On the fourth morning, Seoha decided to warm the shrine.

It was not a sensible decision. He knew that. It came to him sometime before dawn, lying in the little meadow that his bed had become, staring at the beams of the ceiling and trying not to think about two bowls of barley and cabbage soup, one eaten, one not. He had set the table for two the night before, and sat opposite the empty place for most of an hour, and listened to the bell in the Gate Hall toll the time away, until the soup had gone cold and the candle had burned halfway down. Nobody had come. He had told himself that was fine. He had eaten both bowls, slowly, so as not to waste them, and washed the dishes in water that was almost warm, and gone to bed with a feeling in his chest like a small, shut window.

He did not mind. He did not mind at all. He was Ryu Seoha, who had been thrown out of better houses than this.

But the shrine was cold, and he could not stop thinking about it. The cold was not the clean, dry cold of the courtyard. It lived in the walls, in the beams, in the long swept halls, and it had been there so long that the whole place seemed to hold itself braced against it, shoulders hunched. A house like this wanted warmth the way a plant wanted light. He could feel the want, faintly, in the grain of the wood. It made his palms itch.

So, wrapped in the gray cloak, with his hair tied back in a strip of cloth and the seed pouch tucked inside his tunic, he went down to the main hall and laid both hands against the nearest wall.

He did it carefully. A little at a time, with his eyes shut, his breath slow, the heat coming up from the base of his spine in a thin steady thread and out through his fingers into the old boards. Not a flood. Not a flare. A trickle, the way you pour water into a dry cup. The wood sighed under his palms. He felt the rime inside the grain loosen and drain away. A faint scent of cedar rose in the air, warm and resinous, and for the first time he heard the building creak in a way that sounded less like complaint and more like a yawn.

He moved down the wall, hand over hand, and then to the next one. By the time the sun was fully up he had warmed three corridors and a small hall with a lacquered table in it, and he was shivering so hard his teeth rattled. It was the cost. It always was. Every drop of warmth he gave away left a hollow behind it, a cold place in the center of his chest that spread outward, slowly, to his hands and feet. He sat on the floor with his back to a pillar and his knees drawn up and counted breaths until the shaking passed.

I can do this, he thought. A little at a time. I can learn to do it. It's only a matter of measure.

He believed it for almost an hour.

It was while he was searching for firewood that he found the courtyard.

He had passed through it before, at night, half dazed, and by day it looked different. It was long and rectangular and walled in on three sides by the shrine's tiled eaves, with a stone well in one corner and a little open pavilion at the far end, and in the center, under the snow, a pattern of low stone borders marked out something that had once been laid with great care. He knelt and brushed away the white. Underneath was bare dark earth, frozen hard, divided into neat rectangles by a frame of weathered granite. Beds. Garden beds, a dozen of them, each the length of a man and as wide as an armspan.

Somebody had gardened here, once. Somebody had planted herbs and cabbages, maybe flowers, in a courtyard at the top of a mountain where nothing was meant to grow. It had been tended so long ago that the borders had sunk a little, and moss, dead now, had furred their edges. But every bed was empty.

He held his hand out over the nearest one, palm down, and felt the earth underneath. Frozen. But not dead. It had the particular silence of soil that is waiting, and he knew that silence. He had listened to it in a hundred fields. All that was needed was heat, and patience, and someone to put a seed in the ground.

His fingers drifted to the pouch under his tunic. He took his hand away.

Not yet, he thought. It's not allowed. Not yet.

He was straightening up when he noticed the roof.

It was the north eave, over the kitchen wing, directly above the door he used to fetch water. He had walked under it a dozen times. This time, he looked up, and the sight stopped him with one foot in the air.

The ice on it was wrong.

Ice on the eaves was normal, even good. It meant a cold, well-sealed house. But this was too much. It hung from the roof in a thick, dull-white shelf as wide as a cart, glazed and heavy, bulging out over the gutter, and from it, in a line, hung icicles as long as a man's leg. Snow could not have made it. Snow fell and melted and froze again in a pattern that left stripes, rings, the memory of weather. This had no marks on it at all. It was smooth, like poured glass, as though it had welled up from somewhere underneath, seeping through the roof tiles from the cold stone of the mountain itself. Under the shelf, the tiles had begun to bow. As he watched, a thin dark crack ran across one of them with a sound like a knuckle.

If the whole sheet came down, it would take the kitchen roof with it, and the kitchen stove, and anyone standing beneath.

Seoha thought of the single bowl on its shelf, and the single cup. He thought of the tall pale man standing at the foot of the Gate Hall steps at dusk with snow in his hair, eating once every few days in the dark.

"All right," he said, aloud. "All right. Let's see."

There was a ladder in the shed behind the well. It was old and rickety and he had to knock the ice off every rung, but it held. He propped it against the eave, pulled the gray cloak tight, and climbed. He stopped on the top rung, because from there he could see.

He had not understood the shape of the place until then. The shrine was built in a great horseshoe against the shoulder of the mountain, its long halls curving away to either side like arms, and the courtyard lay in the crook of them, white and orderly, a bowl of blue shadow. Above it the slope climbed in a series of terraces, each one rimmed with a row of small stone lanterns, up to a squat dark building with a double roof and a single great door. The Gate Hall. Behind it the mountain rose, enormous and pale, and at its foot, half hidden in a fold of rock, he could just make out the curve of something vast and clear, catching the light like a drop of water on a leaf. The arch. Even at this distance, it hummed. He felt it in his teeth.

Along its flank, so faint that he thought it was a trick of his tired eyes, ran threads of gold.

And in the middle of the courtyard, small as a stroke of ink, stood a figure in white, unmoving, looking up at him.

Seoha lifted one hand, uncertainly, in something between a wave and an apology. The figure did not wave back. But it did not leave, either, and that, he decided, would have to do.

The wind at the top was sharp as a blade. He dug his boots into the ridge-tiles and crawled across the slope on his belly, toward the shelf of ice, until he was lying with his cheek almost against it and the whole dull gleaming bulk of it looming above his face.

"Just a little," he whispered. "Just enough to let it go."

He laid his palm flat against the ice.

The heat went out of him smoothly, as it had in the halls, a thread, a controlled trickle. The ice sweated. It clouded. A thin film of meltwater ran down its face and dripped over the edge, and the shelf shifted with a deep creak and settled, and Seoha breathed a sigh of relief. It was working. If he could bleed it off in pieces, in a few hours, a little at a time

The ice took the warmth and asked for more.

He felt it. It was not a thing he could have explained. It was like laying a hand against a sleeper and feeling the sleeper's pulse pull back at the touch, suck at it, drink. The ice was not simply cold. It was hungry. A tug went through his arm, deep and almost affectionate, and the thread of heat running out of his palm lurched and thickened, no longer a trickle, no longer something he held. It was being drawn out of him.

"Wait," he said. "Wait, that's, that's too much."

The tug came again. His vision wobbled. He tried to pull his hand away and could not. It was as if the ice had grown fingers.

And then, inside him, something broke.

The fever had been waiting all morning, patient and bright, behind every careful measure of warmth, and it took the opening like a held breath released. It surged up his spine in a single roaring wave. The tiles beneath his belly turned warm, then hot. He cried out. The ice before him went white, then clear, then began, all at once, to collapse. It came apart in great sliding sheets, and the meltwater poured over the eave in a rush so sudden and violent that it roared like a river. It was a waterfall. It hammered the kitchen yard, geysered off the stones, and in the middle of it, tumbling and spinning, whirled thousands of pale pink petals, plum and peach, torn from nowhere, from the air itself, from the hot vault of his own chest. They drifted up into the sunlight like startled birds.

Seoha clung to the ridge with both arms, weak with terror and wonder.

"Oh no," he said. "Oh, no, no, no."

And then he remembered the Sentinel.

He was standing at the far end of the courtyard, in the shadow of the pavilion, exactly where he had been when Seoha climbed, and he had not moved since. Seoha knew it the way you know a hawk is above you before you look up. The long silver-white figure was perfectly straight, arms at his sides, face turned up toward the roof. He had been watching. Seoha realized that with a lurch, a hot sick tilt in his stomach, and then the Sentinel moved.

He did not run. He crossed the yard in four strides, so swift that his robes snapped behind him, and the moment his boots touched the edge of the cascade he threw out one hand, palm flat, and the whole world froze.

It was beautiful. Seoha would think so afterward, even in the middle of the worst of it. The roaring water hung in the air between one breath and the next, locked in a column of glittering ice, each droplet suspended in its fall, each pink petal trapped inside like a flower in glass. A hundred small rainbows broke across it where the light came through. The sound cut off so abruptly that his ears rang.

Then the cold hit him.

It came off the Sentinel in a shock that rolled up the roof like surf. The ridge-tiles frosted white. Seoha's breath went out of him in a cloud, and the fever, which had been roaring, shrank back, and in the place where it had been, there was a vast, bright terror, and he slid down the slope on his hands and knees until a gloved hand closed on the back of his cloak and hauled him over the edge.

He landed in the Sentinel's arms. Or, not quite. The man had caught him by the cloak, by the fabric, with his hands in thick folds of cloth, and he held him at arm's length, upright, three inches off the ground. For a long, strange moment they stood like that, face to face, with the wreck of the waterfall frozen at their side and a storm of petals and snowflakes whirling around them.

The petals were still falling. The snow was still falling. They met in the air, a fine pink and white blizzard, drifting down over both of them and neither melting nor freezing, as though the two forces, heat and cold, had reached a standstill in the space between.

Seoha was breathing hard. He realized he had never been this close to the Sentinel before. The distance between them was less than the width of a hand. He could see the fine frost along the man's lashes, and the pulse he did not seem to have, and the cold, clear, frightened rage in his eyes.

"Stop it," the Sentinel said. His voice was very quiet.

"I was trying to help, the ice was going to, the roof, it would have come down on the kitchen, I thought if I could just"

"Stop." The word cracked. "Whatever you are doing. Stop it. All of it. You will stop using your hands."

"I can't."

"You will."

"I can't, you don't understand, it isn't a choice, it's like asking me to stop breathing." Seoha's own voice had begun to shake, hard, and he was horrified by it. He tried to steady it and could not. "You ask me to stop and I'll stop breathing. Is that what you want? Because that's what it is. It's the only thing in me that, that works. It's the only thing in me that anyone ever wanted, and now they don't. In the village, they said it was a curse. They called my hands a curse. They said I was the reason the river came up, they said I should find somewhere cold to live, and so I did, I came here, I came to the coldest place in the world, and the one thing I can't seem to do is stop."

The last word broke in two. He bit down on it, too late.

The courtyard was very quiet. The ice waterfall gleamed beside them, a monument to his own foolishness. A single plum petal drifted down between their faces and did not land.

The Sentinel said nothing.

He was looking at Seoha with an expression Seoha could not name, a strange, stricken, motionless look, as if someone had struck him very softly in a place he had forgotten he had. His hands, still fisted in the cloth of Seoha's cloak, did not move. His mouth had parted a little. Frost was spreading from his collar in slow, delicate fans, and down at the very edge of the cold, almost too faint to see, there was a thread of gold, thin as a hair, running through the ice of his sleeve and fading.

Seoha did not see it. He was too busy trying not to cry.

Slowly, with enormous care, the Sentinel set him down. He released the cloak one finger at a time. And then, to Seoha's utter astonishment, he knelt, in the snow and the wet, and reached down to the ground at his feet, where the whirling petals had begun to settle.

One of them lay on the stone, whole and pink and perfect, caught in a rime of frost so fine that it looked like sugar. The Sentinel took a scrap of cloth from inside his sleeve, a worn strip of gray silk, and, using it, with a great deliberate gentleness, he picked the petal up. He did not touch it with his bare skin. He held it on the fabric as if it were a living thing, very small and easily lost, and looked at it for so long that Seoha forgot to be afraid.

"Forgive me," the Sentinel said at last. His voice was almost inaudible. He did not say what for. He closed the cloth around the petal and rose, still not looking up, and walked away across the courtyard, and went inside, and did not look back.

Seoha stood alone in the whirl of pink and white.

After a while he began, without quite deciding to, to gather the petals. They lay everywhere, on the stones, on the lip of the well, on the frozen shoulders of the waterfall, some whole and some bruised, still soft with the memory of heat. He picked them up one at a time and cupped them in his sleeve. It was a stupid, tender chore, and it took a long time, and nobody came to tell him to stop. When he had gathered what he could, he carried them to the first of the empty garden beds and let them fall onto the dark frozen earth, a thin pink drift against the white, because he could not think of anywhere better to put them.

His legs gave out. He sat down in the slush, hard, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The kitchen roof was safe. The shelf of ice was gone, drowned and frozen and glittering in the yard like a broken chandelier. His fingers were so cold he could hardly bend them. His chest felt like a house with every door left open.

He had told a stranger the worst thing about himself, out loud, in the snow. And the stranger had picked up a flower.

He did not understand the Sentinel at all.

That night, he did not set the table. He sat in the dark of his meadow-room, wrapped in the gray cloak, and listened to the shrine ticking and settling around him. The walls he had warmed that morning held a little of it still. He put his palm against the plaster by his bed and felt, deep in the wood, the faint remnant of heat, like a pulse.

It was well past midnight when he heard it.

It began far off, in the north, below the floor, somewhere deep inside the mountain. A long, slow, groaning sound, like a great beast turning over in its sleep. Then a crack, sharp and clear, so loud that the window shuddered in its frame. And after it a silence, and a feeling, absurd but unmistakable, like the sigh of something unimaginably old exhaling for the first time in a long time.

The mountain, Seoha thought, was breathing.

He lay awake until dawn with his heart in his throat and the faint, sweet, terrible hum of his own fever drumming behind his ribs, and did not dare to move.