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Xiyan thought that she had been ready to give birth. Whatever poison it was that she drank had incapacitated her totally, but she tenuously held onto life through the sheer strength of her will. Her cultivation had been torn from within her, and so she was nothing more than a normal woman now—but normal women gave birth all the time. Like many normal women, she knew that she was not going to live through this, but at least she could give her baby a chance.
She stripped off her outer robe, and squatted down over it. She clamped her sword belt between her teeth, to muffle herself, and bore down. She had borne pain before; what was a little more?
The less said about the birth, the better.
Her baby was perfect, of course, but looking at him brought little comfort because, truth be told, he was too perfect. Newborn babies were, Xiyan knew, so alien that they seemed almost inhuman. Her baby looked to be six months old, maybe, with a darling chubby face and a full head of hair. But he was inhuman. Xiyan was reminded when she looked at the smear of blood on his forehead, so much like the sigil that marked his father as a demon.
She finished chewing through his umbilical cord. She wanted to wash him, but the river was so cold. Surely his tiny body couldn’t handle the winter water. She spat on the edge of her sleeve, and carefully wiped his face with it.
He took her fussing in good humor. Aside from a few gasping sobs as he had exited her womb—his first chances at breathing—he hadn’t cried. His eyes seemed unusually solemn for a baby’s, as if he understood the gravity of their situation.
She wouldn’t even consider naming him without his father there. Very forcibly, she did not think about the fact that his father would never meet him. It was the year of the tiger, and so the entire time the baby had been in her womb, that was what she had privately called him.
“Let’s get you dressed, Xiaohu,” she told him. “I should feed you, but I’m worried that you’d take in the poison and die too, if I did.”
He responded by keeping his sweet baby’s silence.
She stripped off her robes layer by layer and, once she was nearly naked, began to wrap him up, with the softest fabrics, the ones that had laid closest to her skin, first. She recited nianfo as she swaddled him, thinking of the way her own mother had chanted it every morning as she did. Her mother’s voice was her earliest memory, one of the few she retained from the time before she had gone away to Huan Hua Palace. She wished that her son would remember her voice, though she knew he would not. It was an embarrassingly sentimental thing to think, something that she normally would not have allowed herself—but then she was dying, and might allow herself this small mercy.
There were a few things abandoned by the side of the river—a wooden club for beating laundry, some broken shards of ceramic, a woven basket. Xiyan laid her son down on her stained outer robe, and stumbled down to the water. She set the basket in the water. It floated, and when she pushed her hand against its bottom, testing its strength, it stayed afloat too. She could hear Wang-shidi’s voice yelling nearby. So that was the end of Wu Chen, then. The rest would be coming soon. She pulled the basket back to the bank, crawled back to her son, and embraced him one last time, as hard as she could. He would live, she thought, fiercely. She couldn’t give him anything else, but she could give him his life.
Her strength was ebbing as she carried her son down to the river. With the last of it, she placed him inside the basket, and pushed it into the water.
Once he was on the water, he began to cry. She couldn’t even imagine what his little face must have looked like, scrunched up to cry; what it must have done to his serious, intelligent eyes. She was too weak to lift her head, and for that she was almost grateful. Her last memory of her son would be his calm face looking up at her, not asking what he had done wrong, but tenderly giving her a mercy she had not earned; Amitabha’s understanding and Guanyin’s compassion. She prayed that the bodhisattvas would show mercy towards her son. What else could she do?
She let herself fall back on the ground, and imagined the life that her son would live—because he would live. Her martial siblings were coming—she could see the glint of their swords at the edges of her vision. It didn’t matter. Her son had escaped her body, and so he had escaped her fate.
She imagined all the people her son would become. A person whose downy baby’s hair had become thick and long; a person building his meridians; a person learning to ride a sword; a person who wrote poems; a person who could crack jokes; a person who was loved and cared for: a person with a place in this world. It was becoming more difficult for her to breathe. She imagined the bad traits he would surely inherit: stubborn like his father, quick-tempered like his mother. She imagined him growing handsome and tall; strong like his mother, charming like his father. She imagined his confidence, his focus, his wit, his grit. She imagined-