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“Save it!” Wen Kexing calls after dinner, when Zhou Zishu starts to gather up the remains of the rabbit they had roasted by the water, ready to toss them into the sea. “I want to make a stock.”
Zhou Zishu turns to him. He is ethereal in the rising moonlight; still thin and haggard with the scars of his illness, his dark silhouette resembles a willow branch. The carcass in his hands has no meat on it, and its spine is twisted at an odd angle. Wen Kexing stares at it with an intense focus, and remembers what Zhou Zishu had almost become, during those long months when he would not wake.
“Make a stock,” Zhou Zishu repeats, the words heavy on his tongue, like he’s speaking a foreign language. When had Zhou Zishu last entered a kitchen for reasons other than espionage? Perhaps he had been made to wash dishes as a boy at Siji Manor. Wen Kexing had never even had the chance to loathe that chore - there were no dishes for him at all for the longest time. “Do you even know how to do that?”
Wen Kexing bristles. “Isn’t cooking one of the duties of a good wife?”
“I suppose so.”
“And aren’t I a good wife?”
Zhou Zishu snorts. “Questionable.”
“So why wouldn’t I know it?”
“I didn’t think that the Ghost Valley Master had so much free time to spend in his kitchens. My spies never made it far into the valley, either, so I wasn’t aware that there were kitchens at all.”
“What did you think we were eating there, A-Xu? Raw flesh and bones?”
Wen Kexing’s smile stretches across his face, more teeth than lips, and he knows that he looks like something other than human as his suggestion hangs in the air. But Zhou Zishu merely cocks an eyebrow, unimpressed, and glances at Wen Kexing’s mouth with barely concealed desire. Before Wen Kexing can step forward to take him into his arms, Zhou Zishu tosses the carcass at him, whip-fast, and laughs when Wen Kexing yelps at the mess on the sleeves of his robes.
“Make your stock, Wife Wen,” he says. “I look forward to tasting it.”
Wen Kexing’s heart leaps, and then he realises - he really doesn’t have any idea what he should do with it at all.
The market is bustling, stalls flush with the fresh produce of spring. Shāokǎo sizzles along the sides of the street, the smell of the meat making Wen Kexing’s mouth water, and he distracts himself with a stick of sugared hawthorn, crunching through the syrup. The flavour explodes onto his tongue - a sweet and sour medley that makes him think of a young girl in purple, too busy learning to carve human flesh to enjoy a treat like this.
He scans the colourful tables of produce with the same wide, soulless eyes that had observed brownnosers and backstabbers in the Ghost Valley. Since he had left, he had sampled many fine foods, with Zhou Zishu on their travels and even before him, on his forays with young courtesans. He considered himself a connoisseur - and yet, seeing the dishes reduced to their parts and ingredients baffles him. He thinks back to his first new years’ feast, to the happiest New Year of his life, and how proud he had been to chop the vegetables and cook the meat himself, when he had never had the time to spare for it before. Each dish had been seasoned simply with salt and chilli oil, but it had tasted delicious, each mouthful swallowed down with wine and one of Zhou Zishu’s lazy smiles.
The myriad of greens and spices sold at this market remind Wen Kexing more of an apothecary. He remembers his mother’s clever hands, not a true memory but a mirage - if she had taught him healing, might she have taught him this, as well?
There is an old woman behind the market stall. She attends to a pot beyond Wen Kexing’s perception with her back to him, trusting him and the rest of her customers to disturb her. He doesn’t let her down, picking up an eight-pointed seed pod, pinching the sharp angles of it between his fingers.
“Ayi, what’s this?” he asks, forgetting to watch his tone. Though soft, his voice carries a sharp edge that makes her shoulders hunch, turning towards him with a world-weariness that speaks of far too long trying to carve out a quiet living for herself. The trepidation in her face disappears at once when she sees what he is holding, replaced by a flat, disbelieving look.
“Bājiǎo,” she says bluntly. Wen Kexing hums, comprehending little, and she casts an eye over the fine fabric of his robes. At once, Wen Kexing sees himself through her eyes: a lord just a sliver past his prime, venturing out into the market, perhaps for an adventure, or at the behest of his wife. His lack of knowledge about something she must have known since before she could speak takes the blade from his words.
“What do you do with it?” he asks, and as she fumbles for a response, clearly contemplating shooing him from her stall altogether, he grasps her wrist. “Will you teach me?”
This time, he watches himself. He has learned how the ordinary people outside of the Valley work. Neither ghosts nor jianghu heroes, they are nonetheless easily to manipulate, and though he has spent little of his time charming women, he knows how to do it. To see the Ghost Valley Master pout in a façade of desperation is a sight many would pay for, and yet he gives it to this woman for free.
“It’s for my love,” he tells her, watching her wrinkled features melt with satisfaction. “He doesn’t eat enough; I want to make a meal that will satisfy him. As many meals as you can teach me.”
She sighs, and ushers him behind the counter of the stall. Wen Kexing is thrilled when he ties a square scarf around his hair, pinning up his sleeves on her instruction. He spends that day and the next at play as a young apprentice, watching the ayi cook, running errands for her, and counting crumbs of currency as she sells her spices.
Her fingers are nimble even in her old age, and she moves with food as if it is simply a part of breathing. When Wen Kexing asks how much of something, or how long the broth must boil for, she simply clicks her tongue at him, rolling her eyes and swatting him away.
“You’ll know,” she tells him. “I never measured; my father didn’t either. You taste it and smell it, and you know when it’s right. Pay attention.”
For a moment, Wen Kexing burns with an unidentified sensation. He wants to slap her; to take his hand and press it against the part of her breast bone where he can do the most damage with the force of his qigong. His mother had chided him often for not paying attention to his studies, and now that they are done - at least for the most part - with their killing, Wen Kexing has none of the skills from his ancestors to help Zhou Zishu heal.
He pays attention.
Unable to find jìcài **in late autumn and faced with a market-table of cold-season vegetables that had been far from the ayi’s pantry that spring, Wen Kexing decides that any green will do. He remembers the leaves as dark and thin, but the báicài **looks far more tempting in spite of its lighter colour. Wen Kexing has memories of Gu Xiang boiling it in a pot for him, insisting that since he had forced her to eat plants as a child, she would force him to eat them now. So he grabs those, picking the largest, fullest leaves he can find, and washes them diligently, remembering how the ayi’s thumb dipped into the rivet of the stalks, the water icy cold to the touch. He tries to mimic the fluidity he had seen in her movements, but finds himself going from pot to chopping board with frenetic haste instead, his mind buzzing.
The tofu takes him by surprise. He is used to his knives cutting through muscle and bone, not soft silk; the blade slams against hard wood, the sliver he had cut giving way eagerly, slipping off to one side. After that, he moves gingerly, fingertips pressing mellow indents into the block, his cuts slow, delicate and precise. He imagines that it is Zhou Zishu’s heart he is carving, instead of some unfortunate, irrelevant prey. When it slides into the broth he sighs, only to cry in dismay as it disintegrates under his spoon. The tofu is more fragile than a flower - a precious thing, made for hands like his mother's and not his own.
But she isn't here, and his husband needs to eat, and so Wen Kexing's hands will have to do.
The soup simmers over the fire for another xiaoshi, until Zhou Zishu makes his way back from drinking with the fishermen by the river. He fancies himself an old uncle, now that he has dragged himself out from beneath the cold talons of death, and gets his fill of gossip from whichever gaggle of seniors he can insert himself into. It’s an old, bad habit, but they both have their fair share of those. When he returns, holding his hip as he sits against a rock, Wen Kexing ladles the soup into a bowl and clucks his tongue at him.
“If you keep performing age for so long, its cloak will be harder to shed,” he says, and Zhou Zishu glares.
“Who says I’m performing? You know full well why my hips hurt; my wife thinks that we are in our fullest youth and gives me no peace.”
Though Zhou Zishu is no stranger to innuendo and filthy words, the straightforwardness with which he speaks sends a thrill through Wen Kexing, his fingers tensing around the soup bowl just before Zhou Zishu snatches it from him.
Yes, he thinks. You are mine, and you want me. He watches Zhou Zishu lift the bowl to his lips with his heart in his throat, and only when Zhou Zishu makes a satisfied hum, tilting bowl and spoon higher, does he move to serve himself.
It’s all wrong.
When he had eaten with the ayi, the leaves of the jìcài had tasted peppery, enhanced by the broth to bring a pleasant bitterness to the whole dish; now the whole thing tastes mild. It’s not unpleasant, and the báicài has retained its crisp moisture, but it is so far off from what Wen Kexing was aiming for that it feels flavourless on his tongue. He swallows, scowling.
“It isn't right,” he says, smiling thinly at Zhou Zishu. “This wife has failed you.”
“Then tonight you can make it up to me,” Zhou Zishu retorts immediately, before it occurs to him that Wen Kexing is talking about the food. He looks at the bowl and takes a long, deliberate sip.
“It's good,” he says slowly. “I don't know what it's supposed to taste like, but I've tasted a lot of fine things in my life, and I like it. Isn't that enough?”
“Of course it's enough if you like it,” Wen Kexing quips, but his mind is back at the market, at the row of leaves he had been confronted with. Should he have chosen something darker, closer in colour to the leaves he had seen the ayi use? Or was it foolish of him to try to make this meal out of season at all? Zhou Zishu, able to read him as if he is calligraphy for light discussion at court, snorts.
“This meal ranks among my favourites in this lifetime,” he declares, and continues at Wen Kexing's disbelieving stare. “Of all the banquets I attended at court, all of the feasts I attended while wearing another face and another name... This is one of the few that I have never felt the need to check for poison.”
Wen Kexing laughs and leers.
“Perhaps you ought to be more careful,” he teases, and Zhou Zishu looks at him with dark eyes.
“If you choose to poison me, so be it. I know that you will not be long after, and so I will wait at the foot of the bridge to beat you into the next life.”
He scoops the pork from his bowl, and Wen Kexing makes a promise: though his hands are not suited to it, he will cook this man a thousand fine meals before they die together.
“A-Xu,” Wen Kexing calls. “Bring the dishes to the table. Chengling, brat, make yourself useful and warm the wine.”
Zhang Chengling runs, and Zhou Zishu dawdles, snatching a sliver of pork from the dish Wen Kexing has filled. He chews and swallows, and Wen Kexing watches the movement of his throat even as he swats Zhou Zishu’s buttocks with a smoke-stained cloth.
His waist is fuller now; his ass rounder. Wen Kexing abandons the cloth in favour of pinching at the softness of Zhou Zishu’s hips, sighing in contentment when Zhou Zishu scowls. He bites the meat of Zhou Zishu’s shoulder, feeling the layer of fat above the muscle with closed eyes.
“Delicious,” he comments, and Zhou Zishu scoffs. Before he can retort, Wen Kexing pushes a jiǎozi into his mouth. It is perfectly folded, stuffed with chicken that Wen Kexing slaughtered himself. It is the most lively thing that he has slaughtered in a long time, now, and it had brought Wen Kexing a nostalgic sort of amusement to do. “Try this.”
“Mm,” Zhou Zishu nods approvingly with his mouth full. “It will taste good with the wine.”
The table is filled to the brim, and Wen Kexing serves Zhou Zishu before he serves himself, letting the boy fight for his own. He piles the pork high in Zhou Zishu’s bowl, and when it empties, fills it again with the jiǎozi he had approved of, nudging the dipping bowl in his direction.
“I can’t possibly eat all of this,” Zhou Zishu grumbles, even as he uses his chopsticks to fend off Chengling’s fingers when they wander towards his bowl. “Are you fattening me up like a pig for the slaughter? Will I be a part of your New Year Feast?”
Yes, Wen Kexing thinks. It will be my first, and it will be wholly for you.
“I was hoping you’d be my next meal, actually,” he leers, leaning in. Chengling makes himself scarce before the kiss has ended, his feet scrabbling across the tile. The taste of garlic and chilli oil lingers on Wen Kexing’s tongue, pilfered from Zhou Zishu’s lips and sweetened by the wine he drinks with his free hand curled around Zhou Zishu’s relaxed shoulders.
“I’m too full to have sex,” Zhou Zishu retorts. “You should have thought of that before you made all of this.”
“It’s alright,” Wen Kexing tells him, and he isn’t surprised anymore to know that he isn’t lying; there is no platitude, only sincerity. “Watching you eat is pleasure enough.”