On the day Xiao Lin, the Great Zhou’s General Who Guards the North, reached the height of his success, he divorced his quiet wife of three years, Shen Zhiyi, with a single letter of separation.
He thought she was nothing more than a dull woman who made incense, and that her dowry consisted of seventy-two chests of “old books and broken jars.”
He had no idea that the calming sachets she sent every month to the Charity Nursery had secretly saved countless children from convulsions.
The famous paintings moth-eaten in his study and the ancestral armor riddled with holes had all been restored by her, stitch by stitch.
The “talent” his beloved Lin Wan’er took such pride in was a forgery she had fabricated using her wet nurse’s niece.
He knew even less that when Shen Zhiyi left, she was already carrying his child. Her heightened sense of smell during pregnancy even helped her decipher a lost imperial incense from Nan Tang.
When Shen Zhiyi brought the ancient urn she had spent three years aging incense in to the victory banquet and laid out a ledger of three years’ labor;
When Lin Wan’er’s “brocade” ran its colors in wine and her “hand-embroidered” work was exposed before everyone for its backwards stitches;
When Xiao Lin’s old wounds throbbed so badly he couldn’t sleep, only to discover that his former wife’s incense was the only thing that could help, and she quietly told him, “This incense requires dew gathered by a pregnant woman. I’m afraid I can’t make it again”;
Only then did he belatedly realize:
What he had lost was not a gentle, obedient wife, but half the living history of the art of incense.
The Empress Dowager said, “General Xiao, the woman you divorced was the future foremost authority on incense in Great Zhou.”
Meanwhile, Shen Zhiyi held her increasingly prominent belly in Zhiyi Hall, the incense house she had established on her own, and quietly restored the peerless fragrances lost to the ravages of war.
The child would bear the surname Shen, and be named Chengxiang.
As for the General?
She stroked her gently rounded belly and smiled at the courier who had come to deliver seabuckthorn blossoms.
“Tell General Xiao that the art of incense is devoted to the heart, not to the powerful.”
“If he truly wants to atone, he can start by sweeping snow at my incense workshop for three years.”
