On the wedding-curtains of the human world, they embroider mandarin ducks. They are borrowing my family's reputation: the mandarin duck pairs once, and never changes.
The reputation is honestly earned. Mandarin ducks pledge once, one pair for one life; the widowed fly alone to the end, and do not pair again. The poets praise this as constancy, as virtue. In truth there is no grand principle in it —
we simply decide, and then do not wish to change.
She and I pledged at Mirror-Shadow Lake in the Womanland. Swimming, she loved to tilt her head and study her own reflection; I would paddle close until our two reflections overlapped, and she would give one clipped laugh, glide away, and circle back. On the day of our pledge she brought me one of her own tail-feathers in her beak — a mandarin duck's betrothal gift is a single feather; accept it, and it is a lifetime.
We nested on the mid-lake islet and raised four broods. She was impatient on the eggs, forever fidgeting off the clutch, so I sat her shifts and half of mine. I was greedy, forever drifting toward the wharf where the fishing boats unloaded, and she would fly after me and peck the back of my neck and herd me home.
She always said: the nets at that wharf close faster than you think.
She was right. Only it was not I who blundered into one.
That spring equinox, fog rose on the lake. A closing net scooped her up as she swam ahead of me, scouting the way — her habit, always scouting my way. I threw myself at it until my beak split; the net rose into the boat regardless. The boat moved off in the fog. I chased it past three river-forks, and when the fog thinned there was nothing on the water at all.
Only a feather, drifting back out of the fog, unhurried, settling at my feet.
Her tail-feather. From the same place as the betrothal feather.
A widowed mandarin flies alone to the end; that fate I accept. What I do not accept is that she is gone — netted mandarins are not killed; they are caged and sold to rich houses as ornamental fowl. She might be alive in someone's garden pond, head tilted, studying a reflection that now shows only one.
From that day I searched the waterways. Decades of searching made me a spirit; I searched on. Every garden pond in Western Liang, great and small, I have overflown; every fowl-merchant's boat, I have trailed.
I have not found her.
But every spring equinox — the solar term on which she was taken — wherever I am, a feather comes down the wind and lands before me.
Her feather. I would know it among ten thousand: third from the left in her tail, with a crescent of blue-grey in the vane.
One a year. Decades now; decades of feathers. I keep them in the nest, weighted beneath the betrothal feather.
A feather is a letter. She lives. She still counts the solar terms. She still remembers me. She cannot say where she is, or cannot escape it, so she entrusts one feather a year to the equinox wind — a mandarin duck has nothing else to send, and one feather is a complete letter:
"Alive. Don't grieve. Don't re-pair."
Rest easy. Never.
Each year I search the direction the feather came from. The first twenty years they came from the southeast, and I turned out every garden in the southeast. Then they began coming from the north, and I searched north a dozen years more.
This spring equinox, the feather came from due west.
Due west. West of Western Liang there are no gardens and no rich houses — only the official road, the ruined post-stations, and the old pilgrim road. How does a caged ornamental duck travel west?
Unless what took her was never a common fowl-merchant.
Or — she is no longer in any cage, and is making her own way along some western road.
The medicine-basket boy found me at Mirror-Shadow Lake teaching a young pair the waterways — the widowed do not re-pair, but the lake's new broods still need their elders. He watched a long while and asked why I lived alone.
I laid the feathers out for him, one by one, decades of them. When I set down this year's, he lifted it and held it to the western light a long time.
He said: there is sand in the quill. Desert sand. From the west.
She truly is in the west.
So I joined. A mandarin duck's road-finding is first under heaven — and what we navigate by is not landmarks. It is reflections: any water that has once held our image, we remember for life.
Every water on the westward road, I will skim low across, and read the reflections.
Somewhere there is a stretch of water that will show two shadows again.
And on that day I will land with this newest feather in my beak, and deliver the reply she has waited decades for:
"I came. Sorry to be late."