The river that swallowed and fed the great northern plains swelled wide and gold in the late evening sun. Jieshi wasn’t a big city, but it crossed the river. Crossed it with boats, with bridges, and maybe someday with a gondola, if the marriage between the Gatekeeper’s daughter and the Gu family scion went through. The matchmaker had promised to announce their wedding date when the moon filled.
Yiyao leaned forward into the warm autumn evening, elbows braced on the painted railing of the main bridge. His plaited hair was warm against his neck; his layers of homespun wool sticky with humidity and sweat. He had his shepherd’s crook tucked into the soft space between arm and side. And hidden flush against his skin, beneath both the burgundy robe and the plainer brown shirt, he had his money.
It wasn’t a lot. Enough for a stick of candy and a lantern, a bundle of incense to offer his dead parents, maybe a trinket if they were cheap this year, and – the thing that had his lungs aglow and his heart burning – a warded qianhai bag. The nicest one you could get with three strings of copper coin and half a thumb of silver.
It wasn’t a lot. But he’d been saving carefully for ten years, and it was enough.
He tilted his face into the slanting sun, eyes closing against the heat, and hummed a song for weaving.
It went something like this.
Nineteen years since his mother drowned. Twenty years since his father froze, drunk and crippled, in an alley. Twenty-one years since Yiyao was born and named and blessed. And eighteen years since his adoption fee was paid in three wool pelts and a whole slaughtered ram.