Green Phoenix

Her name, the old man said at supper, is Qingfeng. We call her Green Phoenix, though a phoenix is a great bird and she is, I fear, a great deal more trouble. She is my brother's child. Her parents are gone, and this house, such as it is, is all the family she has.

Qingfeng poured the wine. She did not blush at the compliment, and Feng admired that.Nineteen, maybe. A calm forehead. Her eyes moved from his face to his hands to the soaked books at his side, taking his measure as quietly as her uncle had done.

They talked about the rain, then the road. Then, because Qingfeng had read the same scrolls Feng had, they got onto poetry. She quoted a line he had only half remembered and finished it before he could.After that she looked embarrassed. For the first time, it made her look her age.

You must excuse her, old Mr. Hu said, smiling. She has no other company but an old man and a few wild neighbors. She will talk to a brush as readily as to a guest.

I am not complaining, Feng said. And it was true. He had eaten alone at tables where no one asked him a single question. Here was a girl who knew the rhyme scheme of a poem he had thought only he cared about.

Somewhere around the second cup he stopped watching the rain. By the third, the door had lost his attention too.The fire burned low on the hearth. Qingfeng refilled his bowl without being asked. The house held them the way a good story holds a listener. Warm. No one in a hurry to move on.

Outside, somewhere in the wood, a dog barked once and went quiet.Old Mr. Hu's eyes slid to the window, then back. Quick.A tiny movement, but Feng caught it. The way you catch a wrong note in a tune you know by heart.

Your uncle, Feng said carefully. He is a man of leisure?

We live quietly, old Mr. Hu said. He did not say yes. We keep to the hills. We have our reasons, and our ways, and the neighborhood has been kind enough to leave us to them.

Qingfeng said nothing. She looked into her wine bowl. And Feng, watching her, understood. Whatever the reasons were, she knew them. And they were not reasons a traveler from the river town would care to hear at a warm table by the fire.

That night they gave him the east room. A clean quilt, a brazier of his own.He lay awake listening to the rain on the tiles, to the small soft sounds of a house settling. He told himself he would leave at first light. Which is the sensible thing a scholar does.

He told himself this for a long time. And when he finally slept, he dreamed of a green bird with calm eyes that perched on the sill of a ruined house and would not be frightened away.