Page 82 of The Scholar's Improper Wife

The carriage lurched violently to the left, pitching Yun-si into the side panel.

Yun-si grabbed the window with one hand and her notebook with the other, ink smudging across Sword Lady Mei’s most withering comeback. Outside she heard Ting-zhi’s unhurried voice directing the horse around what sounded like a significant hole in the road.

The carriage settled.

She looked at the swash of ink obliterating the bottom of the page, then lifted the curtains separating her and Ting-zhi on the driving seat. He looked relaxed with one hand easy on the reins, the posture of a man entirely unbothered by nearly sending his wife into a ditch.

“You hit a hole,” she said accusingly.

“There was a hole,” he agreed, without turning around. “In the road.”

“That you were driving on.”

“Roads have holes sometimes.” A pause. “How’s Sword Lady Mei?”

She looked back at the page. The ink had consumed approximately three lines of her best work, including the comeback and the beginning of whatever devastating thing was going to happen next, which she now could not remember.

“She was about to say something very cutting,” Yun-si said. “You ruined it.”

“Mm. What was she going to say?”

“I don’t know now. You made me lose it.”

“She could always just cut him,” he offered. “She usually cuts people when she runs out of words.”

Yun-si opened her mouth. Closed it. This was unfortunately accurate—Sword Lady Mei did like to cut people down when a scene wasn’t going her way, which several readers had written to Old Wang about, and which Old Wang had passed along with the noteconsider giving her more words.

“She has plenty of words,” Yun-si said with dignity.

“The last book had a fight scene every time she and Leng Shao-yu were in a room together for more than three pages.”

Leng Shao-yu.The rival’s name. Said by Ting-zhi in that unbothered tone of his, in that casual way one used to reference a familiar friend

She didn’t know why it bothered her so much to hear him say it.

“The road,” she said, with great composure, “requires your full attention.”

“The road is fine.” But she could hear that almost-laugh, contained, which she had learned was worse than the actual laugh because it meant he was enjoying himself thoroughly and being very restrained about it. “I’ve read all four books, you know. Leng Shao-yu is very well drawn. Very specific.”

“He’s fictional.”

“Of course.” The horse took a curve, smooth and unhurried. “He does this thing where he arranges things in advance because he knows what she’s going to want before she asks. Very particular character detail.”

“Many characters do that.”

“Name one.”

She looked at the ink smudge across the page. Looked at the beautiful mountains rolling past the window, the kind of landscape she had been writing about her whole life without ever seeing. A hawk circled somewhere above the treeline, unhurried, surveying everything below with the magnificent indifference of something that had never once been teased about its own fiction.

She leaned further out the window as the road curved and something new appeared—a valley, green and wide, the river far below catching the last of the afternoon light like someone had dropped a mirror into the landscape.

Ting-zhi’s hand came back through the gap in the curtains, palm up, without a word.

She looked at it.

“You need both hands to drive,” she said.

“The road is straight for the next li. Give me the notebook.”