Not long after her thirtieth birthday, she took a commission to guide the palanquin of the Beautiful Nie from west to east, traveling along the Blue Road. These days, that road is very safe, but then, it was little more than a passage between the marshes and the willow copses. The safe stretches of land were marked with pillars set by local engineers, but they would be stolen by wreckers, bandits who guided trade caravans into the marshes and robbed them when they mired in the muck.

Wild Pig Yi took the job in exchange for a pouch of gold dust, a packet of rough rubies, and a chance to look upon the face of Beautiful Nie, which was compared by poets of the time to the moon and to the most beautiful of flowers.

The Nie family guards balked at her insolence, and they might have driven her away and taken their chances with the wreckers and the eating willows and the monsters, but a slender pale hand emerged from the palanquin’s shuttered window, beckoning Wild Pig Yi closer.

She approached curiously, and when she had peered a while into the palanquin, she nodded.

“It’s as the people say,” she said with satisfaction, and pocketing the rubies and the gold, she led them into the riverlands.

The first day they were safe, and the second day they were safe, but on the third day, the moon disappeared to tend to his other wife, and the night filled with a thick and sticky summer darkness. Everything was very still, that kind of restless heat that will make you slow and stupid, and as Beautiful Nie prepared to sleep in the palanquin, Wild Pig Yi took up her place on top of it. The palanquin was big enough that she could stretch out fully on its lacquered green roof, and she gazed up at the bare night sky. From time to time, Beautiful Nie would knock on the roof to ask if all was well, and Wild Pig Yi would knock in return, to say that it was.

She had almost drifted off to sleep when there came a hissing sound, higher than a snake would utter and far crueler. Wild Pig Yi rolled over just in time to avoid the arrow that sank into the roof of the palanquin where she had just lain. Immediately, there came a worried knock, and rolling to the ground, she knocked back.

Wild Pig Yi knew two things just then. The first was that if the bandits were attacking with arrows, the sturdy palanquin was the safest place for Beautiful Nie. The second thing she realized was that if they were shooting arrows, then the guards must be dead or traitor, so so much for them.