River of Stars. Guy Gavriel Kay

simply locked away from the world, each of them given a monthly stipend, dowries for the women, the cost of burial rites—all of which was a serious budgetary concern, because there were so many of them now.

      “Qi Wai?” he said. “I don’t know him. I believe I have met the father. The son is an intelligent man, may I hope?”

      “He is a young historian, a collector of antiquities.”

      It was the girl, speaking up for herself, for her husband-to-be. This was inappropriate, of course. Xi Wengao had already decided he didn’t care. He was a little in love. He wanted her to speak.

      “That sounds promising,” said Chen.

      “I would not inflict my unruly daughter on a man I felt incapable of accepting her nature,” the father said. “I beg forgiveness for her impertinence.” Again, despite the words, you could hear pride.

      “As well you should!” cried Lu Chen. “She has just reminded me of one of my most grievous errors in verse!”

      A short silence, as the father tried to decide if Chen was truly offended.

      “The poems are wonderful,” the girl said, eyes downcast again. “I have them committed to memory.”

      Chen grinned at her. “And thus, so easily, I am assuaged. Men,” he added, “are too readily placated by a clever woman.”

      “Women,” she murmured, “have too little choice but to placate.”

      They heard a sound. None of them had seen the servant approaching again in her blue silk. Xi Wengao knew this girl very well (she spent some nights warming him). She wasn’t happy just now. That, too, was predictable, if unacceptable.

      The wine would be good. His people knew which wines to offer guests, and Lu Chen was known to be his favourite.

      Wengao and the girl (of course) had tea. Lin Kuo joined Chen in drinking the spiced wine, doing it as a courtesy to the poet, Wengao decided. Food was brought. They lingered in morning light, listening to birdsong in his garden, in a gazebo decorated with paintings by San Tsai, done in a style of long ago.

      SHE IS AWARE that the servant girl from the garden this morning doesn’t like her, though a servant (even a favoured one) ought not to let that show.

      The girl probably thinks she isn’t revealing it, Shan decides. But there are ways for a servant to stand, or respond just a little slowly to requests or orders. There are even ways of unpacking a guest’s belongings in the chamber offered her for the night, and messages can be read in such things.

      She is used to this. For some time it has been true of almost every woman she meets, of whatever rank or status. Men tend to be made uneasy, or sometimes amused, by Shan. Women dislike her.

      It is not at all certain, to this point in her life, if her father has really given her a gift with how he’s chosen to educate her.

      Some gifts are complex, she has long ago decided. Small things can change a life, a poet had written, and that is true, but the equally obvious truth is that large things can do the same. Her brother’s death had been a large thing, in their family if not in the world.

      In the years that followed it, the only other child, the thin, clever daughter, had received, slowly at first, as an experiment—the way an Arcane Path alchemist might gradually heat liquid in a flask—and then more decisively, the education a boy was offered if he intended to try for the jinshi examinations and a civil servant’s robe.

      She wasn’t, of course, going to write any examinations, or wear robes with the belt of any rank at all, but her father had given her the learning to do so. And he had made her perfect her writing skills and the brush strokes of her calligraphy.

      The songs, the ci, she had discovered on her own.

      By now, her brush strokes are more confident than his. If it is true, as some said and wrote, that the innermost nature of a person shows in their calligraphy, then her father’s caution and diffidence are there to be seen in his neat, straight, formal hand. Only when he’d travelled and written letters home in a running hand (no one but Shan and her mother had ever seen that hand) did his passion for life show through. From the world Lin Kuo hides this, in his writing, in his lanky, agreeable, slightly stooped form.

      Her own hand, in both formal and running scripts, is bolder, stronger. Too much so for a woman, she knows. Everything about her life is like that.

      The servant has withdrawn at her command, again just a little too slowly. And she’s left the door not quite fully closed on the dark corridor. Shan thinks of calling her back, but doesn’t.

      The room is at the back of the house, nearest the garden. Master Xi’s home is too deliberately modest to have a separate wing for women, let alone a building, but the men are at the front. She isn’t sure if their host and the poet have gone to bed. Her father has. Father and daughter had withdrawn from the dining room together, to leave the two old friends time alone by lamplight, with wine. It wasn’t an action that needed to be discussed. So much sadness here, Shan thinks, however much Xi Wengao has tried to hide it.

      There are noises in the garden at night. A flap of wings, cry of an owl, crickets, wind in leaves, wind chimes, faintly. Shan sees that their host has left two books for her in the room. A lamp with a long wick is lit to read by if she wants. One text is a scroll, the other a printed book, beautifully stitched binding. There is a desk, a single chair. The bed is large, curtained, a curved blue ceramic pillow with a painting of white plum blossoms.

      Master Xi is old enough to simply enjoy what she is, not be disturbed by it. He appears to find her learning amusing. Not necessarily the response she wants. But she is seventeen, and a girl. What response did one expect?

      Perhaps, inwardly—not for speaking aloud—what she really wants is for the songs, the ci she labours to craft, to be read or heard, and considered for their merits—or lack of them. She isn’t vain, she knows how much she doesn’t know yet.

      Lu Chen had said at dinner that he’d like to hear them sung.

      He is, in many ways, the master of all men of their day, the poets and thinkers, at any rate. Yet he smiled easily, laughed with abandonment, jesting through the meal, pulling the three of them in that direction, scattering toasts (even to her!) from a steadily refilled wine cup. Forcing the mood towards lightness. Towards it, but not really arriving there.

      He is going to Lingzhou Isle. The expectation is that he will die. That is what happens there. There is a weight of pain, almost of panic inside Shan when she thinks about it. And something else she can’t identify. Bereavement? The bitter wine of loss-to-come? She feels a strangeness, almost wants to weep.

      Men broke willow twigs when parting from friends, a gesture of farewell, entreating heaven for a return. But could you break a twig for someone going where Lu Chen was going? With so many rivers and mountains between?

      She had been too bold in those first moments this morning. She knows it, knew it as she spoke. She’d felt awed by his arrival, overwhelmed—but fiercely determined not to yield to that or show it. Sometimes, Shan is aware, she feels so strong a need to be seen and heard that she forces an encounter, declaring her presence.

      Look at me! she can hear herself crying. And no one wants to be ordered to do that.

      In a way, she is too much the opposite of her father, who stands among others as if ready to take a step backwards, saying with his posture, his clasped hands, I am not even here if you don’t wish me to be.

      She loves him, honours him, wants to protect him, wants him to be properly seen as well, even if he is happier withdrawing towards shadows. There are only the two of them in the world. Until she weds and leaves the house.

      It is too easy to dismiss Lin Kuo, his daughter thinks for the hundredth time or more. Even his small book on the gardens here, presented to Master Xi today. Of course it isn’t an important work, but it is carefully, wittily done, offers observations that might last: a portrait in words of Yenling,