Dawn had just broken, and a fine layer of morning dew condensed on the leaves of the purple bamboo in the courtyard.
Fan Changyu groggily opened her eyes, feeling a throbbing pain in her head.
Did I get drunk last night after all?
She frowned and raised a hand to rub her temples. As she breathed, she noticed an unfamiliar scent on the bedding. A jolt went through her, waking her completely. She instinctively looked down, relieved to find her clothes were still properly on.
But what met her eyes was a dark quilt cover with a pattern of rhombic flowers and birds in nests. The gauze canopy, embroidered with interlocking lotus vines, was only half-drawn near the head of the bed. Golden morning light scattered across it, making the dark lotus patterns seem to glow with a brilliant light.
Fan Changyu assumed she had passed out from drinking and been temporarily placed in a room in the City Lord's manor. Breathing a sigh of relief, she pushed herself up into a sitting position.
"You're awake?" A low, hoarse, and clear voice sounded from outside the bed curtains.
Fan Changyu froze. She turned to look, and through the gold-threaded gauze canopy, she could vaguely make out a person sitting before the mullioned window opposite her. He wore a python robe and a jade belt, his black hair half-loose and half-bound by a golden coronet. He had been sitting there for who knows how long, as silent as a statue in the morning light.
Xie Zheng?
Was she in his room?
For a long moment, Fan Changyu's mind was a complete blank.
The post-drunkenness headache was severe. She had no choice but to press a hand to her temple and carefully recall the events of last night.
She remembered feigning drunkenness and being helped out of the front hall by a maid. But later, when she was looking for a place to sober up, it seemed she had truly gotten drunk. The last image in her mind was of herself washing her face in a water vat before being hauled up by Xie Zheng.
He had seen her when she was drunk?
Given their current relationship, why didn't he just have a maid send her to a guest room to rest? Why bring her back to his own room?
Fan Changyu's mind was filled with questions, but she couldn't remember a single thing that happened after she got drunk. Fearing there might have been some misunderstanding, she could only speak first. "My apologies, I was drunk last night. I... I didn't cause you any trouble, did I, Marquis?"
Through the gauze canopy, she couldn't see the expression on the man's face as he sat in the mahogany chair, but she could feel the atmosphere in the room suddenly turn heavy.
Fan Changyu didn't know if it was something she said that had displeased him, or if she had indeed been impolite last night.
She could hear the sounds of early-rising servants moving about in the courtyard. Worried that she would be seen leaving Xie Zheng's room if she waited any longer, she lifted the gold-threaded canopy and got up. As she pulled on her boots, she said, "If I truly caused any offense last night, this subordinate will make amends to the Marquis another day..."
The man, who had been silent all this time, suddenly let out a derisive laugh. "What offense could you cause me?"
He had probably been sitting here all night, as his voice was as hoarse as if his throat were filled with sand. Yet his words were sharp and cold, as if he utterly hated the way she constantly drew a line between them.
Fan Changyu's hands, pulling on her tall boots, paused. A deathly silence spread between them.
After putting on her boots, she looked up. Without the layer of gauze obstructing her view, she could clearly see his pale face. The corners of his eyes were tinged with scarlet from the sleepless night, and the fingertips of the hand resting before his knee were crusted with dried blood.
Anyone could see his exhaustion, yet he was like a tautly drawn bowstring, making one fear the madness and distortion that would seep out from the cracks once that feigned calm shattered.
Seeing him like this, Fan Changyu felt a dull ache in her heart for some reason.
The Xie Zheng in her memory had always been proud and arrogant. Even when his life had been hanging by a thread and she had found him, he had never shown the slightest hint of weakness.
But now, he made her feel that his pride and causticity, which were like a body full of sharp thorns, were merely a thin layer of ice on a lake's surface. The slightest touch of the sun could make it crack.
As if realizing his own words had been too sharp, Xie Zheng fell silent for two breaths, then rose and walked toward the door. "What do you want to eat?"
His tone was so natural it was as if this was how they were always meant to be, as if the feud between their fathers had never created a rift between them.
Some memories of their past time together were awakened. Fan Changyu had once thought she could face it all calmly, but at this moment, she was still seized by that heart-wrenching sorrow.
"Xie Zheng."
The man, whose hand was already on the door bolt, stopped dead in his tracks at her words.
Fan Changyu looked at his elegant back, took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was still tinged with hoarseness. "We haven't spoken properly since we parted in Chongzhou. Why don't we take this chance today to clear the air?"
The man with his back to her said nothing, but he showed no intention of leaving, as if waiting for her to continue.
Fan Changyu said, "I am very sorry about General Xie's death."
At the mention of Xie Linshan, Xie Zheng remained silent. His back was to her, so she couldn't see his expression, but the veins on the hand gripping the door bolt bulged from the force he was exerting.
"I don't blame you for the choice you made that day, or for the words you said. Until the truth of what happened seventeen years ago is thoroughly investigated, I won't ask you to believe my maternal grandfather and my father again. You, out of consideration for Grand Tutor Tao, once said that you would only see me as a fellow apprentice from now on. But I cannot be as detached as you, Marquis."
Fan Changyu stared at his back, her eyes already stinging uncontrollably, but she still enunciated each word seriously. "Let's be strangers from now on. I've imposed on you today."
When her mother was alive, she always said that she was big-hearted, but for the people she truly took to heart, losing any one of them was like losing half her life.
She didn't fall for someone easily, and once she did, how could she let go just because she was told to?
Her father's feud, the imperial marriage decree—too much already stood between them. In the end, there was no going back.
Crack—
The sound of splintering wood came from the door. Xie Zheng had snapped the door bolt.
Fan Changyu's heart instinctively jumped with it.
She saw his blood-crusted fingers, now oozing tiny beads of blood from the force, yet he seemed completely oblivious to the pain. With his back still to her, he asked, "What if I told you I regret it?"
Fan Changyu's pupils widened slightly, not understanding the meaning of his words for a moment. "What?"
Xie Zheng turned around, his eyes nothing but an inky blackness. A crimson bead of blood traced a path over his pale, slender knuckles and fell to the floor, bursting into a tiny blood-flower, like a teardrop of blood.
"I said, I regret it."
He spoke slowly, his tone pale and stubborn.
The words sent a numbing shock through Fan Changyu's heart, followed by an endless bitterness. She remained silent for a long time.
The doorframe blocked the morning light pouring in from outside. Xie Zheng stood there, his entire being seeming to merge with the shadows. Fan Changyu was standing right across from the mullioned window, and the morning sun fell fully upon her, vibrant and warm.
The dividing line between light and dark was like an insurmountable chasm.
After a long while, Fan Changyu heard herself ask in a hoarse voice, "You regret it, so what?"
Xie Zheng watched her quietly, not a glimmer of light visible in his pitch-black pupils. "Can we go back to how we were before? Please?"
He had tried to give her up, but these past days had probably been the greatest torment and pain he had ever endured in his life.
At first, he thought he would slowly get used to it, just as he had been unable to accept his parents' successive deaths as a child. No matter how painful, he could endure it.
If not a day, then a month. If not a month, then a year... But he couldn't even last a month.
The space in his chest was terribly empty. The longer he was away from her, the more that hollowness grew, almost driving him mad.
Endless slaughter and pain couldn't alleviate it in the slightest.
Many times, Xie Zheng wondered if he was already dead.
No, death would be better than this torment.
It was as if she were a part of his very life, so once he lost her, he became lost and dispirited, like a walking corpse.
For countless days and nights, she and the tragic scene of Xie Linshan's death in battle at Jinzhou seventeen years ago appeared alternately in his dreams, making him struggle, drenched in blood, in the endless darkness.
It seemed his life was meant only for revenge, that he was unworthy of a single shred of joy or pity in this world.
But he had received the purest, most ardent love from her.
She was the one who let him know that this world was not only filled with bitterness.
But the image of Xie Linshan's abdomen—disemboweled, its organs scooped out, and finally sewn shut crookedly by a medical officer—and those wounds from swords and axes that cut deep to the bone, also constantly suffocated him.
As he was being driven mad by the torment of hatred and love, he was shocked to realize that he hated her too.
Her father's generation had killed his father! It had made him suffer for half his life.
She had shown him what love was, only to have those budding threads of affection torture him day and night, ensuring he would never know peace for the rest of his life!
At the peak of his hatred, he had thought about taking her with him to die after his great revenge was complete.
If they could not share a bed in life, then they would share a tomb in death.
He would no longer have to endure such pain and torment. On the Bridge of Helplessness, he could hold her hand and go to the next life together.
In their next life, they probably wouldn't be separated by such a bloody, generational feud. Perhaps he could have known her since childhood, his childhood sweetheart... She liked scholars, so he would become a refined scholar, earn a title, and in the year of her hairpin ceremony, marry her and have children...
But it was just a thought.
If he could have borne to hurt her in the slightest, he wouldn't have only said that he would never see her again in this life.
When he saw her again and learned that she had already walked through the gates of hell and back, the terror that made his teeth chatter and his whole body tremble with rage and helplessness—he never wanted to experience that a second time in his life.
Xie Zheng looked at the young woman in military attire standing in the morning light. Even the strands of her hair were dusted with a layer of pale gold, as if she were a deity who had mistakenly wandered into the mortal world.
The scene from last night's banquet, when Zheng Wenchang had toasted her on his behalf, flashed before his eyes again. The jealousy clamoring in his heart grew wildly like weeds.
Could she be a deity for him alone?
A long time passed without an answer from Fan Changyu.
Xie Zheng unconsciously clenched his fists. The faint pain from the wounds on his fingertips made him more clear-headed, and his black eyes grew deeper and more somber.
Fan Changyu was simply stunned.
Go back to how they were before?
How could they go back to how they were before?
The feud between their fathers stood between them. Even if the Jinzhou Massacre from seventeen years ago could eventually be cleared up, the emperor had already decreed a marriage. He was going to marry a princess. What would that make them?
Fan Changyu had heard that some high-ranking officials kept mistresses. Could it be that he wanted her to be his mistress?
Fan Changyu suddenly felt it was hard to breathe. A sharp, piercing pain rose from the bottom of her heart, blurring her vision. She held back the stinging sensation that was madly welling up in her eyes and retorted, "How does the Marquis think we can go back to how we were before?"
"Can the Marquis act as if the matter of Jinzhou never happened? Or can he have His Majesty retract the imperial marriage decree?"
As she spoke the last sentence, even though she had clenched her jaw, a tear she had held back for so long finally escaped and fell heavily to the ground.
Hearing the first half of her question, Xie Zheng's eyes turned frighteningly gloomy. After hearing the second half, he suddenly shot his gaze up. "Who told you the emperor decreed a marriage for me?"
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