Chapter 189 — Su Wanning's Letter

CHAPTER 189

Su Wanning's Letter

Su Wanning's letter arrived folded around the tournament results.

Ling Qingzhu knew who had sent it before she saw the name. Nobody else underlined a question three times and then drew an angry face beside it.

She sat at the little table in her assigned courtyard at Hundred Flower Valley. Flowering trees stood beyond the wall, and the morning air carried more qi than the capital's crowded streets. Her white veil stayed tied. This was a new place, not the home she once shared with Shi Feng.

The first line was written larger than the rest.

You left before the final?

Ling Qingzhu read on.

He won? Shi Feng won the entire tournament? I asked the messenger twice. He seemed offended the second time. Why didn't you tell me he could beat all those princes?

There was an ink blot where Su Wanning had stopped, then a fresh paragraph squeezed beneath it.

And don't tell me you chose him only because he was convenient. When you were sixteen, you found excuses for talking about the Qingshi boy. You found a new one after marrying him.

And he ignored you? Him? The same man who forgot his own question when you tucked your hair behind your ear? Don't tell me he was looking at someone else. I'll be angry for you after you've explained what happened.

Ling Qingzhu's fingers tightened around the page.

Su Wanning had seen too much during that outing. She had seen Shi Feng watching his supposed wife, then watched him pay the bill without complaining.

She had paid nothing.

The money was settled now.

At the bottom, Su Wanning's writing became large again.

The princess is joining HIS sect? Sima Lan? Artificer Hall? Are they recruiting disciples or collecting Great Liang's finest scandals? Write back properly this time. Don't send me three polite lines about the weather.

Ling Qingzhu lowered the letter.

For a moment she felt a sharp, foolish jealousy. Sima Lan would travel where Shi Feng traveled. She would see him at meals, hear his blunt replies, and perhaps learn which jokes made him laugh.

Ling Qingzhu thought, That isn't something I can forbid.

She had no right to turn his new sect into another condition of their private agreement. He hadn't left to make her jealous. He had left because living beside her hurt.

A bell rang beyond the flowering trees.

Ling Qingzhu folded the letter and went to the morning practice court. Six other new disciples were already waiting. A pale stone tablet listed the day's training, and a woman in a blue sash checked their attendance.

Lin Yue was at early Foundation Establishment. She had trained at the Valley for several years and had no interest in treating a new disciple's title as a reason to arrive late.

“The sword forms first,” Lin Yue said. “No one leaves an unfinished set because the dining hall opens.”

One girl looked disappointed. Another adjusted her grip and pretended she hadn't been thinking about breakfast.

Ling Qingzhu took her place at the end of the second row. Her inner-disciple token had made people curious, but she gave them no display that answered every question. Her movements were clean, measured and within what she chose to show.

On the seventh turn, a strand of hair slipped across her temple. She tucked it back without thinking.

Then she looked toward the empty edge of the court.

Nobody stood there staring at her.

The ache hit so suddenly that her next step was late. She corrected it before the form broke, but Lin Yue noticed.

“Your feet,” Lin Yue said. “Keep your attention with them.”

“Yes, Senior Lin Yue,” Ling Qingzhu said.

She began the sequence again. The second time, she didn't look beyond the court. She finished the set and accepted the correction without pretending her distraction was part of some secret technique.

Then Lin Yue stood the pale tablet at the front of the court and read the entrance ranking aloud. Each new disciple ran the set once, and the tablet kept the row they reached before they stopped.

The new disciples went in order. Most stopped in the second row, one in the third.

Ling Qingzhu went last. She finished the first row cleanly, entered the second, and came to a stop in the middle of the third with her feet correct and her breath even, as though the row had ended there.

Lin Yue looked at the tablet for a while. She wrote “unranked — to be retested” in the space beside Ling Qingzhu's name, said nothing else, and turned the tablet so both rows of new disciples could read it.

After practice, the others talked about the tournament results. One had a brother who wagered on Yuan Kuang and now claimed he always admired Gu Zhan instead. The girls laughed. Ling Qingzhu heard Shi Feng's name twice and said nothing.

She didn't want his victory to become another excuse for people to question her marriage.

It was his victory. She could at least let it belong to him.

Back in the courtyard, she placed Su Wanning's letter beside a clean sheet.

The brush hovered over the first line.

What could she write? That he wasn't the man they'd assumed? That she had watched his meals grow smaller and called him greedy? That he told her the payment bag was empty and she chose to believe he was bargaining?

Su Wanning would read it. Then she would ask the obvious question: why didn't you listen?

Ling Qingzhu had no good answer.

She set the brush down.

A little packet lay inside her travel chest. It held things too ordinary to count among a cultivator's treasures: a household receipt, the end of a cooking cord, a folded note in Shi Feng's plain handwriting. The note named the jars on the kitchen shelf so she wouldn't mix the medicines after he left.

Ling Qingzhu read the labels again, though she knew them already. His careful writing hurt more than an angry farewell would have.

She thought, I can't ask him to forget it because I finally feel ashamed.

Outside, someone called that the meal bell would ring soon. Ling Qingzhu put the note away and stood. She ate at the dining hall, listened to Lin Yue explain the next day's work, and returned without inventing a reason to send another urgent letter.

That evening, Su Wanning's questions still lay unanswered on the table.

Ling Qingzhu folded the sheet along its old creases. Her friend deserved a proper answer when she could give one.

For now, she put it beneath the travel chest's lid and closed it gently.