On the morning Lü Bu entered Dong Zhuo’s camp, a wine-banquet was hurriedly opened. Wine that had overflowed from Dong Zhuo’s cup soaked the table deeply. An attendant came to wipe it, yet before he could lift the cloth, Dong Zhuo waved him off. “Leave it. The stain of this morning is the first record of one year of Luoyang.” The attendant bowed and stepped back.

Lü Bu knelt beneath the table. He set both hands forward, side by side, and laid his forehead upon the floor.

“From today, I receive my adoptive father (義父) again in this seat.”

The words adoptive father in that single line lightly shook the air of the Luoyang camp. Dong Zhuo, his face reddened with joy, placed his own cup directly into Lü Bu’s hand.

Through the day, Dong Zhuo bestowed three offices upon Lü Bu at once. Qiduwei (騎都尉, Commandant of the Cavalry) · Zhonglangjiang (中郎將, Palace Gentleman-General) · Dutinghou (都亭侯, Marquis of a Precinct). Three lines of office-names attached to one man’s name within a single day. Lü Bu read each of the three in turn. The seats he had failed to receive in the five years since he came up from Wuyuan to Luoyang were settling beside his name today, in the seat of a single morning’s banquet.

In the afternoon, Lü Bu rode upon Red Hare along one side of the great avenue of Luoyang. The red aura of Red Hare passed like a streak of flame over the dust of the street. Wherever that aura passed, the people of Luoyang lifted their heads. A few among them whispered to one another.

“That young captain became the adopted son of Grand Preceptor Dong this morning.”

“Until two days ago, was he not the son of Lord Ding Yuan (丁原)?”

“Then in less than a single month, he is the man who changed fathers twice.”

That one line circled the streets of Luoyang. Within less than a single shichen (時辰), the circle had returned.

Toward evening, Lü Bu came back to his own tent. As a young groom held the rein for a moment, the groom’s eyes were fastened upon Red Hare’s eye rather than upon Lü Bu’s face. Lü Bu noticed it, yet said nothing. He only smoothed the edge of his armor, slowly.

Inside the tent, for the first time in the day, Lü Bu was alone. He set his Sky-Piercing Halberd against the wall and tried pronouncing his own name aloud. “Lü Bu. Fengxian….” At the end of it, his breath stopped behind the character Lü (呂). Inside his mouth the character Dong (董) rose for a breath; before it could pass his lips, it settled down again.

That night, Lü Bu sat beside Red Hare. The coat of Red Hare shone redder under the lamp. Lü Bu brushed Red Hare’s flank lightly, with one hand. At that brushing, the line heard on the streets of Luoyang this afternoon came back slowly toward his ear. The warmth of a horse could warm a man’s palm; yet the back of the ear was a place it did not reach.

“The man who changed fathers twice.”

Lü Bu did not speak those words aloud again. Only upon his forehead, a cold sweat was settling quietly. It was the kind of sweat he had not shed before any enemy in the twenty-six years of his life. Tonight alone, it was turning before five words given him by people who did not even know him. Yet even in the instant the cold sweat settled, his other hand still moved slowly back and forth across the flank of Red Hare. That hand’s motion did not stop.

Meanwhile, in one corner of the Luoyang palace, another thing had been unfolding quietly since morning. The deposed Liu Bian (劉辯) had been demoted to the title of Prince of Hongnong (弘農王), and together with his mother Empress Dowager He (何) had been moved to a remote hall in the northern part of the palace. The name of that hall was the Palace of Eternal Ease (永安宮). Despite that name, from today a new troop of soldiers had been placed in the outer garden. The young Liu Bian sat quietly beneath a tree of the garden with a book opened. That his eyes could not follow the words of the book was known first only to his mother Empress Dowager He at his side. Yet she did not tell him so this morning.

That night, in one side of Dong Zhuo’s camp tent, a counselor whispered into Dong Zhuo’s ear. His name was Li Ru (李儒). He was Dong Zhuo’s son-in-law. His face was pale, and his gaze carried a cold that, once met, was not twice forgotten. He was not the one who made Dong Zhuo’s decisions; he was the one who first proposed the decisions Dong Zhuo could not make alone.

“Your Lordship. Gaining one adopted son was easy; now only the problem of how to use that son’s name remains.”

After that line, Dong Zhuo’s cup was emptied to the bottom for the first time this night. Once the cup was empty, Dong Zhuo rose from his seat. The direction he walked was not the direction of the Palace of Eternal Ease. It was the opposite: the seat where another blade of his own was being sharpened with his own hand.

The fifteenth night of Book 1 deepened quietly across two seats: the cold sweat in Lü Bu’s tent and the remote garden of the Palace of Eternal Ease. The three characters Iyeokbu (二易父, the man who changed fathers twice) were planted as a seed: the posture on which a name trembles inside a mouth and settles again. The Red Hare’s price of Day 13 (赤兎價) and the Gachung of Day 14 (價忠) were gathering today into the inside of one man’s name.

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