Chapter 5: Thirteen

Nobody at the long table said anything. The bride's mother stood over Nine with the gold jug tilted in her hand, and the spilled wine ran along the grain of the table toward Ming's entry paper.

Ming lifted the paper out of its way.

"Sold?" she said.

Nine laughed. It was a good laugh, warm and easy, and it went down the table like a breeze through grass, and one by one the guests in their silks turned back to their food.

"Lent, Auntie," he said to the bride's mother. "Lent to the Bureau, for a term. It is a great honor. I am told I have been a tremendous help." He took the jug gently out of her hand, filled her cup, and set the jug down. "Sit. Drink. It's your daughter's wedding, and you've poured wine on the Recorder's table, and she'll be writing a report about it."

"I won't," said Ming.

"She will," said Nine, "in her head."

The bride's mother sat. She did not drink. She looked at Ming across the dishes with an expression Ming could not read at all, and then looked down at her cup, and her lips moved in what might have been a short prayer.

At the fifth watch the old fox stood and clapped his hands, and the feast ended like a dream, all at once.

The guests rose in a rustle of silk and went down the steps into the weeds in pairs, carrying their lanterns. The boy and the bride went first, in the red chair, to flutes. The lamps in the hall began to go out one by one with nobody touching them. The servants were gathering the gold cups onto a lacquer tray, quickly, counting under their breath.

"Seven," said one of them. He was a thin young man with ears like jug handles. "Master. Seven."

The old fox's face changed. He looked at the tray. Then, not at the sleeping student, but at Ming.

"Recorder," he said. "We borrowed eight. If eight do not go back into the box before the cock crows, the seals on that box will know."

"And then?"

"And then we did not borrow them." He did not raise his voice. "My daughter was married tonight with stolen cups."

"I know," said Ming. "I saw."

"Then you know where it is."

"Yes."

The old fox looked at the student, who was snoring with his head on his arms and his heavy right sleeve beside his ear. And Ming saw the old fox's hand close slowly on the edge of the table, and saw his shadow on the red wall behind him, which was the shadow of a fox, and had its ears laid back flat. "I'll get it," she said. "It's the Bureau's case. Leave it to me."

She did not wake Yin. She sat down on the bench across from him and waited, with her writing box on her knees, until he gave up pretending.

It took a while. He was stubborn. Nine sat on the balustrade of the terrace behind her with his fan closed, and watched the sky over the eastern hills, where the black was going gray at the edge.

Eventually Yin opened one eye.

"They've gone?"

"Most of them," said Ming. "Give me the cup."

He sat up. In the last of the lamplight he looked younger than she had thought, and thinner, and his patched scholar's gown was too light for the season. He put his hand over his sleeve.

"What cup?"

"The gold one with cranes on it. It's in your right sleeve."

He said nothing.

"It's pulling the sleeve down," Ming said. "You've held that arm stiff all night so it won't clink."

He looked at her. She looked back.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I'm a clerk."

"Clerk of what?"

"Of tonight," Ming said. "I'm writing it down. And I'd like to write that eight cups went home, and not seven."

Yin's hand stayed on his sleeve.

"Do you know," he said, "what they bet me? A dinner. One dinner, if I slept here a night."

"I heard."

"And nobody will believe I did. They'll say I sneaked home and came back at dawn." He laughed, not happily. "One cup, and they'd believe me. One cup and I'd eat for a year."

"I know."

"Then let me keep it."

"No."

"Why not? They're foxes. They took it from someone. I'm only taking it from them."

Ming put her writing box down on the bench.

"Because they borrowed it," she said. "There's a difference. They'll put it back before sunrise, and by morning the Chu tablets will have nothing to complain of."

He didn't move.

"If you keep it, the old man stole it. His daughter was married over stolen wine." She held out her hand. "You can't steal from a thief, Scholar Yin. You can only make a borrower into one."

He looked at her open hand.

Then he took the cup out of his sleeve and put it in her palm. It was heavier than she expected, and warm from his arm.

"Nobody will believe me," he said.

Behind Ming, there was the soft snap of a fan closing.

"Ah," said Nine. "On that point, Scholar, I may be able to help."

He wrote the poem on the back of Ming's spare entry paper, with her brush, on the balustrade of the terrace, in the pale light before dawn.

It was eight lines long. It was about a fox wedding on the night of a new moon, and lanterns shaped like lotuses, and a bride in kingfisher feathers, and a poor scholar who drank from a gold cup and gave it back. Ming did not know much about poetry. But she knew handwriting, and the hand on the paper was the same one that had written the character for person at her desk, the strokes standing apart and holding each other up, and no one who saw it would believe a poor student had written it himself.

"Show them that," said Nine, and blew on the ink. "And tell them a fox wrote it."

"They won't believe me."

"Some will. And the ones who don't will want to know where you got it." He handed it over. "You'll eat for a month on the story alone."

Yin held the paper in both hands, like a bird he had just caught.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't," said Nine. "Rule six. One doesn't thank a fox. It puts us in your debt, and we hate that."

The old fox had come up the stairs behind them. Ming turned and held out the gold cup, and he took it from her in both hands and looked at it, and then bowed to her, low. Lower than he had bowed when she arrived. Then he turned to Yin and bowed to him too.

"You will pass the examinations, Scholar," he said. "On your third attempt. Don't despair at the second."

Yin stared at him.

The cock crowed somewhere off in the town. When Ming looked round again, the old fox was gone, and so was the tray of cups, and the lamps in the hall were all dark, and the weeds stood high and wet with dew where the banquet tables had been.

She made the entry back at the Bureau, at her desk by the window, while the window showed its colorless morning. Her eyes were gritty and her hands were cold. She wrote it out fair from her notes. A marriage, witnessed. Fox to fox. The old Pan mansion, the first watch, the second of the tenth month. Gold cups borrowed from the house of Chu, eight; returned, eight. She pressed her seal into the cinnabar paste and stamped the corner.

The ink went dark red and held.

She sat back. Somewhere far beneath her, in the Hall of Registers, in a narrow black book on a shelf of its own, a line was filling itself in. She could feel it the way you feel a tooth stop aching. Fourteen. Thirteen.

"Thirteen," she said aloud.

"Congratulations," said Nine. He was sitting on the corner of Bao's desk, and Bao had given up and gone to work in the archive. "I believe that is the human word."

"You said not to say it."

"I said not to say it to foxes." He held out his hand for her brush, to clean it for her, as he had started doing without asking. "Well done, Recorder. You were fierce with the student. I was afraid for him."

She held out the brush.

His hand was between her and the desk. The window light was falling on it. And through his palm, faint as a watermark in good paper, she could see the grain of the desk. The dark lines of the wood. A spot of old ink she had never been able to scrub out.

Her own hand stopped halfway to the desk.

He took the brush. His fingers did not touch hers. He began to wipe it clean on a rag, with care, his head bent over the work, and in the moment it took him to turn his hand she could not see the grain any more. It was only a hand. Long, ink-stained at the second finger, like hers.

"Nine."

"Mm?"

"Hold out your hand again."

"Why?" He did not look up. "Have I done it wrong? It's a very bad brush. I've told you."

She sat and looked at him, the gray robe and the rust sash and the black head bent over her brush, and she thought about the empty column in the Ledger of Debts, where there should have been a line and was only cold white paper. Of no line. She thought about the old fox's servant counting cups, seven and then eight, and about the word released, and how he had looked out of the window when she said it, at a sky with nothing in it.

Thirteen.

She had always thought of it as how much she owed.

She watched his hand turning her brush in the rag, and began, for the first time, to count it the other way.