Chapter 1

Outside the broken window of the thatched hut, the north wind wailed. Inside, a woman wept.

"Elder Brother, I can't go on. From the day the family was condemned and sent into exile, all the way from the capital to Shuozhou, my family kept telling me to divorce my husband. I refused. My mother took to her bed and never got up again, and still I hardened my heart and stayed with him. The whole road here was suffering, but he was beside me, and I could bear anything. And now he's dead. Even with our two children, I have no wish to live. A letter reached the camp a few days ago. My mother — after I left, no medicine helped. She was gone within half a month."

By then the thin young woman was crying too hard to speak. The man she called Elder Brother was Zhuo Yan, eldest of the three Zhuo brothers. All three had been ruined by their father's case: the whole household exiled to hard labor in the far north, their careers destroyed, their wives and children dragged down with them. The second brother had died on the road of sickness and exhaustion. The third had frozen to death half a year ago in the quarry, leaving a three-year-old daughter and a baby not yet one.

Only Zhuo Yan was left. He had just turned thirty, but his temples were white and his body worn thin. He listened in silence, eyes on the ground. His wife, Madam Song, put an arm around Madam Jiang's shaking shoulders and cried too.

Madam Jiang gripped her hand. "My father was past forty when he got me, his unfilial daughter. The letter says grief made him ill after Mother died. He talks nonsense all day, all of it about games from when I was small. My brother listens and weeps. Every doctor says there's nothing to be done. He told me to remember the days at my parents' knees, and to think of my own family for once. He says that with my husband dead I'm already a widow, and by law, if Elder Brother consents and issues the document, I can petition to leave and go home. I can get free. But my children. My two poor children bear the name Zhuo."

The rotting window rattled, as if the wind wanted to howl along.

"Sister-in-law. Say no more."

Zhuo Yan had been silent a long time. His eyes stayed on the straw-covered floor, and the words came out of a raw throat. "The children stay with my household, the same as second brother's daughter. Since your father misses you, go back. Go to your mother's grave and pay the respects you couldn't pay."

He said it calmly, without a tremor. Then he turned his head slightly toward Zhuo Siheng, huddled in the corner of the plank bed with his sleeping sister in his arms. "Child, tomorrow borrow paper and a brush from the camp steward."

"Yes, sir." Eight-year-old Zhuo Siheng had been well-behaved at every moment since arriving in Shuozhou.

His sister Zhuo Huiheng, just turned five, stirred at the voices and opened her eyes. He soothed her with practiced ease and she went back to sleep.

Better not to let a child hear such things.

Zhuo Siheng thought it sadly.

By rights he was a child himself. By his countrymen's habit, grown men and women are still children until they have children of their own. He had been nineteen, riding high, when he learned his gaokao score — first in the province in the science track, the newest "somebody else's kid" in every parent's mouth. That was when he transmigrated.

The real Zhuo Siheng was six then. Soon after they reached Youbei Commandery his fever wouldn't break, and he must have died. How else could Siheng have woken up in his body, apparently set to carry a nineteen-year-old's mind and life on inside a small child?

Only it was very hard going.

Even with Zhuo Yan's consent, Madam Jiang went on crying. It was his mother in this life, Song Liangyu, who had already grown calm. She lifted a thin girl of two or three out of the basket in the corner, then took the sleeping baby off Madam Jiang's back, still wrapped in its ragged swaddling.

"Siheng, from now on these are your third sister and fourth brother."

She said it to reassure Madam Jiang, but she said it to Zhuo Siheng too, as if hoping he would accept it at once.

After dying and transmigrating, there wasn't much Zhuo Siheng couldn't accept. He only thought his third uncle's children took things better than he did. It had taken him half a year of misery before he made his peace with fate. His new third sister had ignored the gloom entirely, gone bouncing into the basket, and laughed at nothing. His fourth brother had slept straight through since coming in the door.

Madam Jiang cried until she nearly fainted. She took the children back, kissed them again and again, then buried her face against her sister-in-law's shoulder, and the two women broke down together.

Zhuo Siheng believed she truly couldn't bear to give them up, and that she felt she had failed her parents and missed her family. He knew what it was to be pulled apart by fate. In the end you choose, and you accept.

Here and now, two years in, his choice was to go along with heaven and work at staying alive.

That night Madam Jiang went back to her own camp. The wind didn't let up and there was no fire, so the family huddled together. Zhuo Huiheng was the only daughter of Zhuo Yan's second brother. Ciheng and the unnamed baby went back with Madam Jiang for the time being.

Huiheng had lost her mother as an infant, and the family was condemned before she turned three. The prison was damp and filthy, and illness took root in her. Then came the march north with the convoy, colder and harder the farther they went, and she picked up more ailments. Several times she nearly died. After they settled in Shuozhou she pulled through to five. Medicine was scarce and she still coughed and ran fevers, but she had the strength in her now to be raised. Song Liangyu held her between herself and Zhuo Yan for warmth, took Zhuo Siheng's cold hand, and spread every garment she could find over the two children. Seeing it, Zhuo Yan pulled his wife closer.

"A letter came for you from your family too. Why don't you go back to the capital with third brother's widow?" he said quietly.

Song Liangyu tucked the children in and said evenly, "You're still alive. Where would I go? Third sister kept the baby alive to a full year after third brother died. Her lot is harder than mine, and it's right that she goes home to her father. My parents died early, my brother heads the house, my sister is married. This is my home. If I left there'd only be you and the children, and the next time a wind blows this cold, who would warm the bed?"

Zhuo Yan looked at the smile she tipped up at him. It was the same as the day they were newly married and her pulse first showed she was carrying. They had leaned together like this then too, racking their brains for names, not knowing yet if it was a boy or a girl. They had even settled what age it would start school, what tutor to hire, what family to seek a match with.

Her face was still lovely, but hardship had worn it thin and the tiredness showed. It hurt him to look at, and still he spoke. "My family's conviction never touched your family or your mother's line. You have talent and looks. Once we divorce you won't be a convict. If you could live better, it would ease me and the children both."

"The children would rather have their mother!" She glared at him. "Don't put words in his mouth."

Zhuo Yan held back his tears and held her tight. A hundred feelings at once. Heaven had given him a marriage this good, the fruit of a hundred lifetimes — so why sentence his whole family to this?

Song Liangyu wiped the tear off his cheek and said gently, "I know there's worse ahead. But all six of us have to be all right. A settled life may be too much to ask for. A life together isn't."

His voice caught, and it took all his strength to say one word.

"Yes."

Zhuo Siheng had heard the whole thing and badly wanted to cry, but he was still pretending to sleep, so he held it in.

He was grateful to them. In two years he had come to think of them as his real parents. His parents in the other life had died when he was small and left little impression. His luck with parents had been thin, and he'd done all right anyway. When he first arrived here he was full of resentment. Why him? For a solid half year he went about like a man who couldn't afford to live. There was a struggle in him. Curiosity kept tugging at him, wanting to know what this world was and how he'd got here. Against that was dread and disgust at the reality of it. He had transmigrated into a scholarly house as the eldest son of the senior branch, which wasn't bad at all, and then disaster hit at once — the kind nothing human could fix. If you don't accept your lot, then what?

In the end it was something Song Liangyu said to comfort Zhuo Yan that hit him hard.

She said, "Even a mole cricket with three years to live steals what life it can. The road is long and hard. There is always tomorrow."

He thought it over. If he had really died, he'd have nothing. Instead he was living again. Everything about it was bad, but it was another go at a life. Worst case he died a second time, and he'd died once already, so it wasn't new, and it no longer frightened him.

So after half a year of wallowing he pulled himself together and found a new goal: stay alive, and see it through.

For that he had Song Liangyu to thank. His other mother.

And Zhuo Yan, who had looked after him through all of it and never given up on him.

Held between his parents, with the wind still blowing, Zhuo Siheng slept.

---

Half a month later the wind was worse and the day colder.

Madam Jiang set out for home at last, leaving behind two children who bore the name Zhuo and couldn't be released from the registry, to be raised by Zhuo Yan. He named the boy, just turned one, Xiheng. Looking at his third brother's two children — the girl Ciheng with her spirited face and frank eyes, the boy with his fine brows and full straight nose — he saw that in temper and in looks they were his youngest brother, the one he'd doted on most. And Huiheng, frail as she was, was gentle and refined and easy to talk to, exactly his second brother at the age he started school. To think of his brothers, and of white hair sending them off, and the grief had no end.

Youbei Commandery had always been the court's place of exile. Convicts and their dependents were entered in the convict registry on arrival, stripped of political rights for life, then assigned by household to a labor camp. The steward set each day's work. Men quarried stone, cut mine shafts, cleared hillsides and felled trees. Women tilled, hulled rice, planted hemp and spun. Zhuo Siheng was eight, below working age, so he stayed home with the younger children and did the odd jobs. None of the huts had a stove, so the workers ate at their sites, and the old and the young left at home had to collect their two meals in person, at the right time and place.

That job fell to Zhuo Siheng.

Every day at the hour he took Huiheng by one hand and Ciheng by the other, tied Xiheng on his back in a scrap of cloth, and off they went.

The four Zhuo children going to the mess hall were quite a sight. Few families in a place of exile could muster that many.

Zhuo Yan and Song Liangyu had stopped caring about clans and branches. It was enough that the family lived. So they entered the three children of the second and third brothers under their own names and had them call them Father and Mother, with none of the collateral forms of address. They did think of them as their own and doted on them as they did on Siheng. And they taught Siheng to be a good eldest brother and look after the rest.

Zhuo Yan gave him one other task: study.

"Even if a convict's descendants can't sit the examinations or hold office, study teaches you principle and wakes you to virtue. At the least it clears the mind and settles the temper. It's all gain and no harm. Your schooling was cut short when the family was condemned, and there's no brush or ink or book here, so it will have to be by mouth, father to son."