The first thing He Renxiao felt was warmth.
It was the wrong warmth. That was what his mind noticed first, before it had even remembered that it was a mind, before it had worked out which way was up or how many arms he was supposed to have. It was not the thin, grudging warmth of his own quarters on the east side of the Cleansing Spring, where the brazier was always half-empty because he kept forgetting to ask the outer disciples for charcoal and was too proud to go and fetch it himself. This was a deep, steady, generous warmth, the kind that comes from a brazier someone has been feeding carefully all night, and from blankets piled on top of you by someone who did not trust a single blanket to do the job.
His consciousness floated somewhere between dreaming and waking, in that grey borderland where a man can't tell which side of the river he's standing on. For a long, frightening moment he genuinely did not know. Was the gold water still closing over his head? Was Renren Xiao standing on the slate shore, arms folded, waiting to call him pathetic again? Was there a sword in his lung? He reached for the edges of the world, the way he had in the river, and could not find them. He felt as though he were losing his grip on reality itself, as though reality were a wet fish and he had very bad hands.
Then the smell reached him, and the smell was wrong too.
His own room smelled of sandalwood, faint and cheap, the kind sold in bundles at the market at the foot of the mountain, and of the medicinal herbs he kept in a little lacquered box beside his bed: dried angelica, licorice root, a few pinches of the bitter yellow powder Nan Feng swore would stop his headaches and which mostly just made his tongue go numb. This room smelled of ink. Good ink, the expensive pine-soot kind that came in carved cakes from the south. Of old scrolls, dusty and dry. Of rosin, as though someone had been oiling a sword. And, beneath all of it, of a subtle, clean fragrance like cold water over stones and crushed cedar needles, which he recognized immediately, completely, in the oldest part of his body, before his thinking mind had even caught up.
Mo Shuyi.
This is Shixiong's room.
He tried to open his eyes. His eyelids would not cooperate. They felt as though someone had hung tiny bronze weights from each lash, the way the market fortune-tellers hung bells from their banners. Somewhere nearby, voices were murmuring, low and hushed. He could not make out the words, only the shape of them: the rise and fall of worry, the clipped edges of people trying very hard not to argue in a sickroom. He strained after them. They slipped through his fingers like water through cupped hands.
He reached instead for memory. How did I get here? What was the last thing?
There was the river. There was the gold. There was Renren Xiao's hand. And before that...
Before that, there was a hole.
He went looking for the night before and found nothing. Not darkness. Darkness at least had a shape. This was an absence, smooth and blank, like a page from which every character had been carefully scraped off with a knife. He remembered the evening meal: cold rice and pickled radish, and Jing Peishi telling a joke about a magistrate and a goat that nobody had laughed at. He remembered walking back toward his room afterwards along the eastern path, the moon very bright, almost too bright, beating down on his shoulders like a hand pressing him into the ground. He remembered a light. Something on the path ahead of him, a glimmer, bright and square and somehow wrong, the way a lantern would be wrong if it floated at chest height with no one holding it. He remembered thinking, quite clearly, That's not a firefly.
And then nothing at all until the black water.
Did I fall? he wondered. Did I die? Is that how it happened, this time? Not a sword. Just a rock on a cliff path and the moon in my eyes. How embarrassing. Renren Xiao will never let me hear the end of it.
The futon beneath him was not his own. It was softer. The bedding was finer quality than anything He Renxiao allowed himself. He knew that because he could feel the silk of the inner quilt against his wrists, and he had never in his life owned a silk inner quilt, partly because he couldn't afford one and partly because accepting one would have meant accepting it from Li Yuan, who would never have let him forget it. His Shixiong was always scolding him about that. You're not a mountain ascetic, Mo Shuyi would say, with those steady eyes fixed on him, as He Renxiao sat in his drafty little room with one thin blanket and a cup of tea gone cold. Comfort is not a crime. And He Renxiao would say, Neither is minding your own business, Shixiong, and Mo Shuyi would go away, and the next morning there would be a bag of charcoal outside his door that nobody admitted to having left there.
A familiar heaviness had settled in his limbs. It was the heaviness of childhood, of days spent stuck in bed while the world went on outside the window without him. How often had he woken like this when he was small? Too often to count. Sickness had been his most faithful companion then, more faithful even than death would later become. His constitution had been frail from birth. It was a small hindrance as far as his cultivation went (the elders had said so, publicly, and then privately had said rather more), but it had been a source of endless worry for the people around him.
They used to take turns sitting with him through the fevered nights. Li Yuan would stubbornly refuse to leave even when the others came to relieve him, even when Jing Peishi physically picked him up and carried him to the door, at which point Li Yuan would bite him and go back. His half-brother's face would be drawn and pinched with worry, dark circles forming beneath eyes that were the exact same shape as He Renxiao's own. That was the only obvious mark of the blood they shared. Everything else about them had been divided, measured out, and labeled long before either of them could walk. Li Yuan was the son of the main wife: the Li family heir, his name entered in the clan register in gold ink on the day he was born, a cousin of three different imperial consorts. He Renxiao was the son of a singing girl from the southern pleasure boats whom their father had brought home one drunken spring and then quietly sent away again before the summer. He had taken his mother's surname because the Li clan register had no space for him, and he had been sent up the mountain at six years old because the Li household had no space for him either.
Li Yuan had followed him up the mountain two years later, by choice, against the explicit wishes of his mother and two grand-aunts. Nobody had ever been able to explain why. When asked, Li Yuan would say, haughtily, that the Azure Cloud Sect had the best sword instructors in the empire, which was true, and also that he had come to keep an eye on the family's interests, which was nonsense, because nobody on the mountain had ever been interested in the Li family except the Treasury Pavilion, and only around tax season.
He clearly cared. He Renxiao had always known that, somewhere underneath. But when they were children he had not been sure Li Yuan knew how to show it properly, with the great wall of their status standing between them like a city wall with no gate. Li Yuan would sit by his bed all night and then, in the morning, when He Renxiao woke up, would sniff and say, Finally. You look like a boiled dumpling that's been left out in the rain. It's disgusting. Father would be ashamed. And He Renxiao would say, Father already is, and Li Yuan would go red and storm out, and then come back an hour later with honeyed plums from the kitchen and throw them at his head.
Even now, grown, the two of them fought like a pair of roosters in a single coop. Constantly. About everything. About whose turn it was to fetch water, about the correct angle of the fourth sword form, about whether a man with no clan name had any business wearing blue. And even now, He Renxiao was not sure. Not really. Not all the way down.
Those days had been both bitter and sweet. Bitter for the weakness that dragged at him, sweet for the rare moments of tenderness it pulled out of the people around him. He Renxiao had always been terrible at accepting care. He knew that about himself. He was like a half-wild cat that crept up to the kitchen door every night for scraps and then hissed at whoever put the bowl down. Even in his former life he had been the same. Especially in his former life.
It wasn't that he didn't appreciate their concern. He simply had no idea how to receive it. He did not know how to bend his stiff, stupid, ridiculous pride far enough to admit that their presence was a comfort.
As a child he used to turn his face to the wall whenever they came in. He'd pretend to be asleep, or bored, or deeply absorbed in counting the knots in the ceiling beams. And all the while he'd be secretly counting the moments until they spoke, until one of them put a cool cloth on his forehead or helped him sit up to drink his medicine. He would scowl and complain about the bitter taste. He would make faces. He would tell Nan Feng her soup tasted like boiled sandals. But he never once refused. This strange dance of shoving away the exact thing he wanted most had become so much a part of him that by now he no longer knew how to do anything else. Like a puppy, Jing Peishi had said once, laughing, that bites your hand because it wants you to keep petting it. He Renxiao had thrown a teacup at him. It had missed. Jing Peishi had caught it and handed it back, refilled.
A soft rustle of robes nearby drew him partway back to the present. Someone was moving around the room, their footsteps almost silent on the polished floorboards. He tried again to open his eyes and managed the barest slit, through which lamplight came filtering in, golden and hazy. Night, then. It had been night on the eastern path. Was it still the same night, or a new one? How long had he been gone?
"His breathing's changed. I think he's waking up."
That was Nan Feng, his shimei. Her voice carried the particular mixture of authority and anxiety she saved for moments when her medical knowledge was needed and she was afraid it might not be enough. She was the youngest of their small group and had always tried to sound older than she was, especially when tending to others, as though she believed that if she spoke firmly enough, injuries would be too intimidated to get worse. In both of his lifetimes, she had been the only one among them besides He Renxiao himself who really cared about herbs and the arts of healing, which was ironic, because she was also a frighteningly good fighter, and he, at this point in his life, was not. Not in this life. Not yet. She could put a needle into an acupoint from ten paces and a sword through a straw dummy from fifteen. He could identify forty-two varieties of mountain mushroom by smell and had once fainted during a sparring match from sheer heat.
"Renxiao?" Another voice, deeper. Jing Peishi. "Can you hear us? If you can hear us, blink twice. If you can't hear us, also blink twice, so we know you're being stubborn."
He wanted to answer. His tongue felt thick and clumsy in his mouth, too big for it, like a sock. Instead a small groan escaped him, embarrassingly weak to his own ears. And suddenly, sharply, he was twelve years old again, lying in the dirt of the practice field with the sky spinning over him. He had pushed himself too hard that day. He'd been determined to keep pace with Li Yuan in the endurance drills despite the fever that had been creeping up on him since dawn. He'd hidden it well, or so he'd thought, right up until the world tilted sideways and the practice field came rushing up to meet his face.
He'd woken hours later to find all four of them there. Just like now, most likely.
Mo Shuyi had lectured him sternly about knowing his limits, in a voice so quiet and so cold that He Renxiao would have preferred to be shouted at. Li Yuan had sat silent and tight-lipped beside him and refused to look at him at all, his fists knotted in his lap. Jing Peishi had tried to lighten the mood with jokes that landed in the worried silence like stones in a pond. And Nan Feng, only eight at the time, had cried quietly into her sleeve until He Renxiao awkwardly patted her hand and promised her he would never scare her like that again.
A promise he had apparently broken. Again.
"Water," he finally managed to croak. His voice scraped against his dry throat like a whetstone.
At once there was movement. Someone slid a hand beneath his neck and lifted his head gently while someone else pressed a cup to his lips. The water was cool and sweet, drawn from the spring itself, the one that gave the Cleansing Spring its name. He drank greedily until the cup was pulled away.
"Slowly," cautioned Li Yuan. He Renxiao realized with some surprise that it was his half-brother's hand cradling the back of his head. "Or you'll make yourself sick, and then you'll throw up on Shuyi-ge's silk quilt, and then he'll kill you, and then I'll have to explain to Father why he only has one son left, and honestly, it'll be the best news he's had all year, so on second thought drink as fast as you like."
"Li Yuan," said Nan Feng.
"What? I'm encouraging him."
With a tremendous effort, He Renxiao forced his eyes all the way open.
The room swam slowly into focus. The familiar scholarly chaos of Mo Shuyi's quarters. Scrolls and books stacked in perilous towers against every wall, several of them leaning at angles that suggested they'd been leaning that way for years and had come to an understanding with gravity. A half-finished ink painting of mountains in mist lay abandoned on the desk, the brush still resting across the inkstone. Jars of ink and brushes scattered about. A sword rack with a single sword on it, oiled and gleaming. And on the corner of the desk, half-hidden behind a stack of commentary on the Classic of the Eight Winds, a small heap of little green stones. Jade offcuts, it looked like. Some carved, some half-carved, all of them crude. One of them, at the top of the pile, had the faint beginnings of two pointed ears.
He Renxiao's heart stopped for a second and then started again with a jolt.
Eleven pieces, Nan Feng's voice said in his memory, gleeful. He ruined eleven pieces before he got one he didn't throw in the pond.
He looked away from the desk so fast his head throbbed.
Gathered around him were four faces, each etched with its own particular flavor of concern.
Mo Shuyi sat nearest his head, his dark eyes assessing He Renxiao with clinical precision, as if he were a sword whose edge needed checking. His Shixiong's long hair was tied back loosely, a few strands escaping to frame his face. Despite the late hour he was still fully dressed in his sect robes, with not one wrinkle anywhere, which meant either that he had been sitting perfectly still for hours or that he had changed his clothes at some point while He Renxiao slept, and He Renxiao did not know which of those two possibilities was more alarming. There were no welts on him. No chains. No blood matting his hair. His face was young and whole and pale, and his eyes, both of them, were open and clear, and very, very tired.
Watch him, a cold voice whispered somewhere at the back of He Renxiao's skull. The dog is at your bedside, and his collar is already fraying.
He Renxiao flinched. Just slightly. Just enough that he felt the blankets shift.
Mo Shuyi's eyes flicked down to the movement, then back up to his face. Something passed over his expression too quickly to read.
Next to him knelt Li Yuan, in pale green silk that had clearly been expensive at the beginning of the day and was now creased beyond saving, who managed to look worried and furious at the same time, which was an expression He Renxiao had seen on his half-brother's face so often that he privately thought of it as Li Yuan's natural state.
Jing Peishi stood a few paces back with his arms crossed over his broad chest. His usually laughing face was serious for once, and that, more than anything, frightened He Renxiao, because Jing Peishi had laughed at the funeral of the old Kitchen Elder, and at the time Nan Feng accidentally set the Medicine Hall's roof on fire, and once, memorably, at a demon beast that was actively trying to eat him.
And at the foot of the futon sat Nan Feng, her medicine case open beside her, herbs and powders laid out in neat little rows on a folded cloth, preparing what was undoubtedly another bitter concoction he would be made to swallow.
"What happened?" He Renxiao asked. He tried to push himself up onto his elbows. Firm hands immediately pressed him back down. Three pairs of them, actually.
"Found you collapsed on the side of the mountain," said Mo Shuyi. His voice betrayed no emotion at all, though his eyes stayed fixed on He Renxiao's face as though he expected it to vanish if he looked away. "Again."
That single word carried weight. An unspoken reprimand, stacked on top of years of other unspoken reprimands. He Renxiao felt a flash of irritation, followed swiftly by shame. He'd thought those days were behind him. He'd been so sure.
"You've got a head wound, and you didn't look after it the way you should have," said Nan Feng, not looking up from her mortar and pestle, where she was grinding herbs with more force than was strictly necessary. "And don't bother denying it. Tonight proves it. You're lucky your skull is as thick as it is. I always said it would save your life one day, and Eldest Brother said I was being unkind."
"I said," said Jing Peishi, "that you were being accurate in an unkind way. Those are different things. Don't blame him, shimei."
"I'm fine," He Renxiao insisted. The words fell out of his mouth automatically, like coins from a torn purse. How many times had he said that, over two lives? It was always the same answer, whether he was truly fine or about to collapse.
A scoff from Li Yuan made him flinch again. "You've been unconscious for nearly a whole day. That isn't fine by any definition, not even the one you made up in your head. I've seen corpses at clan funerals with more color in their cheeks. One of them was my great-uncle, and he'd been dead a week."
A whole day? He Renxiao blinked, startled. No wonder they all looked so haggard. A pang of guilt struck him, sharp and unexpected, right under the ribs, in roughly the place where the sword had gone in. He hadn't meant to cause trouble. He hadn't meant to make them worry. He'd only...
He'd only what? He didn't know. That was the problem. He didn't know.
"I was perfecting a technique," he said, and lied through his teeth. "I didn't notice the time."
He turned his head, sliding his gaze away from their faces to fix on the ceiling. The ceiling beams in Mo Shuyi's room were made of old cedar. One of them had a knot in it shaped like a fish. He had stared at that knot before, he realized. Many times. When he was small, and feverish, and someone was sitting up with him through the night.
The silence stretched. Nobody believed him. He could tell nobody believed him by the particular quality of the quiet, the way you can tell a drum is cracked before anyone strikes it.
Nan Feng came toward him with a steaming cup in her hands. The bitter smell of it reached him first and made him wrinkle his nose before he could stop himself. "Drink," she commanded, her small face set with determination. "All of it. If you leave any, I'll make you a second cup with double the coptis root."
He took the cup without protest. He knew from long experience that arguing only made the misery last longer. The taste was as foul as he'd expected, herbs and other things he preferred not to identify coating his tongue in a slick, bitter film. He forced it all down in a single unbroken swallow and handed the empty cup back to his shimei with as neutral an expression as he could manage. His eyes were watering. He hoped nobody noticed.
"Good," Nan Feng said, examining his face closely. "At least you haven't lost the ability to follow simple instructions."
"Unlike the instructions to look after yourself," added Jing Peishi, but his tone had softened. He reached out and ruffled He Renxiao's hair, an old gesture from their childhood that never failed to make He Renxiao's hackles rise. True to form, he jerked his head away, scowling.
"I'm not a child," he muttered.
"Then stop acting like one," Li Yuan shot back immediately.
The two brothers stared at each other. It was a silent battle of wills that had been fought a hundred times before, over a hundred sickbeds, a hundred dinner tables, a hundred practice fields. And as usual, He Renxiao was the first to look away.
"Ha," said Li Yuan, very quietly, with deep satisfaction.
"Your hair's coming out of its knot," said He Renxiao to the ceiling. "On the left side. It looks like a bird's been nesting in it. Didn't your mother send you up here with three maidservants just for your hair? Did they all run away?"
Li Yuan's hand flew to the side of his head before he could stop it. His hair was perfectly fine. He Renxiao smiled at the fish-shaped knot in the ceiling beam.
"I will smother you," Li Yuan hissed, "with Shuyi-ge's silk quilt, and nobody will ever—"
"Li Yuan," said Mo Shuyi, without looking at him, and Li Yuan subsided, glowering, and made a great show of refolding the cloth that had been under He Renxiao's head.
A moment of quiet settled over the room, broken only by the sound of Nan Feng putting her herbs away and the occasional snap of charcoal from the brazier in the corner. He Renxiao became uncomfortably aware of the weight of their eyes on him, of the concern he had no idea how to deal with. It would have been easier if they were angry. If they shouted at him, or punished him, he'd have known what to do: shout back, sulk, climb out a window. Their quiet worry was so much harder to dodge. It was like trying to fight fog.
"You scared us," Mo Shuyi said finally, his voice low. "There was no warning. Nothing."
The words hung in the air. He Renxiao swallowed hard. Something tight was forming in his chest that had nothing to do with his injuries. Mo Shuyi almost never admitted to being afraid of anything. He had not even admitted to being afraid the time a wild tiger got into the outer court and he'd had to fight it with a broom.
He said those exact words, a cold voice whispered in He Renxiao's skull, to the guards in the water prison. 'There was no warning.' Ninety lashes, and 'where is Renxiao.' Do you remember? You remember. Don't look at his eyes.
He looked at Mo Shuyi's eyes.
They were dark, and steady, and so tired. There was no madness in them. There was nothing in them at all except him, his own pale reflection, small and doubled in the lamplight.
"I..." He Renxiao began, and faltered. An apology felt like a foreign language on his tongue, though he knew he owed one. "It won't happen again," he said finally. It was the closest he could come.
Mo Shuyi's gaze stayed on him a moment longer. Then he let out a breath, and his shoulders, which He Renxiao only now realized had been drawn up tight as a bowstring, relaxed slightly. "See that it doesn't," he said, and turned away to speak quietly with Nan Feng about something to do with a poultice.
The conversation around him began to blur as the throbbing in He Renxiao's head swelled again. He closed his eyes. Just for a moment, he told himself. The dark behind his eyelids swirled like ink stirred into water and pulled him down further than he'd meant to go.
VIII. What Shizun Said
When he opened his eyes again, the light in the room had changed.
The lamps had burned down to their wicks and been put out. In their place a thin, clean, early light was coming in through the carved lattice of the window, pale gold at the edges and grey in the middle, the light of a mountain dawn before the sun has properly climbed over the eastern ridge. It lay across the polished floorboards in long, slanted bars. Somewhere outside, beyond the walls, a crane was calling, and below that, very faintly, the first bell of the morning was being rung on the Main Peak, slow and sleepy, by a bell-ringer who had clearly not yet had his tea.
The faces above him had moved. They were the same faces, but they had been rearranged, like pieces on a board after a long night's game.
He Renxiao blinked slowly. His thoughts were scattered like autumn leaves in a gust of wind. His awareness came back in pieces: the softness of the futon, the herbal smell hanging in the air, the birds. The crane again. He tried to gather the pieces into something whole and they slid out of his grip like water.
This disorientation, too, was familiar, like stepping back into a half-forgotten dream. He had felt this way many times before, when fever had taken him as a child, in those long hazy days drifting between sleep and waking, when his small body had seemed too fragile to hold him in. The world used to blur and shift just like this, faces appearing and disappearing above him like clouds passing over a valley.
His childhood had been marked by illness the way a scroll is marked by the seal of its owner. His constitution had been weak from the day he was born, a fact his father had never once let him forget. A sickly bastard, he had overheard the old man say to a guest once, laughing, over wine. Her blood, not mine. The Li line has never produced a weakling. Every turning of the seasons had brought new ailments. Winter chills that settled into his lungs and rattled there for months. Summer fevers that burned through him like wildfire through dry grass. And always, every single time, his sect siblings had been there.
Li Yuan, beside his bed through the night, changing the cool cloth on his forehead whenever the fever climbed too high, glaring at the cloth as though it had personally offended him. Though they shared a father, their relationship had always been tangled, knotted up with expectations and resentments neither of them had chosen. In the mornings Li Yuan would be cruel and sharp and say unforgivable things about his face. But in the nights, when it mattered, he had never once left.
Jing Peishi, with his brusque manner covering for real worry, forcing bitter broth down He Renxiao's throat and telling him to stop being difficult, you little mule whenever he complained. His big hands, so deadly with a sword, became surprisingly gentle when they checked his forehead or tucked in the corners of his blanket. He would sing, sometimes, very badly, soldiers' songs he'd learned from somewhere that Nan Feng was too young to hear, and He Renxiao would pretend to be asleep so that he could hear the end of the verse.
Nan Feng, only a little thing herself back then, sneaking into his room with handfuls of wildflowers she'd picked on the slopes, insisting they would make him better faster than any medicine. Half of them were weeds. One of them, once, had been mildly poisonous. She would chatter endlessly, her bright little voice chasing away the shadows that sometimes gathered in the corners of his mind during the long illnesses, the shadows that whispered that he would be better off not waking up.
And Mo Shuyi. His Shixiong had been his constant guardian. When the pain was too much and He Renxiao cried silently in the dark, too proud to let anyone hear, it was Mo Shuyi who would appear like a shadow, saying nothing, and sit beside him until dawn broke. Just sit there. Not touching him. Not asking him anything. His presence alone did more than any remedy Nan Feng could grind. Once, half-delirious, He Renxiao had reached out and grabbed a fistful of his sleeve and refused to let go, and in the morning he had woken to find Mo Shuyi asleep sitting up against the wall, his arm stretched out at an awkward angle so as not to pull his sleeve free. Neither of them had ever mentioned it.
They had seen him at his weakest, these people who now surrounded him with worry on their faces. They had witnessed his fragility in ways nobody else had ever been allowed to. Maybe that was why he worked so hard to keep them at a distance now. Every moment of weakness felt like a step backward into that sickly child he had fought so desperately to leave behind.
His vision swam again and he closed his eyes. The pain in his head pulsed in time with his heart, steady and insistent, like a magistrate knocking on a door with the butt of his staff. He could hear whispered conversation around him, but the words broke apart before they reached his ears and fell into meaningless sound.
"...still disoriented..."
"...should we call the head physician from the Medicine Peak..."
"...the Medicine Peak will want to know why, and then they'll want it in writing, and then it'll be in front of the council by noon..."
"...stubborn as always..."
A cool hand was laid against his forehead. He leaned into the touch before he could stop himself. Old habits. His body remembering a comfort his mind no longer allowed him to want. He caught himself and went stiff, and the hand stayed where it was for a moment longer than it needed to, and then withdrew.
"Renxiao," a voice said, closer now. "Can you hear me?"
He forced his eyes open again to find Mo Shuyi leaning over him, brows drawn together. The others had come closer too. Li Yuan was standing with his arms crossed near the foot of the futon, his robe changed (of course he'd changed his robe; it was now a severe, pale, imperial blue that made him look like a disapproving official), Jing Peishi was kneeling on his right, and Nan Feng was hovering just behind them with a fresh roll of bandages clutched in both hands.
"I hear you," He Renxiao managed. "I'm fine."
The look they exchanged over him was achingly familiar: equal parts exasperation and concern. He had seen it countless times, that silent conversation that passed between his sect siblings whenever he insisted he was well when he very obviously was not. Jing Peishi raised his eyebrows at Li Yuan. Li Yuan rolled his eyes at Nan Feng. Nan Feng looked at Mo Shuyi. Mo Shuyi looked at nobody but him.
"If you were fine," Li Yuan said dryly, "you wouldn't be lying on Shuyi-ge's futon with blood in your hair. Again. Do you know how hard it is to get blood out of silk? I do. I had to find out last night. I've had to learn laundry, Renxiao. Because of you. A son of the Li family, scrubbing a quilt in a bucket at the third watch like a scullery maid. If my mother knew, she would have the mountain leveled."
"Your mother would have the mountain leveled if a sparrow looked at you sideways," He Renxiao said.
"Exactly. So you see the danger you've put us all in."
He frowned and reached up instinctively to touch his head. Jing Peishi caught his wrist before his fingers could reach the wound.
"Don't," his Da-shixiong warned. "Nan Feng only just finished cleaning it. You'll start it bleeding again, and then she'll cry, and then I'll have to comfort her, and you know I'm terrible at it. Last time I tried, I told her a joke about a goat and she hit me with a pestle."
"It was a bad joke," said Nan Feng.
"It was a good joke badly received."
He Renxiao let his hand fall back to his side. A strange hollowness was spreading through his chest. How many times had they done this? How many times had they put him back together after he'd broken himself against the world?
"What happened?" he asked finally. The events that had led to his injury stayed blurry, just out of reach. The only place he remembered being hurt was on that riverbank, in that grey place, with Renren Xiao standing over him and the rock coming up to meet his skull. Did the wound follow me? he wondered. Can a wound do that? Can a man split his head open in a dream and wake up bleeding?
Nan Feng moved into his line of sight. Her young face was serious in a way that didn't suit it at all. "We were hoping you could tell us," she said. "Shizun sent us to look for you when you missed morning lessons yesterday. Li Yuan-ge was the one who found you. You were lying in the rocks below the eastern cliff path, near the old pine. The one with the split trunk."
"Unconscious," Li Yuan said. His voice was carefully neutral, but his eyes gave him away entirely. "There was blood on the rocks near your head. A lot of it. You must have fallen and hit your head on the way down. It's a wonder you didn't go over the edge altogether. Another three steps and you'd have been on your way down to the river, and I'd have had to go and fish you out of it."
He Renxiao's whole body went cold.
Fishing your soaking carcass out of this river once was quite enough to last me an eternity.
He tried to sit up, ignoring the wave of dizziness that crashed over him at once. Strong hands, Mo Shuyi's, steadied him immediately and helped him up into a sitting position before he could topple back down.
"Careful," Mo Shuyi murmured. "Your body needs time."
"I don't have time," He Renxiao said, automatically. And then winced at how childish it sounded.
Jing Peishi snorted. "Right. Because bleeding from the head is clearly less important than whatever secret training you've been doing out there in the middle of the night. What is it this time? A new sword form? Some forbidden manual you stole from the Archive? If it's the Ninefold Thunder Palm, I have to warn you, I tried it when I was sixteen and couldn't feel my left arm for a month."
He Renxiao shot him a glare, but it didn't have its usual heat. Sitting up had drained what little strength he had left, and now even keeping his eyes open was a monumental effort. His gaze drifted around the room instead, taking in what he'd missed the night before. A stick of incense burning in the corner, almost down to its stub. His own outer robes folded neatly on a side table, the bloodstains on the collar already scrubbed faint. A tray of half-eaten food on the floor by the door, cold rice and a few pieces of pickled cabbage and four pairs of chopsticks, which meant his siblings had been eating their meals here instead of going down to the dining hall.
How long had they been watching over him? The thought made something uncomfortable twist in his stomach.
"You should eat," Nan Feng said, following his gaze. "I can bring congee from the kitchen. Shizun said you need to rebuild your strength."
"Shizun knows?" The words came out sharper than he'd meant, with alarm in them.
Li Yuan raised an eyebrow. "Of course Shizun knows. Who do you think sent us out looking for you? He said you'd come to see him the night before."
He Renxiao went very still.
"He said," Li Yuan went on, apparently not noticing, "that you'd come to his pavilion late. After the evening bell. That you'd wanted to ask him something about your cultivation, and that you'd seemed agitated, and that he'd sent you back to rest. And then you didn't turn up to lessons in the morning, and he called Shuyi-ge in and told him to go and find you. Did you think we could just hide the fact that one of his disciples was found unconscious and bleeding on the mountain? Shizun knows everything that happens on this peak. He probably knows what I had for breakfast."
"You had nothing for breakfast," said Nan Feng. "You were out on the cliffs."
"Then he knows that."
He Renxiao did not answer. He couldn't. His mind had gone completely, horribly blank, like a sheet of rice paper held up to the sun.
I went to see Shizun?
He went looking for it. He went into his own memory the way a man goes into his house after a burglary, room by room, opening every cupboard. The evening meal. The goat joke. The eastern path. The moon pressing down on his shoulders. The strange square light hanging in the air ahead of him, that's not a firefly. And then the black water.
There was no pavilion. There was no Shizun. There was no late visit, no question about cultivation, no being sent back to rest. There was nothing. The eastern path didn't even go to Shizun's pavilion. Shizun's pavilion was on the western side of the peak, above the spring, a quarter of an hour's walk in the opposite direction. To get from there to the old split pine on the eastern cliffs, you'd have to walk past the dormitories, the kitchen, and the Law Enforcement Peak's night patrol post, and the night patrol would have seen you.
Unless I went to Shizun first, he thought, and then walked all the way back across the peak in the dark, past everyone, without anyone seeing me, to go and stand on a cliff by myself.
Why would I do that?
Why can't I remember doing it?
And underneath that thought, very quietly, like a fish moving under ice, another one. Shizun said I came to see him. Shizun told them that. And there is nobody on this whole mountain who would ever, ever question anything Shizun said.
He thought of a man in white robes crouching in the snow at Frostgate, gathering his hems so they wouldn't get dirty. Including any member of my lineage.
He thought of a handkerchief burning in a brazier.
No, he told himself, hard, the way you'd slap your own face to wake up. Stop it. You're concussed. Renren Xiao said it himself: your memory is a broken vase. You went to see Shizun and you hit your head and you forgot. That's all. That's what happens to people who hit their heads. Physician Song in the valley has a whole shelf of books about it. You've read them. Stop it.
"Renxiao?" Mo Shuyi's voice. Very close. "What is it?"
He realized his hands had knotted themselves into the silk quilt hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He made them let go.
"Nothing," he said. "My head hurts."
He looked away, his jaw tight, and made himself think about something else. He made himself think about how Shizun would react. Their Shizun was not an unkind man, the others always said. But he had very little patience for carelessness. And this, training alone at night, pushing himself to exhaustion, ending up hurt on a cliff, would certainly be seen as careless. One more failure to add to the growing list. He could already picture it: the fan tapping once against Shizun's palm, the slight, disappointed tilt of his head, the soft voice saying, Renxiao, I had hoped for better from you. It was worse than any whipping. All the disciples of the Cleansing Spring agreed on that. The whip only hurt your back.
"He's not angry," Mo Shuyi said quietly, reading his thoughts the way he always somehow could. "He's concerned. As we all are."
He Renxiao looked down at his own hands. For the first time he noticed the small scrapes across his knuckles, the dirt packed under his fingernails, a long shallow scratch across the back of his right hand. Evidence of his fall. Of his weakness. He curled his fingers into loose fists to hide them.
There was dirt under his nails. Dark mountain dirt. And, wedged under the nail of his left forefinger, a tiny shred of something white. He stared at it. Thread. A single fine white silk thread, the kind that came from very good robes.
He closed his fist over it before anyone else could see.
"I miscalculated," he lied again. "I was trying out a new sword form, and I lost my footing."
"In the dark? On the edge of a cliff?" Jing Peishi's voice rose in disbelief. "What were you thinking? No, don't answer that, I know what you were thinking. You were thinking, I am He Renxiao, the laws of nature are suggestions, and gravity will respect my dignity."
He Renxiao didn't answer. What was he supposed to say? That he was trying to prove something? That he was tired? That some talking glowing box had come flying at him out of the dark and made him slip and fall into a pile of rocks? That he had died, and been fished out of a river by a meaner version of himself, and shown the end of the world, and told to poison the man sitting at his elbow? He hadn't been practicing a sword form at all. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to look at a sword form again without feeling steel slide between his ribs.
Silence stretched between them, filled with everything he couldn't say. Finally Nan Feng broke it, gently.
"You don't have to do everything alone, A-Xiao," she said. She used the childhood nickname that she was the only one left who could still get away with. "That's what shimei and shixiong are for. Otherwise what's the point of us? We'd just be people who eat your share of the pickled radish."
His throat closed up without warning.
He looked up and found them all watching him, each in their own way. Nan Feng's open worry. Jing Peishi's exasperated care. Li Yuan's guarded, prickly anxiety, the anxiety of a man who would sooner die than be caught worrying. And Mo Shuyi's quiet, patient understanding, as steady as a mountain. The sight of it made something crack inside the walls he'd spent two lives building.
"I remember," he started slowly, not sure why he was speaking at all, "when I was twelve. That fever that wouldn't break. For three days I couldn't recognize any of you."
They went still, clearly surprised by the sudden turn into the past.
"I remember waking up on the fourth day," he went on, his voice low. "All of you were there, asleep in different corners of my room. Nan Feng was curled up in the laundry basket. Da-shixiong was snoring with his mouth open. Even Li Yuan was there, even though he'd been sent to the southern branch for training that month. You'd all come back, just to sit with me while I was sick."
"Of course we came back," Li Yuan said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, as though abandoning duties and training and a southern branch instructor who had personally threatened to have him expelled for it to watch over a feverish child was simply what anyone would do. And yet he managed, somehow, to sound annoyed about it. As if it were an obligation he resented. "You're my little brother. And Shuyi-ge's shidi. And Nan Feng's shixiong. And Da-shixiong's... whatever you are to him. Responsibility. Burden. Punishment for sins in a previous life."
"Beloved junior brother," said Jing Peishi, with dignity.
"Punishment for sins in a previous life," Li Yuan repeated firmly.
"I'm not little anymore," He Renxiao said, echoing his earlier protest, but this time with no heat in it at all.
"No," Mo Shuyi agreed, and a faint smile touched the corner of his mouth, so faint it was almost not there. "But you're still my shidi. And brothers look after each other, whether they want to or not."
He Renxiao blinked rapidly and looked away from the plain sincerity in his Shixiong's face. The room swayed slightly as another wave of dizziness washed over him, and he felt, rather than saw, Mo Shuyi shift closer, ready to catch him if he fell. Just like on the Grand Terrace, the cold voice said. Just exactly like that, until the moment he didn't.
They'll never understand, he thought. Not truly. What it's like, sitting here, looking at the four of you, knowing what I know. Knowing how it ends.
Knowing that one of you might be the knife. And not knowing which way the knife is pointing.
IX. The Quarterly Requisitions
It was Jing Peishi who broke the moment. It usually was. He could not abide a silence that went on too long, the way some men cannot abide a crooked painting.
He leaned forward and laid two cool, calloused fingers against the inside of He Renxiao's wrist, and the easygoing elder brother who sang bad soldiers' songs vanished, and in his place knelt the chief disciple of the Cleansing Spring lineage. It was a remarkable transformation and He Renxiao had never once seen it fail to work. Jing Peishi's back straightened. His face settled into the stern, unbending gravity of an imperial magistrate about to sentence a horse thief. Even his voice dropped, into the deep, resonant baritone that had run the lineage's discipline roster for ten years and had once made a visiting elder from the Thunder Peak apologize for the state of his own boots.
"His core is stable," Jing Peishi murmured, "but his spiritual pulse is erratic. Racing like a startled colt." He frowned at the bandage along He Renxiao's hairline, then turned his sharp gaze slowly around the room, as though the walls might be hiding a culprit. "No sign of demonic qi. No trace of a hostile technique. Just a fall, and a great deal of foolishness." He paused. "A very great deal of foolishness."
"Thank you, Da-shixiong," said He Renxiao. "Your diagnosis is a comfort."
"It wasn't meant to be." Jing Peishi took his fingers away and sat back on his heels. "Here's the situation, and I want you all to listen, because I'm only saying it once and then I'm going to go and have breakfast like a civilized person. Renxiao cannot attend sword drills today, or tomorrow, or until Nan Feng says otherwise."
"Thank you," said Nan Feng.
"However." He held up one finger. "The Grand Assembly's quarterly requisitions are due at the Treasury Pavilion by the time the sunset incense burns out tonight. If they are not submitted, the Cleansing Spring forfeits its share of the boundary maintenance allocation for the next quarter, and the Treasury Elder will give it to the Thunder Peak, again, and the Thunder Peak will spend it on a new pavilion for their Peak Lord's concubine's cat, again, and then in three months our western boundary array will fail during the autumn storms and a demon boar will wander into the kitchen garden and eat all of Nan Feng's medicinal ginseng. Again."
"I loved that ginseng," Nan Feng said darkly.
"We all know you loved that ginseng. So." Jing Peishi ticked items off on his fingers. "We're out of high-grade cinnabar. We're out of array parchment. We have exactly four spirit-binding talismans left in the whole lineage, and two of those are the ones Li Yuan drew during his calligraphy phase, which nobody trusts."
"My calligraphy was exquisite."
"Your calligraphy summoned a goose. We need replacements, and we need them before the Feather Tribe envoys arrive at the eastern gate, because once they arrive the whole sect goes into ceremonial lockdown, the Law Enforcement Peak starts searching everyone's sleeves at the gates, and nobody gets in or out without three seals and a recommendation letter."
At the words Feather Tribe envoys, He Renxiao's stomach turned over.
"The envoys are coming now?" He heard his own voice, too high and too fast. "This week?"
The others looked at him. Li Yuan's eyes narrowed.
"They're due in four days," said Jing Peishi slowly. "It's been posted on the notice board in the main hall for a month. The treaty renewal talks. You complained about it, Renxiao. At length. You said the last renewal took so long that two elders died of old age in the middle of it, and you wanted to know if the sect would be paying for their coffins out of the hospitality budget."
"Did I?" He Renxiao swallowed. "Of course. I did. I remember. Four days." The treaty renewal. That's when she comes. That's when Huo Song comes up the mountain. He tried to remember the exact date she had fallen. He could remember the eclipse, the violet sky, the moss on the balustrade. He could not remember the date. Renren Xiao, you smug, useless—
"So," Jing Peishi went on, still watching him a little too closely, "I am going down to the Grand Library with Nan Feng to go over the boundary formation records before Shizun comes out of his meditation, so that when he asks why the western array is leaking we have an answer that doesn't involve the words Li Yuan's calligraphy. And Li Yuan and Shuyi will take Renxiao down the mountain into the town."
There was a short silence.
"A town excursion," said Li Yuan, with the air of a man who has just been handed a dead fish wrapped in a silk handkerchief. He had produced a painted folding fan from somewhere in his sleeve (Li Yuan always had a fan somewhere in his sleeve, the way other people had lint), and he tapped it against his chin. "Da-shixiong, with respect, the gate guards are particularly suspicious this week. The Law Enforcement Peak already has twice the patrols out because of the envoys. If we march down there with a bandaged disciple who fell off a cliff under mysterious circumstances, someone is going to write a report. And then someone will write a report about the report."
"Which is exactly why you're going." Jing Peishi fixed him with a heavy, meaningful look that carried the full weight of the twelve peaks' internal politics. "Your family's seal carries weight with the merchant guilds in the valley. If the Li family seal is on the purchase order, the Cinnabar Guild won't dare charge us the 'sect surcharge' they keep inventing every time the Treasury Pavilion is late paying them. Procure the cinnabar, the parchment, the talismans, and a box of unrefined spirit stones for the boundary maintenance. And more importantly." He pointed at He Renxiao without looking at him. "Take that directly to Physician Song's pavilion in the eastern district. Sect medicine is excellent for spiritual wounds, but Song's mortal decoctions are far better for treating damage to the flesh without stirring up the meridians, and if we take him to the Medicine Peak, the Medicine Peak will want to know what happened, and then they'll want it in writing."
"And then it'll be in front of the council by noon," Nan Feng finished, nodding grimly.
"And then," said Jing Peishi, "someone on the council will ask why a disciple of the Cleansing Spring was wandering around the eastern cliffs at night during the week of the treaty renewal, and someone else will suggest he was meeting a spy, and someone else will suggest he is a spy, and by the end of the week Shizun will be answering questions before the Law Enforcement Elder about whether his lineage is loyal. And none of us want that. Especially not Shizun." He paused. "Especially not with the Thunder Peak looking for any excuse to take the boundary allocation."
Li Yuan sighed through his nose, a long-suffering, deeply aristocratic sigh that he had almost certainly learned from his mother. "Understood. I'll make sure our procurement accounts are balanced to the last copper coin, and that the Cinnabar Guild remembers who my third cousin is married to."
"Who is your third cousin married to?" asked Nan Feng.
"The Vice-Minister of Revenue's nephew."
"Is that good?"
"It's good for frightening merchants," said Li Yuan. "It's terrible for family dinners."
He Renxiao was not listening. He was looking at Mo Shuyi, who had not said a single word through any of this, and who was looking back at him.
The Vice-Minister, said a cold, sardonic voice in his memory. I believe his son has recently been promoted. He is said to be very diligent about reviewing military failures.
Down the mountain. Into town. For a whole day. With Mo Shuyi.
Watch him, Renren Xiao had said. Every excursion. Every whisper.
Well. He thought, with a hysterical little lurch of humor. At least I won't have to go far to watch.
X. Making Him Presentable
"Right," said Nan Feng, rising to her feet and dusting off her knees with the brisk purpose of a general about to march an army. "If he's going into town, he's not going like that."
"Like what?" said He Renxiao.
Four people looked at him with identical expressions.
"You look," said Li Yuan, with relish, "like a corpse somebody dug up, put in a dress, and then dropped in a ditch."
"Thank you, Young Master Li. Your poetry has improved."
"I've been practicing. On you. You're very inspiring." Li Yuan flicked his fan shut and pointed it at him. "Up. We're not leaving this room until you look like a disciple of a respectable sect, and not like a beggar who got lost on his way to rob a temple."
"I don't need help getting dressed."
"You don't need help falling off cliffs either, apparently, and yet here we are."
He Renxiao opened his mouth to argue. Mo Shuyi got there first, quietly, in the tone he used when an argument was finished whether anybody else knew it yet or not.
"His wound needs cleaning before anything else," he said. "Sit forward, Renxiao."
He Renxiao hesitated. His fingers tightened in the quilt. Then, slowly, because there was no sensible reason to refuse and every reason not to look like he was refusing, he leaned his head forward.
Nan Feng thrust a small porcelain basin of warm water and a stack of clean linen at Mo Shuyi, then knelt on He Renxiao's other side and began unwinding last night's bandage with quick, deft fingers. "Hold still. If you twitch, I'll put the needle in your neck."
"There's no needle."
"There will be if you twitch."
The bandage came away. The cool air of the room hit the wound and it stung, sharp, bright, and He Renxiao hissed through his teeth before he could stop it. Nan Feng clicked her tongue.
"It's opened again along the edge. You've been frowning in your sleep. You always frown in your sleep, did you know that? Like a grumpy old scholar who's been told his poems are bad."
"I do not."
"You do," said Li Yuan, Jing Peishi, and Mo Shuyi at the same time.
He Renxiao glared at the wall.
Mo Shuyi dipped a clean cloth into the basin and wrung it out with quiet precision. Then he leaned in, and his tall body blocked the dawn light from the window, and his shadow fell across He Renxiao, long and close.
The first touch of the cloth against his temple was so gentle that He Renxiao barely felt it.
That was the worst part. That was what he would remember afterwards, lying awake. Not that Mo Shuyi was gentle; he had always been gentle, with him, in the small things. It was that his gentleness was exactly the same as before. Exactly the same as every sickbed and every scraped knee and every splinter Mo Shuyi had ever picked out of his palm with the tip of a needle, frowning, while He Renxiao complained the entire time. The same slow, careful dabs at the dried blood along his hairline. The same faint warm breath against his forehead. The same small pause each time he flinched, waiting until the flinch had passed before going on. It was not the gentleness of a man who would one day stand over him on the Grand Terrace and look straight through him. And it was. It was the same man. The same hands.
Every brush of damp linen sent a shudder through him, down his spine, a horrible tangled mixture of instinctive comfort and paralyzing fear, two animals fighting over the same bone.
Kill him in his sleep, said Renren Xiao, inside his skull.
Poison his tea.
He looked at you with a hunger that had nothing to do with brotherhood.
He Renxiao stared fixedly at the collar of Mo Shuyi's robe, which was the only thing directly in front of his eyes. There was a tiny frayed thread at the seam. On the inside of the collar, almost hidden, a faint smudge of green: jade dust. He had been carving last night. Sitting up beside a sickbed, carving. Eleven pieces.
"You're shaking," Mo Shuyi said, very low, for him alone.
"It's cold."
"The brazier's lit."
"It's cold in my head."
There was a pause. He could have sworn he felt Mo Shuyi almost laugh: the faintest stir of breath, quickly suppressed. "Then I'll finish quickly," Mo Shuyi said, and did.
Nan Feng took over the moment he was done, dabbing the clean wound with a pungent green herbal paste that smelled of crushed mint and something swampy and made He Renxiao's eyes water all over again. "Bone-knitting salve," she said, with satisfaction. "Shixiong said it might scar. It won't. Not if I have anything to say about it. And I always have something to say about everything."
"We've noticed," said Li Yuan.
"Don't make me put it on you." She wound a fresh, narrow strip of linen neatly around He Renxiao's head, tucking the end in at the back with a firm little tug. "There. Now you look like a wounded hero instead of a wounded idiot. It's a very small difference, and people in town won't notice it, but I'll know."
Meanwhile Li Yuan had stalked across the room to Mo Shuyi's wardrobe, flung open the carved doors with the confidence of a man who has never in his life been told that a cupboard belonged to someone else, and begun pulling things out.
"No," he said, holding up a robe and dropping it on the floor. "No. Absolutely not. Shuyi-ge, do you own anything that isn't the color of a thundercloud?"
"Those are my clothes," said Mo Shuyi mildly.
"I'm aware they're your clothes, it's a tragedy. Why do we have to dress him from your wardrobe anyway?"
"Because his own room is on the other side of the peak," said Jing Peishi, "and the Law Enforcement patrol will want to know why you're carrying an armful of robes past their post at dawn during the week of the treaty renewal."
Li Yuan made a noise of deep suffering and went on rummaging. Then he stopped. He pulled out a folded set of travelling robes in pale celestial blue, simple and unembroidered, with a plain white inner layer, and held them up to the light, frowning.
"These are new," he said. "These have never been worn. They're not even your size, Shuyi-ge. The sleeves are too short." He turned around slowly. "These are his size."
Silence.
"They were a mistake from the tailor," said Mo Shuyi, without any change of expression at all.
"Mm-hm," said Li Yuan.
"Mm-hm," said Jing Peishi, from the corner, grinning like a fox who'd been handed the keys to the henhouse.
Nan Feng, very busily, began rolling up spare bandages.
He Renxiao felt his ears go hot. He had no idea why. It was a robe. It was a tailor's mistake. There was nothing at all embarrassing about a tailor's mistake. He could feel the heat crawling down his neck anyway, and he put a hand up to the side of his face as if to adjust his bandage, and scowled ferociously at the ceiling beam with the fish-shaped knot.
"Give them here," he snapped. "Before you get your perfumed fingerprints all over them."
"My fingers are not perfumed."
"Your fingers smell like the Imperial Consort's dressing room."
"Have you been in the Imperial Consort's dressing room?"
"I've smelled you. It's enough."
Li Yuan threw the robes at his head. He Renxiao caught them, wobbled, and was steadied from behind by a hand on his back that he did not need to look at to identify.
Dressing was a whole campaign in itself.
He Renxiao insisted on doing it alone. He managed the inner robe, mostly, though he had to sit down halfway through when the room tilted. He managed the outer robe, barely. Then he looked down at the wide white sash and realized his fingers had gone stupid and slow and would not tie a knot to save his life. He fumbled with it for a while, grimly, his tongue between his teeth, while four people pretended not to watch him.
"You've tied it backwards," said Li Yuan eventually.
"I tied it the way I like it."
"You've tied it the way a drunk mortician likes it. Turn around."
"I'm not—"
"Turn around, you stubborn mule, or I'll tell Shizun you were trying to cross the river on a log."
He Renxiao turned around.
Li Yuan undid the sash with three quick, impatient jerks and retied it properly, sharp and flat, the knot centered, the ends falling exactly the right length, with the ruthless competence of a boy who had been dressed by a staff of maidservants every day for the first eight years of his life and had watched every single one of them very carefully. His fingers were brisk and not at all gentle. They lingered, just for a moment, at the small of He Renxiao's back, smoothing down a fold that didn't need smoothing.
"There," Li Yuan said gruffly. "Now you look like a human being. Barely. Father would still be ashamed. But only of your face."
"Father is ashamed of my face as a matter of policy," said He Renxiao. "It's written in the clan register. Page forty."
"Page forty-two," said Li Yuan. "Page forty is the bit about Great-Grandfather's donkey."
There was a strange pause. Then, very quietly, so quietly that He Renxiao almost didn't catch it over the sound of Nan Feng packing her medicine case: "...You scared me, idiot. I thought you'd gone over. I stood on that path and looked down at the river and I thought—"
He stopped. He took his hands away.
"Anyway," said Li Yuan, in his normal voice, loudly. "Your hair is a disgrace. Shuyi-ge, do something about his hair. I refuse. I have my limits."
He Renxiao did not turn around. He did not trust his face. He stood there and looked at the sword rack on the far wall, at the single gleaming sword on it, and blinked very hard several times.
Like a dog with a bone, Renren Xiao had said of Mo Shuyi. But it was Li Yuan who'd been on the path. Li Yuan who'd found him. Li Yuan who'd scrubbed his blood out of a silk quilt in a bucket at the third watch, son of the Li clan, cousin of consorts, swearing the whole time no doubt, and who would sooner have walked into the sea than admit it. You're my little brother. Not my father's other son. Not the singing girl's boy. Brother. Said like it was an insult. Said like it was a fact.
He wished, suddenly and violently, that he could ask Renren Xiao what had happened to Li Yuan in the other life. He realized, with a cold drop in his stomach, that he didn't know. That in all of those memories, the Feather Hall and Frostgate and the water prison and the Terrace, Li Yuan had not appeared once.
He was in the capital, he told himself. He must have been in the capital.
He wasn't sure.
"Sit," said Mo Shuyi behind him.
He sat. On the low stool before the bronze mirror, the one Mo Shuyi never used, which was old and slightly warped and made everyone look as if they were being viewed from the bottom of a well. In it He Renxiao saw a pale, thin young man with a white bandage around his head and shadows under his eyes and his hair hanging loose and tangled to the middle of his back, sticking up on one side where he'd slept on it. He looked, he thought, like a cat that had been dragged backwards through a hedge and was trying to pretend it had meant to go that way.
Behind him, in the warped bronze, Mo Shuyi picked up a wooden comb.
"I can do my own hair," He Renxiao said.
"You can," Mo Shuyi agreed. "Badly."
"I do it perfectly well."
"You do it with your fingers, in the dark, and then you stick a pin through it and hope." The comb touched the ends of his hair, very lightly. "Hold still."
He held still.
It took a long time. Mo Shuyi was not quick. He started at the ends, the way you were supposed to, working the knots out one by one, patiently, holding the hair above each tangle in his fist so it wouldn't pull at the scalp. He was careful, very careful, around the bandage. Every now and then the comb snagged and He Renxiao winced, and every single time the comb stopped and waited and then went on more slowly. The room had gone quiet around them. Nan Feng was folding linen. Jing Peishi was writing something on a strip of paper at the desk, his brush whispering. Li Yuan was pretending to fan himself by the window and watching them both in the reflection of the window lattice with a peculiar expression, half sour and half something else.
He Renxiao closed his eyes.
He could feel his heartbeat in his temple, slow now. Each slow pull of the comb tugged gently at his scalp and let go. The fire snapped in the brazier. It was so quiet. It was so warm. It was so absolutely, mortally dangerous, sitting here with his back to this man, his throat bare, his eyes shut, and his body had simply decided, without asking his permission, that it was safe.
Fool, said Renren Xiao, very far away. You pathetic, soft-bellied fool.
I know, He Renxiao thought back. I know. Shut up.
Mo Shuyi gathered his hair up into his hands, twisted it, and bound it high at the crown with a strip of white ribbon. Then he paused. He Renxiao opened his eyes and saw him in the mirror, holding a hairpin, looking at it.
It was not He Renxiao's pin. His own was a plain stick of peachwood that he'd whittled himself, and it was, he vaguely remembered, now probably lying somewhere in the rocks below the eastern cliff. This one was dark wood too, but carved: a long slender shaft ending in a small, crude, slightly lopsided cat's head, the ears uneven.
"Shixiong," He Renxiao said. His voice came out strange. "That's not mine."
"Yours was lost." Mo Shuyi's voice was entirely flat. He did not meet his eyes in the mirror. "This was lying around."
"Lying around."
"Yes."
"In your room. A hairpin. With a cat on it."
"The tailor," said Mo Shuyi, "made a mistake."
Over by the window Li Yuan made a sound like a kettle beginning to boil. Jing Peishi coughed loudly into his sleeve, several times, his shoulders shaking. Nan Feng dropped a roll of bandages and dove under the desk after it and did not come back out for a while.
He Renxiao looked at the lopsided cat in the mirror. Then at Mo Shuyi's face, which was perfectly composed, and at the tips of Mo Shuyi's ears, which were going slowly, unmistakably red.
It was the face from behind the stables. The boy with the scowl and the red ears, who'd shoved a clumsy jade cat into his hand and stalked off without a word. The boy who had not yet hung in the dark for nine days. Who had not yet heard a soft, sorrowful voice say passed into the cycle of reincarnation. Who had not done anything, yet, at all.
Not yet, He Renxiao thought. And then, more strangely, with a sudden fierce lurch that he did not understand: Not ever. Not if I'm there first.
"It's ugly," he said aloud.
"Then take it out."
He didn't take it out.
Mo Shuyi slid the pin into place, firmly, carefully, through the knot. His fingertips brushed the back of He Renxiao's neck once, very lightly, as he drew his hand away. Then he stepped back, and the warm shadow he'd cast moved off him, and the cool dawn air came in where he had been.
"Done," said Mo Shuyi.
XI. The Road Down
After that, everyone seemed to have something to give him.
Nan Feng came out from under the desk, red in the face, and pressed a small embroidered pouch into his hands. It was heavy. "Medicine," she said, very businesslike. "Three packets. The red one's for pain, but only if it's very bad, and don't take it on an empty stomach or you'll be sick on Li Yuan-ge's shoes."
"Then I'll definitely take it on an empty stomach."
"A-Xiao." She glared up at him. "The blue one is for dizziness. The white one's just sugared ginger, because you'll complain about the taste of the other two, and I know you, and I'm not going to listen to you complaining from all the way down here in the library." She paused. Then, quickly, before he could stop her, she threw her arms around his middle and squeezed, hard enough to make him wheeze. "Don't you dare fall off anything in town."
"There's nothing to fall off in town."
"You'll find something. You always do." She let go, scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve, and stomped back to her medicine case.
Jing Peishi folded the strip of paper he had been writing on and tucked it into He Renxiao's sleeve, then followed it with a small, heavy purse that clinked. "The list," he said. "Cinnabar, high grade, two jin. Array parchment, forty sheets, the yellow kind, not the white kind, the white kind tears. Spirit-binding talismans, one box. Unrefined spirit stones, one crate, not from the Guo family stall, they mix in river pebbles and paint them. And the purse is for Physician Song's fee, and the receipt from Physician Song comes back to me, not to the Treasury Pavilion. Understood?"
"Why not the Treasury Pavilion?"
"Because," said Jing Peishi, "if the Treasury Pavilion sees a receipt for a head wound, the Treasury Pavilion will ask what the head wound is, and we've had this conversation." He reached out to ruffle He Renxiao's hair, remembered the bandage, remembered the hairpin, and changed course at the last second to pat him on the shoulder instead, twice, quite hard. "And if Li Yuan tries to buy a new fan with the boundary maintenance money, you have my full permission to hit him."
"I have never—" began Li Yuan.
"The spring of last year. The fan with the peonies."
"That was a diplomatic gift!"
"To whom?"
"To myself. From the Li family. Which I represent." Li Yuan snapped his own fan open with great dignity, and it was, in fact, a fan with peonies on it. Everybody looked at it. He snapped it shut again.
Jing Peishi turned to Mo Shuyi last, and his voice changed again, lower and plainer, the chief disciple speaking to the second.
"The eastern gate," he said. "Take the long way down, by the waterfall stairs, not the cliff path. Keep him off his sword, he's not steady enough for flight. If anyone at the gate asks about the bandage, he slipped on wet stone during morning practice. Nothing more. Not the cliffs. Not the night." A pause. "And Shuyi. Watch him."
"I always do," said Mo Shuyi.
He said it simply. Not as a boast or a promise. As a fact, like the weather.
He Renxiao, standing between them with a pouch of medicine in one hand and a list in his sleeve and a hairpin with a lopsided cat in his hair, felt the words land in his chest like a stone dropping into a well. And he thought, with a strange, dizzy clarity: So do I, Shixiong. So will I. Every minute of today. You have no idea.
And, said a small, stubborn, entirely un-Renren-Xiao-like voice somewhere underneath, neither do I.
Jing Peishi gathered his things. Nan Feng snapped her medicine case shut, and stood on her toes to adjust the knot of He Renxiao's bandage one final time, though it didn't need adjusting, and then pointed one stern finger in his face.
"Don't you dare fall off your sword on the way down the steps, Renxiao!"
"I'm not allowed on my sword."
"Then don't fall off your feet!"
And they went, the two of them, out through the sliding door into the bright morning, Nan Feng still talking, Jing Peishi laughing at something she'd said, their voices dwindling down the corridor until the door slid shut behind them with a soft wooden thud.
In the quiet that followed there were only three of them left.
Li Yuan was at the window, fanning himself with the peonies and looking out at the mist rising off the valley, his profile sharp and haughty and very much the son of the Li clan. Mo Shuyi was at the door, lifting a dark grey travelling cloak from its peg. And He Renxiao stood in the middle of his Shixiong's cluttered, ink-smelling room, in robes that had been made for him and were too small for anyone else, with his heart going hard and slow against his ribs.
Remember the plan, said Renren Xiao, a whisper in the back of his skull. Watch him. Distrust him.
I'm remembering, he answered. I'm remembering everything. The snow. The jade. The handkerchief. I'm remembering that Shizun says I went to see him, and I didn't. I'm remembering a white thread under my fingernail.
I'm going to watch everyone.
Mo Shuyi crossed the room, shook out the cloak, and dropped it around He Renxiao's shoulders without asking. He drew it closed at the throat and fastened the clasp there with two quick, practiced movements, and his knuckles brushed the underside of He Renxiao's jaw, warm and dry.
"The mountain winds are sharp today," he said quietly.
"I'm not cold."
"You said it was cold in your head."
"That's different."
"Mm." Mo Shuyi tugged the hood up over the bandage and the ridiculous little cat, carefully, so the fabric wouldn't press on the wound. His dark eyes rested on He Renxiao's face for a long moment from very close, as if he were memorizing it. As if he were checking that it was still there. "Keep it on anyway. For me."
He Renxiao opened his mouth to say something cutting. Nothing came out. He closed it again and scowled at the floor instead, and pulled the edges of the cloak tighter around himself, and did not, absolutely did not, lean into the warmth of it.
"If you two are quite finished," said Li Yuan from the window, without turning around, "the Cinnabar Guild opens at the hour of the dragon, and the gate guards change at the hour of the snake, and if we get the new shift instead of the old one, it'll be Captain Wu, and Captain Wu hates me."
"Everyone hates you," said He Renxiao.
"Captain Wu hates me specifically. I beat his nephew at weiqi in front of the Sect Master. His nephew cried. It was the best day of my life." Li Yuan snapped the fan shut and finally turned around, and looked at the two of them, and something sour and unreadable crossed his face. Then he sniffed. "You look ridiculous with that hood up. Like a monk who's been expelled for gambling."
"You look ridiculous all the time," said He Renxiao. "Like a peacock that's been expelled for vanity."
"At least I'm a peacock."
"Peacocks are just chickens with a bad attitude and a tailor."
"Then you're a chicken with no tailor, which is just a chicken." Li Yuan stalked past them to the door and hauled it open. Morning light poured in, gold and cold and smelling of pine, and somewhere far below in the valley, through the thinning mist, the rooftops of the market town were beginning to catch the sun. "Come on, then, chicken. And if you faint on the waterfall stairs I'm not carrying you. Shuyi-ge can carry you. He'll like it."
Mo Shuyi said nothing at all. But the tips of his ears had gone red again.
He Renxiao stood on the threshold for one breath longer. He looked back once into the room, at the stacked scrolls and the half-finished painting and the heap of little green jade offcuts on the corner of the desk, and the one at the top with its two uneven pointed ears.
Then he turned his face toward the valley, and the town, and the four days that remained before the Feather Tribe came up the mountain, and whatever lay waiting at the bottom of the waterfall stairs.
Try not to die this time, Renren Xiao had said.
He Renxiao pulled his Shixiong's cloak tight, tucked his hands into his too-short sleeves, and stepped out into the morning, between his half-brother and the man he had been told to kill.
I'll try, he thought. But I'm not promising anything.