Wenyan didn't sleep much that night.
The weight of that one moment—the woman's eyes through the veil, the poem pressed into his hand—kept replaying in his mind like a song he couldn't stop humming. Something about it made the world feel slightly tilted, as though everything he'd known had shifted half a degree. It wasn't love, not yet. But it was a kind of awakening. The feeling that something had begun.
Morning arrived gently, sun spilling across the courtyard stones, dappling the fishpond with golden shimmer. Wenyan stood outside his modest home, the silk pouch in hand. He hesitated.
This was foolish. He was a scholar and a teacher of village children—not a dreamer chasing nobles behind veils.
And yet, his fingers closed around the thread-tied scroll as if it were a lifeline.
He returned to the marketplace at midday, when the sun warmed the plum blossoms and voices rose in every corner like birdsong. The same spot beneath the blooming tree—where she had passed, where the servant girl had handed him the poem—stood undisturbed.
A flutter of nerves stirred in his belly. What if no one came?
He waited.
The street bustled around him, but his mind narrowed into a single thread of focus. After some time, he began to wonder if he'd misunderstood the poem altogether. If perhaps the noblewoman hadn't meant anything more than a poetic curiosity.
But just as he turned to leave, a shadow slipped beside him.
It was the girl—Meixiang. The same servant, same gray robes, but her eyes looked more tired this time. She held out her hand without a word, palm open, discreet.
He gave her the pouch.
Their eyes met briefly. She didn't smile, but there was understanding there. Then she vanished again into the crowd, leaving Wenyan with only the pounding of his own heart.
Days passed.
Three, then four.
He returned to the tree once more, half-hoping, half-resigning himself to silence. Spring had deepened—plum blossoms had begun to fall in earnest, their petals collecting like pale confetti on the worn stone paths.
On the fifth day, as the sun dipped low and lanterns began to blink to life, Meixiang appeared once more.
This time, she looked around warily before slipping the silk packet into his hand. "She read your words," she whispered. "She wrote back."
Then she disappeared into the dusk.
Wenyan stood frozen, the bundle a warm weight in his palm. It felt more personal than holding someone's hand. He carried it back to his study like a sacred thing, heart thudding against his ribs.
There, under the soft light of a single lantern, he unfolded the silk.
A new poem. Familiar script. The same red seal—this time fainter, as if written with trembling hands.
"Your ink spoke louder than the drums of court.I read your words with hands that shook.In my world, silence is a duty,But your voice slipped through—a thread of gold in a room of stone."*
Wenyan sat back, breath caught in his throat.
She had read it. Not only that—she had felt something. He could hear it in the trembling verse, in the way her words refused to be formal. There was vulnerability there. Not just a noblewoman amused by a poet. A woman, reaching out from a cage.
He stared at the poem for a long time.
Then he wrote.
Not with calculation, not with practiced elegance—but with the rawness of someone writing for no one else.
"Threads of gold belong in light, not in stone.If your voice is silenced, let mine sing for us both.*The world is wide, and I—a small man—know little.*But I know when a poem becomes more than a poem.*And I know that when I close my eyes now,*I see yours."*
He paused. Considered.
Then, with a sudden impulse, he added something he hadn't yet dared:
"Tell me your name.""Or tell me what I may call you—in poems, if not aloud."
He folded the letter, tied it with a clean red thread, and placed it once more inside a pouch. As the moon rose outside, bright and full, Wenyan felt something stir in his chest that hadn't moved in years.
Hope.
The next day, the letter left his hands. And the next, another arrived.
Each exchange carved a hidden trail between them—one made of ink and yearning, of shared silence and daring metaphors. They never spoke directly, and they never used full names. But the meaning between the lines grew deeper, like roots stretching through soil.
She called herself Lian.
He never asked more. He didn't need to.
To him, she was the morning breeze across his window. The moment between the first stroke of his brush and the next. She was in the waiting. In the ache.
And perhaps—he feared, he hoped—he was beginning to live in her silence, too.