Married to the Emperor's Fiercest General, Who Is Terrified of Me novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Why Him

"Not here," said Zhenyuan. "Please. I'd like to tell it in the stable."

Wenxuan looked at him.

"You're joking."

"The mare is there. She's heard the worst of it already."

It was so unexpected, and so exactly him, that Wenxuan's mouth twitched before he could stop it.

They sat in the straw side by side, with a lantern between them and the old grey mare chewing hay over their heads.

Zhenyuan did not look at him.

He looked at his scarred hands, and told it.

"My third winter at Hanlu, the supply wagons did not come."

"The snow," said Wenxuan.

"The snow, and an officer at the granary who swore on his mother the stores were empty."

"There were four thousand men on the wall. We were eating boiled leather."

Wenxuan said nothing.

"A man had a book of Model Essays. He used it for kindling."

"I took it out of the fire, and it was your essay on grain taxes."

"The one with the padding," said Wenxuan.

"The one in the fourth paragraph."

"When a granary officer swears the shelves are bare," said Zhenyuan. "look under his floor for a second ledger."

Wenxuan stared.

"I wrote that out of spite," he said slowly.

"I was sixteen. I'd read about an official in the next province who was robbing his own warehouse."

"I read it to the men in the trench, by a candle, with the wind coming in."

Zhenyuan's voice was low and steady, the field voice.

"Then I took twenty of them to the granary in the dark, and we pulled up the floor."

"What was under it?" said Wenxuan.

"Eleven hundred sacks."

The mare shifted.

Somewhere outside a night bird called, and went on.

"That's how the garrison lived," Zhenyuan said.

"Four thousand men. A winter. They were fed because a boy in a province was angry at a thief."

He turned his head at last.

"I carried your essay in my coat for the rest of the war. Every battle. I read it before I slept."

"When the Emperor said, ask for anything, I thought of the trench."

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