The hunters did not come that night.

Qingluo lay awake until the sky went grey, listening for the knock that did not come, and when at last the torches on the lower slope had guttered out and the bells had faded into the wind, she rose and washed her face in water so cold it made her teeth ache and went to the kitchen to begin the day.

The kitchen was warm and smelled of millet and wood smoke. The great iron pot already simmered on the stove, and Granny Pei stood before it with her back to the door and a wooden ladle in her fist, in a stance Qingluo knew well. It was the posture of a woman who has been waiting a long time to say something and has rehearsed it twice.

"Sit," Granny Pei said, without turning.

"I should check on—"

"Sit."

Qingluo sat. A bowl of porridge appeared in front of her with a small thump, and a pair of pickled turnips beside it. Granny Pei lowered herself onto the stool opposite, put her hands on her knees, and fixed her with a look.

"Who is he?"

"A patient." Qingluo picked up her chopsticks. "A traveler. He was found half frozen at the gate—"

"A traveler."

"With frostbite, and a wound that went bad on the road. From very far away, I think, though he hasn't said where."

"A traveler," Granny Pei said again, in a voice of terrible gentleness, "who has iron marks on both wrists, and who nearly took the lantern out of the boy's hand without so much as opening his eyes." She leaned forward. "A traveler whose eyes shine in the dark."

The porridge turned to paste in Qingluo's mouth.

"Child," Granny Pei said. "I have been cooking in this house for thirty years. I have fed bandits and magistrates and one terrible poet. I know what a man looks like when he is afraid of the road, and I know what a man looks like when he is afraid of what is behind him. And I know what you look like when you are lying to me, because you have the worst face for it in all of Yunmo."

Qingluo set the chopsticks down. "He is hurt," she said, and her voice was low. "And he will die if I turn him out. That's all I know for certain. The rest, I don't know yet. I don't want to know it until I have to."

The old woman looked at her for a long time. Then she sighed, a huge, put-upon sigh, and reached over to pat her hand. It was a rough, brisk pat, with a hard bone of love underneath it.

"You have always been a fool about the sick," she said. "Eat."

After breakfast Qingluo carried a tray to the herb room. The man, Ziyan, was awake. He was sitting up against the wall with the blanket pooled around his waist, pale and gaunt in the grey light, his black hair falling loose over the shoulders of the borrowed robe, and he watched her come in with the flat, unreadable gaze of a cat on a high shelf.

The bowl from last night had gone untouched. She had left it on the stool, and it had grown a skin and gone cold. She took it away without comment and set down the new one, steaming.

"I'm not going to pretend this is simple," she said, sitting. "You can't leave this room. Not yet. There will be travelers through the pass, and if the road stays open, guests. If anyone sees your eyes, there will be questions I can't answer."

"A reasonable concern."

"So there have to be rules." She counted them off on her fingers. "First. You stay in the back rooms and out of the common hall. Second. You don't frighten the household. Third, and this is the one that matters most, you don't use your power. Not for anything. Not even to light a candle."

His gaze sharpened. "Power?"

"Yesterday you made a fire in your hand, and it nearly killed you." She did not look away. "I'm not a fool."

He was silent a moment. Then, to her surprise, something almost like amusement crossed his face, brief and sardonic. "No," he said. "I begin to see that you are not."

"Do you agree?"

"On one condition." He leaned his head against the wall, and in the dim light his eyes had a faint, steady shine, like water at the bottom of a well. "I have rules of my own."

"Go on."

"No one touches me while I sleep." He said it flatly, with no inflection at all, and that was how she knew it mattered. "No one asks me the name I had before. Ziyan is what you have. It will remain what you have." He paused. "And you will stop carrying everything on your back as if the roof would fall in if you set it down."

She blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"You are dead on your feet. You have been since the moment I first saw you. You taste each herb ten breaths by the count, and I have seen you do it forty times since I woke, and you have not once asked anyone to do a single thing for you. It is making me ill to watch." His mouth twisted. "Whatever else I am, I would prefer not to be healed by a corpse."

"That isn't a rule," she said. "That's an insult."

"It is both."

She should have been angry. She was aware of it, faintly, as one is aware of an itch that has not yet become a scratch. But the surprise of it had gone through her like a cold draught, and what rose in its place was something so unfamiliar that she did not at first recognize it. It was the sensation of being seen.

"I'll consider it," she said stiffly.

"See that you do."

She picked up the fresh bandages. "I need to look at your back. The wound runs under the ribs and around. I want to see how the stitches are holding."

He turned without protest, and she knelt on the cot behind him and drew the borrowed robe down off his shoulders.

It was a mistake, though not the one she had braced for.

She had expected the wound. She had seen the wound, and cleaned it, and stitched it. But in the grey daylight, with nothing to occupy her hands except the careful unwinding of linen, she saw the rest of him. The long muscle of his back, narrowing to the waist, the shoulder blades sharp beneath the skin like the folded edges of something that had once had wings. And everywhere, crossing and recrossing it, the old scars. Thin pale lines, hundreds of them, in neat bands, the history of a thing that had been bound and lashed and bound again. Around his neck, below the black fall of his hair, a faint band of paler skin, where something heavy had rested for a very long time.

She stopped breathing.

His spine had gone rigid. He did not turn his head. "Well?" he said, very evenly. "Say what you like. Everyone does."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

A beat. Then, quieter: "Good."

Her fingers, when she began again, were not quite steady. She laid the cloth against the wound, peeled back the old dressing, and as she worked, her knuckles brushed along one of the old scars, a thin, raised line that ran from his shoulder blade to his hip. She felt, under her touch, the muscle go still as a held breath.

She should have taken her hand away. She did not. She smoothed her thumb, once, along the length of the scar, a movement so small and so natural that she was not sure she had decided to make it. She felt him shiver.

Neither of them spoke. The air in the little room grew tight and strange. The scent of him, cold pine and smoke and that wild undertone, filled her nose. Beneath her fingertips his skin was warm, and she could count the slow beat of his heart in the hollow beneath his ear, and she was suddenly, acutely aware that she was kneeling on a cot behind a half-clothed man she did not know, and that he was a good deal more than a man.

He turned his head just a little. Not enough to look at her. Only enough that she could see the edge of his jaw, and the tension in it.

The door banged open.

"Sister Qing, Granny says—"

Qingluo shot upright, dropping the bandage. A-Du stood in the doorway with a stack of folded towels in his arms and his mouth open, and across the room, where he had snapped his head around at the sound, Ziyan met his stare with eyes that blazed gold.

It lasted only a heartbeat. But in that heartbeat A-Du saw, and the towels slid slowly from his hands and fell to the floor.

Qingluo moved before she thought. She crossed the room in two strides and put herself between them, her back to Ziyan, one hand held out toward the boy the way one holds a hand toward a startled colt.

"A-Du."

"His eyes," A-Du whispered. "They—they shone. Like the kitchen cat's. When it sees a mouse."

"It's the fever." It was the worst lie she had told in three years, and she told it in her calmest voice. "Some fevers do that. It makes the eyes bright. You've seen it, haven't you? When you had the red cough last spring?"

"I didn't—"

"It will pass." She crouched, so that she was at his eye level, and took his shoulders. "A-Du, listen to me. This man is very ill. And there are some people who might be frightened of a sick man's strange eyes, and might say unkind things, or might make him leave when he is not well enough. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

He shook his head slowly. He was twelve, and not stupid, and the look he gave her over her shoulder, toward the cot, was the long, uncertain look of a child deciding how much of the world he is willing to be told.

"Can it be a secret?" he said finally. "A real one? Like the kind in the storybooks?"

Relief went through her so sharply that it was almost pain. "The best kind," she said. "The kind that only you and I and Granny Pei know. And if you can keep it, you get the first pick of the sesame candy when the next peddler comes."

"All of it?"

"Half."

"Two thirds."

"You are extremely good at this," she said, and he grinned, tremulous but real, and picked up his towels and fled.

In the silence that followed she heard, from the cot behind her, a low sound that took her a moment to place. It was the dry, rusty beginnings of a laugh, quickly strangled.

"Two thirds," Ziyan said. "He negotiates like a magistrate."

"Be quiet," she said, but her ears were hot, and her hands, when she turned back to the bandages, were not entirely her own.

She found Granny Pei in the dispensary after noon, grinding mustard seed with a vigor that suggested murder. The old woman did not look up.

"The boy told me," she said.

"Granny—"

"He did not tell me *what.* He told me there was a secret and that I was to know it and that it was very, very important." The pestle came down. "He looked as if he had swallowed a lantern. I have decided I do not want to hear the rest, so you will not tell me. But I will say this once."

She set the pestle aside and wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at Qingluo, and all the sharpness had gone out of her face and left something older and more tired behind it.

"I have watched you pay for one dead man for three years," she said. "I will not watch you pay for another. I will keep my mouth shut, and I will keep the boy's shut, and I will cook for your guest. But if this one so much as lifts his hand against you, or this house, or the child, I will put him in the stewpot with my own two hands. Whatever he is. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Granny."

"Good." The old woman sniffed. "Now take him a decent meal. That poor wretch looks like a plucked chicken."

Qingluo almost laughed, and found she was close to tears instead. She bent and kissed the old woman's weathered cheek, which earned her a scowl and a smack with the dish towel, and went to do as she was told.

The afternoon passed. She tested the powder from his sleeve in a dozen ways, with silver and with ash and with a dab on a snail she kept for the purpose, and the snail curled up and did not move for an hour. She sat with the little dead thing in her palm and the packet open on the table and felt something cold crawl up the back of her neck. Whatever had been added to her Quiet Pine, it had been added with care and knowledge. It was no accident of the road.

She told no one. She wrote the results in her ledger in a small, upright hand, and locked the ledger in its drawer.

And as the light thickened toward dusk, and the wind came back sighing from the heights, she was in the common room laying the lamps when she heard it.

A knock. Slow. Even. Three strokes, measured as a bell.

She stood very still, with the taper burning down toward her fingers. A-Du, at the far end of the room, went white. In the kitchen, the cleaver stopped.

The knock came again.

She set the taper down, smoothed her sleeves with both hands, and crossed the room to the great door. She drew the bolt and pulled it open, and the wind and the last light of day came in together.

A man stood in the snow.

He was tall and spare and past middle age, with a face weathered to the color of old leather, and he wore a long robe the grey of wet slate, patched at the hem, and a wide straw hat with the snow melting on its brim. Over one shoulder he carried a staff, and from the staff, ringing softly in the wind, hung a small bronze bell. At his belt, bound with red cord, was a bundle of yellow paper strips covered in script.

He lifted his head. His eyes were black and tired and extraordinarily patient, and he looked at her for a moment as if he were reading something written on her face.

"Forgive the hour, young mistress," said the demon hunter, in a pleasant, quiet voice, and the bronze bell on his staff chimed once, a clear, cold note that she felt in her back teeth. "I wonder if you might have a room for a tired man. And a cup of tea."