The Fragrance of Her Hair

It was as if she had slept for too long and now needed an immense kind of courage simply to open her eyes again.

Her eyes shone like luminous pearls hidden for ages in the deep sea, unseen by the world. Her long lashes trembled. Light moved in her gaze. Only when everything before her turned sharp and real did delight slowly surface on her face.

"Look at yourself." The masked man in black standing beside her handed a mirror to the girl who had just awakened.

Who was that?

Her face was soft as cherry petals, her brows fine as willow leaves. Her beauty was as clear and fresh as a water lily only half in bloom, part enchantment, part shyness. Her long hair fell like silk, every tip of it glimmering with a pinprick of light. Surrounded by firelight, it swayed like a cluster of tiny spirits dancing in the air.

The girl cupped her flushed cheeks in astonishment, her voice bright as jade striking stone.

But the black-robed figure shook his head.

"Not enough."

He turned her shoulders and lifted a brush stained with red pigment. He pressed a dot of cinnabar onto her smooth forehead, then painted her brows and lips. He set moon-pearl earrings by her ears, dressed her in pale gauze and violet silk.

One glance, and a city could fall.

Only then did the man in black finally nod in satisfaction, as though setting down a heavy burden.

The room, however, was too lonely. A beauty like this, and there was no third person there to admire it. The girl could not help feeling a little forlorn. She leaned against the black-robed figure's shoulder and coaxed him in a soft murmur. At last he nodded, and she flew from the attic like a released bird.

She never noticed the sigh that slipped from beneath his iron mask, lighter than down and yet filled with desolation and resentment, as cold as if it had crossed the frozen reaches of the Southern Frontier.

No one knew how many days they had already been walking through the desert. The large party that had set out at the beginning had dwindled almost to nothing.

None of them had imagined that the Southern Frontier would be so barren, so filled with sand and ruin. Several of the men had been swallowed by storms and dragged under the yellow earth, leaving not even bodies behind.

Those who remained had trudged on for nearly four days without a grain of rice or a drop of water. Sand filled their sight, weariness their faces. Only the man at the front kept walking on, step after step, unshaken, a hard light still burning in his dust-laden eyes.

At last one of the others dropped to the ground with a dull thud. No one moved. This kind of death was no longer unfamiliar. Only the leader took off his cloak and laid it over the body before the wind and sand buried it from sight.

"Go back," he said at last.

The words lit the fury in the half-dead men beside him like a fuse. Go back? How were they supposed to go back now? They sneered that they should never have come with him at all. They had once been his servants, but now they rushed him, tore the water flask from his belt, and began fighting one another over who would drink first.

When the last man finally won it and tore out the stopper, he shook it and realized there was not a single drop inside. At that same moment, one foot sank into a patch of soft sand. He went down bit by bit, even his cries growing weak as the desert swallowed him whole.

As though everything that had just happened were no more remarkable than another sandstorm, the leader turned away and forced himself back to his feet with great effort.

Then he saw her.

In that endless yellow waste, that immense desolation, there stood a girl as fresh and delicate as dew.

Even outside the desert she would have been irresistible to any man. Yet what caught his eye was not her face but the blossom in her hand, a flower so pink and lush it looked almost unreal.

The girl seemed to understand. She held it out to him.

She watched with open amusement as he ate the flower down to the last petal. For some reason, she found the sight unexpectedly interesting.

"What did you come to the Southern Frontier for?"

"To find someone."

"What kind of person?"

"I don't know."

His answer puzzled her, but she did not pursue it. "Then where are you from?"

"Somewhere better than the desert, I imagine," she said with a blink. "The flower you just ate is called Yaorao. It is worth a city."

"I'll pay for it," the man said without hesitation.

"Oh?" She narrowed her eyes and looked him up and down. "Do you even have any money on you?"

Then she leaned close, her breath fragrant, enough to leave him slightly dazed. "Forget the silver. Just promise me one thing."

"Take me to the Central Plains."

The place called Liuye Town opened her eyes at once.

Green waters, lake light, families living on boats. The misty beauty of Jiangnan was lovelier than the desert by ten thousand times.

Along the way she also learned who the man was. His name was Dongyun Bicheng. In all of Jiangnan he was a power no one could ignore. Even the reigning emperor gave him a measure of face. The inns run by the Dongyun family were scattered across the world and famous everywhere.

Everywhere except the Southern Frontier. When one of the Dongyun servants said as much, the girl cut him off coldly.

"I've done what you asked of me. Do you still remember what you promised?" Bicheng asked, setting down his teacup without even looking up.

It seemed that from the first day they had met, he had never truly looked at her. All along the road, passersby stared in fascination. He alone did not. Thinking of this, the girl let her eyes shift and moved with graceful steps to refill his cup herself.

"Why the rush? You don't even know who you're looking for. Even if I took you through a shortcut across the desert, it would do you no good. Besides..." She paused, gazing at the man before her with all the languid charm she could summon. "I can make your inn more prosperous than it is now. One day there may even be Dongyun inns standing in the deserts of the Southern Frontier."

"Oh?" This time she had stirred him a little. As he raised a brow, pride flickered in the gesture. In truth, he was curious about this beautiful woman from a distant place whose identity he did not know. Yet what held his attention most was always her hair, drifting as lightly as wind, beautiful enough to startle him.

"But first, you must give me a name," she said, looking at him with shining eyes.

"Shayue. What do you think?"

"Shayue... Shayue..." She repeated it like someone murmuring in a dream, and a faint smile spread across her face.

From that day on, there was not a person in Liuye Town who did not know her.

Every morning, people began queuing outside the Dongyun inn at dawn, because the first ten guests through the door at noon would be accompanied by Shayue herself while they drank. And if any one of them managed to get her drunk, he could take her away.

Once the news spread, there was almost no one from Liuye Town to the capital who had not heard of it. The Dongyun business flourished more and more. Even those who missed the first ten places were willing to pay heavily for a seat, so long as they could catch a glimpse of the beauty as she drank.

But no matter how much she consumed, Shayue never once became drunk.

If anything, the stronger the smell of wine around her, the more intoxicating her eyes became. They were clear as colored glass, as though some untouched lake made from Tianshan snow had been hidden within them, and men were left drunk without ever taking a sip.

Very often, even after every guest at the table had collapsed one by one in a storm of snores, Shayue would still be sitting in the middle, holding her cup with elegant fingers and drinking it in small, steady sips. Sometimes Dongyun Bicheng would only come downstairs late at night to look at her.

"What kind of woman are you," he once asked, "to be able to drink like this?"

Shayue smiled faintly and walked toward him step by step, graceful beyond compare. "Only because I haven't met the man I'd want to get drunk for."

But before she could reach him, Bicheng had already wished her good night and gone upstairs.

The coldness of his retreating back left her close to despair.

It was while she was drinking with a guest that she first learned Dongyun Bicheng already had a wife as beautiful as a flower.

Whether the shock was too great or the despair deeper still, she could not have said. In any case, the mouthful of wine lodged in her throat came spraying straight back out, all over the guest's clothes.

Everyone around them stared. They all thought this was the moment Shayue would have to lower herself and apologize. Instead she only glanced at the man and said evenly, "I won't drink anymore today. I won't drink again after this, either." Then she turned to go, only to have the guest seize her wrist.

"Leave? It's not that easy." He tried to drag her into his arms. The other tables in the inn were clearly filled with his men, and within moments they had the room under control. The message was obvious: do not invite trouble.

Shayue was rattled. Never before had she been so helpless in someone else's grip.

Only then did Dongyun Bicheng walk in slowly. To the man holding Shayue, he said, "The matter you promised me has not yet been concluded. Why trouble a woman in such a hurry?"

So they knew each other. No wonder that from the moment he had entered, this guest's gaze had been so steady and assured, as if he had meant to take her from the beginning. Shayue pulled back her reddened wrist and looked at Bicheng with a trace of gratitude.

Later, from their conversation, she learned that Bicheng's wife had died of illness a month before, in his arms. He refused to accept it, and had exhausted every possible means trying to bring her back. When he heard there was a priest in the distant Southern Frontier who could summon souls, he made that long journey into the desert, only to lose his servants to the wasteland one by one.

Only by chance had he survived to meet Shayue.

"Please come with me, sir," Bicheng said to the man from before, inviting him up to the room on the fourth floor.

The onlookers could not help but shiver. Who would have imagined that above an inn full of song and revelry, there had been a corpse lying cold for a month? But Shayue was not afraid. She wanted to see for herself what kind of woman could occupy Bicheng's heart so completely that even death had not loosened her hold on it.

Sandalwood was burning in the room, and the scent drifted faintly through the air.

For some reason, Shayue found it familiar. Yet when they stepped inside, they discovered that the bed was empty. Only clothes had been laid out upon it: a cloud-edged robe, a brocade jacket embroidered with peonies, a jade-colored skirt. It looked as though a peerless woman truly lay there.

"After she stopped breathing, I laid her here and went everywhere looking for a physician. But when I came back, only these clothes remained." Bicheng stared at the empty bed, his eyes raw with helplessness. The sight of such despair made Shayue's heart ache.

"I'm afraid your wife took Ningxiang Powder before she died," the gentleman said after a glance, his gaze never leaving Shayue.

"It's a notorious secret weapon from the Southern Frontier. Slip even a trace of the powder beneath your fingernails, and within a few hours flesh and blood will dissolve into wisps of faint fragrance and vanish into the air. Which means..."

Shayue cut in before he could finish. "There would be no bones left at all." Each word struck the floor like a stone. "She did it because she wanted you to forget her. Don't you understand that?"

"No. Impossible. Ayano can't be dead. Now there's not even a body to prove it. I won't believe it."

Dongyun Bicheng turned and strode out as if pursued.

Only the gentleman and Shayue were left standing there.

The man began edging closer to her again. "Come with me, beauty. I'll see that you live a thousand times better than you do here." But before he could touch her, Shayue lifted a hand. A delicate sachet flashed between her fingers.

"What's that?" he asked, taken aback, looking at the mischievous smile on her lips and the slyness in her eyes.

"Didn't you just explain it yourself?"

The man's expression changed at once. "You... you can't have..." Before he finished, he was already bolting downstairs like a frightened animal.

Shayue stood in the doorway and laughed softly. Then she looked from the sachet in her hand to the garments laid upon the bed.

For the first time, she found herself envying the woman who had vanished without leaving even a body behind.

By the time autumn arrived, Dongyun Bicheng had long since stopped eating and drinking properly. After what happened, Shayue no longer appeared in the inn either, and the guests who still came for her could only cling to the windows and hope for a single glimpse inside.

But Shayue's room had always been sealed tight, as though it were hiding some secret. From the very first day she moved in, she had ordered the steward to hang curtains over every wall. Night after night, once all was still, she lit a candle inside and worked there alone at something no one else was allowed to see.

It was her secret. It was also the thing the black-robed figure had warned her about again and again before she left the Southern Frontier.

Another late night came. Outside the window, the autumn wind swept through fallen leaves.

Dongyun Bicheng was drinking again, as though he meant to empty the whole inn by himself. Shayue did not want to bother with him, but after only a few steps she turned back, snatched the cup from his hand, and said, "If you want to drink, I'll keep you company."

Then she lifted the whole jar and drained it in a single breath.

Some women, people say, are like good wine: three parts fierce, seven parts mellow fragrance.

Shayue was one of them.

It was as if the wine kept mingling with her blood, drawing out the scent hidden deep in her body under its blazing heat. The fragrance that rose from her was rich and heady. Her hair flowed more beautifully than ever, and a wild, full-blooming beauty unfurled from her.

Even a man as hard-hearted as Dongyun Bicheng was entranced. Yet just as his hand was about to touch her hair, Shayue heard him murmur one name.

"Ayano."

It was like a steel needle driven without warning into her heart.

She felt herself almost splintering apart. At last she shoved him away with all her strength and ran back to her room alone.

Fragrance filled the room. Candlelight illuminated the curtains around her.

Then some sudden wind from nowhere slipped through. The flame trembled once, twice, and then the light itself seemed to crack. The beautiful face in the mirror broke like glazed porcelain, layer by layer peeling away in the wind.

At last it exposed the cloudy, pale skin beneath that peerless beauty.

It was rough and uneven, like the surface of a candle. Compared with the flawless skin she had worn moments before, it was almost impossible to believe that the figure in the mirror was still her.

Shayue covered her face. No softness remained in her movements now.

She remembered what the Priest had told her: if she failed to find someone who truly loved her, the beauty she had been given would begin to fall away.

And she remembered, too, that night in the desert.

When she would not speak, Dongyun Bicheng had thought she was cold. He took off his outer robe and laid it over her shoulders. Shayue had looked at him in surprise. In that instant, a thousand unsaid words had surged into her chest. But when she opened her mouth, she had not known where to begin.

Should she have started with her true identity? With the way her heart had warmed the first time she saw him? Or with the way he had still clung stubbornly to life even when he lay wounded in the sand?

Then Bicheng reached out and brushed aside the hair against her cheek.

"If there had been no Ayano," Shayue asked softly, "would you have loved me?"

The desert wind brushed past their ears, scattering fine grains of sand over their clothes. Her voice was as light as that drifting sand. It seemed that the three months since they had met had already turned into one invisible gust that had passed through both their hearts.

But there was no answer.

The man in blue-green was almost spent, already on the edge of sleep, his head resting against her narrow shoulder.

In that moment, Shayue wished time would never move forward again. She asked for nothing more. She only wished that the single warmth life had granted her might last a little longer, enough to console the long cold loneliness waiting for her after he was gone.

But dawn came too quickly.

In a nearly sealed attic, a purplewood table was lined with candles of every imaginable shape. None of them had wicks. They lay there dry and useless, like puppets without souls. In the corner stood the masked figure in black, lighting an ancient bronze brazier whose carved patterns glowed a violent red, as if some seductive monster were about to step from its smoke.

He did not look once at the woman kneeling on the floor.

Not even though she had once been his most beloved work.

"Priest, please. Save him." The kneeling woman was beside herself with worry over Bicheng's injuries. Sweat stood in tiny beads across her brow.

"I told you already. If you made that man fall in love with you, your beauty would endure forever. And I also told you not to come back." The black-robed figure's voice, filtered through the mask, echoed like layers of sound rolling through a deep valley. "Yet you brought an outsider here."

Shayue had never seen him so angry. Their duty was to cultivate creations like her so that life in the Southern Frontier would continue unbroken. Perhaps Shayue's failure had become the Priest's failure as well. If she could not win the heart of the man she wanted, she could never become a true woman. And in a priest's lifetime, there was only one chance.

"Priest, please."

Shayue knelt there with her lips bitten purple.

The figure in black looked at her without speaking. Even through the iron mask, his helplessness showed.

Then another voice came from the far side of the wall.

"Don't beg him."

He had actually found the hidden mechanism that opened the concealed door.

And what shocked Shayue even more was that the wound on Dongyun Bicheng no longer looked serious at all. "You're all right? You... you were deceiving me?"

In the dark room, everything shifted in an instant.

Before Shayue had even fully heard the apology in his voice, she saw him move with terrifying speed. The soft sword in his hand was already pressed to the Priest's chest.

"No!" Shayue cried and rushed forward, but Bicheng blocked her.

"I've finally found you," he said, every word hard as stone. "The murderer who killed Ayano."

The sword drove deeper.

"It can't be true!" Shayue could not believe what she was seeing. "The Priest couldn't have killed Ayano. Didn't you say she died suddenly? Didn't you?"

Then Bicheng turned to her, eyes burning. "Then where did your hair come from?"

Hair...

Shayue lifted a hand to it without thinking. Yes. She should not have had hair at all. Without real human hair, she could never have had a soul. She would only ever have been a wax figure assembled piece by piece, like a candle without a wick.

But this hair had clearly...

She turned and looked at the Priest.

All at once she understood the loneliness and suffering the Priest of the Southern Frontier had endured. And yet she could not bring herself to say it.

"Yes," the Priest said at last, and suddenly let out a laugh so wild it bordered on madness. "To complete the dearest work of my life, I killed your wife, dissolved her flesh away, and planted her hair strand by strand into Shayue's head."

The goal was achieved. Dongyun Bicheng was wholly enraged now. With a hoarse shout, he drove the sword halfway in.

Drops of thick black blood seeped out beneath the Priest's cold mask.

"No!" Shayue screamed. With all her strength she shoved Bicheng away from the sword.

The Priest's body was light as a feather as it collapsed into her arms.

"Priest... don't die. You can't die." Something inside Shayue split completely apart. The cracks ran so deep she knew they would never be mended.

At last she raised her head and looked at Dongyun Bicheng, who still stood there gripping the sword, his face expressionless.

"Do you know?" she asked in a voice full of grief and despair. "My hair belongs to the Priest himself."

It took a long time for the man with the sword to understand her words. And when he finally did, he broke.

He had abandoned his business in the Central Plains and ridden into the desert only to find the rumored secret of the Southern Frontier, the secret by which a wax figure could be given real human hair and turned alive. Ayano's death had been too strange. No matter what, he had needed an answer.

At first he had believed Shayue was only an ordinary young woman, innocent and untouched by worldly dust. But one night, standing outside her window, he had finally seen the shadow cast by the lamp inside. What he saw was a broken silhouette, as if a candle had been smashed on the floor and shattered into pieces.

Only then had he understood what Shayue was, and why her hair resembled Ayano's so closely, even down to its scent. He did not blame Shayue. But he had already resolved that he could never forgive the Priest who had stolen Ayano's hair.

That was why he had let himself be wounded and allowed the soft-hearted Shayue to carry him all the way back to the Priest in the Southern Frontier.

What he never could have imagined was that beneath the mask of the dying Priest there would be a face exactly like Ayano's.

Everything was the same except for the missing hair: the slender waist, the beauty that could topple a city, all of it drawing out the radiant memories buried in Bicheng's past.

"Why?" Dongyun Bicheng threw back his head and cried out to the heavens, Ayano's nearly dissolving body clutched in his arms. The sound of his grief shook the room.

Shayue wanted to weep with him, but she had no tears.

Ayano's death had always been fated. Yet before she died, she had shed her mortal shell and gone like blowing sand to the Southern Frontier. There she had painstakingly created a perfect wax woman who might remain at Dongyun Bicheng's side in her place, so that the pain of their parting might be lessened.

But Bicheng was too faithful. His heart was like stone. Except for Ayano, he was cold as iron to everyone else.

Suddenly Shayue rose and leaped into the carved brazier. At once her body gave off wave after wave of intense fragrance, and in the fire her hair streamed upward like the spread tail of a peacock.

By the time Dongyun Bicheng understood what she meant to do, it was already too late. Firelight reddened Shayue's eyes, and at last, drop by drop, scalding tears began to fall.

To long for you is to be a bright candle, scorching my own heart while holding back tears.

In that moment, Bicheng saw that Ayano's body, which had already begun to disperse, was being gathered back together by the fragrance rising from the flames.

Joy filled his eyes, and grief with it.

Shayue's tears hardened in the fire like beads of candle wax, falling one by one into the blaze.

"This is all I can do for you," she said. "Until I burn out completely, the Priest will not vanish. So you still have this last little while to finish the farewell she owes you."

Her clear eyes overflowed with sorrow. Dongyun Bicheng felt as if his heart had been torn into two.

On one side was Shayue, burning herself to ash. On the other was the wife he had thought of day and night.

His tears fell too, mingling with the sparks.

The dark room had turned bright and clear beneath the fierce fire.

And everything, in the end, would become black ash with the dying light, buried beneath wind and sand.

Dongyun Bicheng sagged where he stood and held the senseless Ayano tighter in his arms.

Until all things fell silent.