The east room was the warmest in the inn, which was the only reason it held only one bed.

It had been built forty years ago by the first innkeeper, a stout widow with strong opinions about drafts, and she had laid the chimney flue straight through the wall beside the sleeping platform so that on the coldest nights the bricks beneath the quilts would hold the heat until dawn. It was the room in which the family of the house had slept when there had been a family of the house. For three years Qingluo had slept in the dispensary on a cot among her herbs, because the east room held too much quiet. Now Granny Pei stood in the doorway with her arms full of bedding and her chin set, and in the lamplight her face was the face of a general who had won a war and did not intend to be thanked.

"Two quilts," she announced. "A pillow each. The good blanket, the grey one, which you may share. And a hot brick for the foot of the bed." She dumped the bundle on the platform. "There is a screen in the corner for the changing of clothes. I expect it to be used. I have no wish to see anything I do not already know the shape of."

"Granny," said Qingluo, weakly.

"Do not Granny me. You made the bed, child. Now you will lie in it." She narrowed her eyes at Ziyan, who stood by the window with his arms folded and an expression of lofty distaste. "And you. I am cooking you three meals a day and cleaning the blood from my floors, and you will be civil. I do not care if you were born in a palace or a pond."

"Madam," Ziyan said, with enormous dignity, "I have never been in a pond."

"Good." She sniffed, and went out, and the door clicked shut behind her with the finality of a verdict.

Silence.

The lamp hissed. Snow ticked against the shutter. In the middle of the room stood the sleeping platform, a broad bed of dark wood piled with quilts, perhaps four feet across. It was not a large bed. It had never seemed small before.

"I will take the floor," said Ziyan.

"You will not. You have a wound that has not closed. You'll catch a chill in your lungs on those boards, and then I will have to treat you for pneumonia, and I do not have time."

"Then you will take the floor."

"I am the healer. I decide where the patient sleeps."

"I am not a patient, I am a guest."

"You are a *husband.*" She heard herself say it, and went hot to the ears, and rushed on. "A husband who sleeps on the floor while his wife takes the bed will be noticed. A-Du will wonder. Granny will wonder aloud. There are going to be guests, with the snow, and they will see everything. We can't afford the floor."

He was silent. She could see him turning it over, the logic of it, with the grim distaste of a man forced to concede a point to an adversary he respects. At last he let out a short breath through his nose.

"A wall," he said.

"What?"

"A wall. Between us. There is a bolster in the corner." He nodded at it. "And the pillows. We build a rampart down the middle of the bed, and neither of us crosses it. It is a standard arrangement in the old romances."

"You read romances?"

"I have been alive for three hundred years. I have read everything."

She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, to keep from smiling. "Very well. A rampart."

They built it together, in a silence so formal that it was nearly comic. The bolster went down the center of the platform, a long cylinder of buckwheat husk in a faded blue cover. She added her pillow, he added his, and they stood back and surveyed the result, a lumpy, crooked fortification that ran the length of the bed and divided it into two narrow territories. It did not look like a wall. It looked like a pile of laundry that had been given ideas.

"It will do," he said.

"It will do," she agreed.

She took her night robe from the chest and went behind the screen. It was a flimsy thing of oiled paper on a wooden frame, painted with faded herons, and every sound carried through it. She heard him turn away. She heard the creak of the floor as he walked to the far side of the room and stood, presumably, facing the wall. She slid off her day robe and her outer skirt and her sash with fingers that fumbled at every knot, and she thought, with a sense of unreality, *I am undressing three feet from a man I met a day ago, who calls me a poisoner, and who is not a man.* The nightgown clung to her skin, damp from the humid air, and she pulled it over her head and stood a moment with her forehead pressed to the frame of the screen.

She could hear him breathing. Slowly, carefully, far too evenly, the breathing of a man who was concentrating very hard on a corner of the ceiling.

When she came out, he was staring at the shutter as though it had personally offended him. The tips of his ears were pink. She noticed it with the odd detachment of exhaustion, and filed it away, and said nothing.

They climbed into bed from opposite sides.

The quilts were thick and smelled of cedar and sun. She lay on her back with her hands folded on her stomach, as stiff as a corpse laid out for burial, and stared at the beams. On the far side of the rampart, she felt the bed shift as he lowered himself with a stifled hiss, favoring his side. The lamp was out. In the dark she could hear him settling, the soft rustle of cloth, and the breath that went out of him when he finally lay still.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

"He believed us," said Ziyan finally, into the dark. His voice was quiet. "Mostly."

"Mostly," she said.

"He will come back."

"I know."

"The bell on the gate..." He stopped. She heard his breath catch, slightly, the sound of a man swallowing something unpleasant. "I cannot leave. Even if I could walk. It would announce me to the entire mountain."

"I know." She turned her head on the pillow, though she could see nothing. "I am sorry. If I had said nothing, if I had let him open the door..."

"He would have seen what I am. And then he would have done what he does." The words were flat. "You did what you had to. I am not a fool, Qingluo. I know the price of it."

It was the first time he had used her name. It slid into the dark between them, soft and unadorned, and she lay very still and did not say anything.

"He is not a bad man," she said at last. "The priest."

"No. I do not think he is."

"Do you know why he thinks it was you? His brother. Do you know anything..."

"I have never harmed anyone in these mountains." A pause, and then, more quietly, "I did not come here to kill. I came here to die, I think. Though I did not say it to myself in so many words. I wanted a quiet place to bleed."

She did not answer. There was nothing to say. She thought of the grey-green slough in his wound, and the powder in the paper, and the shape of that other sentence she had not let herself finish. *Three winters. A death that should not have been.* There was a cold place in her chest where the thought was trying to take root, and she pressed her hand over it, as one presses a bruise.

"I am afraid," she said, before she knew she was going to.

He was quiet for a long moment. "Of the priest?"

"Of being wrong. I have been wrong before, and a person died." She swallowed. "I would rather not be wrong again."

There was a long silence. She thought he had fallen asleep. Then, unexpectedly, from the far side of the bolster, came a low, dry voice. "I have been wrong about a great many things. I was wrong about a woman once. It cost me three years in a cage."

She turned her face toward the wall and found that her eyes had filled.

"That is a terrible thing to be wrong about," she said.

"Yes."

"I am sorry."

"Do not be sorry. Be quiet. I am trying to hate you, and you are making it difficult."

She laughed, a small, wet, helpless sound, and pressed her fist against her mouth to stifle it. From the other side of the rampart came a dry exhale that might have been the ghost of his own. Then silence, deep and warm, and the slow, familiar creak of the house settling around them in the cold.

She slept. She had not meant to. She had meant to lie awake and listen for the bell, and instead the exhaustion that had been piling up in her for weeks came down all at once like a wall of snow, and the last thing she heard was the sound of the wind in the eaves and the quiet, steady breathing of another person in the dark.

She woke once, in the black heart of the night, to a sound she knew.

It was a shiver. A fine, continuous tremor, running through the mattress. She lay still and listened, and heard, from the far side of the bolster, the faint chattering of teeth clenched against the cold.

She thought of his wound. His yao strength, burned out of him. A creature that had been built to carry a furnace in its chest, and now had only embers. The room was warm, but it was a human warmth, and he was shivering inside a nest of quilts like a child.

*It is not my business,* she told herself.

The shiver deepened.

She lay with her eyes open in the dark for the space of ten breaths, the way she counted herbs. Then she turned onto her side, and reached across the rampart, and put her hand flat against his back.

He went rigid. She felt the whole length of him lock, the long muscle tight under the thin cloth. "Do not," he said, very low.

"I am taking your pulse," she said. "Professionally."

A pause. Then, with what seemed to be a great effort of will, he unclenched. She felt it go out of him, a slow, shuddering exhale. Under her palm his heart was beating fast and light, and in the dark she could not see his face, but she heard him breathe in, as if bracing against something, and then, to her enormous surprise, he rolled slowly over and eased himself backward until his shoulder blades met the bolster, and the heat of her hand, and the warm curve of her arm.

He did not say anything. She did not say anything. She lay with her hand against his spine, and he lay with his back to her, curled slightly, like an animal seeking the heat of another body, and slowly, minute by minute, the tremor in him quieted and stilled.

She should have taken her hand away. She counted his pulse instead. It was a strange rhythm, slow and then quick, a little uneven, like a bird's. She counted it for a long time. At some point, without deciding to, she drew the quilt higher over his shoulder with her free hand. At some point the sound of his breath deepened and slowed into the heavy, even rhythm of sleep. At some point she stopped counting, and her own eyes drifted shut.

When she woke it was morning, and she was warm.

It was an unfamiliar warmth, deep and total, all the way down her front and around her back. For one hazy, unguarded moment she lay in it with her eyes shut, smiling a little at nothing, and thought it was a good dream. Then she noticed that her face was pressed against something firm and warm and rhythmically moving, that her fingers were curled into a fistful of coarse cotton, and that something heavy and strong was wrapped across her back.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying in the middle of the bed. The rampart was gone. She did not know where. Somewhere in the night, the bolster had been shoved to the floor, and the pillows scattered, and she had ended up pressed into the hollow of Lu Ziyan's chest with her head tucked beneath his chin and her knee hooked over his leg, and his arm, his long, scarred, powerful arm, was locked around her waist like a rope.

Her whole body went still.

He was asleep. His face was inches from her own, relaxed, with the hard lines of it gone soft and young, his black hair spilling across the pillow and the long lashes resting on his cheeks. He looked, absurdly, at peace. A thin ray of morning light fell across his mouth. His breath stirred the loose hair at her temple.

She thought, quite clearly, *I should move.*

She thought, *in a moment.*

He stirred. The arm around her waist tightened, instinctively, the way a sleeper holds onto warmth, and a low sound rose in his throat, a sort of contented rumble that she had never heard from a human being, and that was most decidedly not human at all. Her heart leaped like a hooked fish.

His eyes opened.

They were dark, and then, for the length of a heartbeat, as he focused on her face, a molten ring of gold flickered around the pupil and sank again. He stared. She stared. Neither of them breathed. The whole room seemed to hang suspended in the pale light, the dust turning, the beams creaking, the distant clatter of Granny's pots rising through the floor.

Then they both moved at once.

She shoved against his chest and he flung himself backward and the quilt tangled between them, and she rolled off the edge of the platform in a flurry of limbs and landed in a graceless heap on the floor, and he sat bolt upright with his hair standing on end and his face, to her intense satisfaction, a deep and furious red.

"You," he said, "crossed the wall."

"*You* crossed the wall!"

"I did no such thing. I was asleep."

"You pulled me in! You had me by the waist like a, a sack of millet!"

"You put your hand on my back in the middle of the night!"

"I was taking your pulse!"

"You were *cuddling!*"

"I was *treating* you!" She scrambled up, clutching her robe, her hair a wild tangle around her face, and glared at him from the floor with all the dignity she could muster. "I will have you know that I have never in my life cuddled a patient, and I do not intend to begin with one who snores!"

"I do not snore."

"Like a bear in a barrel!"

"I am a *fox!*"

They both froze.

The word hung in the sunlit air between them. He had said it without thinking, in the heat of the argument, and she could see the instant he realized it, the way his eyes went wide, the way his mouth snapped shut. It was the first time he had said it aloud. And in that moment, standing in a crumpled night robe on a cold wooden floor, with her ears burning and her heart still racing from a dream she did not intend to remember, Qingluo began to laugh.

It was not a dignified laugh. It started as a hiccup and grew into a wheeze, and then she was bent over with her hand on her ribs, tears squeezing out of her eyes, trying to stop and failing. It had been so long. She could not remember the last time she had laughed like this, helplessly, with the whole of her body. Somewhere in the middle of it she looked up, and found him staring at her with an expression of the most complete bewilderment, as if she had sprouted wings.

Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth twitched.

"It is not funny," he said.

"No," she gasped. "It is not."

"I was being serious."

"I know."

"I am a very dangerous creature."

"I know. You snore."

"I do *not*—" And then he, too, was laughing, a low, rusty, astonished sound, as if the muscles of it had not been used in years. He fell back against the pillows with his hand over his eyes, shoulders shaking, and for a long moment the two of them laughed together in the pale morning like fools, until the laughter dwindled and left behind a strange, bright, tender silence that neither of them knew how to fill.

She wiped her eyes. He lowered his hand and looked at her. The color had not left his face. The light caught the edge of his jaw and turned his eyes the dark brown of strong tea, and she saw, with a small jolt, that he was looking at her mouth.

She looked away. She busied herself with her sash.

"I should dress," she said.

"Yes," he said, in an odd voice. "I think you should."

She went behind the screen, and he turned to face the wall, and they spent the next several minutes dressing in a silence so thick that she could have cut it with a scalpel.

When she came out, smoothing her hair, she found the door standing ajar. Granny Pei was framed in it, a tray of steaming millet porridge balanced on one broad forearm, her face composed into an expression of the most perfect innocence. Her eyes traveled slowly over the wreckage of the bed, the fallen bolster, the quilt in a heap on the floor, the pillows strewn across the boards like casualties, and then over the two of them, standing at opposite ends of the room, both red to the hairline.

She said nothing.

She set the tray on the table. She crossed to the chest, took out a third quilt, thick and blue and embroidered with cranes, and laid it carefully at the foot of the bed.

"The nights will get colder," said Granny Pei serenely. "You will want it."

She went out. At the door she paused, and Qingluo could have sworn she saw the old woman's shoulders shake, once, before the latch fell.