The Beast's Way Out - Chapter 3

When I was fifteen, my eldest sister was nineteen and my second brother seventeen.

Prices in the capital soared. A dou of rice cost one liang of silver, and a bolt of cloth cost two.[1]

For an ordinary family, a single day’s food and necessities now cost as much as two months had before.

Long lines formed outside the rice shops every day. Before dawn, people carried cloth sacks to the eaves, hunched against the cold and stamping their feet.

As soon as the door boards were removed, the crowd surged forward with a roar. People shoved and cursed until the rice jars inside the shop were scraped bare.

The cloth shops were no different.

The coarse cloth cost two liang a bolt. It was rough and scratchy, its colors faded, yet the moment it was put on the shelves, noblewomen’s maids snatched it away.

At the roadside, refugees with blue, frozen faces huddled in the corners, staring at the cloth with dull, hungry eyes.

This looked less like an age of peace than a time of war.

The roads outside were often littered with people who had starved or frozen to death.

Someone might be curled beneath a wall one day, only to vanish the next. No one knew who had dragged them away, or where.

Qi Yao was leaving for the border with his father.

On the night before he left, he climbed over the wall and sat with me all night.

We lay side by side on the roof, our backs against the gray tiles, gazing up at the stars.

The night wind brushed our ears, carrying the faint scent of late plum blossoms.

Qi Yao raised a hand and pointed at the brightest star overhead. “My elder sister told me it’s the Dipper. Wherever you lose your way in the future, look up and find it. Follow it, and you’ll surely find your way home.”

He turned to me, his eyes shining. “Little Fence, I’m going to become a hero without equal. When you turn eighteen, I’ll come back. If you really become an eagle, I’ll take you flying at the border. I’ll gallop below, and you’ll ride the wind above me.”

I said, “All right.”

The sky had not yet brightened when Qi Yao and his family left.

The friends who had once fought for territory with us scattered too. Some died young, some went to live with relatives, and some left to travel.

Only I remained, trapped in the little courtyard, nurturing bones.

The peach tree in the courtyard bore another crop—large, red fruit swaying from its branches.

I could no longer knock them down with my head.

The copper skin and iron bones remained, but my parents said a grown girl could no longer be so wild.

If I wanted the sweetest peach at the top, I had to have a servant bring a ladder.

What a nuisance.

Eventually, I didn’t even want peaches anymore.

I let them ripen, fall to the ground, and rot in the mud.

Qi Yao still wrote whenever he had time.

He said there was so much yellow sand at the border that opening your mouth once was enough to fill your stomach.

He also said that the first time he killed someone, his hand shook so badly he couldn’t keep hold of the knife. He vomited after pulling it out—vomited until even the bile was gone.

But his elder sister was even fiercer than he was. She had killed more.

The enemy hated her to the bone. Wanted posters offering rewards for her capture covered their military camps.

He always ended his letters with: “Being wounded really hurts, but what son of the Qi family doesn’t bear scars? Little Fence, I’m hacking my way through thorns toward becoming a hero without equal.”

I sent him a peach pit and told him to plant a peach tree at the border when he had time.

Then he wouldn’t have to eat sand anymore. He could eat peaches instead.

I also packed several bottles of good medicine for wounds, with a note: “This stops bleeding well. It’s more reliable than the army doctor.”

Our letters went back and forth, sporadically, for three years.

[1] Dou measures grain by volume; liang is the weight unit used here to price goods in silver.