscripts that, in other people’s eyes, would be considered worthless.

Pu Zhu felt a surge of quiet relief and immediately began going through her father’s manuscripts, arranging them in chronological order. She found that they were his travel journals from the western territories spanning the decade from the twenty-seventh year of the Xuanning reign — when he first ventured beyond the passes — through the thirty-seventh year, when he met his end. They recorded in detail every country he passed through on each journey: his discoveries there, the local customs, people, taboos, and strange tales. What he encountered, and what he did. Though only some remained and the rest had been lost, for Pu Zhu this discovery was still like finding a treasure.

It was as though, crossing the distance between life and death, across time and space, she felt herself turning again into that little girl of long ago — sitting on her father’s knee, listening as he told her story after story about his journeys to the west.

Unmindful of the dust on the floor, she sat down right beside the chest, took up her father’s manuscripts, and began reading with ravenous hunger. She read in one breath until deep into the night, her hands and feet numb with cold yet feeling nothing, not the slightest sense of fatigue, and finally picked up the journal recording his last diplomatic mission before his death — the one to Yinyue City.

She remembered that this journal had been among his other effects, brought back by one of the attendants who had narrowly escaped alive from that ambush. At the time she had been too young to read it, and her mother, at the sight of the belongings, had dissolved into tears and put everything away together with her father’s other possessions. Over the years it had passed through various hands and finally come to rest here, where now, so many years later, she opened it.

Pu Zhu read every single thing her father had written down with his brush during the last period of his life, word by word, with something close to reverence.

Reading on, her gaze suddenly stopped.

In the autumn of the thirty-sixth year of the Xuanning reign, her father had once again taken up the envoy’s staff and led his delegation westward on a mission to the Western Regions.

That year, the woman then known as Princess Jinxi, who had already been married into the Western Di for six years, through her efforts at mediation — beautiful and courageous as she was — had not only won the deep affection of her husband, the Western Di prince, but had also earned the recognition of the Western Di people. They called her the Yinyue Princess, naming her after the river that wound around their tent-city and pastoral lands and had nurtured them. It was also that year that the Western Di prince smoothly succeeded to the throne and became king, swearing that for as long as he reigned, he would remain on friendly terms with the Li Dynasty.

On this trip, her father’s primary purpose was to go to Yinyue City to attend the coronation ceremony of the new Western Di King.

In her father’s handwritten journal, Pu Zhu saw the name “Suyuan.” She knew this was Jiang Yi’s courtesy name.

Before setting out, his close friend, General of the Southern Court Jiang Suyuan, had seen him off for more than twenty li beyond the western gate of the city, stopping only when they reached the farewell pavilion set outside the city — that pavilion which served as a reminder to those seeing others off that it was time to halt.

Her father wrote that it happened to be his friend’s birthday that day. Thirty-two years old, and still unwed six years on. His heart was full of feeling, and before departing he could not help saying: “If you have anything you wish to say, I will carry it as your messenger.”

His friend looked out toward the western horizon, smiled, shook his head, and said he had nothing to say — only that he should take care on the road. Then he turned his horse and galloped away.

Pu Zhu’s heart beat a little faster. She read this passage twice, sensing that something was implied, then hurriedly flipped to the later entries in the journal.

The name Suyuan appeared again in her father’s writing three months later.

In the thirty-seventh year of the Xuanning reign, he arrived in Yinyue City and had an audience with Princess Jinxi.

Though her husband, the Western Di King, had successfully ascended the throne, under pressure from within the tribe he had, at the time of his accession, also taken a Western Di noblewoman as a secondary consort.

Her father attended the coronation ceremony, conveyed the grace of the Li Dynasty’s Emperor to the Western Di King on behalf of the court, and on the day of his departure, Princess Grand Jinxi saw him off to the banks of the Yinyue River. She entrusted to him a Jiugao flute and asked him to take it back to Jiang Yi, with no further words.

The journal ended abruptly there. For on the return journey, her father encountered a sudden attack by the Wuli people, and never came home again.

Pu Zhu looked at that last yellowed page, at the familiar handwriting upon it, and in her mind’s eye rose the scene from early in the year when she had first arrived in the capital, and encountered Jiang Yi at the city gate.

She understood now why Jiang Yi, despite holding high office, had never attended to marriage matters, and had remained unwed all his life.

She also finally understood why he had taken such a particular liking to Huaiwei.

On that night, when he first met the child — in the courtyard of the relay station — he had slowly crouched down before the boy, gazed at him, reached out and gently stroked his hair, and in a tender tone of voice said: No. I like you very much, Huaiwei.

Pu Zhu nearly leapt up. She quickly set down her father’s journal, knelt on the floor, and, bending over the wooden chest, began searching through it urgently.

Fortunately, the item was still there — she found it!

A Jiugao flute — literally a flute made of crane bone. Though it possessed the beauty of drawing pine-wind to play against the evening snow, it was after all only a bone flute — in the eyes of most people, worth nothing at all. This was precisely why, after so many years, it had remained here intact and untouched by anyone else.

Pu Zhu picked up the flute that the Grand Princess had once entrusted her father to deliver to Jiang Yi, and in the last flickering candlelight in the loft, carefully turned it over a few times. She saw that one end of the flute, at the tip, had what appeared to be a row of small characters carved by a knife.

She brought it close to the candlelight and read carefully: “Spring of the twenty-sixth year of the Xuanning reign — Yi presents this to younger sister Lang.”

The Grand Princess’s given name was Lang. In the twenty-sixth year of the Xuanning reign, she must have been only about fifteen or sixteen years old.

The candle burned down its last remaining wick. The flame gave one final flicker and went out, leaving darkness before her eyes.

Pu Zhu understood once more.

This crane flute must have been the token of their young love, sent by Jiang Yi to her in their early years — though she did not know what story lay behind it at the time.

That year, by having her father carry it back to Jiang Yi, she was clearly urging him to take a wife, to stop ruining his life waiting for her.

It had only not been foreseen that, after passing through many hands, it would finally come to rest quietly in this dust-covered place — until tonight, when she had turned it out by chance, and it saw the light of the world again.

Pu Zhu sat in the darkness, holding the crane flute in her hands.

One was a woman she had never met in either her past life or this one.

One was a man she had only passed briefly and had no further connection with.

Someone else’s parting — by life or death — what did it have to do with her?

Yet her eyes could not be controlled — they grew gradually hot, and at the bottom of her heart there was even a quiet envy of Princess Jinxi, for that devoted and faithful watching-and-waiting, that lifelong constancy. Even in the end, parted by death — surely before she departed, regarding that young love from her youth, her heart had been free of regret.

And so she remained — in this small loft thick with the smell of mold and dust and curtained in cobwebs, dark as pitch — quietly keeping the last watch of the old year alone, through the night, until dawn came, and the morning light entered through the skylight of the loft and drove away the shadows. She slowly opened her eyes, gathered together her father’s manuscripts and the crane flute, and carefully tucked them away.

A few days later, she left Qizhou and set out on the road back to the capital.

Since the night of keeping watch for the new year, her mind had been restless. She went almost every day to visit her parents’ graves — as though only there could she find inner peace.

The sixth year of the Xiaochang reign had now begun.

In her previous life, the great plague that swept across many prefectures and reached dozens of commanderies, eventually even spreading to the capital and altering the fate of countless people — if nothing had changed — was about to descend very soon.

She remembered it clearly: after the plague ended, the Imperial Medical Bureau reported to the court that Tongzhou had suffered the most deaths, and that area, after subsequent investigation, was determined to have been where the epidemic first appeared.

Tongzhou was located to the north of Qizhou, several hundred li away.

Later accounts claimed that the great plague had also shown ominous signs beforehand. The previous year had seen floods, and mosquitoes and flies had run rampant. On a certain day in the local area, an extraordinary phenomenon had occurred in which mosquitoes and flies blotted out the sky as they passed overhead in a mass migration. Shortly afterward, people began showing symptoms of illness. At the time, however, no one had paid it serious attention, and no effective measures of treatment had been put in place — until in the end, patients were coughing blood and dying; in the worst-affected places, corpses lay piled upon each other, and nine out of ten households had lost someone.

Now, a few days later, this day had arrived: Pu Zhu was about to leave Qizhou, planning to continue westward.

Early that morning, Ye Xiao had already prepared the carriage, waiting for the princess consort to set out.

More time had passed than the agreed hour, and still the princess consort had not come out. Ye Xiao sent someone to urge her, and was told that the princess consort was standing alone inside a room upstairs, showing no signs of coming out. He grew uneasy, went himself to fetch her, went upstairs, and saw the princess consort already dressed in a traveling cloak — yet for some reason, she stood alone at the window, gazing down at the people coming and going on the street below, seemingly lost in thought.

He waited a moment, then spoke: “My Lady, it is time to set out.”

Pu Zhu was looking out the window.

In this lifetime, so many things had already changed. This was almost the last foreknowledge she possessed.

If things proceeded as they had in her previous life — Madam Jiang dying in this plague, and judging from what the Emperor had told her when he summoned her, the likelihood of the Emperor making his move was very high — then what would follow would be the Que Kingdom’s westward migration. Even if Li Xuandu would not listen to her advice and seize the moment to fight back and kill Emperor Xiaochang, as long as he could keep people alive, he should be able to — as in his previous life — make a comeback in the end and ascend to the highest position.

Conversely, if there were no such plague and Madam Jiang remained alive and well, then this court would continue to sustain itself in this fashion — a slow death by a blunt blade — with no telling what upheaval might come one day. Moreover, the Que Kingdom was an enormous unknown variable.

Looking at the Que King’s condition, even without some crisis occurring, he did not have much time left. If the old Que King were to die, the threat from the Li Dynasty would still be present, and Li Xuandu had not agreed to marry Li Tanfang. She did not know whether Li Siye, who was bent on going to war, would make some unusual move.

If the Que Kingdom divided internally and Li Siye seized power — if he truly allied with the Eastern Di — this would place Li Xuandu in a very dangerous situation.

So it was best for everything to proceed as it had in her previous life.

But…

She looked at the stream of people moving to and fro on the street before her — people who had no idea that calamity was about to strike, people going about their early morning business to earn their livelihoods — and could not help thinking back to the day she had accompanied Madam Jiang on her return from Anguo Temple, when along the road they had encountered the ordinary people from Liang Village and Di Village, led by old soldiers, coming to offer their food in tribute.

Those two villages, along with other nearby villages, had seen — according to the Ministry of Revenue’s post-plague report in her previous life — one in three persons die; every household had lost someone.

Those old soldiers, who had fought half their lives for the court — the end that awaited them ought not to have been so tragic.

She thought again of the spring pennants she had pinned in her hair on New Year’s Eve to pray and welcome spring; thought of the crane flute that Grand Princess Jinxi had entrusted her father with, so many years ago, to return to Jiang Yi; thought of her father’s death.

And finally, before Pu Zhu’s eyes, it seemed there floated again the scene of Li Xuandu’s reunion with Madam Jiang the year before, when he first returned to the capital. And there floated the image of his eyes in his previous life — weeping as though weeping blood — as he knelt before Madam Jiang’s spirit tablet.

“Father, come home soon —”

A childlike girl’s voice rang out, jolting her back to the present.

Across the street, a door in one of the households had opened. A young peddler came out with his carrying pole, and running out behind him was a child of five or six, a jade-fair little girl, who grabbed hold of the peddler’s leg and looked up at him with reluctance to part.

The peddler patted the little girl’s head, smiling, and said all right. A woman came running out behind, also smiling, and picked up the little girl. Mother and daughter watched the peddler leave home.

In a moment of reverie, she seemed to see again the scene of many years past: another little girl, full of reluctance, seeing off her father as he left home to go west through Yumen Pass. That father, too, had smiled as he said all right to that little girl. And yet, he had never come home again.

She closed her eyes, turned her head, and instructed that the party halt here for a few more days, then told Ye Xiao to bring people and set out immediately for Gaoxian County in Tongzhou, to the north, in search of a wandering physician by the name of Wu Zhilin.

It had been this physician who, in her previous life, had played a crucial role in bringing the epidemic that later spread to the capital to an end. After the epidemic was extinguished, the court wanted to retain him, but he refused an official post and continued to wander the land.

Pu Zhu remembered that during this period of time, this physician should be in the Tongzhou area.

Now, with several months still remaining before the epidemic that would later spread widely in her previous life had erupted in full force, if this physician could be found early at this moment, he would surely be of great use.

Ye Xiao heard her instruction and felt somewhat puzzled, but asked no further questions, agreed, and immediately set out with his people.