(3) Hope and Despair

"Fourth Sister! Guo Fourth Sister!" The voice came from inside a carriage—it was Yang Chong. Catching sight of Guo Huilian dodging along the roadside through the carriage window, he called out at once for the driver to stop, then leapt down and hurried toward her.

"Why are you out here all alone?" Seeing Guo Huilian walking barefoot along the road, her clothes and skirt smeared with blood and dust, her hair disheveled, her eyes vacant and full of terror, Yang Chong felt a sinking dread in his heart. His own household, having built an underground cellar, had managed to hide their entire family there when the Jingyuan troops stormed the Yang residence, and so they had narrowly escaped the catastrophe. Given the wild, murderous rampage the Jingyuan troops had unleashed, even Yang Chong, only thirteen himself, could guess at the horror that must have befallen the Guo household just from the sight of her.

"There's no one left at the Guo residence but me..." Encountering a familiar face, Guo Huilian could no longer hold back the terror welling up inside her. Yang Chong was the son of her father's closest friend, Yang Nian; the two families had arranged their betrothal in childhood, and though the two families always maintained proper decorum between the sexes, the two of them were hardly strangers to each other. Hearing the concern in Yang Chong's voice now, she looked at him and found herself crying once more, unable to help it.

Seeing how bitterly Guo Huilian wept, Yang Chong reached out to comfort her, but just then Lady Yang approached and spoke to Guo Huilian instead. "Fourth Sister, your color looks poor—could you be ill? Why don't you go find your Uncle Da at Mochou Hall first? We're heading to Chong'er's uncle's household to seek refuge with family, and it wouldn't do for you to travel such a long distance with us while you're unwell. Mochou Hall regularly holds free clinics for the common people of Chang'an, and your father and Physician Zhou were on such good terms—going to Mochou Hall for help really is your best option right now."

Lady Yang's tone remained gentle throughout, but her true meaning was unmistakable: she had no intention of taking in this newly orphaned girl to travel with them. She drew back the hand Yang Chong had extended, soothing her son instead. "Fourth Sister can't very well squeeze into the same carriage as us—the four of us are already crowded enough as it is, and besides, how could Fourth Sister possibly ride crammed together with you men? Wouldn't that ruin her reputation entirely?"

Hearing his mother's reasoning, Yang Chong found it sounded logical enough on the surface, and yet he couldn't help feeling that, after all, Fourth Sister was the very daughter-in-law his own father and mother had chosen for him—surely this was no time to simply abandon her to her fate.

"But Fourth Sister has no one left to depend on, and she's unwell besides..." Yang Chong tried to argue with his mother, but Lady Yang cut him off before he could finish.

"Just look at how flushed her face is—she's clearly running a fever. How could she possibly keep up with us traveling? Are you a physician now?"

Yang Chong shook his head at this, and Lady Yang pulled him along back toward the carriage.

"Chang'an isn't safe right now—we need to move quickly, and let Fourth Sister get to Mochou Hall as soon as possible too. Let's not delay any further..."

Still uneasy in his heart, Yang Chong called back to Guo Huilian as he walked away. "Fourth Sister, once you're feeling better, you can go find my father—he's staying behind in Chang'an, he isn't coming with us..."

"That's enough out of you..." Lady Yang muttered under her breath, pushing Yang Chong up into the carriage.

Watching the Yang family's carriage gradually recede into the distance, Guo Huilian's vision grew increasingly blurred. That flicker of hope she'd felt igniting within her had now been snuffed out entirely—somehow worse, even, than if she had never encountered the Yang family at all. She finally lost her footing, retching up a few mouthfuls of bitter fluid, her legs weak, her head spinning. She truly was ill, yet had no strength left to make it to Mochou Hall; the Four Seas Inn lay just two more streets away, and no matter what, that remained her only hope now. She stumbled forward unsteadily, her consciousness growing hazier by the moment, arriving almost without awareness at the front of the Four Seas Inn—only to find its main gate shut tight. Perhaps because of the chaos unleashed by the Jingyuan troops, even this inn, which normally stayed open for business every single day of the year, had shut its doors, as had every other establishment along the entire inn street. Guo Huilian summoned the very last of her fading consciousness and strength to grasp the bronze door-ring and knock.

"Han..." She had only managed to cry out that single syllable, "Han," before she collapsed unconscious in front of the inn's gate, her clenched fist loosening as she fell, the stone seal she had been gripping so tightly slipping free and rolling away across the ground...