Chapter 19: The Stall

Lanxin was alone at the head of the riders, and she was not in armour.

She had come in plain dark robes, with the iron pin in her hair and her scarred brow bare, and she swung down from the saddle in the lamplight.

Twelve soldiers sat their horses behind her in a silent half circle, with Mo at the end, his beard shining silver.

All along Willow Lane the shutters were open.

Faces filled the windows, round and sleepy and curious.

The stall owner across the road had stopped pretending to sort his goods.

Lanxin walked up to Shuyi's counter and stopped in front of it.

She looked at the stool, the lamp, the pot of ink, and the small woman standing with a folded page in her hand.

She had not slept.

Her eyes were rimmed with red.

"I need a letter written," she said.

Her voice carried down the whole lane.

Shuyi swallowed.

"Sit down," she said.

"The stool is the customer's."

Lanxin looked at the cheap wooden stool.

She sat.

She was so tall that her knees came up awkwardly, and a boy in the crowd giggled and was hushed.

"To whom?" Shuyi said.

"To a woman who tore my pass."

A rustle ran along the lane.

Shuyi took up the brush, because it gave her hands something to do.

"What do you want it to say?"

"That I lied to her."

"The pass was a lie, and the dismissal was a lie, and the words I used to make her go were the worst I could find."

"I said she was a mistake."

"She was not."

"She is the best thing that has come to me in three winters, and I locked her out because I was afraid."

Shuyi's brush shook.

A drop of ink fell on the page and spread.

She did not move to blot it.

"Go on," she said.

"Write that I will not do it again."

"Write that I cannot do this alone, and I have been doing it alone so long that I forgot there was another way to stand."

"Write that the man in the letters was a lie, and the woman who wrote them is here, in front of everyone."

The lane had gone completely silent.

A woman at the well pressed a hand over her mouth.

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