Lan Xichen glanced at him. “This was once my mother’s residence in the Cloud Recesses.”
Of course, his mother was Lan Wangji’s mother too. Wei Wuxian found this rather strange. The heads of the Lan Clan of Gusu traditionally took the Wintry Room as their residence, which was a far cry from this small cottage tucked away in a nook of the Cloud Recesses. Could it be that Lan Wangji’s parents lived separately because they were like Jiang Fengmian and Madam Yu—an incompatible pair in a forced marriage?
No matter how you considered it, there couldn’t have been a pleasant reason for why the family head and mistress didn’t live together. The wife of Qingheng-jun—the previous head of the Lan Clan of Gusu—was said to have been frail and perpetually in a convalescent state, which made it inadvisable for her to host guests. People knew very little about her to begin with, and so everyone privately speculated that this “illness” might be a front for something too disgraceful to be seen in public, such as a disfigurement or disability.
As such, it wasn’t Wei Wuxian’s place to pry. He held his tongue and waited for Lan Xichen to speak on his own terms.
“Wei-gongzi,” Lan Xichen started, “you are probably aware that my father was in seclusion year-round and paid no attention to the affairs of the secular world. The Lan Clan of Gusu was managed by my shufu almost single-handedly all those years.”
“That I know,” Wei Wuxian confirmed.
Lan Xichen lowered the hand holding Liebing. Both disappeared under the white sleeve. “It was because of my mother that my father was in seclusion year-round,” he continued slowly. “Rather than calling this place a residence…one might well call it a prison.”
Wei Wuxian was stunned.
Qingheng-jun, the father of Zewu-jun and Hanguang-jun, was once a renowned cultivator with an impressive reputation. He made a name for himself in his youth, but when he came of age at twenty, he suddenly abandoned all his pursuits, announced his marriage, and stopped concerning himself with the affairs of the secular world. While the official reason put forward was seclusion, it was in truth more like retirement. Many potential reasons were discussed in gossip, but none had ever been confirmed.
Lan Xichen leaned down to a gentian bush and gently stroked the thin, delicate petals.
“My father encountered my mother in his youth outside the city of Gusu on the way back from a Night Hunt.” He smiled. “Apparently, it was love at first sight.”
Wei Wuxian smiled as well. “Young people are a romantic bunch.”
“But she did not reciprocate his feelings,” Lan Xichen continued. “And then she killed one of my father’s mentors.”
This was completely beyond imagining. Wei Wuxian knew it was rude to probe further, but when he considered that these were Lan Wangji’s parents, he felt he had to ask. “Why?!”
“I do not know,” Lan Xichen admitted. “But I suppose it must come down to the debts of gratitude and grudges between them.”
It would be inappropriate to keep prying. Wei Wuxian forced down his curiosity. “So…what happened after that?”
“After that,” Lan Xichen resumed, “when my father learned the truth, he was naturally anguished. But after much struggle, he nonetheless secretly brought her back here. Disregarding the clan’s objections, not speaking so much as a word to them, he bowed to the Heavens and the Earth with her in wedding rites. He then told everyone in the clan that she was his wife for life, and that anyone who wanted to lay a finger on her had to first pass through him.”
Wei Wuxian’s eyes widened.
“Once the ceremony concluded, my father found a cottage and confined my mother within,” Lan Xichen continued. “He then found another place for himself and confined himself in turn. He called it seclusion, but in truth, it was self-reflection.”
He asked, after a brief pause, “Wei-gongzi, can you understand his actions?”
Wei Wuxian was quiet for a moment before he offered an answer. “He couldn’t bring himself to forgive the murderer who killed his mentor, and he couldn’t bring himself to watch the woman he loved die. He married her to save her life and then forced himself to be apart from her.”
“Do you think that was the right thing to do?” Lan Xichen asked.
“I don’t know.”
Lan Xichen appeared slightly at a loss. “Then what do you think was the right thing to do?”
“I don’t know.”
After a while, Lan Xichen said quietly, “It could be said that my father completely disregarded the consequences of his actions. The clan elders were enraged, but they had all watched him grow up. In the end, there was nothing they could do but keep it a secret and hint to outsiders that the mistress of the Lan Clan of Gusu had an unmentionable illness and was thus indisposed to host guests. When Wangji and I were born, they immediately removed us and put us in the care of others. Once we were old enough, we were handed over to our shufu to be taught and raised.
“My shufu…is frank and upright by nature. Because my mother’s crimes caused my father to destroy his own life, he came to particularly loathe those who behaved with such disregard. For that reason, he was particularly strict when raising Wangji and I. We could only see our mother once a month in this little cottage.”
Every day, those two young children had faced their stern shufu, strict teachings, and mountains of books. No matter how tired or weary they were, they had to keep their young backs straight and be the most exemplary juniors in the family. Role models in the eyes of others.
They were forbidden from growing up alongside their closest kin. They couldn’t horse around in their father’s arms, they couldn’t be cuddled and spoiled by their mother’s embrace.
But the two children had clearly done nothing wrong.
“Every time Wangji and I visited her, she never complained about how dreary it was to be so confined, with her freedom so restricted,” Lan Xichen said. “And she never asked about our studies. She particularly loved to tease Wangji, but you know him, of course—the more you tease him, the more he clams up and the sourer his face gets. He has always been that way, ever since he was a child. However…” He chuckled. “…Although Wangji never said as much, I knew he spent every month waiting for the day he got to see Mother. That was how he was. That was how I was.”