Chapter 418 — The Ledger on the Floor

CHAPTER 418

The Ledger on the Floor

One pill couldn't save forty-three people, so he made forty-four.

It took four firings. The first came out at noon with the whole Valley watching. The rest came out in the dark, with nobody watching but Rui Ning, who fed the coals and wept into his rag every time a lid opened. Sima Lan counted each pill into the tray. Su Wanning carried the tray down the rows of cots, pill by pill, and Bai Chenxi followed with a lamp and a face like a locked gate.

“Number twenty-six,” Su Wanning whispered, bending over a boy of fifteen. “Open, please. That's it. Swallow.”

Grey went out of his fingers like ink from wet paper.

Two hours past midnight, the patients slept with pink nails on their blankets. The court was quiet again, but now their breathing was easy. Shi Feng looked along the cots while Sima Lan checked her count.

“Forty-one cots, all dosed,” Sima Lan said. “The Valley Master had hers at noon. That leaves one.”

“Two,” Shi Feng said. “Her, and a spare. In case of a late case.”

Sima Lan looked at him over the ledger. Then she wrote spare, 1 in the margin and said nothing, which he had learned to read as approval.

He walked alone through the Valley to the room at the end of the garden path. Su Wanning had gone to bed at last, dragged away by Bai Chenxi under one arm, still protesting that she wasn't tired. The candle in the little room had burned down to a puddle. Ling Qingzhu lay asleep, flushed and quiet. He knelt beside the bed, lifted her head, put the last pill on her lip and watched her swallow.

The grey went out of her left hand slowly, nail by nail, from the base to the tip.

He sat down on the floor with his back against the foot of the bed, the furnace ledger open on his knee, and wrote the last line.

Patient one. Pill given. Fee:

Shi Feng studied the blank fee space. He was too tired to make another calculation, and charging her tonight felt wrong. He laid the brush across the page without filling it in.

Ling Qingzhu woke slowly, like a swimmer coming up through warm water.

She lay there and took stock. The ceiling was hers. The quilt was hers. Her head was clear for the first time in weeks, and she could breathe all the way to the bottom of her chest without feeling it scrape. She raised her left hand into the light of the window.

The nails were pink.

Ling Qingzhu remembered the cup, the dark room, and his voice. Then she remembered what she’d told him. I didn’t want you to come. Once words are spoken, even four horses can’t pull them back. She was embarrassed. The fever hadn’t invented everything; most of it was true.

Please let it have been a dream.

She turned her head.

Shi Feng was on the floor.

Shi Feng slept with his back against the foot of her bed and his legs stretched across the floor. His head tipped against the wooden frame at an angle that would leave his neck sore when he woke. The ledger lay open on his knee, its brush resting across the page as though he’d just stopped writing. Ink marked his cuff; ash marked his jaw. He hadn’t changed his robe. His breathing was slow and even. After three days awake, he’d finally fallen asleep here.

Ling Qingzhu sat up, very carefully, and didn't make a sound.

She was supposed to wake him. She had a speech ready. It began with You should not be in a lady's room and ended, in its better draft, with Get up and go to bed.

She looked at the ledger instead.

The upper page was a list in Sima Lan's square hand. Day three. Seventeen herbs. One petal. No failures. Below, in a different hand, a plainer one, with an uneven brush that had obviously been steadied against a bench, ran a column of names. Forty-one, each ticked. At the bottom he had written, Patient one: Ling Qingzhu. Pill given. Fee:

And nothing.

She read the line twice. The man who had invoiced Martial Palace for the dust on its own floor had written Fee and left the rest blank.

Her thumb pressed hard against her sleeve.

He doesn't know what to charge me, Ling Qingzhu thought. Or he does, and he can't bring himself to write it.

She didn't decide which was worse.

Ling Qingzhu eased the quilt off her knees and leaned over to cover his shoulders. She had to stretch farther than she liked. He didn’t wake. She carefully straightened the crooked corner and withdrew her hands before looking at his face again.

“Idiot,” Ling Qingzhu whispered.

His breathing didn't change.

Grey dawn filled the window behind her. A bird called from the garden. Ling Qingzhu listened, relieved by the ordinary sound after days of gongs and frightened voices. Shi Feng continued sleeping against the bed.

She sat with her knees drawn up under her chin and watched the light creep across the floorboards and over the ledger.

Ten more minutes, she thought. Then I'll wake him.

She looked out of the window one more time, idly.

Far out over the Fanghua Hills, a thin red light had risen into the dawn. It hung there, quite still, like an eye opening.

Ling Qingzhu knew what it was. Every Valley disciple did.

She looked down at the sleeping man. Her thumb stayed where it was.

Ten minutes, she decided again, and didn't move.