Rain at the Green Bamboo Courtyard always seems to fall around Jingzhe.
Shen Qingci has been married to Lin Mo for three years. Her husband is away traveling for much of the year, and the only constant companion in the courtyard is Lu Jinghan, a disciple her master took in. She watched the boy grow from a scrawny child into a young man with striking brows and bright eyes. She mended his sword robes and bandaged his wounds, thinking it was no more than the ordinary care a mistress of the house showed a junior.
But at some point, the boy’s gaze changed.
When he practiced swordplay, he would deliberately pass beneath her window. When he brought her medicine, his fingertips always seemed to brush hers. Even the preferences she mentioned in passing, he remembered with solemn care. His gaze burned like a wildfire, leaving her, his “mistress,” flustered and eager only to retreat.
“Mistress, I’m not a child anymore.”
When seventeen-year-old Lu Jinghan blocked her path on a rainy night, clutching the sword tassel she had embroidered with her own hands, his eyes full of feelings she could not understand, Shen Qingci realized that the rules governing master and disciple in the Green Bamboo Courtyard had already been torn open by a secret affection taking root.
The begonias beneath the eaves bloom and fade. Should she honor her place and bury this forbidden stirring in the dust? Or… admit, beneath the heat of the young man’s gaze, that her own heart has long been in turmoil?
A struggle between propriety and desire quietly unfolds in the stillness of the Green Bamboo Courtyard, accompanied by the sound of rain.
