Chapter 9: Frostgate

Lanxin told it standing at the window, with her back to the room.

She looked at the black sky over the plum tree, and her voice was the plain voice of a woman giving a report.

"Three winters ago the old marshal held Frostgate Pass with twenty-four hundred men and nine hundred horses."

"I was thirty, his second-in-command, and the only woman on the wall."

"The tribes came down from the north in the first week of the snow, and the road behind us closed."

"On the twelfth day of the siege the marshal died of a fever in his sleep."

Shuyi sat at the table with her hands around a cup of cold tea.

She did not interrupt.

"The officers met that night," Lanxin said.

"They were good men, and they were afraid."

"They looked at me, and they looked at the food, and they voted to open the gate at dawn and ask for terms."

"Terms with those tribes meant a line of men on their knees, and then a ditch."

"I said so, and nobody listened."

"A woman, thirty, with no rank of her own, telling them to wait."

"What did you do?" Shuyi asked.

"I went to my room, and I took a ledger off the shelf that had belonged to a dead courier."

"I tried to write a letter in his hand."

"It took me until the fourth watch."

A faint, humorless smile touched her mouth.

"At dawn I called the officers to the north wall."

"I told them my husband was the commander of the eastern relief column."

"I told them he had sent word by a rider who slipped through the snow, and that the army would reach us by the thaw."

"I said his name was Lu Zhaoming, and that I had not mentioned it because we had married in secret before the war."

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.