The Blue-Gray Horse - Chapter 1

My adoptive father, Shi Wuhen, had been acting strangely lately.

Only the day before yesterday, he’d said he was retiring for good and would never get mixed up in the martial world’s troubles again. Then he woke up this morning and changed his mind.

The disciples he’d summoned back to the hall were all baffled. They came to me with questions.

“Does the sect master still have enemies left to kill?”

“What does he want us back for?”

I was just as lost as they were.

Over the years, his enemies had died one by one, their names and reputations erased along with them. The fierce obsession in him had gradually faded. He’d grown so detached that he’d even found the time to look for my birth parents.

When he discovered that they were powerful figures at court, and that I had been betrothed to the Third Prince as a child, he was apparently bored enough to start preparing my dowry.

Even so, he wasn’t entirely happy with the marriage. If I was going to marry, he thought, it ought to be the most exalted man in the realm. The Third Prince wasn’t the heir to the throne, which meant I wouldn’t become empress.

“What a raw deal,” he said.

So when the Feng family came for me today, he planned to have a serious talk with them about how we might bring down the Eastern Palace and get me an empress’s seat to play with.

I showed little enthusiasm. If I had to choose, watching the clouds rise and fall over Partridge Mountain with him sounded far more interesting than being an empress surrounded by gold and luxury.

He scolded me for having no ambition. He had to be the best at everything, he said, and I ought to take after him.

I always listened to my adoptive father. If he wanted me to become empress, I would. Still, I couldn’t help feeling reluctant to leave. When I heard the Feng family’s carriages arrive that morning, I dragged my feet, waiting for him to come and hurry me along.

But he didn’t.

He had been standing outside my door since early morning, barefoot, his long black hair loose around him. He looked so grim that he startled me. Then he raised his eyes. For an instant, he wore the same look he must have worn as a young man, watching his family tortured by his enemies: a hatred held down so hard that his eyes were threaded with red.

He seized me and crushed me against his chest. My shoulders ached under his grip. I stared blankly past him at the fine, unending rain beyond the corridor.

“…Father?”

After a long while, he answered hoarsely. “Mm.”

I told him dawn was coming. “Mm,” he said again.

I hesitated. “Do I still have to go?”

He held me tighter, his sharp chin brushing lightly against my hair.

I didn’t have to go. He promised.

The Feng family’s carriages waited from darkness until daybreak, but Shi Wuhen did not hand me over. He changed his story as casually as could be: the Feng girl was his to raise, and he would not give her back.

He did not even come out himself. He stationed a few disciples at the mountain gate, unwilling to offer his visitors so much as a cup of tea. It was a clear order to leave.

Young Master Feng was furious.

He hadn’t wanted to fetch a sister in the first place, but his elders had ordered him to make the long journey over mountains and rivers. He thought little of a man from the martial world like Shi Wuhen. In his eyes, merely deigning to come was an enormous honor for Partridge Mountain. Instead, he’d had the door shut in his face.

He was so angry that he tried to force his way in with his servants. The disciples bound him up like a rice dumpling and hauled him before Shi Wuhen.

It was the first time I’d seen my younger brother. At a glance, I knew we shared the same blood. For all his disheveled state and flushed face, the shape of his eyes and brows and the dimples at the corners of his mouth were just like mine. Something stirred faintly inside me.

Young Master Feng wriggled across the floor like a silkworm. He spotted me and shouted, “Hey! Are you just going to stand there? Untie me, now!”

I looked to Shi Wuhen first.

His expression did not change. He rested his long, elegant fingers against his chin and tipped his head toward the man beside him.

My burly senior martial brother stepped forward and punched Young Master Feng square in the face.

“Fuck…” The young man licked his split lip in disbelief. “My own father has never hit me. You got a death wish?”

Before he’d finished speaking, my senior brother struck him twice more. By the time his mouth was so full of blood he couldn’t speak, Shi Wuhen was barely satisfied.

“Since your father never taught you how to address people, I suppose I’ll have to.”

He lowered his weary lashes, flicked his fingers, and gave an order. “Shi Lin, continue. Beat him until he learns what to call his elder sister.”

The young man’s eyes went wide. “Mmph!”

Judging by his expression, he was probably calling Shi Wuhen a lunatic.

I thought it odd too. Was he really beating him this badly over that? I looked at my adoptive father, unable to help feeling sorry for the boy. But he told me to stay out of it.

“Go outside.”

I took a couple of hesitant steps, then turned back. “…Father, you won’t beat him to death, will you?”

Shi Wuhen scoffed and looked at Young Master Feng as if he were an insect.

“His ancestors should be burning incense in gratitude that he hasn’t provoked me enough to seek his own death. Otherwise, I’d wipe out the Feng family line.”

The final words fell softly, almost weightlessly. Yet Young Master Feng’s pupils and mine both contracted.

What on earth had the Feng family done to him…?