The plum rain season in Jiangnan always arrived unannounced. Clutching a bridal veil soaked with rain, Shen Zhitang gazed at the cold ancestral tablets on the offering table in the ancestral hall. In the watery mist, the curls of sandalwood smoke twisted like winding snakes, tightening around her heart with a dull ache. The five gilded characters on the tablet—"My Late Husband, Gu Chengxiao"—pricked at her eyes until they burned.
It had been raining just like this three years ago. Clad in dark armor, Gu Chengxiao had drawn her hands into his cloak beneath the veranda. "When I quell the rebellion in the northern frontier, I will come to marry you with a procession stretching ten miles in red." The young general's eyes had shone as bright as winter stars, and the jade pendant at his waist had chimed softly against his movements. Back then, it never crossed her mind that this would be their final parting.
Gu Chengxiao was the only son of Grand General Gu Lin, and had studied alongside Shen Zhitang in the Shen Mansion academy since they were children. She remembered how, on a spring day, he had plucked an apricot blossom and tucked it into her hair, earning a thunderous crack from the tutor's ruler; she remembered how he always quietly shoved his assigned schoolwork onto her while he slipped off to the training grounds to practice his swordplay. Later, when Grand General Gu Lin fell in battle, fourteen-year-old Gu Chengxiao inherited the title. The silver patterns on his armor …
Chapter 110