On the day I, Yun Chu, married Qi Zhan — we had known each other for twenty years — I felt nothing like happiness.
Sitting in my bridal chamber, surrounded by all that red, I felt a spreading sense of ruin inside my chest.
I had always imagined marrying someone who loved me. Instead, the night before our wedding day, Qi Zhan had come to find me — bloodied from some fight, shirt torn — and said: "Yun Chu, I'm in pain. The person I love is marrying someone else, and there's nothing I can do about it."
I had never considered that Qi Zhan might be in love with someone. I'd never imagined he would tell me something like that — me, his bride-to-be, the night before our wedding.
I pressed down everything rising in me, picked up my handkerchief, and wiped the blood from his face. "Go find a doctor," I said.
He kept his head down. "Yun Chu. I don't know what to do."
A long silence.
Finally, I found two words: "I know."
* * *
The day of my wedding, the Yun household — one of North City's premier merchant estates — had spread out a banquet that stretched the full length of the compound. Relatives and well-wishers arrived in continuous waves. It was lively, cheerful, full of noise.
Missing from all of it was the bride. Me.
I had buried my face in the thick bridal quilt and had no intention of coming out.
My personal maidservant tapped at the door and slipped inside, her expression already somewhere between coaxing and scolding. "Miss, it's your wedding day. You can't hide in here forever. Please get up."
I put my face out of the covers just enough to speak. "What if I truly don't want to get married?"
"A young lady's marriage is decided by her parents and the matchmaker. There's no 'wanting' or 'not wanting' about it. Miss, be sensible —"
I pulled the quilt back over my head. "Go tell everyone I'm not going out. Drink the wedding wine without me if you want. I'm not drinking."
"Miss!"
I lay there in a daze and thought: fine, just get married. I was going to have to marry someone eventually.
* * *
On our wedding night, when Qi Zhan lifted my veil, the first thing out of his mouth was: "How can you be this ugly?"
In the middle of everything I was feeling, the words stopped me cold. "I... I've just been crying."
"I know," he said, perfectly untroubled. "I'm still saying you're ugly."
"..." Insufferable man.
* * *
Before the wedding, I had asked my father: is this really happening? Am I truly marrying into the Qi family?
"What else?" he'd said.
"And what about Xuan Xuan?"
Xuan Xuan — the name that was, by common knowledge throughout North City, always on Qi Zhan's lips. The person he kept close, went everywhere with, spoke of openly.
"That," my father said, "I couldn't tell you. Go ask your mother."
"That," my mother said, "is not something I can get involved in. Go ask your father."
So both my parents had simply married me off without knowing — or choosing to know.
Fortunately, there was one person outside of my parents who might actually know the situation: my second elder brother, Yun Xi. Known for his easy charm and his wide circle of old friends throughout North City, he'd been summoned home from the capital just in time for the wedding.
He looked at me for a long moment after I asked him, clearly weighing his words. "Xuan Xuan is — I have my reasons for not being able to explain clearly. But there's one thing I can say for certain: it's good that you're marrying him. Qi Zhan is a good man."
I didn't know the details of Xuan Xuan's situation. What I did know was that she was the person Qi Zhan was in love with. I found the whole thing quietly absurd.
But both families had agreed to this marriage. So I married him.
* * *
Life in Qi Zhan's household was harder than I'd imagined.
He was never warm toward me — but he was never cruel either. He didn't neglect me badly, and in the chamber, he performed his duties as a husband with a workmanlike neutrality that didn't humiliate. It was simply cold.
The source of that cold had a name: Xuan Xuan.
At every family gathering or social occasion in the Qi household, I would spot her somewhere in the room. And whenever she was present, Qi Zhan's attention never once settled on me. His eyes found her by instinct — the way water finds its course.
I practiced not caring about it. In company, I kept a pleasant expression on my face. Whether I'd cried in private — that was no one else's business.
Eventually the quiet bitterness of it overcame my better judgment, and I stopped him in the corridor one afternoon. "If you've cared about Xuan Xuan since you were children, why did you marry me instead of her?"
His expression cooled slightly. "Your brother asked me to help with something. I helped."
"Help with what?"
"Something involving Xuan Xuan." He wasn't inclined to elaborate. "I know this situation is hard on you. But bear with it for now. I won't wrong you going forward."
"I don't need you to not wrong me," I said, and left.
* * *
After settling into the Qi household for a time, I came to understand that everyone in it treated me well.
Lady Qi — my mother-in-law — was an easy and affectionate woman. She summoned me regularly to keep her company, always thought of me when anything good came in, made sure I was included in everything. The Qi patriarch, though quiet, bore no hostility toward me. Even the household stewards and the older servants had a warmth about them that surprised me.
Only Qi Zhan treated me as a peripheral concern.
He had a reputation outside the house: charming, elegant, warmly received everywhere he went. The man who came home was a different person. I sometimes watched him in unguarded moments and wondered if this was genuinely the same individual.
I wasn't going to accept it indefinitely. I had never been a compliant woman, and I wasn't about to become one now just because my pride had been wounded.
So I reclaimed a patch of the rear courtyard for myself, broke the soil, and planted a proper garden — flowers, a small herb border, a flowering shrub I'd been fond of for years. When Qi Zhan asked why, I said I liked it.
He nodded, said nothing, and left.
That small garden became the thing I was proudest of in that house.
* * *
For the Lantern Festival, Qi Zhan said he would buy me a lantern, and I stepped out with him with expectations calibrated very close to zero. We walked for a while together — and then he vanished. I ran into an acquaintance and wandered the festival stalls with her for a time.
When she left, I turned to look for Qi Zhan — and caught sight of him across the way, speaking in low tones with Xuan Xuan. Her eyes were red. His face held a taut, barely visible anxiety.
I didn't approach. I turned the other way, pretended I hadn't seen, and walked back alone to wait.
He returned eventually, holding a lantern. The workmanship was coarse — visibly cruder than anything for sale at the stalls, the kind of thing that would look embarrassing beside the delicate commercial ones. He pushed it into my hands. "Here."
I looked at it, said nothing, and accepted it.
Back home, I examined it more carefully. The lantern was shaped like a rabbit — a fat, round-bodied rabbit, bright and a little lopsided. It was handmade. The colors were vivid and slightly mismatched, the construction clearly improvised. But someone had made it.
I sat with it for a long time, turning it in my hands. I couldn't have said what I felt.
* * *
I learned later — through Xuan Xuan's maidservant, who came to find me on her own — what had actually happened that night. Xuan Xuan had asked Qi Zhan to lend her money. The money was all he'd had with him. With nothing left to spend, he'd had no way to buy a lantern — so he'd made one instead, on the spot, and given it to me.
"Young Mistress, I'm sorry," the maid said, her face carrying a small, genuine guilt.
"You have nothing to apologize for," I told her. "It isn't your fault."
After she left, I took the rabbit lantern out again and sat with it for a long while.
It was a simple night. Qi Zhan had run short of money because of someone else, and he'd improvised something to give me instead. It meant nothing specific. It was probably just a matter of not showing up empty-handed.
At the time, an inexplicable mix of sorrow and joy tangled in my heart; I couldn't explain it. But something shifted in me that night. Something had begun.