A Kiss for My Sworn Enemy - Chapter 2

“Physician! I don’t care what it takes—get her fucking memory back!”

The physician and I stared at each other.

She looked troubled. I was even more troubled.

While Yun Yanzhi was away at the military camp, she lowered her voice. “You’re faking it, aren’t you?”

I hesitated. I neither nodded nor shook my head.

Yun Yanzhi had always thought I was a man. Yes, I had always dressed as one. First I had wandered the martial world, then I’d joined the army. All the more reason to keep my sex a secret.

Now that I had been rescued, Yun Yanzhi had naturally learned the truth. The sworn enemy he’d fought for years was suddenly sitting in bed, looking weak and bewildered, sweetly calling him Husband.

Yun Yanzhi found this very **.

No wonder he’d reacted like that.

The physician sighed again. “I want to go home.”

I felt rather guilty. After all, you couldn’t wake someone who was pretending to sleep, and she couldn’t cure someone who was pretending to have lost her memory.

“Is there anything we can do?” I whispered.

“Do about what?” She gave me a puzzled look. “This husband of yours treats you quite well.”

“He’s not my husband,” I said, even more quietly.

“He’s not?” Her eyes lit up, as if she’d uncovered some enormous secret. She glanced around, then leaned closer and lowered her voice still further. “I never would have guessed Hero Yun had tastes like that. Don’t tell me you’re another man’s wife, and he abducted you, and you refused to submit and chose death instead, so…”

“Stop!”

I felt the miracle physician had missed her calling. She should have written storybooks.

I had once been a thief in the martial world, robbing the rich to help the poor. The rich I robbed were corrupt officials. The poor I helped were ordinary people in need.

I had also wandered far, watching sunsets and peach blossoms, listening to flowing streams and mountain springs.

Before all that, I had been born into a very poor family. My mother died after giving birth to me. My father worked himself to the bone, chopping wood and farming.

But the official in our county was no honest man. Every year, his taxes squeezed the breath out of us, and he pocketed well over half of what he collected.

The officials protected one another. The people suffered, and no one dared speak.

My father died one winter. I had just turned ten.

I remembered only how bitter the wind had been that day. Snow covered his tattered clothes. He couldn’t hold on any longer.

My face was wet and hot. I didn’t remember how long I cried before someone stopped in front of me.

There was something like compassion on his face as he held out his hand.

After that, I trained hard. Only later did I learn that the man who’d saved me was the greatest swordsman in the martial world.

Yet even the greatest swordsman couldn’t save all the suffering people, or overthrow a government of corruption and abuse.

He died too, in the winter when I was fifteen, leaving me nothing but a sword. It had accompanied him all his life, cutting down the vicious and the irredeemable.

His sigh mingled with the wind and snow. He said he would not live to see peace and good government. But Xiaoqiu, he said, you can.

I didn’t understand what he meant. I only felt his body slowly turning cold in my arms, becoming one with the snow.

From that day on, the martial world no longer had its greatest swordsman.

It had one more master thief.

Yun Yanzhi had once been a young hero famous throughout the martial world. Only later did I learn that he was the son of a corrupt official in the capital.

He despised what his father did but could do nothing about it. He left home without taking any of its ill-gotten wealth and entered the martial world alone, with a sword.

Young and hotheaded as I was, of course I’d robbed his family. I had to hand it to the most corrupt official in the capital: his covert guards hit hard. Getting out had taken everything I had.

Yun Yanzhi was a complete novice then, his head full of punishing evil and upholding good. One look at me, and he’d decided I was a common criminal. He chased me around trying to cut me down every day.

I wasn’t about to take that lying down. I teased him, stole the fresh fruit he’d picked, and made off with the fish he’d roasted.

Then invaders came, and Yun Yanzhi went resolutely to war.

Years later, he became a great general with illustrious victories to his name.

And I became a general of the enemy nation, every bit as renowned as he was.