Chapter 8: The Left Hand

Lanxin did not deny it.

She stood in the middle of the small room with the candle throwing her shadow up the wall.

For a long time she did not speak.

Then she said, "Come back to the study."

Shuyi followed her, holding her robe closed.

Lanxin lit three lamps, one after another.

She took a fresh sheet of cream paper and a brush from Shuyi's own case.

She ground ink, slowly, with her scarred right hand.

"Watch," she said.

Lanxin dipped the brush and wrote the line, Lanxin, my wife, the pass is closed.

Her strokes were fast and leaning, heavy on the downstroke, with the little hook on the heart.

She had written it in the hand of the sixty letters.

Then she took a second sheet and wrote the same line again.

The second time her hand stood upright, square and slow, a soldier's careful hand, with the heart dot round and plain.

She laid the sheets side by side.

The two lines were the same words in two different hands, and Shuyi could see how one had been bent out of the other.

The hook and the tail were the shadows of her own habits, not quite gone.

"I learned to lean it left from a captured ledger," Lanxin said.

"I practiced for a month at night."

"I could never lose the heart."

"A dot is hard to change when the character is your own name."

Shuyi's throat was tight.

"You wrote them," she said.

"All sixty."

"Every one."

Lanxin put down the brush and looked at her hands.

"Lu Zhaoming never lived," she said.

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.