The Fox Unmasked

The trial was set for the morning of the tenth. On the evening before, Siniang asked to be taken into the cell. The guards, who had been well tipped by a quiet woman over a week, let her through without a second look.

She brought Feng a bowl of hot broth, and washed his face with her own handkerchief. She told him, gently, that he must answer the magistrate's questions plainly, and must not, whatever he felt, look Wang in the eye.

"And how is it to end?" Feng asked, his voice cracking. "They will flog me again. They may send me to the frontier."

"It will end," Siniang said, "before the morning is out." She paused. "Feng, I have not told you the whole truth of myself. I am not what I seem. When the trial turns, do not be afraid of what you see."

He stared at her. She had grown in the lamp-light strange and luminous, as though the fire were lit inside her rather than outside. He remembered the cold moonlight behind her eyes on the night of his arrest, and understood.

He did not shrink from her, or from the hand that still lay on his forehead. The fear he might have felt had been burned out of him already by the jail and the beating; what remained was only a deep, weary gratitude, that this creature should have spent her own forbidden powers on a fool like him.

"You are a fox," he said, slowly. He did not flinch. "All this while — you have been living among us."

"A fox who took human shape to learn what humans call loyalty," she said. "I have used no harm. But tomorrow I must use what I have, or lose you. The rules of my kind forbid open shows of power among men. I shall break them once. After that, I must go."

She kissed his forehead and was gone. Feng sat in the dark and did not sleep.

At dawn the court was crowded. Wang himself sat in the front row, stout and smirking. The magistrate took his seat, called the case, and had Feng brought out. He had scarcely begun his questioning when a clerk came hurrying up with a dispatch from the prefecture. Shen read it, and his face changed.

A quiet word had gone ahead of the prisoner: a memorial, laid before the prefect by an unknown hand, setting out, with neat dates and names, the crimes of Wang's household — the poisoned cousin, the cheated maid, the bribe that had bought this very lawsuit. The prefect, who had been looking for an excuse to discipline his overzealous county, had sent down orders to look into the matter.

Wang's smirk died on his face. The magistrate, reading the writing on the wall, turned the case in an hour. Feng was released. The bully was taken in his stead, and the yamen clerks who had smoothed the way for him were sent home disgraced. No one ever learned who had written that memorial, though the old serving-woman A-Qing was seen, that same morning, walking quickly out of the town with a small bundle on her shoulder.