Original | The Sedan Chair She Chose

[Original story · Fiction · All characters are adults]

Her elder sister refused the marriage because her heart was already taken. Wen Wantang accepted it because she'd done the sums.

She was twenty-six, an embroiderer, and her needle kept the family fed. The betrothal gifts from the Marquis of Zhenbei would clear her father's debts and free her sister to marry the man she loved. So that night, it was Wantang who knocked on her father's door. "I'll go."

She had one condition. One more line had to go into the marriage contract: "Within three months, should the bride be unwilling, she may request a separation, and the household shall not prevent it."

Her father said the marquis would never agree. On the day the sedan chair arrived, the contract came back with a vermilion seal beside that line.

No matchmaker came to lift the veil on the wedding night. The marquis, Xie Jinghan, thirty-two, opened the door himself and stopped three paces away.

"I know you aren't the elder Miss Wen," he said. "I've read the line you added."

She gripped her sleeves. "If my lord wishes to cancel—"

"I don't," he said. "But you may leave whenever you like. You don't have to wait three months."

He didn't lift her veil. He said he'd wait until she wanted him to see her.

He slept on the couch in the outer room that night, and the next. On the seventh night, she left a pair of knee guards on his pillow, embroidered with the snow mountains of the north. He wore them to the training ground the next day.

A month later he came back from the border with a wound in his shoulder. As she changed the dressing, her fingers paused on his skin.

"Does it hurt?"

"No." He watched her. "Your hand is shaking."

"It isn't fear," she said.

The candle flickered. She reached up and lifted the red veil herself. She'd kept it under her pillow and put it on again that night.

"You can look now," she said. "And you can come a little closer."

He asked if she was sure. She said she was. He asked again, and she laughed and said he wasn't this careful even in court.

On the day the three months ended, the steward brought the contract to ask what she wanted. Wen Wantang took it and pressed a second seal beside her line, the private seal of her embroidery shop.

"Leave this line in," she said. "As long as it's there, I know every day is one I chose."