The rainy season came early to Jiangnan that year. Mists rolled in from the river, soft and silver, curling like breath across rooftops and low fields. Water gathered in shallow ponds between the stones, and the earth itself seemed to hush, listening.
Wenyan didn't mind the rain. It meant fewer students at the village school, and longer stretches of quiet where he could write, think—or more often, wait.
By now, the rhythm had become familiar: a new silk bundle every third or fourth day, passed discreetly by Meixiang beneath the plum tree or along the edge of the eastern canal. He never asked where they came from, or how the girl managed to slip in and out of a noblewoman's life so freely.
It was enough to receive them.
Lian's poems had grown bolder. Less guarded. What began as veiled metaphors now carried raw emotion: fragments of dreams, fleeting images of her days behind the palace walls, and more than once, quiet confessions that left his heart aching with wonder and worry.
One note read:
"Today, I watched the rain from my window,tracing your words in the glass with my fingertip.If they caught me, I would be punished.But what punishment is worse than silence?"
He had read it three times before pressing it to his chest.
And in response, he wrote:
"If silence is your prison,let my poems be the chisel.I will carve windows through stone,line by line, until the sky finds you."
He was beginning to fall. Not the foolish kind of falling—not infatuation—but a slow, helpless descent into something deeper. He missed her between letters. Wondered if she reread his lines as he reread hers. Wondered if she saw him not as a scholar, but simply as a man.
One afternoon, as the rain let up and light filtered again through thinning clouds, Meixiang came to him breathless and damp, holding the letter tight against her chest.
"She's asking for something," the girl whispered, glancing around as if they were being watched. "Not just a reply."
Wenyan's fingers closed around the bundle, but he hesitated. "What is it?"
Meixiang hesitated too. "I think she wants to meet."
His breath caught.
He turned away, hiding the shock in his expression, and unwrapped the silk.
"The garden gate opens only once each week,when the lanterns are lit for the Moon Festival rehearsals.On the third evening, I will walk beneath the magnolia tree,wearing a red hairpin.If you are there, don't speak.Only look.That will be enough."
There was no signature. Just the seal: the plum blossom, now pressed firmly, as if stamped with certainty.
The appointed night came too slowly.
Wenyan barely ate. His fingers trembled as he prepared his hair, smoothing it back as best he could. He wore plain robes, dark but clean, and tucked one of her poems into his sleeve like a charm. He told himself he would stay hidden, just outside the garden wall, and leave before anyone noticed.
And yet, some small part of him knew that if she appeared, he would not be able to look away.
He arrived early. The lanterns had just begun to flicker to life—small orbs of yellow flame, dancing in the soft wind. The palace garden loomed just beyond the outer wall. A servant had told him once that it was filled with peonies and magnolias, white stones arranged in the pattern of constellations.
He waited in the shadow of a cypress tree, heart pounding louder than the crickets.
Then—footsteps.
Soft. Slow. Measured.
A figure appeared beyond the gate's arch: cloaked in pale silk, moving like water across stone. Her head was bowed slightly, but as she passed beneath the magnolia tree, she tilted her chin upward.
A red hairpin caught the lantern light.
Wenyan's breath left him.
She was real.
Not a dream. Not just a voice on paper. Her form, her grace, her silence—they struck him harder than any words ever had. And yet, she did not turn toward him. She didn't need to.
She stopped for a heartbeat beneath the tree, placing one hand against its trunk. A gesture so simple, so quiet—it spoke volumes.
He stepped forward slightly from the shadows.
She didn't look at him. But her lips curved, barely, into the ghost of a smile.
Then she moved on, vanishing into the garden path, and he—frozen—watched her go.
That night, he wrote again:
"You are more than poem now.You are presence.You are the hush before thunder, the light behind clouds.I saw you.And now I cannot unsee you."
He folded the letter, but this time he didn't seal it.
Some things, he knew, were too alive to be shut away.