Chapter 544 — The Hairpin

CHAPTER 544

The Hairpin

The eastern courtyard was smaller than he remembered.

It had the same three rooms with the same sagging roof, and the same cracked flagstones where the stone chamber lay under the third slab from the well. Someone had swept it recently. Someone had also lit a single lamp and put it on the step, so that the light fell in a small yellow circle and left the rest in shadow.

Shi Feng stopped at the gate. Behind him, in the guest wing, Ling Qingzhu had said only, “Go,” and shut the door. Sima Lan had said nothing at all. He was grateful for both.

Shi Yulan sat on the step beside the lamp. She had changed out of her brown dress into an old grey one, and she held a small cloth bundle in her lap with both hands. She looked worried and kept checking the knot without untying it.

“You came alone,” Shi Yulan said.

“You said to,” Shi Feng said.

“Since when do you listen?” Shi Yulan asked. She tried to sound cross and failed. She moved over on the step. “Sit. Don't stand there looking like a gate.”

He sat. The stone was cold through his robe. For a while neither of them spoke.

His Spirit Sense, quiet and tightly folded, swept the walls once. No one was listening.

“I should have given you this when you left,” Shi Yulan said. “I almost did. Then you went west with that spear, and I thought, he'll be dead by spring. And I thought: if he's dead, no one needs it. If he lives, he'll come back, and I'll give it to him then.” She stopped. “That's a stupid thing to think.”

“It's what most people think,” Shi Feng said.

“Don't be reasonable. It's irritating,” Shi Yulan said.

She unwrapped the cloth.

Inside lay a hairpin. It was thin and no longer than a finger, made of a dark silver-grey metal that didn't shine and didn't tarnish. At its head, three tiny crescents curved around a single bead, and every line was cut so fine that he had to tilt the lamp to see it.

Shi Feng did not touch it.

“Whose is it?” Shi Feng asked.

“Your mother's,” Shi Yulan said.

The courtyard was very quiet.

“I don't know her name,” Shi Yulan said. “That is the truth, and you can think what you like of it. Your father brought her home from a border contract, the spring before you were born. He said her name once at the wedding supper, and in front of the whole clan nobody caught it. She spoke our language well. She spoke it too well, I always thought. She never said where she was from. When Shi Zhen asked, she smiled and passed him the rice.”

“What was she like?” Shi Feng asked.

Shi Yulan was silent so long that he thought she wouldn't answer.

“Quiet,” Shi Yulan said. “She wasn't shy. She was careful. She watched doors. And she sang to you at night, a tune I never heard anywhere else, not in a teahouse or a temple. I'd stand outside this wall and listen, and never tell her.” Her voice cracked a little. “You were about two years old. She made your bed, left your breakfast on the stove and walked out. Your father found the bed made and her shoes gone. That's all.”

“Did he look for her?” Shi Feng asked.

“Every border contract for the next five years. He said it was for money,” Shi Yulan said, shaking her head. “Your father never took a contract for money in his life. Pity the hearts of parents all under heaven.”

She turned the pin over in the cloth without touching the metal.

“This was in your blanket,” Shi Yulan said. “He found it, put it in a chest under his bed, and told me never to show it to anybody while he lived.”

Shi Feng looked down at the cloth. He let her continue without interrupting.

“After he died, I took it to a jeweller in Yunze,” Shi Yulan said. “An old man. He turned it over for a long time and gave it back and told me not to come to his shop again. He said he'd never seen the like. Not the metal, not the pattern. He'd worked on rings for three kings and didn't know what he was holding.” She looked up. “I've shown it to nobody since. I don't know what it is, Feng'er. I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid of it, and I wanted you to have it before somebody else put a price on it.”

Her hands were shaking now. Shi Feng put his own over them and held them still, and she let him.

“There's something else,” Shi Yulan said. “That paper of yours. The one with the five extra curves, the one you nearly died with.”

“What about it?” Shi Feng asked.

“Your father got that paper the year she came,” Shi Yulan said. “He told everyone he'd found it on a border contract. But he never found anything in his life. He once spent three days looking for his own hat.”

He did not say anything.

He took the hairpin and held it up in the lamplight. It was lighter than it looked. It was cool against his fingers. Spirit Sense told him it was metal, old and finely made, and told him nothing else. It did not hum or glow. He turned it carefully and studied each crescent. His mother had left this in his blanket, but even now he could learn nothing about her from it.

He could have asked her what she thought. He could have asked whether she believed her sister-in-law had left of her own will, or been taken, or gone back to something she had never named. Shi Feng wanted to know whether his mother had chosen to leave. His aunt had already admitted she didn't know, and he couldn't bear to press her for a guess.

He didn't ask it. Not yet.

“Thank you, Auntie,” Shi Feng said.

“Don't thank me,” Shi Yulan said. She wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her wrist, angry at herself for crying. “Just don't lose it. And don't die. I'm too old to start looking.”