The lawn garden with pink and yellow flowers was right before Wongtao's bedroom. In the center was a small pond surrounded by smooth black boulders. Red koi and gold koi swam aimlessly in the pond. The water was clearer than any crystal, allowing Wongtao's mother to teach him math by counting koi. Right next to the pond was a kuai tree. Kuais were taller and slimmer than oaks but thicker than birches and pines. Their surface texture was similar to ash trees: clots of bark were formed in vertical bulge lines, leaving slender dents between clots. Some connected with others head to tail, and some ended halfway with narrowing tips. Unlike ash trees, kuai trees' branches solely grew horizontally in one direction and only started growing after the tree was at least three meters tall. In fact, most kuais couldn't reach higher than two meters.
Nevertheless, the kuai next to the pond was the exception. It was a special breed of kuais, dong kuai (dragon kuai), which was only allowed in the royal court. The dong kuai was four meters high, with its branches twice more twisted and curvy than a normal kuai and leaves broad enough that there wasn't a gap between them for a wisp of light to thread through. Although there wasn't a single flower under the branches, Wongtao and his little sister, Aitao, always hid there to avoid the blazing sun of summer.
Of course, the lawn garden was the smallest in the royal court. Yet, it belonged to the siblings. No stranger was allowed in there; even the servants were those who had been babysitting the two siblings since they were born. Well, the garden did recently receive a new visitor, Jiantao. He was the latest child and the reason why Aitao was forced out of her mom's bedroom. Her father put it, "Jiao Ai a, li fa he fei hong wi si chao ku li fen diang ke fa ban qing. Er xie, li tou diu zui de. Jiao Wong he zhi yu zui xi qiu hai zhi ci qi zhui de. (Li'l Ai, your mother doesn't have time to handle two troubles at the same time. Besides, you're six already. Li'l Wong had been sleeping by himself since he was five.)"
Not surprisingly, Aitao cried for the first three weeks. She only stopped after seeing her brother eating pork jerky at midnight. Then, she wished she had moved out of her mom's bedroom earlier. Aitao rushed through the sod and onto the terrace like every other night to wake up her brother, whose room was across the garden. She peeked through the glassless window next to the door. She could see Wongtao lying on his bed, but she couldn't enter. Although the window was a glassless hole in the wall, the square pattern made of wood stripes left no openings on the window big enough for anyone to pass through. The girl was well-prepared for this situation. She took a few steps back and raised her hand, which was holding a lump of dirt. After a hard throw, the dirt flitted through the window and hit the wall above the brother's bed. The lump shattered into pieces, and some fell on the boy's face. The tiny sound of the soil breaking, plus the feeling of granules on his face, almost awakened the boy. The final blow landed a little more than a second later when the smell of freshness intruded his mind.
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Filled with mild anger and frustration, Wongtao sat up from the bed and glared at his naughty sister as he wiped his bed perfunctorily. He didn't care that much anyway. The girl leaned backward against the balustrade while quietly chortling under the delight of messing with her brother. After a dozen seconds, her brother opened the door, wearing a khaki dahu, a short-sleeved robe with the right shawl lapel extended to the left armpit, and a white long-sleeved tunic. He held another dahu of his, demanding his sister to put it on by staring at her.
"Aiyooo, yo che wang qiu kou de da, (Aiyooo, I am fine with these,)" Aitao, waving off her brother's demand, referred to her red shorts and hezi, a towel tied around her chest. In response to his sister's euphemistic pushback, Wongtao kept staring at her smiling face.
"Che gui che chu yo te jiao gua da, (This will block my little flower,)" the girl pointed at the white lotus embroidery on her hezi, pushing the center of her lips upward and pulling the outer sides of her eyebrows downward, trying to call on her brother's compassion.
The boy sighed, "Qin yan che fe deng. Li pu shuan tuo tian gui chao diang te. (Tonight is too cold. You will catch a cold if you don't wear more.)" Humming in unwillingness, Aitao put the dahu on in an intentional slow motion. "Gao de, vo fen cou pa, (Okay, let's go,)" Wongtao took off his sandals and led the way.
The lawn garden was in the center of a quadrangle, with the two siblings' rooms facing each other and their mother's room on the opposite side of the exit. As long as none of them got the direction wrong, they wouldn't even approach their mother's room. Therefore, the possibility of them accidentally awakening their mom was pretty close to zero unless they weren't the ones waking her up.
The wooden structure of the royal court could barely block any sound. Jiantao's loud sobbing was small yet evident to his siblings in the same quadrangle. The two hurried out of the exit, which was a rectangular arch with the signboard "Wuan Gou Guang (Yard of the Empress)" on top of it. The wooden palisade extended from the arch and surrounded the whole place, including the three bedrooms. Outside the quadrangle, there was a whole block of houses. The block was only slightly smaller than the quadrangle while containing nine houses and more than ten servants. Two of the servants were night guards. They would patrol the area to stop anyone from sneaking through the arch. Wongtao thanked them for their service, but he did get in their way every single night.