Chapter 7: Side by Side

The great hall was cold, with a long table down the middle and a dozen candles to make it brighter than the grey morning.

Du Wenyuan sat at the head of it in a fur-lined robe, drinking tea.

Lanxin stood at his right hand, and Mo Hanzhang stood behind her.

Shuyi stood at the foot of the table, with the sixty copies stacked before her and the sixty originals beside them.

Her sleeves hid hands that were trying not to shake.

"Let us begin with the first letter," Du said.

He drew the original toward him and the copy after it.

He laid them side by side and bent over both with a magnifying glass.

The hall was silent except for the tick of the tea cup.

Shuyi counted her own breaths.

At last Du straightened and put down the glass.

"Perfect," he said.

"The leaning stroke, the heavy downstroke, the quick turn."

"There is not a single difference."

Lanxin said nothing.

"That troubles me a little," Du said.

"Why?" said Shuyi, before she could stop herself.

He turned and smiled at her.

"A copyist's hand and a soldier's hand should not be twins, Miss Qin."

"Even your father's copybooks would not be so exact."

"They would, my lord, if the copyist had a month."

"I am paid to be exact."

"Of course."

He turned the pages over.

"But look at this."

He tapped the middle of letter thirty-one, where the strokes were thick and ragged and the ink had cracked in tiny lines.

"The original is cracked here."

"Yours is not."

Shuyi's pulse stumbled.

She had cleaned that crack away without thinking, because it was ugly.

"It's Frostgate ink, my lord," she said.

The words came out smooth, though she had no idea where they came from.

"Soldiers in the cold thaw their ink stick on a stove and write at once."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Calligrapher and the Widowed General from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.