He picked up his brush and faced his parchment again.‘Relax your wrist, let the brush breathe,’Scholar Wen had said numerous times.
The brushmustbreathe. The language was a thousand layers of breath and tone, structure and spirit. JingYi had learned Tremesi in a matter of weeks. He had been here for a month and still, his pronunciation of ‘thank you’ could get him directions to a butcher instead.
Alexander practiced again, not caring how much time passed. The character fordogwas just beginning to take shapeproperly beneath his brush when a swell of noise rose from the street. He lifted his head. On instinct, he stood and moved to the edge of the veranda, leaning over the railing. The breeze shifted, and he caught sight of silk canopies gliding down the road.
His neighbour, the wiry older woman who sold preserved plums and had once shooed chickens out of his rented courtyard, waved at him.
“Lán mùyân!” she called, the name they’d teasingly given him—Blue Eyes,rendered in their local tongue. “Come see!”
He descended the few steps in front of Scholar Wen’s house before he could think, wiping ink from his hands with a rag. The street was already teeming with people, all bowing low as the procession neared. He stood at the back, watching the soldiers in their armour, attendants in layered silks, a canopy with lacquered poles and tasselled veils swaying in the breeze. And within it?—
JingYi.
His heart jolted against his ribs.
He couldn’t quite see her face, half-veiled behind the silk screens of the palanquin, but he would know her anywhere, even by silhouette. He knew the line of her shoulders, the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her brow as intimately as his own breath. Around him, the murmurs swelled. Every syllable was laced with reverence and honour. He caught only fragments of the language he was fighting so hard to learn, but one word was clear among the rest:Meirûnsha.
The First-Ranked Princess.
He watched as the procession turned the corner toward the palace gates. His pulse roared in his ears. He wanted to call her name, but her name wasn’t his to speak here. Not in this place where she was worshipped like the morning moon.
He stood there long after the crowd dispersed. His neighbour nudged him lightly in the ribs.
“Magnificent, isn’t she?” she said with a smirk. “Too noble for you.”
Alexander managed a smile. “I know.”
He headed for the veranda, his hands already itching for the brush. He would work until his hand broke to write her name in her language. To speak to her not as a stranger, but as a man who had walked her roads, learned her words and the culture that shaped her.
Even if he never earned her forgiveness, he would meet her in her world.
He was two steps from Scholar Wen’s house when a light tap landed on his shoulder. Alexander turned.
Xu Haorán stood behind him.
The man was as he remembered: lean and sharp-angled, built like a reed that had learned how to cut.His robes were simple—charcoal grey, the cuffs trimmed in black, but they moulded over the contours of his body, concealing nothing of the agile strength beneath. The single sword at his hip had a lacquered scabbard, the silk wrapping at the hilt fraying where fingers had gripped it countless times.
“Lord Wulfbane,” he said in Isseric, bowing with a precision that held no deference, only courtesy. “You walk fast for someone far from home.”
Alexander’s mouth twitched. “I have to. Otherwise, I’ll be trampled by grandmothers and children with better footing than I have.”
Amusement touched Haorán’s eyes, gone as quickly as it came. Then, after a moment’s pause: “Have you eaten?”
Alexander hesitated. In Xûen, that question was more than politeness. Sharing a meal was language. A way of seeing someone, of showing care, extending honour, demanding respect. Since arriving, he had never gone hungry. Even strangers offered him something—not out of obligation orflattery, but to watch how the pale-haired, pale-eyed foreigner took in their land one bite at a time. A sweet bun savoured. Broth drunk with closed eyes. They observed him the way one watched a guest in one’s home: quietly, attentively.
And he had learned not to take a single bite for granted.
The famine that plagued Xûen-Sarai during the previous emperor’s reign was still fresh in many minds. Entire provinces had gone without grain. Bitterroot porridge had once been common. Their bowl of rice had never been white but colourful from miscellaneous grains and, oftentimes, insects. Even now, recovery was uneven—pockets of hunger still lingered along the western valleys, where he heard the climate was so dry the earth cracked like bark.
So, when he accepted an offer to eat, he bowed—not just his head, but his pride.
He answered Haorán, “I have, but I’d share a meal with you.”
Those purple eyes watched him, as though reading more into the answer than words alone.
Haorán tilted his head toward the market. “Come. I know a good place.”
They sat at a corner table inside a crowded teahouse that smelled more like broth than tea. The place was narrow and unpretentious, its walls stained with decades of steam and soy. One side of the room opened to the street, where smoke wafted from large clay pots simmering over coals, each bubbling with stew, soup, or spiced porridge. Steam fogged the serving counter as aproned boys ladled broth into bowls and chopped scallions with thattap-tap-tap-taprhythm, their hands and cleavers flying across cutting boards.
