Jiangnan romance (page 11)
Tang Lili’s flying daggers were made by a swordsmith in Jiangnan each in six hours’ time, which you would know if you knew her mother’s name before marriage was Li.
So famous is the Li house of flying daggers that Dowager Li, Tang Lili’s mother’s grandmother, hanging on by sheer force of will and deadly martial ability, suggested the infant Tang Lili take the Li name, until it was pointed out that Li Lili might be just too much Li, even for the Lis. The person who pointed this out got a Dowager Li flying dagger in his throat for his trouble, but Tang Lili did become Tang Lili, for Dowager Li was a rational, though emotional, woman, and could accept a point, even if not the pointee.
Dowager Li had tiny, bound feet, though she was never stopped in the least. Who needs to walk when your qinggong is so good you can almost fly?
Dowager Li alone had a rare talking clouded leopard, which she had brought out of the Qinling mountains as a girl. For the Qinling mountains had not been entirely glaciated in the last ice age, and so had preserved talking fauna found no longer elsewhere under heaven. The clouded leopard had cubs who then had cubs of their own, but who to everyone’s disappointment lost the ability to speak. Until in the next generation a sport arose, and a talking clouded leopard cub was born again, whom Dowager Li gave to her great-granddaughter Tang Lili. And that’s how Tang Lili, of the distaff Lis, whose daggers flew through the air, splitting the wind, came to possess the cub Yunbao.
And now here on top the banana trees, bare neck as if not under her sword, in the soft Jiangnan rain, was the boy of the bronze laughter, who had stolen her Yunbao in his arms. And Yunbao liked it.
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