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After a brief meeting of families and an equally brief betrothal, Wei Wuxian is married on a balmy morning in the autumn of his twenty-fifth year.
Despite his passion for love-ballads and romance novels, Wei Wuxian never expected that he might be married one day. As the common-born ward of a merchant, he lacked the standing to find a wife among the gentry; and though he had liked the idea of a love match—where neither his rank nor that of his wife would matter very much, as long as Wei Wuxian could provide a comfortable home for them—no would-be beloved had ever materialized.
What was more, he took in a yang child of his own when he was twenty-three; and after it became clear that small A-Yuan would never be displaced by a son of Wei Wuxian’s blood (either in affection or matters of inheritance—for such a son would not have the rights of inheritance due to Yuan’er as the first child, no matter what else Wei Wuxian might be able to provide for him) the rare invitations he received from mothers arranging matchmakers’ meetings petered out completely.
It was thus that he came to be unwed at the age of twenty-four, when one of his uncle’s old friends from court wrote to Lotus Pier to ask if Jiang Fengmian would be in favor of a ruzhui marriage with Wei Wuxian as the bridegroom.
At first, the proposal had not seemed unusual, for it was common for educated men without noble-born parents to marry into their wives’ families rather than the other way around. But as soon as Uncle Jiang read the letter, he shut himself up in his study for a full shichen before emerging to speak with Wei Wuxian.
“There’s something wrong with the proposal, isn’t there?” Wei Wuxian asked, when he and Jiang Cheng were admitted into the study. “Or—perhaps something the matter with the bride? I don’t really need to marry anyone, Uncle, but I wouldn’t mind if the bride were—”
“There is no bride,” Jiang Fengmian said in a flat voice. “One of Lan Qiren’s nephews died not long ago; and he wants you to take the nephew as a gui xinlang.”
Jiang Cheng cried out in outrage, but Wei Wuxian only furrowed his brow and tried to remember if Jiang Fengmian had so much as mentioned the name Lan Qiren in his presence before that afternoon.
He hardly knew the names of any of his uncle’s former associates in the Ministry of Works, for Jiang Fengmian left his post long before Wei Wuxian was brought to live at Lotus Pier. He departed in the year Wei Wuxian’s foster sister Yanli was born: for Yanli-jie’s health was delicate from the first, and Jiang Fengmian so feared losing his daughter that he refused to leave her side until her physicians could give him some assurance that she might live to grow up; and though a handful of his juniors from the ministry came to visit now and then while A-Jie was young, Wei Wuxian was sure that none of the officials that were introduced to him bore the name Lan.
Presently, the look in Jiang Fengmian’s eyes softened somewhat.
“Do you remember,” he said, “when you and A-Cheng were six years old, and one of my disciple-brothers came to Lotus Pier with two small boys?”
Jiang Cheng frowned. “The one you studied with in the capital when you were young?”
“Yes, that one. His brother and saozi died nearly twenty years ago, and Lan-xiong was obliged to travel south not longer after their funeral; and since his nephews could not bear to part from him, Lan Qiren brought them along. They stayed with us for a week, and I sent you and A-Xian out to play with the boys—I remember that the older one fell into the lake while the two of you were playing on the docks with A-Li, and A-Xian…”
Wei Wuxian shut his eyes, for a memory had come back to him: an impression of being very small and determined, trudging through the woods on the east shore of Lake Lianhua as he searched the brush for—
“Rabbits,” he murmured. “The little boy—A-Zhan—he was crying for his mother; so I went into the woods to look for rabbits for him.”
He thought for a moment longer; and in bits and pieces, half-faded glimpses of that summer’s day flickered across his mind’s eye. He had dragged the grieving A-Zhan out to sit in the sunny grass near his favorite swimming-hole, where the river Huangbai flowed into Lake Lianhua; and when A-Zhan began to cry, Wei Wuxian left him in the care of Jiang Cheng’s nurse and wandered off to find something to cheer him up.
He ran through Lufeng’s open-air market for what felt like hours, but none of the trinkets and sweets he would have liked seemed remotely suited for A-Zhan; and at length, Wei Wuxian thought of the embroidered rabbits sewn onto the hems of A-Zhan’s sleeves and made up his mind to find his new friend a live rabbit who could go back to the capital with him.
Wei Wuxian swallowed.
“Is Lan Zhan the one who—?”
Jiang Fengmian inclined his head. “En. It is a great pity—I heard that some great general or other was felled at the border last month, but I never imagined…”
He passed Lan Qiren’s letter to Wei Wuxian, who grasped it with trembling hands before unfolding it.
A minghun is the only way that Wangji will ever have descendants to worship him, Lan Qiren had written, after a brief explanation of Lan Zhan’s death in battle and the question of how he was to be cared for in the afterlife, as an unmarried man. I cannot ask a maiden to live as a widow without having ever been wed, much less for the sake of a man she did not know; but more importantly, Xichen is convinced that Wangji was a cut-sleeve, and would never have bound himself to a woman of his own accord.
I remembered then that you have a yang son with a child of his own, whose prospects in marriage have not been favorable since he took the boy into his care. If Wei Wuxian were to accept Wangji as a ghost bridegroom and raise his son as a Lan, he and the child would be granted full rights as members of the inner Lan family; and the child would be recognized as Wangji’s son and the sole heir to his estate, regardless of whether Wei Wuxian chooses to marry again afterwards.
In fact, I will be so bold as to say that a minghun might improve Wei Wuxian’s chances in time; for with his first child’s inheritance settled, his future bride need not fear for the prospects of her own children. As for Wei Wuxian himself—if the minghun is completed, he will be given the deed to the courtyard where Wangji used to live, to be handed over to the child in the event that he leaves the Cloud Recesses to remarry.
Upon remarriage, he will be permitted to take half of whatever remains from Wangji’s inheritance; and though we would not dare to interfere with the rearing of his son, we ask only that the child continue to honor Wangji as his father alongside Wei Wuxian and his step-mother when he is grown.
“What a pity that Lan-jiangjun passed away so early,” Jiang Cheng muttered, peering over Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. “But even so, a minghun …”
For some reason, Wei Wuxian found himself blinking back tears. He could not quite recall the young A-Zhan’s face, for the eighteen years that elapsed since their parting had erased nearly everything about him from Wei Wuxian’s mind; but he remembered how the little Lan Zhan had wept for his late mother, and how tenderly he cradled the two young rabbits Wei Wuxian gifted to him.
That child was dead and buried, now—or perhaps only dead, for the letter gave no indication that his body had ever been recovered from the battlefield where he fell—and Wei Wuxian was still alive, standing less than a third of a li from the spot where Lan Wangji clung to him and cried as if his heart would break for missing his A-Niang.
“Should Father and I write back and tell him you won’t do it, Ge?”
Wei Wuxian shook his head and slipped the letter into his sleeve. “No,” he said, in a voice that was half a sob.
“No, don’t. Tell Lan-xiansheng that I accept.”
* * *
It was thus that Wei Wuxian became a nanqi to the deceased Lan Wangji, in the month before his twenty-fifth birthday.
There was no lack of pomp or richness in the wedding etiquettes, though they were carried out in the utmost secrecy. An astrologer looked at their two ba zi, and announced with some astonishment that he had never seen a bride and groom so clearly fated for one another: and then Wei Wuxian made his wedding bows in the Jiang ancestral shrine, where a pair of memorial tablets had been set up for his parents.
And after that—the very next day, though it had seemed like an eternity—he left Lotus Pier and set off for his new home in the capital with A-Yuan and his new in-laws. He was to live there during autumn and winter, and return to Lotus Pier in the spring; and during their time at the Cloud Recesses, A-Yuan would receive the same schooling due to the children of the Lan clan.
For A-Yuan was Lan Yuan now, and a wealthy little master in his own right. To Wei Wuxian’s astonishment, Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren both seemed to love him at first sight: and stranger still, Lan Xichen remarked in some surprise that A-Yuan seemed to resemble the deceased Lan Wangji about his nose and forehead.
“He looks as if he could have been Wangji’s child in truth,” he said softly, as A-Yuan clambered onto Lan Qiren’s lap with his favorite story-book in one hand and a moon cake clutched in the other. “Have you given him a courtesy name yet, difu?”
Wei Wuxian opened his mouth to reply: but before he could tell Lan Xichen that he had decided to put the matter of A-Yuan’s courtesy name off until he was older, one appeared fully-formed in the forefront of his thoughts.
“Sizhui,” he replied, stroking the little boy’s hair. “He will be Lan Sizhui, in remembrance of his fuqin.”
* * *
After Wei Wuxian came to live at the Cloud Recesses, the days slipped by like a whirlwind. Autumn gave way to winter almost before he realized that the nights had begun to lengthen: and by the turn of the new year, he grew used to living as the widower of a man he had never known.
He visited Lan Zhan’s tablet in the Lan ancestral hall nearly every morning. A-Yuan accompanied him from time to time, before toddling off to study at the Cloud Recesses’ infant school in the afternoon; and while Yuan’er was away from the Longdan Yuan—the courtyard where Lan Wangji had lived before he joined the army, and which Lan Xichen signed over to Wei Wuxian as soon as the minghun was finalized—Wei Wuxian shut himself up in his husband’s old study with the blueprints for the new well pumps he was designing.
When his back began to ache from stooping over his desk, he usually went out to walk in the Longdan Yuan’s little garden. It was oddly wild-looking for a garden belonging to the Cloud Recesses, full of gentians and medicinal herbs tangling as they pleased through the grass; and if not for the lone magnolia standing near the door to Lan Wangji’s bedroom, Wei Wuxian would have doubted that the Lan family had had the slightest hand in designing it.
“This courtyard was our mother’s,” Lan Xichen tells him, on a chilly afternoon in the middle of Zouyue. “She was from a family of wandering healers, and she wanted to grow herbs here after she and Fuqin were married; so he dug up all the things in the flowerbeds and planted gentians and dong quai for her. They kept the magnolia tree, since this one has been here before the Cloud Recesses were built—and when Wangji was little, Muqin used to set him under the magnolia and shake the branches so their petals would fall into his crib.”
Wei Wuxian’s throat grows tight. He would have liked to ask his new brother-in-law more about his and A-Zhan’s childhood; but before he can speak, he spots two pieces of lichen-spotted stone poking up through the snow at the base of the tree.
“What are those?” he asks, squinting against the sun. “Is something else planted there?”
Lan Xichen turns to follow his pointing finger before freezing in his tracks.
“Ah,” he says softly. “No. Wangji’s pet rabbits are buried there. They lived until—when was it? The last dog year, I think. He took such great care of them that Shufu used to say they were like his children.”
And then, as Wei Wuxian tries to dab at his eyes without being noticed: “He named them Bichen and Chenqing—what solemn names for rabbits!” Lan Xichen says, making a valiant effort to laugh as he stares at the two little gravestones. “He named his sword after Bichen later. That was a little more fitting, thank Heaven!”
They sit together in silence for a little while longer, watching the snow pile higher on the rabbits’ tiny graves. Wei Wuxian cannot bring himself to speak, and Lan Xichen seems to have no need to do so: but at length, Wei Wuxian turns to his brother-in-law and asks the question that has been lingering in his mind since the day he took his wedding vows.
“Xichen-ge,” he ventures, “how did you know…?”
“Hm?”
“How did you know that Lan Zhan would have wanted a man to wed him in a minghun, and not a woman? Did he—did he ever tell you?”
“Ah, that…” Lan Xichen’s voice trails off. “I found out by accident, really. I do not think Wangji ever meant to let me know—but when it came to the matter of his minghun, Shufu began by looking for families whose daughters had died unmarried after they were old enough to wed, so I asked him to seek out a bridegroom instead.”
“But how did you know to ask for a bridegroom at all?”
“Wangji said it himself while he was drunk,” Lan Xichen confesses, smiling sadly. “You must have wondered why the Lan forbid the consumption of alcohol within the Cloud Recesses, since even priests do not hold themselves to such standards—but the truth is that even a sip of wine is enough to send most of us out of our wits. Wangji tasted alcohol only once in his life—he mistook a cup of mead served at the Bujingshi for peach juice, and drank it all before I could take it from him—and he had to be chased down and put to bed afterwards.
“He looked so grave, even as he was trying to climb out the nearest window, so I decided to tease him a little. I asked if he had ever liked anyone, and for a time, he did not reply; but at last he told me that he had made up his mind to live as a bachelor forever, for he had a beloved whom he could not wed.
“I asked him who the woman was; but Wangji only shook his head, and told me that the one he loved was a man.
“‘His family would never permit our union,’ he said; ‘and he is so dear to me that I cannot bear to burden him with my feelings: for he is such a soft-hearted soul that he would grieve for the fact that he could not return them. I would not cause him any pain if it were in my power, and especially not in that way.’”
Wei Wuxian’s lips tremble. “Did you ever find out who it was?”
“No, never. Wangji recalled nothing of our conversation the next morning; and since he would never have breathed a word on the subject if he were sober, I did not ask him.”
At this , Lan Xichen lays a hand on Wei Wuxian’s shoulder in farewell before turning towards the gate.
Wei Wuxian remains in the garden for a little while longer, reluctant to leave his husband’s beloved rabbits to continue their long slumber alone. Some part of him thinks he might comfort Lan Zhan’s spirit by keeping vigil here, for the garden in the Longdan Yuan seems to hold more of him than the rest of the compound put together; and when the bell outside the Lanshi strikes the hour—shen shi, meaning that Yuan’er will be finished with his lessons in the next two ke—he crouches in front of Bichen’s grave and brushes away the snow surrounding it with a fallen twig from the magnolia tree.
Before the twin grave-markers, he finds two well-worn indentations that could only have come from a pair of knees pressed into the damp earth, day after day and season after season since the rabbits passed away.
Wei Wuxian presses his hands to his face and bites his tongue to keep from crying.
“Lan Wangji, ah, Lan Wangji,” he chokes, “who asked you to be so good?”
* * *
He comes to know more of his husband in the weeks that follow, despite the fact that Lan-laoshi and Lan Xichen do not often speak of him. From the old diaries in the Jingshi’s study, he learned that Lan Zhan had a wry sense of humor that he kept entirely to himself; and when he opens the neat account-books lined up on the shelves above his husband’s desk, he realizes that his husband used to write music.
It was no surprise that he played, of course. Lan Zhan was a master of the six arts in life, though Lan Qiren still laments his ineptitude in painting: but while any young master his age might be expected to know how to play the qin, talent in composition was not nearly so common.
I saw him giving out bouquets to celebrate Duanwu Jie to-day, Lan Zhan wrote, above a score he had tucked between the pages of the last account-book his mother kept before her death. He was throwing peonies to the girls in the street, until they were ringed about him like a bed of green leaves about a lotus flower.
I was bold enough to steal a peony that one of the maidens crushed underfoot. It was not too badly hurt—it had nearly all its petals, and it will be no different from an intact flower once dried—so I have resolved to press it in one of Muqin’s old books, and keep it there as a remembrance of him.
Heart in his throat, Wei Wuxian drops the account book and turns to the shelf devoted to Madam Lan’s books of poetry. She left Lan Zhan a box full of them when she died, some in better condition than others; and when Wei Wuxian picks up the most battered one of the lot, he finds a dried peony tucked between the cover and flyleaf.
He closes the book almost immediately, afraid of damaging the flower: and from that moment on, he is conscious that some part of his heart has broken away from him and passed into the keeping of a ghost.
It is almost as if Wei Wuxian were in mourning: mourning that a life as dear as Lan Wangji's had been extinguished far from home, without a single loved one close at hand to comfort him in his final hours. His grief is made no easier by the fact that Lan Wangji hardly seems to have left the Cloud Recesses, for the Jingshi and the Longdan Yuan are full of him, so that Wei Wuxian can find some reminder of him everywhere he turns—and as the days draw on, he finds himself wishing that he and the grown Lan Zhan had met just once before the latter rode to war.
I feel as if I knew him, he thinks idly, upon discovering a notebook in which Lan Wangji had attempted—and failed, much to Wei Wuxian’s amusement—to design a scabbard for his sword, Bichen. And so—I feel as if I lost him, too.
The sense of loss only seems to grow deeper with time: and much to his brother-in-law’s distress, Wei Wuxian begins binding his hair with white cord by the day of the Shangyuan Jie. When the Zonghe festival arrives, Wei Wuxian attends it in full mourning; and every evening, after A-Yuan is in bed, Wei Wuxian makes his way to the ancestral hall and sits before Lan Zhan’s memorial tablet for half the night before creeping back to the Longan Yuan at yinshi.
“You look poorly, A-Xian,” Lan Xichen says anxiously, on the day Lan Zhan’s magnolia comes into flower. “Have you been eating? I know you’re not used to the food we serve at the Lan-fu, but this…”
“I cook meat in the Longdan Yuan’s kitchen myself when I have the time,” Wei Wuxian tells him. “I’m all right, Xichen-ge. Really.”
“You do not look all right,” Lan Qiren grumbles, eyeing Wei Wuxian’s shrunken shoulders with dissatisfaction. “Perhaps you should go home to Lotus Pier this month instead of waiting until Meiyue. If your health grows any worse than this by the time you see your uncle again, Jiang-xiong will have my head.”
Wei Wuxian should have leapt at the chance to return home, for he knows full well that these last four months at the Cloud Recesses have altered him for the worse; but strangely, he finds himself reluctant to depart. He is not reluctant to leave the Cloud Recesses at all, for he dearly misses his family in Yunmeng—but for some reason, he cannot bear the thought of leaving early. The date of his departure was settled when he left Lotus Pier—the twelfth day of the plum-moon, exactly six months before his twenty-sixth birthday—and the longer Wei Wuxian thinks on the matter, the more certain he is that he expects something to happen before he leaves his wedded home for the summer.
And as for what that something might be—
“What’s the matter?” Wei Wuxian cries a fortnight later, when he rushes into the Lanshi to find Lan Qiren on the verge of swooning in Lan Xichen’s arms. “Yuan’er told me that you collapsed during his morning lesson—are you all right, Uncle?”
Lan Qiren raises his white face from Lan Xichen’s shoulder.
“Wangji is alive,” he croaks, with great difficulty. “He sent a runner ahead—there was an assassin charged with slaying him at the front, and the body his battalion sent back was not—was not—”
Wei Wuxian nearly faints away where he stands. The Cloud Recesses descends into chaos within the next ke, for Lan Wangji is due to arrive at the estate in less than a shichen: and when the gong outside the Lanshi strikes for the eighth time—marking wei shi—one of Lan Xichen’s uncles draws Wei Wuxian away from his brother-in-law’s side and leads him back to the Longdan Yuan with A-Yuan.
“Stay here for now, Wei-gongzi,” he says gently. “Let Qiren and A-Huan welcome him home and inform him of the minghun, and then…”
He does not remain to say what might happen then. But Wei Wuxian waits on the Jingshi’s front porch as bidden, holding A-Yuan to keep him from running away; and after what seems like an age, he hears an exclamation from one of the outer courtyards, followed by the sound of hurrying feet approaching the Longdan Yuan.
“Wangji!” Lan Xichen calls, from somewhere close by. “Wangji, for heaven’s sake, slow down—”
But the footsteps in the corridor leading to Wei Wuxian’s gate do not slow their pace: and then the gate opens, admitting a tall, gaunt figure clad in a loose coat of armor.
Lan Wangji’s gaze alights on Wei Wuxian as soon as he crosses the threshold of the Longdan Yuan. He takes one step forward, and then another: and then he staggers through the garden to the steps beneath the Jingshi’s front door, and meets Wei Wuxian’s eyes for the first time.
“They told me that I was married in my absence,” he says hoarsely, looking up at Wei Wuxian in mingled shock and disbelief. “And that—Xiongzhang said that I had a child.”
Despite himself, Wei Wuxian bursts into laughter.
“En, you do! This is Lan Yuan,” he says, holding A-Yuan up for Lan Wangji to see. “Your son."
“Hello,” A-Yuan whispers, favoring Lan Zhan with a tiny smile before hiding his face in Wei Wuxian’s neck.
Lan Wangji draws a harsh breath and stretches out his hand. “And you?” he entreats, so softly that Wei Wuxian has to lean forward to hear him. “My husband—what of you?”
Wei Wuxian meant to introduce himself by his courtesy name—for what other name should he have given, when he has been of age these last five years?—but at the last moment, he bites his lip and says:
“This husband is the one who gave you your rabbits,” he smiles, trying with all his might not to weep as Lan Wangji’s eyes grow wide in wonder.
“You knew me once—as Wei Ying.”