Chapter 51 — The Unpaid Debt

CHAPTER 51

The Unpaid Debt

Shi Feng set the empty bag beside the breakfast bowls and waited for her to look up. The porridge was hot and the courtyard gate was shut. There were no visitors, so a plain quarrel could stay a plain quarrel.

“There wasn’t one spirit stone in this,” Shi Feng said calmly.

Ling Qingzhu’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. Her expression changed, and for a moment she looked truly startled. Then she remembered the savings she had counted herself, the expensive dinners of the past month, and his endless complaints about small prices.

So that’s it, she thought. He emptied it himself and now he wants to be paid twice!

“We agreed on a sum,” Ling Qingzhu said, and her chin came up. “I paid it. Don’t ask me twice.”

“I’m asking about the first payment,” Shi Feng said.

“The one I put in your hand,” Ling Qingzhu said. “You said ‘after the dishes.’ You were standing right there.”

“Open it,” Shi Feng said.

She snatched the bag and pushed her hand inside. It went in easily and came out empty. She checked the mouth, the seams and the stitching, and found nothing wrong. Her fingers tightened on the cloth.

Shi Feng watched her face settle into disappointment. He knew that look. She had reached her verdict before the evidence arrived.

“I thought we understood each other,” Ling Qingzhu said. “I really did. That’s the stupid part.”

That sentence nearly made him laugh. Yesterday he had been furious at the absurdity of it. Today, facing her certainty, it didn’t feel so funny. He could spread every receipt on the table and make her count each fish and each repaired latch. That would prove where his money went. It wouldn’t prove where her money never was.

“Ten thousand spirit stones were promised,” Shi Feng said. “You handed me this bag. It held none.”

“Not enough? Say that before we registered!” Ling Qingzhu said, eyes flashing.

Shi Feng looked at her steadily. What an actress, he thought. She hands me an empty bag, and now she’s the one who’s offended? Some arguments could be ended with a sword. This wasn’t one of them.

He took out his copy of the agreement. In the small space beside the payment clause, under both signatures, he wrote: bag received; ten thousand spirit stones promised, not received. Then he blew the ink dry and turned the paper toward her.

“My account will keep the debt,” Shi Feng said. “I won’t ask you to pay twice. I haven’t been paid once.”

Her expression hardened. “Hmph. Keep your debt, then,” Ling Qingzhu said. “Keep it where I can’t see it.” She didn’t touch the paper.

Shi Feng folded it and put it away slowly. She took the care for a show of hurt feelings, and he let her. In truth he just didn’t want to tear a page he meant to keep.

Breakfast went on badly. Ling Qingzhu ate half her porridge and walked out. Shi Feng washed both bowls and carried the bag back to the room, to his corner beside the rolled-up bedding.

Then he sat down on the floor and looked at the arrangement as it really stood.

The Hengyun pass was still valid. It had already given him mountain valleys that ordinary wages could never buy. Tearing up the agreement wouldn’t remove the danger of the marriage, and it wouldn’t make Sima Yu forget his name. It would only cost him a good bargain just to show he was angry.

I chose this for more than a purse, Shi Feng thought. Keep the terms, keep the debt, and make the rest profitable.

That was a decision, not a surrender. But the lavish dinners were over.

At the market, Shi Feng walked past the fish stall without slowing.

“Young Master Shi!” Peng Tao called, waving a silver carp by the tail. “The belly is still fresh! Young Master Shi!”

Shi Feng didn’t turn. Peng Tao stared after him, baffled.

“Is he sick?” the vegetable seller asked.

“He bought a duck three days ago!”

“A duck seven days ago and a bone today? The cripple’s wife must have found the purse.”

“…”

At the butcher’s, Shi Feng chose a cheap cut and asked for the bones. The butcher weighed them and tried to charge extra for the scraps of meat still stuck to them.

“Wrap them together,” Shi Feng said.

The butcher looked at the long queue behind him and did. At home Shi Feng blanched the bones, rinsed them and set them to simmer. He sliced the meat thin so it would cook fast, added greens near the end, and fried the morning’s rice for a second dish.

The meal cost a fraction of the carp. It still smelled wonderful.

Ling Qingzhu came in while he was scrubbing the chopping board. She stopped in the kitchen doorway and waited for another demand, or a speech about wounded pride.

“Move the clean bowls out of the steam,” Shi Feng said.

She did it without a word.

At supper the broth was rich and pale. Ling Qingzhu meant to eat in silence. Then she took a second spoonful, and the flavour made her feel that the household was carrying on as usual in spite of the morning.

“The soup is good,” Ling Qingzhu admitted, sounding like it hurt.

Shi Feng nodded. He’d spent the whole afternoon making sure of it.

She looked over the other dishes. There was meat, greens and rice. There was no silver fish with crisp skin laid along the edge of the plate.

“No fish?” Ling Qingzhu asked, before she could stop herself.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

One flat word, and she lifted her eyes to him in surprise. He ladled a second bowl and set it before her. There was no anger in it. There was also no offer to fix her disappointment by spending more.

Later, behind the folding screen, Ling Qingzhu opened her own purse. It held plenty for any supper she liked.

That’s not the point, she told herself. I paid for this arrangement already. Why should I reward a new demand?

She tied the purse shut.

In the courtyard, Shi Feng checked the Hengyun pass and counted his remaining medicine. Tomorrow he’d visit the warehouse notice board between mountain trips. Honest wages bought something that hidden strength couldn’t, which was a quiet reputation for being poor.

Beyond the wall, two neighbours were passing the lane and gossiping loudly.

“Did you hear? The cripple who married Fairy Ling!”

“What luck! A fallen genius, and now he eats from her table!”

“Heaven has no sense of justice.”

“…”

Shi Feng listened to the end, then closed the gate properly. Inside, he spread his bedding on the floor in the dark. On the other side of the screen, the bed creaked as she turned her back to him. Neither of them said goodnight.

My luck, he thought flatly, has remarkably complicated accounts.

Over the next week, fish became meat, then a small helping of meat among vegetables. He kept the bowls generous and the cooking careful. Ling Qingzhu still remembered the duck.

“Are we monks now?” Ling Qingzhu asked one wet evening.

“Monks cook less,” Shi Feng said.

A greedy dog, Ling Qingzhu thought, annoyed that the broth tasted good. He had been generous until he decided to ask for more. Yet the ginger in her bowl was still sliced thin the way she preferred. She noticed, and the neat explanation in her head became less comfortable.

After washing up, she moved his stool out from under the dripping eaves. Shi Feng found it dry when he came back. Neither mentioned it.

When the room went dark, Shi Feng counted the eight stones left in his pouch. Mountain trips took half a month, and his bones were hungry now. Tomorrow morning he would head to the commercial loading yards—and see who in the capital paid cash on the barrelhead.