The eight remaining days went badly.
Lianxi did not consider them a failure at the time. She considered them an opportunity. Her mind was disordered, and a disordered mind was a solvable problem; one simply had to leave it no room to wander.
So she filled every hour.
She rose an hour earlier and cultivated until her dantian ached. She extended her Core Manipulation from two hours to three, then to four, pushing until her vision swam and the needles blurred in her fingers. She took on array diagrams far beyond her level and worked through the night to solve them. She practiced her sword forms until her arms shook, then practiced them again because shaking arms were a flaw and flaws could be corrected.
She was, she told herself, making excellent use of the time.
Master Gao watched her for three days and said nothing. On the fourth, he confiscated her needles. She retrieved a spare set from her qiankun bag within the hour and he did not comment, but that evening he began appearing in the doorway of her room at intervals, ostensibly to look for a book.
On the thirteenth night, she overreached.
She was attempting to hold a threefold focus, body, needle and array at once, which was a technique she had read about and had absolutely no business trying. She managed it for four breaths.
On the fifth, something tore.
The pain came like a nail driven behind her eyes. The room tilted. She heard a crack as her needles scattered across the floorboards, and then the floor was against her cheek and very cold, and there was a warm wetness running from her nose, and she could not remember how to make her hands close.
She heard her master's voice, distantly, saying a word she had never heard him say before.
Then nothing.
✦ ✦ ✦
What followed, she reconstructed afterward from evidence.
There had been pills. Several, from the taste still coating her tongue, including at least one she recognized as extremely valuable and made a mental note to feel guilty about later. There had been needles too; she could feel the faint residual warmth at a dozen points along her skull and spine, placed with a precision she could not have matched herself.
There had been, at some point, someone holding her shoulders and telling her to breathe.
She surfaced slowly, like something rising through deep water.
The light was wrong.
Lianxi opened her eyes. Her room was full of a warm amber glow, and the shadows of the pines lay long and slanted across the floorboards, and that was wrong, because she had collapsed shortly before midnight and the light through her window at dawn came from the other side.
She sat bolt upright.
The room lurched. She ignored it.
The cave.
She was on her feet before the dizziness cleared, groping for her outer robe, and she got three steps toward the door before it opened and her master filled the frame, carrying a bowl.
"Sit down."
"Master, I have to—"
"Sit. Down."
Lianxi sat down on the edge of the bed, quivering with impatience.
Master Gao set the bowl in her hands. Porridge, thick and pale, with slivers of something medicinal stirred through it and a faint bitter smell she recognized as spirit-grass.
"Master, what time is it?"
"Past noon."
The bowl nearly slipped. "Past noon?"
"You tore a channel in your sea of consciousness," her master said, with the flatness of a man who had spent several hours very frightened and had decided to be angry about it instead. "You were unconscious for eleven hours. You will eat that, all of it, and then you will sit quietly for one hour, and then, if you have not fallen over again, you may go."
"But—"
"You were bleeding from the nose, the ears and one eye, Xiao Xi."
Lianxi shut her mouth and ate the porridge.
She ate it very fast, which earned her a look, and then she sat with her hands folded for what she was certain was an hour and was almost certainly twenty minutes, and then she said, "Master, please," in a voice so uncharacteristically desperate that the old man's expression changed.
He studied her for a long moment.
"Take the pills in the blue jar if your head begins to ache," he said. "If you feel the slightest disturbance in your focus, you will sit down wherever you are and wait for it to pass. And you will be back before full dark."
"Yes, Master. Thank you, Master."
She was gone before he finished nodding.
✦ ✦ ✦
She went as fast as she dared, and it was not fast enough.
Twice she had to stop and brace herself against a tree while the world swung around her, and she stood there counting her own heartbeat with her eyes shut and thinking, with a kind of dull desperation, that this was precisely the sort of inefficiency she had spent eight days trying to eliminate.
By the time she reached the valley, the sun was already touching the ridge, and the light through the trees had gone red.
She slowed as she came up the last slope.
He'll have gone, she thought. Of course he's gone. It's nearly evening. He waited a reasonable interval and he left, as any rational person would.
The thought sat in her chest like a stone.
It's better this way. This is what you decided on the path. You wanted a clean break and now you have one, and you never even had to say the words, and by the time you might have seen him again he'll have understood the message perfectly well.
She came around the last of the rocks.
Then she stopped.
There was someone standing outside the cave.
He was facing away, toward the western path, the one she always came by. His robe, which had been deep blue, was torn at the shoulder and down one side, and stained dark. His hair had come loose from its tie. He was standing oddly, weight all on one leg, one arm held close against his ribs, and even at this distance she could see that he was swaying very slightly, like a man in a wind that wasn't blowing.
He had been standing there, she realized, for a long time.
"Brother Xuan!"
He turned.
She would remember the next moment for the rest of her life: the way his face, which had been utterly grey, utterly empty, broke open all at once like the sun coming out from behind a mountain.
"Sister Xi—"
She was already running.
"You came." He took a step toward her and had to catch himself against the rock. His eyes were shining, and his voice cracked straight down the middle. "You came. You finally came."
"Don't move!"
"I thought—" He was laughing and it was a terrible, unsteady sound. "I thought you weren't coming. I thought you'd decided you didn't want to see me anymore. I thought you'd left me."
"Brother Xuan, you're injured."
She reached him and seized his arm, and what she saw wiped every other thought out of her head.
Three long gashes down his left side, crusted and inflamed. A puncture through the meat of his shoulder. Bruising along the ribs deep enough to have gone purple-black. Claw marks on his forearms in the specific overlapping pattern of a beast fought off at close range, more than once. His knuckles were split. There was dried blood at his hairline and a cut above his eyebrow that had been bleeding recently enough to still be wet.
Her hands began moving on their own, checking, cataloguing.
"What happened to you?"
"It's nothing serious."
"You have a puncture wound two inches from the subclavian artery."
"…It's slightly serious."
"Brother Xuan."
He had the grace to look sheepish. "When you didn't come this morning, I thought something must have happened to you. So I went to look." He gestured vaguely at the northern treeline. "I searched the woods. I ran into a few things."
"A few things."
"Some of them ran into me."
Lianxi closed her eyes briefly. "How long have you been waiting?"
"Since this morning."
She opened her eyes and fixed him with a flat stare.
"…Late morning."
"You're lying."
"I'm not—"
"The blood on your shoulder is at least a day old. It's oxidized." She pointed at the cave mouth. "There are two fires' worth of ashes in there, and the outer ring is cold through. You cleared the stones on that ledge to sleep on, and the moss hasn't recovered. You've been eating the emergency rations I left in the back, because the jar has been moved and you don't know where I keep it." She folded her arms. "Shall I continue?"
Xuan stared at her.
Then he looked at the ground and said, very quietly, "…Yesterday morning."
Lianxi did not say anything.
"I thought you might come early," he said, still not looking at her. "I know you said today, but I thought— if you came at dawn, or the night before, and I wasn't here, you might think I hadn't waited. You might think I'd given up on you. And then you'd never come back." He shrugged, and winced. "So I came early. It was only a day and a half."
A day and a half.
She thought about him sitting in that cave through the night, listening for footsteps. She thought about him waking at every sound. She thought about him going out this morning when she hadn't come, walking into a Tier 4 zone alone and half-rested, because his first assumption had not been she doesn't want me but something has happened to her.
Something in her chest hurt so much that she had to look away.
"That was extremely stupid," she said.
"It wasn't a trouble at all," he said, brightening. "I got quite a lot of training out of it, actually. There was a Ridgeback that nearly had me, and I worked out a counter to that lunge they do—"
"Get in the cave."
"Sister Xi—"
"In the cave, Brother Xuan."
✦ ✦ ✦
She built up the fire and set him against the wall and got to work.
For a while there was no talking, only the small sounds of it: the clink of instruments, the tear of clean cloth, water in a basin. She cut away what was left of his sleeve, cleaned each wound with a bitter astringent that made him hiss through his teeth, and set her needles around the puncture to draw out the heat before it turned.
"I'm sorry I was late," she said, some minutes in. "I intended to come this morning."
"What happened?"
"I overreached in training last night. I attempted a threefold focus, which was beyond my current capacity by a considerable margin, and I tore something." She was concentrating on the needle in her fingers. "There was some bleeding. I was unconscious for eleven hours. My master treated me and I only woke this after—"
She stopped, because Xuan had sat bolt upright and seized her hand.
"You were bleeding?" All the sheepishness had gone out of his face. "How badly? Where? Are you all right?"
"Brother Xuan, you're going to tear the stitching—"
"I don't care about the stitching. Are you all right?"
"Yes." She blinked at the sheer force of it. "Yes. I took medication and I rested. It's resolved. My master is an exceptional physician."
He did not let go of her hand.
"You could have died," he said.
"That's a substantial overstatement. A torn consciousness channel is serious but rarely fatal, provided treatment is prompt, and my treatment was extremely prompt—"
"Sister Xi."
"…I'm all right," she said, more gently. "I promise. Now let go, please, so I can finish."
He let go. Slowly.
She worked on in silence after that, and he watched her the entire time. She was aware of it the way one is aware of standing near a fire. Every time she glanced up, his eyes were on her, dark and steady, with an expression she had no framework for at all.
"You were going to stop coming," he said at last.
Her hands paused for half a breath.
"I would have come this morning," she said, "if I had not been injured."
"That isn't what I asked." His voice was very quiet. "You were going to come today, and then tell me it was the last time. Weren't you."
Lianxi looked at the needle in her fingers.
She did not answer.
The fire popped. Outside, the light was going.
"Do you hate me?" Xuan asked.
Her head came up so fast she nearly upset the basin. "What? No. Of course not."
"Then why?"
"It isn't—"
"Is it because of what happened? With Ling Shi?" The words came in a rush now, tumbling over each other. "Because that was my fault. All of it. I was careless and she followed me and I should have checked, and it will never happen again, I swear it. I've dealt with it. I told her exactly what I thought of what she did, and I've made it very clear she isn't to come near this forest again, and she won't. She's given me her word." He pushed his hair back off his face, wincing as it pulled at his shoulder. "She's not a bad person, Sister Xi. Truly. She's defensive, and she's got a temper she hides badly, but her heart is good. She'd never actually hurt anyone."
Lianxi looked at him.
She thought about a girl's perfectly even breathing beneath a perfectly timed collapse. She thought about the look that had come into that girl's face in the half-second before the blade, when she had believed no one was watching. She thought about the particular quality of hatred that dresses itself in concern.
"Have you known her long?" she asked.
"Since we were four. We grew up together, trained together." He said it easily. "She's like family."
Ah, thought Lianxi.
There was a thing she could say here. She turned it over: Your sworn sister is performing for you, and has been for some time, and the performance is very good. She examined the probable outcomes. He would not believe her. He would defend the girl, because that was what he did with people he had decided to keep, and something would come into the room between them that had not been there before.
And she would be asking him to take the word of a child who had never told him her own name over the word of a girl he had known since he was four.
She had no right to that.
"I see," she said, and went back to the needle.
Xuan's face fell slightly. "It's not— I mean, we're only friends. She's a friend. There are others too, you know, in our group. Haoran, and Jingyi, and a few more. We all grew up together. She's just one of them."
Lianxi looked up, puzzled by the urgency in his voice. "I didn't ask about that."
"Right." He cleared his throat. "Of course. I only meant— never mind."
She finished the last of the stitching and began wrapping his ribs, which required her to lean in close and pass the bandage around him, and she was so absorbed in keeping the tension even that it took her a moment to notice he had gone completely rigid.
"Am I hurting you?"
"No."
"Your heart rate has increased significantly."
"It's the fire," said Xuan. "It's very warm in here."
Lianxi glanced at the fire, which was small, and then at the cave mouth, through which a distinctly cold evening wind was blowing. She filed this away as another data point in the ongoing puzzle of Brother Xuan's inconsistent physiology, and finished the bandage.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was packing away her instruments when he spoke again.
"These two weeks were awful."
She looked up.
He was staring into the fire, and he had stopped trying to look cheerful, and without it his face was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the injuries.
"I kept thinking it would get better," he said. "I trained. I trained until Jingyi asked what was wrong with me. And it didn't help. Nothing helped. Everything was just—" he made a small, frustrated gesture, "—grey. Flat. Like someone had taken the colour out of the days."
Lianxi's hands went still on the clasp of her bag.
Heavy, she had told her master. And cold. And it's worse when the house is quiet.
"I counted them," Xuan said. "The days. Every night I'd think, that's one more gone. And then yesterday I couldn't stand it anymore, so I came a day early like an idiot, and I sat in this cave all night listening for you." He laughed, and it came out wrong. "And then it got to noon today, and you hadn't come, and I thought—"
He stopped.
"Brother Xuan."
"Please don't stop seeing me."
It burst out of him all at once, and he turned to face her, and his eyes were wet.
"Please. I'll do anything. I'll never bring anyone here again, I'll never tell a living soul you exist, I'll take a blood oath if you want one, I'll swear it on my cultivation. Your secret is safe with me. I'll protect it with my life, I mean that, with my life—" His voice was coming apart. "And if it's too dangerous to meet often, then we'll meet less. Once a month. Once a season. I'll wait however long you want, I don't care, I'll wait as long as you tell me to, as long as there's a next time. Just don't—"
He had to stop.
"Just don't take it away completely," he said. "Please."
The fire crackled.
Lianxi sat very still, holding her bag, and stared at him with her mouth slightly open.
She had prepared for many outcomes. She had run through the conversation a dozen times over eight days. In every version she had constructed, she explained the risk calmly, he grew angry or wounded, he argued for a while, and then he accepted it, because it was a sound argument and he was a sensible person.
In none of them had he cried.
Her mind, presented with a phenomenon so far outside its models, did what it always did. It reached for the nearest available framework and began, helplessly, to reason.
"Brother Xuan," she said carefully, "I think you may be overestimating the significance of our acquaintance."
Xuan stared at her.
"We've known each other approximately four months," she continued, in the tone she used for explaining dosages. "In that time we've met eleven times, for an average of perhaps five hours each, which comes to something under sixty hours in total. That's approximately two and a half days of cumulative contact." She was pleased with the calculation; it had been troubling her. "You've known Ling Shi since you were four. In pure duration, my presence in your life is statistically negligible. It's therefore unlikely that my absence would produce a significant—"
"Sixty hours," said Xuan.
"Approximately. I'd have to check the—"
"Sixty hours." He was looking at her with an expression she could not read at all. "Sister Xi, in the last four months, how many hours have you spent talking to anyone other than me and your master?"
Lianxi opened her mouth.
She closed it.
"…None," she said.
"And how many people in this world know that you like candied hawthorn?"
She frowned. "That's not a relevant—"
"How many?"
"…One."
"Then your number is wrong," Xuan said.
Lianxi sat with that.
She sat with it for a long time, actually, while the fire burned down and the wind moved in the trees outside, and something in the architecture of her thinking shifted very slightly and did not shift back.
She had been measuring the wrong thing. She had counted the hours because hours could be counted. But the question was never how much of her life he occupied. It was that when he was absent, the days went grey; and she had spent six days ruling out poison before it occurred to her to consider that she simply missed someone.
The mind never knows everything. That is why the cleverest people make the worst mistakes.
Trust yourself, child.
"Brother Xuan," she said slowly. "I need to tell you something, and I'd like you to let me finish."
He nodded, ashen.
"I was going to end it today. You're correct." She saw the blow land and pressed on. "Not because of Ling Shi, and not because of anything you did. It's because I've understood something. Every time you come here, you're taking a risk. And every time I meet you, I'm taking one, and mine isn't only mine to take." She looked at her hands. "I thought that if I cut the thread now, cleanly, while it was thin, it would cost less. I was proud of the reasoning. It was very sound reasoning."
"Sister Xi—"
"I said let me finish." She took a breath. "And then my master told me something. He said that a choice can be correct and still ruin you. He said that if you set down the thing you cannot bear to lose, you'll carry the absence for the rest of your life, and it'll be heavier than whatever you thought you were avoiding." Her voice was not quite steady. "He said, don't deny your heart what it wants. And he said the strain of keeping a secret is a small price. He was speaking from experience. I don't know whose, and he won't tell me. But I've never seen him look like that before."
She raised her head and looked at him.
"So the reasoning is sound and I'm going to disregard it," she said. "I don't want to stop seeing you. That's the whole of it. There's no argument underneath. I've looked."
Xuan's breath went out of him all at once.
"You'll keep coming?"
"Yes."
"You mean it?"
"I don't say things I don't mean. It's inefficient."
And then Xuan laughed, wet and wrecked and enormously relieved, and dropped his head back against the cave wall, and said, "Thank the heavens," with such feeling that Lianxi felt obliged to check his pulse again.
✦ ✦ ✦
Outside, the last of the red had gone out of the sky.
"It's dark," Lianxi observed. "You need to leave."
"Or," said Xuan, "I could stay here tonight, and we could go to the northern ridge in the morning. You said there was a frost-herb up there. We never went."
"Absolutely not."
"It's a very good plan."
"You have four untreated fractures in your ribs, a puncture wound that will reopen if you so much as climb a slope, and you haven't slept properly in two days." She began packing her bag with sharp, decisive movements. "You'll go home tonight, you'll sleep for twelve hours, you'll take the pills I've given you at dawn and at dusk, and you will not draw on your qi for eight days. Eight, Brother Xuan. Not five. I know you."
"Ten days from now, then. Here."
"Eight days of rest, then travel. Twelve days."
"Ten."
"Twelve."
"…Eleven," said Xuan.
Lianxi considered this. "Eleven," she allowed.
He grinned. Then the grin faded, and he looked at her with sudden naked anxiety, and said, "Say it."
"Say what?"
"That you'll come. Say it properly."
She sighed. "I'll come."
"On the eleventh day."
"On the eleventh day."
"Even if something happens. Even if you're late. You'll come anyway, and you won't decide on the way here that it's safer not to."
"Brother Xuan—"
"Say it, Sister Xi."
She looked at his face, and at what was in it, and stopped arguing.
"I swear it," she said. "On the eleventh day, I'll come to this cave. Whatever happens. And if I'm delayed, I'll still come, even if it's late, even if it's the day after. I won't disappear on you." She met his eyes. "I give you my word."
Xuan let out a long breath.
"Good," he said.
Then, at the mouth of the cave: "Swear it again."
"Brother Xuan."
"Once more. Please."
"I swear it."
"…All right." He turned to go, then turned back. "Sister Xi?"
"What."
"I'm glad you came."
And he went off into the dark, limping badly and refusing to admit it, and turned around twice to wave.
✦ ✦ ✦
Lianxi walked home under the stars with her master's blue jar of pills unopened in her bag, and her head aching faintly, and no plan at all for what she had just committed herself to.
It was reckless. It was indefensible. It exposed her master, and it exposed her, and every argument she had built over eight days was still standing there in her mind, entirely unrefuted.
She had never felt lighter in her life.
I'll have to be more careful, she thought. Different routes each time. Sweep for followers. Never the same day of the week twice.
The list assembled itself as she walked, precise and practical, and somewhere under it, in the place beneath her ribs that had ached for fourteen days, the pain had simply gone.
She noticed that it was gone.
And this time, she did not attempt to diagnose it.