Fake Daughter Is the Real Legend novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Ironwall
At the frozen camp gate the quartermaster strips Ruyun's coat and finds the Grand Princess's bronze tally. He carries it to the commander, and she is summoned.
The cart reached Ironwall on the thirteenth day, and the gate was frozen shut.
Ruyun had found the bronze half-tally in her cuff on the first night.
The Grand Princess had slipped it there when she caught her sleeve in the clan hall.
Ruyun had sewn it into the lining of her coat with a hairpin and a thread pulled from her hem.
Nobody had asked her about it since.
The guards hammered on the ice until a soldier on the wall shouted down and the gate groaned open.
Inside, the camp was a grid of low gray barracks and trampled snow.
A heavy man in a fur collar waited at the foot of the steps with a ledger under his arm.
He did not look at her face.
He looked at the trunk.
"Qiao Ruyun," he read. "Convict servant, three years."
"Yes."
"I am the quartermaster. Everything in this camp that is eaten, worn or burned passes through my hands."
He flipped a page.
"My cousin the Marquise writes that you were raised soft. She says you will sign a paper when you are cold enough."
Ruyun said nothing.
"Open the trunk."
The guards pulled the rope.
The quartermaster lifted out her blue jacket, her winter boots, the silk quilt, the hair combs, a box of ink sticks.
He tossed each one onto a pile.
"Confiscated. Convicts wear what the camp gives."
He held out a coat of undyed gray hemp, stiff with old grease.
"Take off yours."
The tally was in the lining, and Ruyun was afraid.
"It is the only coat I have for the road back," she said.
"There is no road back for three years."
A soldier stepped forward and pulled the coat off her shoulders.
The cold went through her blouse.
The quartermaster ran his thumb along the hem, pressed the lining, and stopped at the lump over the left hip.
He looked up at her for the first time.
"What is this?"
"A coat," she said.
He pulled a small knife from his belt and slit the seam.
The bronze half-tally fell into his palm.
It was the length of a finger, green at the edges, and cast with a plum blossom on one side.
He turned it over under the light.
"Where does a washhouse girl get a Guard tally?"
"It is not mine."
"Whose?"
"Ask the person who gave it to me."
The quartermaster smiled at the soldiers.
"The fake daughter has a tongue."
One of them laughed.
The name went round the yard in a murmur.
The fake daughter.
Her face burned and she kept it still.
"Kneel," the quartermaster said.
Ruyun did not move.
A bamboo rod cracked across the backs of her knees and she went down in the snow.
"The camp rule is that convicts kneel to me when I speak."
"Then speak," she said, "and I will kneel."
He struck her left hand.
Once, across the knuckles.
The pain was white and total.
Ruyun bit down on her tongue and did not cry out.
She heard the Grand Princess saying, eat everything they give you, and she understood now what she had meant.
Be alive in three years.
The quartermaster dropped the rod and walked into the barracks with the tally closed in his fist.
Two soldiers dragged her to the washhouse, a long low building steaming against the cold.
Forty women in gray coats stood over wooden tubs, scrubbing wool and army linen in water that smoked.
None of them looked up.
An old woman at the nearest tub dried her hands on her apron, took Ruyun's swelling fingers, and turned them over.
"Cold water," she said. "Right now. It will take the heat out before the bone sets crooked."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. Everybody who is here is here for a reason. What was yours?"
"My family decided I was not theirs."
The old woman snorted.
"That is the third one this winter. The last two died."
"Of what?"
"Of waiting for someone to come."
She plunged Ruyun's hand into a bucket of water rimmed with ice.
Ruyun gasped and held it there.
Behind them the washhouse door banged open.
A young soldier stood in a flurry of snow, out of breath.
"The Commander wants the new girl," he said. "Now. The quartermaster has brought him a bronze tally."
The old woman looked at Ruyun.
"Well," she said. "That did not take long."
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