Sweet Romance21 min read
"I Won't Marry You" — How I Turned a Root into a Home
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"I won't marry him."
"I won't," I said again, louder, and my voice bounced off the sun-washed courtyard walls.
"You will," my buyer's wife snapped. "You belong where your price put you."
"Not to that fat boy," I said. "Not ever."
They laughed. The laughter slid through me like cold rain.
I am Delilah Chan. I used to be a small ginseng spirit on the high green ridge. I am a root that learned how to breathe, a tiny sprout that grew thoughts. I am also very small and very human now, with knees that hurt when I run and a stomach that knows hunger.
"She'll scare our son away," the buyer's mother grumbled. "Keep her quiet."
"Quiet?" I looked at them. "I am not quiet."
The village knew the market price. They knew the coin exchanged hands. They knew I had been bought and handed over like a bundle. They didn't know what my seed-socketed heart felt.
Wade Ford, the boy who was supposed to "take me in" and grow up with me on his lap, stood with his chest puffed out and his mouth full of protest.
"I won't marry that ugly girl," he said. "Whoever bought her can marry her. I won't."
His mother snapped a string of curses that sounded like knives.
My head swam. I had never been inside a human courtyard before. I had never heard two coins and a contract decide my place in the world.
Then an older voice cut in. "Let her go to me."
Jenna Larsen came forward before anyone knew she would. She was a neighbor, a woman with hands like long wooden spoons and a smile that had survived too many hard winters. She looked at me as if I were a pot of hot soup and she wanted to make room at her table.
"Take her," Jenna said flatly. "Four coins. She goes with me."
"Four?" the buyer's wife shrilled. "What a bargain."
"Cheap or not," Jenna said, and her hands did not tremble. "I will take her."
They counted the coins. I closed my eyes and felt the weight of change.
They pushed me forward, and for once I let myself be pushed. I thought of the ridge, of the long white roots in soil that smelled like tea and rain. I thought of Cangyan, my brother in spirit form, who had wide black wings and used to shelter me. He had followed me down once and had broken something reaching the clouds. I did not know if he lived or remembered me.
"Stay," I whispered as we walked, meaning both to Jenna and to myself.
They put a thin dress on me and a small straw cap. The skirt smelled odd and human, but Jenna's pocket held a warm loaf that tasted like safety.
"Eat," Jenna said. "You have been crying. Eat."
I am not ashamed to say I hugged that bread until crumbs were gone.
That night, as Jenna's small house slept and the rain came steady, I woke to a little bright voice.
"Welcome, Mistress. I am Young Sprout, the space's helper."
I blinked. A small presence hung by the window, all shimmer and a voice that sounded like a sugar-bell.
"Space?" I asked. "What space?"
Young Sprout fluttered like a moth. "The Yulin Space. It belongs to me and you when you become its owner. You cannot use it freely yet. You must complete tasks."
"Tasks?" I tasted that word and it glinted. I was only a small girl. I had been a ginseng root for hundreds of years. I had promised the high sky I would not ask for myself. Tasks sounded like a thing grown-ups do. I liked the sound.
"One thing now," Young Sprout said. "There is a spring near the broken ravine. Go. Bring water. Follow my map."
"Why?" I asked. "I have never carried water like this."
"Just go," Young Sprout said, with a tiny laugh. "I will show you."
I went. I stepped out before dawn. I wrapped my shawl around myself and walked the wet path. The ridge still smelled of honesty. The wind felt like fingers patting my head.
The spring was small, high in the hollow where the dragon-root used to sleep. I dug beneath a stone and felt a cool whisper of water. Inside the stone the spring hid a hollow, and inside that hollow—my hands closed around something odd and white, like a root that had forgotten it belonged underground.
It looked like a thick white carrot.
"A ginseng?" Young Sprout chittered. "A real one."
I had seen ginseng before in whispers, in old trader tales and in passing. The root was pale and strong. My small heart wanted it to be something that would buy a room for me, but we did not trade such things.
I carried that ginseng back old woman Jenna's house. She took one look and her hands shook.
"Ismael?" she called, and I realized she had a son that needed saving.
I had heard his name in the courtyard the first night, the one they called the scholar's son who had broken himself helping people in a flood. The village said the doctor could not save him. The village said the boy's bones were tired.
I set the root on Jenna's table.
"What's that?" she whispered.
"A ginseng," I said simply. "For him."
Jenna's face split. I didn't know why she had hope the way the sun cracks open bread, but the hope was a thing that moved like mice in a barn—small, desperate, real.
She agreed. "We will boil it with chicken," she said. "All will drink."
Ismael Berry was a small-winged name to me. He was not a bird now. He was a thin, long-limbed boy with skin like paper and eyes like little dark stones. He had the rigid stillness that hurt to look at. He lay on the back chair and watched like the world was a play and he no longer had the script.
I sat at his feet. I wanted to whisper the secret of root and bird. I wanted to tell him that I had come to be his keeper.
"Don't," Ismael said first, but softer than a road in rain. "You shouldn't have left your home."
I flinched. "I did not leave it on purpose."
He closed his eyes. "We were not meant to break the sky for someone else," he said. "I failed at flying and I failed at keeping us. Now I cannot walk. I will be of no use."
"You are useful," I said.
He turned his head slowly. His voice carried a small laugh that had been taught decades ago. "You are a root, Delilah. Why save me?"
"Because you caught me once and took me home," I answered. "Because I am a root and it is what roots do. They hold things. They hold people."
He bobbed his head. "Then hold me."
We boiled the ginseng in chicken and thin broth. Jenna ladled a bowl and set it to his lips.
"Drink," she commanded gently.
He drank.
We watched that steam like a small miracle. The broth tasted like grit and gold. Ismael's face moved, like someone folding an old letter: the lines softened.
"Did you know how to find this root?" Jenna asked me later when the house had gone quiet.
Young Sprout hummed in the corner. "She did," it said. "She is connected."
I told Jenna about my ridge, about the black-winged friend who had dove after me once. Jenna listened and did not laugh.
"You are a miracle, little one," she said, and I wanted to cry at the sound because it felt like a hand holding my head steady.
Ismael slept that night. His chest rose easier. The next morning he sat up.
"Do not think me very fine," he said, fingers turning a page in a book that had not been read in a long time. "I will not boast. But I feel less dead."
"You must walk," I said. "You must try."
He swallowed. "People will say it is the root."
"Then they will say it," I said.
I should have stopped there. I should have kept my glee small like a thimble. But I had been small and nearly ruined before, and small things deserve to be loud.
"Ismael," Jenna told him that afternoon, "you must promise to be good to Delilah. She offered the root."
He raised an eyebrow. "Promise?"
"Promise," I insisted. "Promise now."
He looked at me as if I were a book he was trying to read upside down. "I promise."
That was the first promise between us. It was brittle and soft and a thing that grew like damp leaves.
Days passed like small coins. I learned chores. I learned how to light a stove without scalding and how to braid hair without yanking. I learned how to make a bed with corners sharp as knives and how to call the chickens.
Ismael read. He drank in words with the hunger of someone who had been starved for sunlight. He read to me at night while I braided his hair because he said my hair smelled like the green ridge.
"You miss your brother," he said one night, and I could not answer at first because my chest was tight.
"His name is Cangyan," I said after a long breath. "He is a bird and a brother. He fell when he came for me once. I think he is hurt."
He listened. "Then we will mend."
I told Ismael my truth. I told him about being born a spirit and being small and how the Yulin Space had taken me in. I told him of Young Sprout and the seeds and the tasks.
"Can I see?" Ismael asked. "The space."
"It will not let me show anyone yet," I said. "Only when I finish tasks."
He made a little face like a boy who had missed a meal. "Finish them faster."
So I started small and noisy. We planted seeds from the Yulin Space. I brought them out, one by one: pearl corn, giant potatoes, seeds that smelled of rain. I hid them in the little shed and fed them water from the spring. I pooled the space water into a basin and soaked the seeds until their skins swelled like tiny lamps.
"You keep this secret," Ismael told me, fingers cold in mine when we walked the field in the dawn. "If they know, they will want to buy your seeds or sell you."
"I know," I answered. "I will be careful."
But small villages have whispers like threads. Wade Ford, the boy who had spat at me in the courtyard, kept watching me with his stupid round face. Fielding Crosby from down the lane chewed tobacco and said things in a voice like a plow.
One morning, Wade caught me in the field with a small sack of seed. He laughed and pushed me. "What are you doing, root-girl? Plotting to steal the sun?"
I slapped at him. My small hands were quicker than his. He slipped on mud and landed with his face in a puddle. He came up smelling of wet boots and humiliation.
"Get away," I told him, and my voice was like a bell.
"Or what?" he sneered. "What are you going to do, little root?"
I thought of Cangyan on the ridge and the way he had protected me with his great shadow. I thought of Ismael's promise. I thought of Jenna's steady eyes.
"Or I will take your pride," I said, shocking myself at the boldness of it.
He ran, and he told his mother. His mother came and yelled, but Jenna stepped forward like a pillar.
"Enough," she said. "Do you want to keep starting fights? This child came to us and earns her place."
They did not argue further. The village is lazy on anger when there is work to do.
As the first harvest grew, the seed magic was quietly obvious. Corn stood large and proud. Potatoes sat like sleeping suns underground. When we dug them up and set them on the table, the family eyes opened wide.
"Where did these come from?" asked Ismael's father, Cooper Calhoun, who had hands like plow handles.
"Delilah helped," Jenna said flatly.
There were murmurs. "Bought girl turned treasure," said someone. "What new witchcraft?"
I stepped forward. "No witchcraft," I said. "Only hard work and good water."
They stared and then they ate. The food was good. It was better than the year before, when the flood had taken much. It was enough.
Ismael grew stronger. He could walk a few steps without his cane. He stained his sleeves in the garden with a grin.
"See?" I told him one morning when he carried a basket of new potatoes. "See what we did."
He looked at me like someone discovering a world. "You are not like other children," he said. "You are fierce."
"I am a root," I said. "We survive by bending and holding."
We were quiet for a while. Then Ismael cleared his throat.
"Delilah," he said, hesitant. "When I can walk, will you stay?"
"Yes," I said. "I will stay as long as you want me."
He smiled like the sun splits itself at dawn.
Promises then are small. They sounded like coins being dropped into a hungry jar and not emptied.
Weeks turned into a cycle of seasons. We planted more. We dug deeper. The Yulin Space smiled at me in tiny, cruel ways: it sent tasks that were hard and then rewards that felt like gold.
"One more task and you can open the seed chest," Young Sprout would trill.
"Another task," I would snort, but I did it.
Once I had to run to the market and barter a handful of seeds for charcoal for Jenna's stove. Once I had to find a missing calf and bring it home. Once I had to stand in front of the village at the harvest and speak without shaking.
"You have my word," I said then, and the people listened in a small, obedient way.
Wade kept trying to humiliate me. Fielding Crosby tried to take a potato or two when my back was turned. People whispered. But as the harvest fed the village, their whispers turned gentler. Food is a translator.
One night, when the moon was thin and Ismael sat at my feet reading by candlelight, he said, "I will go back to the school. I will take the county tests next year."
"You?" I laughed. "But you were told—"
"I am telling them," he said. "I will not be held because of a leg. If I can think, I can write."
I poured some water for him. "Will you be a scholar?"
"I would like to be," he said. "I want to write books and live in a room with many windows."
"You will," I said.
I was small, and the world was large. My tasks from the Yulin Space felt urgent. The seed chest unlocked, finally, when I carried four sacks to Jenna's loft. The chest held a few more hundred cobs of pearl corn, and a small bundle of dried roots that gleamed like small moons.
Young Sprout chimed, "You can take out one item per five tasks."
"One item per five?" I asked. "Then I must not waste them."
"No," Young Sprout agreed. "Be wise."
I used the gains wisewly. We sold some seeds to neighbors at fair price, enough to patch a roof and buy a blanket. We used other seeds to plant test plots, and those grew strong and fed more mouths.
People began to notice more than the food. They noticed I moved differently. I noticed they saw me as a person and not a bargain. I noticed Jenna's face made room for me like a shell.
The more Ismael recovered, the truer the bond between us became. He read to me things about history and about the way the world measured its kings. He would read long lines of poems and then say, "Do you think that is for us?"
"Everything is for us," I said.
He learned to laugh without the strain. He learned to run in short bursts. He still had pain and would wince on rain days, but the pain lent him a gravity that made people hush when he entered a room.
Then came the moment I had feared. The old family who had first owned me, the Pereiras, came back. Franco Pereira had a mean smile.
"She is ours," he insisted, shoving his chin. "You cannot keep what was bought."
Jenna clenched her jaw. "She is with me now. She matters."
"Four coins can be argued," Franco said. "Maybe we miscounted."
Wade stood behind Franco like a little shield. He spat.
"She humiliated me," Wade mumbled. "I will have what's mine."
The village gathered. Voices ran like dogs. I felt the old knot of being sold squeeze at my throat. I wanted to vanish into the soil and be a root again.
"Tell them she has been bought and sold," Franco said, but Jenna would not back down.
Ismael rose. He steadied his cane, and the whole sundrenched courtyard felt a hair's breadth from storm.
"She made food for everyone," he said quietly. "She kept us. She gave her root for me when I was dying. What is yours? A contract?"
Franco laughed. "Contracts. Coins. Law."
"Then use the law," Ismael said. "Go to the magistrate if you will. But she is here now. The court decides."
It was true. They could take it to the town. They could sue. The Pereiras started for town right away. The rumor trail gurgled—"root-magic, curse, fortune."
Then the thing that surprised everyone happened. The Pereiras were not quick with steps of love. They were quick at one night, to the public square, to bring men and witnesses and things that smell of paper.
The hearing was ugly. Franco tried to call witnesses who had seen the coin go. Jenna swore we had paid and paid and had the receipts. She produced a thin scrap of paper the way she produced bread: with hands that had kept things safe. The magistrate scratched his beard.
I waited and my stomach turned. When it came down to it, the magistrate asked me one question I had no script for: "Do you wish to stay with Jenna Larsen?"
It wasn't a legal question. It was the only one that mattered.
I said, "Yes."
The magistrate nodded. "There is no sign of coercion. We will not move a child against her will."
The Pereiras stormed, kicked, cursed. Franco's face went many colors. He had lost the game of public favor.
After the hearing, the village listened. The Pereiras lost standing. People who had once traded with them cut small chairs for Jenna's house. They whispered as though the whole world had been turned right-side up.
There was a taste of triumph. There was also a deeper thing. I felt like I had given Ismael not only a root but also a reason to stand. He had stood and his promise had teeth.
When life settled, my little duties kept me busy. I cared for Ismael, who now walked with a cane but walked. I planted the fields. I kept the Yulin Space tasks quiet in the loft and night.
Young Sprout hummed soft songs when I passed by. "You are rising slowly," it said. "One more task and you might step into the Space."
One more task. It was always "one more" until the "one more" got smaller and manageable. I could do this.
Then a rumor black as crows came. A man in the next village said he had seen the Pereiras' old money back on the market. The Pereiras had sold off something like shame and were in trouble. The village liked a justice story and cheered quietly when they heard it. Wade's mother scowled.
"She isn't ours," she muttered once, but it did not stick. Wade had been humbled by the mud and the yellow-grease of his pride. Children do not store fury forever when their stomachs are full.
Ismael studied. He wrote small essays. He practiced walking with a little limp, which became a trademark. Some called him "the Scholar on a Stick." Ismael smiled, because he liked the sound of the name.
"One day you will go to exam," I told him, tucking a single potato into his bag. "You will leave for a time."
"Will you be angry?" he whispered.
"No," I said. "I will be here, with my seeds."
We had no official wedding. No big cloth nor curtains from the city. In our little kitchen we carved a promise: that we were each other's shelter. When people asked, we said, "We belong to each other." It was enough for us.
Time pullulated like a thick root. I grew used to Ismael's hands on my head, to his voice calling me to read a line or to fix the door. I grew used to being called "my little root." I grew used to the way he would keep his hand on my shoulder when the thunder came, because thunder made him imagine the sky falling again.
We kept the harvests. We saved a little. We traded seed stock for a small bag of books. The Yulin Space laughed every time I hid a seed where my hands could reach.
"Almost," Young Sprout said once, "but you must give an honest deed."
"An honest deed?" I asked.
"Yes. You must help someone who hates you without complaint. That is required."
Who hated me? Wade had tried. Franco had tried. Fielding had tried. What could I do? Then I heard Farmer Garrett Pfeiffer's wife had a sick child, fever and hot as a furnace. Garrett began to go to the town and beg for medicine.
"Bring her here," I told Ismael. "We have broth and potatoes. We have a little coin."
He looked at me like I had asked the moon to marry him. "You will feed them?"
"I will feed them," I said.
They came. The small girl had eyes like watered glass. Her mother was tired and eyes bled worry. Wade watched from the edge, jaw tight.
I went to the stove and burned myself on the pot because I rushed, and the pain smeared through my hands like a story you can't erase. I bit my lip so I did not cry and set the broth before the girl.
She drank it. Her breathing calmed. The fever dropped. Her mother wept in a way that could not be watched without water breaking in one's own chest.
Garrett came and put both hands on my shoulders. He badmouthed me before and he was a hard man with furrows like grave markers, but those hands were warm.
"They will tell you this girl lived because of the root," Garrett said, voice thick. "I will tell them you have a soft earth in you."
Wade stood there, embarrassment shrinking him. He had hated me like you hate a loud crow. He could not find the words to un-hate. He watched me and swallowed.
That night Young Sprout flashed bright.
"You did it," it sang. "You gave to someone who hated you."
"Someone who hated me?" I asked. "He did not hate me much."
"Enough," Young Sprout said loftily. "Enough."
The chest unlocked. The Yulin Space opened like a cupboard in the wall and showed me a small pale root, wrapped in paper.
"A gift," it said. "From the space."
I took it with trembling hands.
It was small, finer than the one that had saved Ismael, but it smelled like snow.
Young Sprout hummed. "Use it only when you have no other way."
I tucked it away in the loft next to my few spare coins. I thought of Cangyan and wished he was there to help us store the seed.
Ismael took the exam the next year. The whole village held its breath. He went to the county on a wheeled cart and then a week later returned with a paper in his hand and a face that wore a new light.
"I passed the district test," he said, voice too bright for me. "I will go on."
"Take me," I said immediately.
He shook his head. "You must stay."
"Take my seeds," I said. "Take our plans."
He kissed my hand like a knight. "You will never be alone."
Months passed. Ismael walked less like a man who had been broken and more like one who had been mended. The cane became a companion rather than a support. He studied; he taught village children by the light of a small lamp. The harvests fed more than our family. Jenna stitched a coat and called it pride. The Pereiras kept losing smaller coins and more of their voice.
One evening, when the first frost had laced the fields, Ismael came home late, eyes bright and a paper in his hand.
"What is it?" I asked, dropping a basket of apples.
"It is an invitation," he breathed. "A scholarship. A teacher said I could attend the academy with his letter."
"Go," I said before thinking. "I will not hold you."
He looked at me raw in the half-light. "You will stay? With our fields, our books? You will tell me you will wait?"
"I will wait," I said.
He stood up and took my face in his hands, silly and trembling. "Delilah," he said bare and astonished, "if you go with me, I will shoulder a thousand roads."
"If you go, I will keep the seeds," I said. "We will trade letters."
He kissed me. It was small and careful. It tasted like beet and bread.
The night before his leaving, we sat up until candle ends, and I told him everything I had left to say. I told him the value of a root in a pantry, of patience in a seed bed, of the way a person will ripen if you shelter them well.
"Promise me this," he said, voice thin. "When I write, you will not think I have moved away. You will read my words as if I am there."
"I will," I promised.
He left in spring. I kept the fields. I hoarded the space seeds like treasures. Letters came back in stack. They smelled of ink and smoke. He wrote of books and roads and teachers and of the long nights of study. He wrote about how he read my letters and how his voice learned to say my name like a blessing.
Time did not stop. It braided itself with seasons. The village saw harvests, rains, droughts, and more harvest. Our little house grew more sturdy. Children came to Ismael's lessons. Wade came and asked for help with letters, and I taught him how to tie his shoelaces without lecturing him on why being kind was better.
One year a stranger came to the village with a broken cart and a small silver purse. He had a sick baby and money to trade for help. His hat had come from roads that smelled like the ocean. He paid in coin and in a promise to offer manuscripts to Ismael if he ever made it to the city.
"Give him some of our seed," the stranger begged. "I will send word if a buyer likes it."
"Give him an apple and send him on," I told Jenna.
"Use the seeds, Delilah," Ismael said, and he had a letter between his fingers saying he would be home in six weeks.
The stranger thanked us. He left and his path swallowed him like a small river.
At the market that autumn, I was asked to sit in the center. A traveling merchant wanted to buy seed in bulk. He had a pouch fat with coin. For a moment I could have sold all of our seeds and bought a house. I could have tasted silver and rare cloth. I could have left the village and all this gentle dirt like a dream.
I thought of Cangyan and Ismael and Jenna. I thought of the Yulin Space and the small root in my loft. I thought of the girl Garrett's child had become after the fever. I thought of Wade's softened eyes.
I refused.
"Keep your purse," I told the merchant. "We keep our seeds."
He blinked. He thought I was a fool. He offered more coin. I watched Ismael's hands close around my letter like he feared loss like I feared rain without water.
"Can you afford to be generous?" the merchant asked later.
I smiled and answered the same way Young Sprout taught me: "Richness is measured by what you keep when you give."
He left with less money and a thicker doubt about what trade meant.
Ismael returned years later, older and steadier. He had walked lanes of books and light. He had ink in the corners of his fingers. He had learned much and brought back a thin bundle of papers and a job offer to teach in a small town school.
"I will take it," he said. "But only if you come with me."
I did not hesitate. We packed a little: seeds, shirts, a single small chest with the pale root I had saved for the day My Cangyan may need it. I arranged the Yulin Space carefully in a corner and told Young Sprout that we were bringing it along.
"Do you think the space will like the city?" Young Sprout asked with squeak.
"I think the space will feel what we feel," I said. "It does not matter where we go. It matters who goes with us."
We walked to the town with hands held, a power in the silence. People watched the scholar with his cane and the small woman with hands like soft roots. They talked and some frowned, but most smiled.
We rented a room with two windows.
"Is this a start?" Ismael asked.
"This is a start," I said. "We own no coin more than the kindness between us."
We set up a stove and a tiny bed. The Yulin Space hummed in the corner, like a small animal pleased. We taught children to read. We sold seed in small amounts for modest coin that still left us poor but dignified.
One evening Ismael came home and set a small letter on the table. It said I had been recommended for a teacher's assistant in exchange for a space in the academy.
"You will be there," he said. "You saved me when I fell from the sky. I will not let you return to roots without a roof."
I laughed at the way he said roof like a kingdom. I kissed his forehead because my mouth knew that kindness.
Years later, when the academy was a blur of chalk and rain, a man knocked at our door. He had been a small sober villager turned magistrate in the city. He bowed like a reed.
"Delilah Chan," he said. "You are called."
"Called how?"
"Called because you refused to sell your seeds last autumn and because you fed a stranger's child and because you refused a great coin to buy your bread. The merchant reported you as unusual. The Pereiras' name is no longer a question."
I blinked. The village had small reasons to call us many things.
He handed us a small sealed envelope. Inside was a certificate and a note folded like a flower.
"Delilah," Ismael said, reading aloud. "For service to the people, for giving food, and for saving a life, the county grants you a small plot: two fields for your seeds and a stipend to teach."
I felt my heart go stiff and then soft. We had been roots and we had become soil.
"We share," Ismael said, his voice catching. "This is not yours alone."
"It is ours," I corrected.
We planted a field by the river. We built a little school with two windows and a door that squeaked. Children came with hunger for letters and for bread. We taught them to keep promises.
Years later, our house became a place where people came to ask for words and for seed. Wade Ford came too, with a hat. He brought his child. He mumbled apologies and we did not make him kneel. We gave him seeds.
"Thank you," he said at last, like a river breaking a dam.
It did not change the years, but it softened them. People came and told of the ginseng root that had saved Ismael. They asked if I wanted to sell more seeds. I smiled.
"No," I always said. "We plant and keep the rest. Some gardens need to grow."
One winter the Yulin Space had a small new offer. "You have completed many tasks," Young Sprout sang. "You may enter for an hour. Choose a thing. Only one."
I closed my hands and thought of the pale root in my chest. I opened the space and stepped in. For one hour the space gave me a glimpse: a ridge of green where Cangyan flapped his long black wings, where the sky bent and the tree of our first home hummed like an old school bell. The hour was bright and fragile.
I came back and found Ismael at the door with a paper.
"What news?" I asked.
"I have been offered a permanent chair in the academy," he said. "They say I will teach, and they will send a letter to my students."
I laughed like the bread had risen inside me. Ismael took my hand and drew me close.
We had both been given things by life: him, a way to walk and to teach; me, a space and seeds and the small mercy of being useful. Our promises had been kept not because we forced them into place but because we planted them and kept them watered.
One summer evening, when the river shone like a coin, we three—Jenna, who had never left the ridge, Ismael and I—sat by the river with a small picnic. We ate corn and potatoes and read verses aloud.
"Do you ever think of it," Jenna said slowly, "how you started as a root and now you run a field and a school?"
I looked at Ismael and his hair warmed by the sun, at the students running with books in the distance, at the small field with two neat rows of seeds.
"I think," I said quietly, "that roots have to decide where to put their strength. I chose here."
Ismael smiled and put his hand on mine. "And I chose to stand."
"Then we do not need crowns," Jenna said with a small laugh. "We need a good stove."
We laughed like small people who know the truth: that warmth matters most.
That night I took something out of my loft. The pale root I had saved for a day of impossible need. I put it under a pot by the stove and breathed.
"One day we may need this," I whispered.
Ismael kissed the top of my head and promised, "We will use it only when no other way is left."
We shared that promise like a loaf.
Years later, far down the path, a bird with black wings passed over our fields. It circled once and dipped like a bow. I thought of Cangyan and I whispered into the wind, "If you are out there, fly gentle."
The bird cried once, a sound like a child's laughter, and vanished.
I do not know if it was him. I only know that I am here, with a man who reads by candlelight and who keeps promises, with a woman who made a home when no one else offered one, and with small seeds that grow into stock.
We did not become rich. We did not become famous. But people speak of our fields and our little school. Children who once could not read now read poems. Men who once only knew plows now can sign letters. We grew a life by small measures of mercy.
My space, Yulin, hummed quietly in the loft. Young Sprout settled on my shoulder like a photograph. Once, when we were old enough to understand the city, Ismael and I taught at an academy and at a village school. Our letters came like a chain.
"Do you ever regret it?" he asked me one night as we watched the fireflies.
"Regret?" I repeated. "No. Being bought was ugly. Being chosen by you and by Jenna was beautiful."
He took my hand. "Then stay," he said. "Be my wife in public and my root in private."
"I will," I said.
We had no wedding that the town could call famous, no big sheet of silk to hang from a tree. We had, instead, a little bell by the school and a bench by the garden. We had a promise.
"One more thing," Young Sprout said quietly, when it was our time to sleep. "You may bring the space to the ridge someday."
"One day," I said. "Perhaps."
I think that's the most honest end I can give. I am Delilah Chan. I was a ginseng spirit. I became a small human who learned to hold hands and to keep a promise. I made soup for a boy who could not walk and watched him become a man who could stand. I kept seeds and gave away food, and when a village asked, "Who is Delilah?" they learned to say, "She is the woman who keeps roots well."
And whenever I walk past the river, I lift a small hand to the sky and whisper to the black-winged birds: "Fly gentle, brother."
We sleep now with open windows and a bell that rings for school. We wake with bread and with the small certainty that has come to us: that being chosen is not the end but the beginning of making a true, stubborn garden.
The End
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