The cold came in the night.
It came the way it did at that altitude, without warning, a hard dry silver cold that crept through the shutters and under the doors and settled over the inn like a hand. By the second watch the water in the washbasin had grown a skin of ice. By the third, the wind had begun to hunt along the eaves with a long, thin, wavering note, and Qingluo, lying awake on her side of the bolster with her eyes on the dark, heard a sound from the far side that made her sit up.
It was a sharp, indrawn breath. A sound a man makes when he has been holding something in for hours and has just failed.
"Ziyan?"
"It is nothing."
"It is not nothing. Light the lamp."
"I can do it myself."
"You cannot," she said, "because you are not allowed to use that." She did not say what *that* was. She did not need to. She swung her feet to the floor, found the flint on the chest in the dark, and struck it, and the little lamp on the table bloomed into a warm circle of amber.
He was sitting on the edge of the platform with his back to her and his hands braced on his knees. The robe had slid from his shoulders. In the lamplight she could see the long line of his spine, the shoulder blades drawn up tight, and the dressing she had laid over the wound that morning, which had darkened along one edge. A fine tremor ran through him, and she realized, with a small cold drop of her stomach, that it was not the tremor of anger. He was shivering.
"The wound has gone damp," she said. "The cold has got into the bandage. Sit still."
"I am sitting."
"You are sitting very loudly." She fetched the little basin from beside the window, broke the thin ice with her fingernail, and set it on the brazier to warm. She laid out her things on the low table with the practiced economy of a person who has done a thing a thousand times: clean linen, a jar of salve, boiled silk in case a stitch had pulled, a sprig of mugwort for the smoke. The routine steadied her. It was a thing to do with her hands.
She knelt on the bed behind him and began, slowly, to unwind the old bandage.
For a while neither of them spoke. The linen came away in damp, stiff coils. Underneath, the wound was clean and closing, a long red seam along his ribs, the stitches tidy and tight, a little puffy at one end where the cold had pinched it. She cleaned it with warm water and then with wine, and felt him flinch and go still beneath her palm, and she murmured a thing she said to all her patients without thinking, *almost done, you are doing well,* and heard a short breath of dry laughter in the dark.
"I am being comforted," he said. "Like a horse."
"Horses are very good patients."
"They do not talk back."
"No. That is where they have the advantage."
She smoothed salve along the seam with two fingers. It smelled of pine resin and honey. Her hand moved along his side, and beneath it his skin was warm and rough with old scars, the thin lines she had learned by heart in the last week, the long one from shoulder blade to hip, the cluster at the base of his spine, the pale band at his nape where an iron collar had lain. She let her fingers drift across them without quite meaning to. Her thumb found the end of one and stopped.
He turned his head. Not much. Enough that the lamplight caught his profile.
"What is that?" he said.
"What?"
"On your hand."
She looked down. Her left hand was resting against his ribs, and the lamp had thrown the scar across the back of it into sharp relief: a pale, shiny stripe, a hand's width long, running from the knuckle of her forefinger to the wrist. She had stopped seeing it years ago. She had learned to reach for things with it so that nobody noticed.
"A burn," she said.
"I can see that it is a burn."
"A decoction. I was fifteen. I was apprenticed to a master healer in the river towns, and he had a way of teaching." She heard how light her own voice had come out, and was faintly impressed. "He made me carry the boiling pot across the room to see whether I would drop it. I did not drop it. I merely spilled it over my hand, which I understand was an adequate result."
"He did that on purpose?"
"He said a healer must learn to hold things that hurt."
The quiet that followed was a different quiet. She felt it before she heard it, a change in the air of the little room, the way the pressure drops before snow. He had gone entirely still. When he spoke, it was in a low, level voice she had not heard before.
"Does it still hurt?"
She opened her mouth to say *no.* It was the answer she gave everyone. It was a perfectly good answer, an honest one, because the burn had healed a long time ago and the nerves in it had gone dull and strange, a numb patch that only woke when the weather turned.
But that was not what he had asked. She could hear it. He was not asking about her hand.
"Sometimes," she said. And then, because the lamp was warm and the night was long and his back was bare under her palm, she said the rest. "When it is cold. When I am tired. When I make a mistake, I think. It is silly, there is no reason for it to know. But it does."
He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Mine too."
She looked at the pale bands crossing his spine. "Your scars?"
"They ache in the cold. They ache in the rain. They ache," and the corner of his mouth moved, "when I am among people who are kind to me. That is the worst. I do not understand it. It is a very strange kind of pain."
She did not answer. She knew what he meant. She had a hand on his back and a throat full of things she could not say, and she thought, quite suddenly and clearly, *I am not afraid of him.* She had not realized until that moment how afraid she had been of herself.
"Turn around," she said, gently. "I need to see the front. The cold may have got under the other edge."
He turned.
It was a small movement. He swung one knee onto the platform and pivoted, and the lamp threw his shadow huge against the wall, and for a moment they were facing each other at a distance of no more than a hand's breadth. His robe hung open. The old burned brand on his chest, below the collarbone, gleamed faint and red in the dimness, a slow ember pulse. The shadows of his lashes lay across his cheekbones. His eyes, in this light, were not brown and not gold but something in between, a dark amber, like honey held up to a candle.
She forgot what she had meant to do.
"Your hands," he said. "They are cold."
"Healers have cold hands. It is a rule."
"It is a terrible rule." He lifted his own hand, slowly, so slowly she could have stopped it, and his fingers closed lightly around her wrist. Not hard. Only a touch, the pad of his thumb resting on the inside of the joint where her pulse lived. She had felt that touch before. The first night, in the herb room, when he had caught her half dreaming and nearly broken her arm. This was nothing like that. It was as though he were holding something that might break. "You are always cold," he said. "I noticed it the first day."
"I am a very busy person."
"You are a very tired person."
"That too."
His thumb moved. A small, slow circle against the tender skin. She felt it in the soles of her feet. It went through her like warm wine, softening every joint, and her breath came out unsteady, and she saw him hear it. His eyes dropped to her mouth and came back up, and in them was something she had no name for, a naked, wary, wondering look, like a creature that has been bitten many times and still, against all sense, holds out a paw.
"Qingluo," he said.
"Yes."
"Do you think," and he stopped. He swallowed. The lamp hissed softly. "Never mind."
"What?"
"It is not a thing I should say."
"Then say it anyway."
He was very close. She could not have said which of them had moved. His breath stirred the loose hair at her temple. She could smell him, cold pine and woodsmoke and the faint sweetness of the salve, and she could feel the heat coming off his skin, and in the whole bright circle of the lamp there was nothing at all but the space between their mouths, and it was shrinking.
Her eyes began to close.
She thought, with great calm, *this is a mistake.* She thought, *he is a patient. He is a spirit. He is a stranger whose life I may have ruined.* She thought of the hunter's tired voice. She thought of a lamp guttering, three years ago, and a cooling hand. The thoughts went by like boats on a river, and she watched them go, and did not step into a single one.
She felt the brush of his breath on her lips.
Outside, in the courtyard, in the dark, the wind came sweeping down off the heights and found the old pine at the gate.
The bell rang.
It was a long, low, hollow sound, iron-green and mournful, rolling across the frozen yard and through the shutters and into the little room like a hand slapping a table. Every hair on her arms stood up. Beneath her fingers she felt him jerk, felt the whole length of him go taut as a bowstring, and she tore her hand out of his grip and scrambled backward across the bed so fast that she banged her elbow on the bedpost.
They stared at each other across a yard of quilts.
The bell swung again. Twice. Three times, softer, and fell silent.
"The wind," said Qingluo. Her voice came out in a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. "It is only the wind. It does that. In high gusts. It is a very light bell."
"Yes," said Ziyan.
"It is not," and she swallowed, "it does not mean anything."
"No."
Her hands had begun, absurdly, to shake. She seized the clean linen from the table and began to fold it, and unfolded it, and folded it again. Her face was burning. Her whole body was burning, and underneath the burn, scalding and sour, there was a cold, clear note of terror, because she knew exactly what she had been about to do, and she knew exactly how much it would cost them both.
"I will finish the dressing," she said. "It will only take a minute. Hold still."
Her voice had gone flat and brisk, the voice she used on the dying, on the frightened, on the family waiting outside the door. She heard it come down over the room like a shutter. She laid the linen against his ribs and wound it, quick and neat and impersonal, and did not once look at his face. "Keep it dry. No exertion. If you shiver again tonight, wake me. If the edges swell, wake me. It is a perfectly ordinary wound and it will heal in the ordinary way."
He said nothing. She tied off the bandage and sat back and began to gather her things, the salve, the basin, the little jar of silk, and her hands would not stop moving.
"Qingluo."
"It is late."
"Qingluo."
"We should sleep." She finally looked at him, and made her face into a smooth, polite thing, a closed door with a lamp behind it. "I am sorry. I was tired. It was a long day, and you were cold, and I think we were both a little foolish. It will not happen again."
He looked at her for a long moment. She watched the thing in his eyes go out, slowly, like a lamp being turned down. When he smiled, it was not the crooked, rueful smile of the kitchen. It was an old smile, thin and cool and a little cruel, and she knew it was not meant for her. It was meant for himself.
"Of course," he said. "A very long day. I should not have presumed."
"You did not presume."
"I am a guest. You are a healer. I have a wound, you have a duty. It is a perfectly ordinary arrangement." He reached for the borrowed robe and drew it up over his shoulders, covering the brand, covering the scars, covering himself. "Forgive me. I had forgotten for a moment what we were."
"Ziyan—"
"Good night, Healer Bai."
He lay down with his back to her, on his side of the platform, and drew the quilt up. His shoulders were rigid. The lamp burned on between them, and she did not trust herself to touch it.
In the end she pinched the wick out herself, with her bare fingers, and the dark came down. She laid the bolster back along the middle of the bed, with a care that was almost a ceremony, and the third quilt, Granny Pei's blue quilt with the cranes on it, over her knees. She lay on her back with her hands folded. She did not sleep. She listened to the wind in the eaves, and the slow settling of the house, and the breath of the man beside her, which was not the slow breath of sleep but the careful, measured breath of someone lying very still and listening, as she was, to a silence with a hundred things in it.
He knew she was awake. She knew he knew.
Somewhere in the small hours the bell on the gate rang once more, softly, and neither of them moved. She turned her face into the pillow and let the dark have her tears, and did not make a sound. And on the other side of the wall of cushions, so quiet that she told herself afterward she had dreamed it, a low voice said into the dark, as if to itself, "Foolish."
She did not know which of them he meant.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The cold came in the night.
It came the way it did at that altitude, without warning, a hard dry silver cold that crept through the shutters and under the doors and settled over the inn like a hand. By the second watch the water in the washbasin had grown a skin of ice. By the third, the wind had begun to hunt along the eaves with a long, thin, wavering note, and Qingluo, lying awake on her side of the bolster with her eyes on the dark, heard a sound from the far side that made her sit up.
It was a sharp, indrawn breath. A sound a man makes when he has been holding something in for hours and has just failed.
"Ziyan?"
"It is nothing."
"It is not nothing. Light the lamp."
"I can do it myself."
"You cannot," she said, "because you are not allowed to use that." She did not say what *that* was. She did not need to. She swung her feet to the floor, found the flint on the chest in the dark, and struck it, and the little lamp on the table bloomed into a warm circle of amber.
He was sitting on the edge of the platform with his back to her and his hands braced on his knees. The robe had slid from his shoulders. In the lamplight she could see the long line of his spine, the shoulder blades drawn up tight, and the dressing she had laid over the wound that morning, which had darkened along one edge. A fine tremor ran through him, and she realized, with a small cold drop of her stomach, that it was not the tremor of anger. He was shivering.
"The wound has gone damp," she said. "The cold has got into the bandage. Sit still."
"I am sitting."
"You are sitting very loudly." She fetched the little basin from beside the window, broke the thin ice with her fingernail, and set it on the brazier to warm. She laid out her things on the low table with the practiced economy of a person who has done a thing a thousand times: clean linen, a jar of salve, boiled silk in case a stitch had pulled, a sprig of mugwort for the smoke. The routine steadied her. It was a thing to do with her hands.
She knelt on the bed behind him and began, slowly, to unwind the old bandage.
For a while neither of them spoke. The linen came away in damp, stiff coils. Underneath, the wound was clean and closing, a long red seam along his ribs, the stitches tidy and tight, a little puffy at one end where the cold had pinched it. She cleaned it with warm water and then with wine, and felt him flinch and go still beneath her palm, and she murmured a thing she said to all her patients without thinking, *almost done, you are doing well,* and heard a short breath of dry laughter in the dark.
"I am being comforted," he said. "Like a horse."
"Horses are very good patients."
"They do not talk back."
"No. That is where they have the advantage."
She smoothed salve along the seam with two fingers. It smelled of pine resin and honey. Her hand moved along his side, and beneath it his skin was warm and rough with old scars, the thin lines she had learned by heart in the last week, the long one from shoulder blade to hip, the cluster at the base of his spine, the pale band at his nape where an iron collar had lain. She let her fingers drift across them without quite meaning to. Her thumb found the end of one and stopped.
He turned his head. Not much. Enough that the lamplight caught his profile.
"What is that?" he said.
"What?"
"On your hand."
She looked down. Her left hand was resting against his ribs, and the lamp had thrown the scar across the back of it into sharp relief: a pale, shiny stripe, a hand's width long, running from the knuckle of her forefinger to the wrist. She had stopped seeing it years ago. She had learned to reach for things with it so that nobody noticed.
"A burn," she said.
"I can see that it is a burn."
"A decoction. I was fifteen. I was apprenticed to a master healer in the river towns, and he had a way of teaching." She heard how light her own voice had come out, and was faintly impressed. "He made me carry the boiling pot across the room to see whether I would drop it. I did not drop it. I merely spilled it over my hand, which I understand was an adequate result."
"He did that on purpose?"
"He said a healer must learn to hold things that hurt."
The quiet that followed was a different quiet. She felt it before she heard it, a change in the air of the little room, the way the pressure drops before snow. He had gone entirely still. When he spoke, it was in a low, level voice she had not heard before.
"Does it still hurt?"
She opened her mouth to say *no.* It was the answer she gave everyone. It was a perfectly good answer, an honest one, because the burn had healed a long time ago and the nerves in it had gone dull and strange, a numb patch that only woke when the weather turned.
But that was not what he had asked. She could hear it. He was not asking about her hand.
"Sometimes," she said. And then, because the lamp was warm and the night was long and his back was bare under her palm, she said the rest. "When it is cold. When I am tired. When I make a mistake, I think. It is silly, there is no reason for it to know. But it does."
He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Mine too."
She looked at the pale bands crossing his spine. "Your scars?"
"They ache in the cold. They ache in the rain. They ache," and the corner of his mouth moved, "when I am among people who are kind to me. That is the worst. I do not understand it. It is a very strange kind of pain."
She did not answer. She knew what he meant. She had a hand on his back and a throat full of things she could not say, and she thought, quite suddenly and clearly, *I am not afraid of him.* She had not realized until that moment how afraid she had been of herself.
"Turn around," she said, gently. "I need to see the front. The cold may have got under the other edge."
He turned.
It was a small movement. He swung one knee onto the platform and pivoted, and the lamp threw his shadow huge against the wall, and for a moment they were facing each other at a distance of no more than a hand's breadth. His robe hung open. The old burned brand on his chest, below the collarbone, gleamed faint and red in the dimness, a slow ember pulse. The shadows of his lashes lay across his cheekbones. His eyes, in this light, were not brown and not gold but something in between, a dark amber, like honey held up to a candle.
She forgot what she had meant to do.
"Your hands," he said. "They are cold."
"Healers have cold hands. It is a rule."
"It is a terrible rule." He lifted his own hand, slowly, so slowly she could have stopped it, and his fingers closed lightly around her wrist. Not hard. Only a touch, the pad of his thumb resting on the inside of the joint where her pulse lived. She had felt that touch before. The first night, in the herb room, when he had caught her half dreaming and nearly broken her arm. This was nothing like that. It was as though he were holding something that might break. "You are always cold," he said. "I noticed it the first day."
"I am a very busy person."
"You are a very tired person."
"That too."
His thumb moved. A small, slow circle against the tender skin. She felt it in the soles of her feet. It went through her like warm wine, softening every joint, and her breath came out unsteady, and she saw him hear it. His eyes dropped to her mouth and came back up, and in them was something she had no name for, a naked, wary, wondering look, like a creature that has been bitten many times and still, against all sense, holds out a paw.
"Qingluo," he said.
"Yes."
"Do you think," and he stopped. He swallowed. The lamp hissed softly. "Never mind."
"What?"
"It is not a thing I should say."
"Then say it anyway."
He was very close. She could not have said which of them had moved. His breath stirred the loose hair at her temple. She could smell him, cold pine and woodsmoke and the faint sweetness of the salve, and she could feel the heat coming off his skin, and in the whole bright circle of the lamp there was nothing at all but the space between their mouths, and it was shrinking.
Her eyes began to close.
She thought, with great calm, *this is a mistake.* She thought, *he is a patient. He is a spirit. He is a stranger whose life I may have ruined.* She thought of the hunter's tired voice. She thought of a lamp guttering, three years ago, and a cooling hand. The thoughts went by like boats on a river, and she watched them go, and did not step into a single one.
She felt the brush of his breath on her lips.
Outside, in the courtyard, in the dark, the wind came sweeping down off the heights and found the old pine at the gate.
The bell rang.
It was a long, low, hollow sound, iron-green and mournful, rolling across the frozen yard and through the shutters and into the little room like a hand slapping a table. Every hair on her arms stood up. Beneath her fingers she felt him jerk, felt the whole length of him go taut as a bowstring, and she tore her hand out of his grip and scrambled backward across the bed so fast that she banged her elbow on the bedpost.
They stared at each other across a yard of quilts.
The bell swung again. Twice. Three times, softer, and fell silent.
"The wind," said Qingluo. Her voice came out in a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. "It is only the wind. It does that. In high gusts. It is a very light bell."
"Yes," said Ziyan.
"It is not," and she swallowed, "it does not mean anything."
"No."
Her hands had begun, absurdly, to shake. She seized the clean linen from the table and began to fold it, and unfolded it, and folded it again. Her face was burning. Her whole body was burning, and underneath the burn, scalding and sour, there was a cold, clear note of terror, because she knew exactly what she had been about to do, and she knew exactly how much it would cost them both.
"I will finish the dressing," she said. "It will only take a minute. Hold still."
Her voice had gone flat and brisk, the voice she used on the dying, on the frightened, on the family waiting outside the door. She heard it come down over the room like a shutter. She laid the linen against his ribs and wound it, quick and neat and impersonal, and did not once look at his face. "Keep it dry. No exertion. If you shiver again tonight, wake me. If the edges swell, wake me. It is a perfectly ordinary wound and it will heal in the ordinary way."
He said nothing. She tied off the bandage and sat back and began to gather her things, the salve, the basin, the little jar of silk, and her hands would not stop moving.
"Qingluo."
"It is late."
"Qingluo."
"We should sleep." She finally looked at him, and made her face into a smooth, polite thing, a closed door with a lamp behind it. "I am sorry. I was tired. It was a long day, and you were cold, and I think we were both a little foolish. It will not happen again."
He looked at her for a long moment. She watched the thing in his eyes go out, slowly, like a lamp being turned down. When he smiled, it was not the crooked, rueful smile of the kitchen. It was an old smile, thin and cool and a little cruel, and she knew it was not meant for her. It was meant for himself.
"Of course," he said. "A very long day. I should not have presumed."
"You did not presume."
"I am a guest. You are a healer. I have a wound, you have a duty. It is a perfectly ordinary arrangement." He reached for the borrowed robe and drew it up over his shoulders, covering the brand, covering the scars, covering himself. "Forgive me. I had forgotten for a moment what we were."
"Ziyan—"
"Good night, Healer Bai."
He lay down with his back to her, on his side of the platform, and drew the quilt up. His shoulders were rigid. The lamp burned on between them, and she did not trust herself to touch it.
In the end she pinched the wick out herself, with her bare fingers, and the dark came down. She laid the bolster back along the middle of the bed, with a care that was almost a ceremony, and the third quilt, Granny Pei's blue quilt with the cranes on it, over her knees. She lay on her back with her hands folded. She did not sleep. She listened to the wind in the eaves, and the slow settling of the house, and the breath of the man beside her, which was not the slow breath of sleep but the careful, measured breath of someone lying very still and listening, as she was, to a silence with a hundred things in it.
He knew she was awake. She knew he knew.
Somewhere in the small hours the bell on the gate rang once more, softly, and neither of them moved. She turned her face into the pillow and let the dark have her tears, and did not make a sound. And on the other side of the wall of cushions, so quiet that she told herself afterward she had dreamed it, a low voice said into the dark, as if to itself, "Foolish."
She did not know which of them he meant.
You've reached the end of this chapter