The air was thick with the slow drift of peach blossom fragrance. A warm spring breeze moved through the garden — soft enough to make a person drowsy, pleasant enough to make them glad they had come. Bright-dressed courtesans from the entertainment houses moved among the guests, lending their voices to poems as they were composed, rising to perform songs and dances on impulse, while the young scholars clapped and called out their appreciation. Fine verses circulated from hand to hand; the gathering had built, by degrees, to a genuine pitch of festivity.
And yet, if you watched carefully, you would notice that none of it quite landed. There was something lodged in the collective throat — something that could neither be swallowed nor spat out. A subtle, creeping unease that cast a faint shadow over even the most animated exchanges.
The cause required no explanation. Li Manmiao had been gone the better part of an hour. The gathering had crested and begun to hold its breath, and she had not returned. Minds wandered. Speculation accumulated quietly behind composed faces.
Song Zhijin and Zhao Luan’er, by contrast, were perfectly at ease — drinking, tasting tea, listening to music, admiring the blossoms, the very picture of contentment.
Song Zhijin had, earlier in the afternoon, composed a poem for the occasion, and Chen Gongwang himself had offered words of praise. It was already being passed around as the day’s finest work. By every measure, Song Zhijin had made today his. He had nothing left to prove.
Whether Li Manmiao came back with Su Mu or came back alone, he had already won. After today, Su Yu would understand with perfect clarity where the Zhao and Song families stood. What had begun as Su Yu’s welcome banquet had become, in effect, Song Zhijin’s hour of triumph. How could a man not feel expansive?
The poem in question had made its rounds:
Seated alone in the Moon Palace on a clear night,
moonlight falls on a face half-lost in shadow.
My heart turns toward the mortal world below —
and three thousand petals come tumbling down.
“The young Song master does have some talent. That may well be the best of the day.”
“That Zhao Luan’er has a wild temperament, but the Zhao family has deep pockets. If the two clans unite, the Su family’s position will be precarious.”
“But the old patriarchs have some history together, surely. They won’t go so far as to make open enemies of each other.”
“Wait and see. I’ve heard the Zhao family has connected themselves to a powerful figure in Bianjing. That business about Zhao Wenpei’s substantive posting — the Song family handled that quietly. The rift between the Su and Song families goes back over half a year. The Zhao family can hardly stay neutral now.”
“Su Mu, whatever his failings, is to be pitied — fiancée taken, family about to be squeezed out. A sorry business.”
“What’s there to pity? He spent his days on idle pleasures. Pity Su Yu, if you want to pity anyone. He’s the one with real ambitions, and now he has to carry that useless brother of his. If he hadn’t gone into trade, he might have taken the examinations and matched Zhao Wenpei by now.”
The whispers moved through the gathering like water — quiet, but in sufficient volume that they inevitably reached Su Yu’s ears. He showed nothing. He talked, laughed, raised his cup. But Zhao Wenpei, seated not far away, could feel the new layer of distance that had settled between himself and his oldest friend, thin as silk and quite impassable.
He exhaled silently. Right or wrong — he still wasn’t sure. He had fought the family elders hard when the decision was being made, not because he believed in Su Mu, but because he believed in Su Yu. Then the Song family had inserted itself and made the whole thing what it now was. He hadn’t seen that coming.
He felt none of Song Zhijin’s satisfaction. Song Zhijin, in Zhao Wenpei’s private estimation, was not even Su Mu’s equal — whatever anyone else might think. Others didn’t know. Zhao Wenpei knew. The poem that had just been praised was purchased.
The man was vindictive, narrow, and short-sighted. He was no match for his sister’s hopes of him. If Su Mu had never returned — if the engagement had simply dissolved in his absence — that would have been one thing. But Su Mu had returned, and moving against the Su family now left the Zhao family on the wrong side of the ledger, whatever alliances they made afterward. A name, once dirtied, took time to clean.
The afternoon wore on. On the surface: noise, festivity, clinking cups. Beneath the surface: everyone calculating, everyone slightly elsewhere. Only Song Zhijin wore genuine pleasure on his face. Chen Gongwang sat in the place of honor, saying little, and found — to his own mild amusement — that his mind had drifted to the taste of a certain rolled crepe.
Then, in the space of a breath, the noise stopped.
Li Manmiao had returned.
She was flushed a brilliant red — not from delicate emotion, not from the effects of cosmetics. She had been sitting in the sun for the better part of an hour, and she looked it.
Song Zhijin saw at once that Su Mu was not with her. He surged to his feet in barely-contained triumph, caught himself, cleared his throat, and made a studied show of composure as he went to welcome her to her seat. Every head in the garden turned.
No one had truly expected a different outcome. And yet Li Manmiao’s long absence had fed their curiosity, and they wanted the story.
Li Manmiao herself was furious — too furious, for a moment, for propriety. She sat down, seized her cup of cold tea, and drained it in one go. Then she turned a reproachful look on Su Yu.
“Young Master Su is evidently quite seriously unwell. I waited at the gate for half an hour and was ultimately unable to persuade him to come.”
The gathered company looked at her pink, sun-scorched face with collective sympathy. The whispers against Su Mu swelled.
Song Zhijin laughed broadly.
“No matter at all. If Brother Su prefers not to attend, he has his reasons — perhaps he has risen above the company of ordinary mortals like ourselves. One can hardly insist. My intentions were sincere; the outcome is of no particular consequence.”
This was said with such magnanimous ease that even Su Yu — who had the patience of a man long practiced in commercial warfare — found himself unable to absorb it. He turned to Chen Gongwang and Wang Jinlun with a slight bow and an expression of quiet mortification.
“My brother has given no one cause for pride. I find I cannot remain without shame — please, continue without me.”
A gentle sigh, weighted with genuine feeling. Several of those present found they couldn’t quite bring themselves to add to the moment. Chen Gongwang spoke up, mild and warm.
“Every man has his own path, Liangzhi. Your brother cares little for reputation and keeps to his own way — that is a freedom most of us pursue and never find. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
Song Zhijin, seeing Su Yu’s composure finally break, was inwardly as pleased as a man could be. He came forward with expressions of theatrical concern and consolation, magnanimous to the last. Li Manmiao, cooling down now, found herself feeling that perhaps things had gone slightly too far. She was a woman of the entertainment world, and making the Su family a genuine enemy had practical costs. She reached into her robe and produced the folded paper.
“Oh — and one more thing. Young Master Su Mu could not come himself, but he asked me to deliver this to Miss Zhao.”
The gathering had assumed the drama was spent. Now every head turned again — toward a single sheet of paper, thin as a whisper. Su Yu’s eyes lit with something that looked like relief finding its footing.
He knew his brother. Underneath the apparent fecklessness there was a mind that moved quickly. His personal guard had ridden back ahead of the hour and brought word. Su Mu was not the kind of person who simply absorbed a blow and said nothing.
But this was one small sheet of paper. What could one sheet of paper change?
Zhao Luan’er glanced at Li Manmiao, then at Song Zhijin — caught his expression of easy certainty and allowed herself to relax. She took the paper. Opened it. Read it.
Her brow drew together.
She read it again.
She said nothing.
Song Zhijin, suspicious now, reached over and took it. Read it twice. His face darkened.
One of the onlookers — seeing that Song Zhijin wasn’t going to volunteer the contents — leaned in, exchanged a glance with a neighbor, and read the characters aloud in a careful voice:
“This very gate, this very day, one year ago —
her face and the peach blossoms, both burning red.
Her face — I cannot say where it has gone.
The peach blossoms still laugh in the spring wind.”
A moment of silence.
“That’s — that’s a poem.”
“Her face I cannot say where it has gone, the peach blossoms still laugh in the spring wind — the language is plain enough, and there’s no elaborate allusion, but the feeling of it…”
“It fits the occasion perfectly. The peach garden, the blossoms, and what happened here today — all of it at once.”
“That’s why he didn’t come. He knew what today was going to be. The peach blossoms still laugh in the spring wind — he doesn’t consider the engagement a matter of any consequence whatsoever.”
***
Poetry is like music — a thousand listeners and a thousand hearings. Without the context of the day’s events, this would have been a small lyric of remembered feeling, pleasant and nothing more.
Last year I saw a girl here. She was beautiful as peach blossoms. This year I came back and she was gone, but the peach blossoms were just as lovely. I miss her.
That would have been the poem, in ordinary circumstances.
But circumstances were not ordinary.
Last year you and I, Zhao Luan’er, were something like peach blossoms — vivid, going somewhere, heading toward a marriage. This year I come back and find you’ve dissolved the engagement and taken up with the Song boy. Things change, people change — and I, for my part, don’t care. I am as indifferent as the spring wind. Your marriage plans concern me not one stroke. Which is why I didn’t bother to come to this gathering.
That was what the room heard, and the room was not wrong.
Song Zhijin and Zhao Luan’er had believed, with good reason, that the situation was sealed: whether Su Mu came or stayed away, the result would be humiliation — for Su Mu, for Su Yu, for the Su family entire. What they had not prepared for was someone declining to play the game at all.
Su Mu had not come. But a poem had come in his place — and in ordinary times it would have been counted a fine poem; with today’s events giving it shape, it would be remembered for longer than today. The message it carried was not one of wounded dignity or veiled threat.
It was simpler and more cutting than either.
I see through your little scheme. I hold no feeling for Zhao Luan’er. Whatever she does with herself is of absolute indifference to me. I didn’t avoid today out of fear of your mockery. I avoided it because your mockery is beneath my notice.
Song Zhijin and Zhao Luan’er had played what they believed was an inescapable move. Su Mu had reached over, picked up the board, and set it aside.
***
The poem spread through the gathering within minutes. Chen Gongwang turned it over in his mind, tasting it. The literary imagination of the scholar class is a remarkable instrument — it can build an entire drama from four lines of verse and an afternoon’s worth of gossip — and by the time the poem had made its circuit, the looks directed at Song Zhijin and Zhao Luan’er had acquired a new quality.
Not hostile. Merely appraising.
And faintly, unmistakably, amused.
“Hah — my brother does have some talent, it seems.” Su Yu kept his face composed. “Some.”
He wanted to laugh. He did not laugh. But he wanted to.
The poem also marked the end of something: whatever thin thread had still connected the Su family and the Zhao family was, as of this afternoon, cut. But Su Yu found, turning it over, that he didn’t particularly mind. There were days when breathing freely was worth more than strategic advantage.
Today was one of those days.
***
At Su Manor, Su Mu stood alone on the upper floor of the small tower, both hands resting on the railing. His gaze moved out over the rooftops, tracing the distance. Then he looked down — over the full sweep of the estate below him, the courtyards and gardens, the roof tiles warm in the late afternoon sun.
He said, quietly, to no one in particular:
“Right then. Time to work a little harder, kid.”