The salt caravan reached the eastern end of the pass at dusk, and by the time the last mule had been unloaded at the Eastgate post station, there was not a free bed within ten miles.

Zheyu stood in the crowded yard with a bundle of dried fish in his arms and watched the chaos with a kind of dazed delight. There were drovers shouting, and boys running with buckets, and a very large woman in a leather apron roaring orders from the top of a cart. Lanterns swung from every beam. The air smelled of dung and woodsmoke and boiling cabbage. Somebody had struck up a fiddle in the courtyard, a thin sawing country tune, and half a dozen men were clapping time with their mugs. It was loud, and it was filthy, and it was the most alive place he had been in three hundred years.

"Do not smile like that," said Qinghe from beside him. "They'll think you're simple."

"I am only enjoying the noise."

"You're enjoying a cabbage."

"It is a very enthusiastic cabbage."

She made a small stifled sound that was not quite a laugh, and turned back to the innkeeper, a harried man with ink on his cuffs and a ledger tucked under his arm. "Two rooms," she said. "I don't care how small."

"Two rooms?" The man gave a short bark of laughter. "Guniang, I have forty-three drovers sleeping in the stable loft. I have a magistrate's clerk in the pantry. I have a monk in the privy."

"Then one room."

"I have one room." He consulted the ledger, flipped a page, and consulted it again, as if the numbers might have rearranged themselves. "One room, on the second floor, at the back. A cousin of the cook's was meant to have it, but he's got the flux. It's yours. Eight coppers. It's very small."

"We'll take it."

"There's," the man hesitated, and cleared his throat, "there's only one bed."

Qinghe was silent for a moment.

Zheyu, with great care, became absorbed in the dried fish.

"One bed," she said.

"Yes, Guniang. A big one. The cook's cousin is a large man." The innkeeper rubbed the back of his neck. "I could have a mat sent up. A bit of straw. It's only for the one night."

"Fine," said Qinghe. She said it in the voice of a woman agreeing to be hanged. "A mat. And a screen, if you have one."

"A screen?"

"A partition. A curtain. A sheet on a rope. Anything."

"I'll see what I can do."

He scurried off. Qinghe turned and looked at Zheyu, and Zheyu looked at the fish, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

"I will sleep in the corridor," she said at last.

"You cannot."

"I can. It's a floor. I've slept on worse."

"It would be eleven paces from the door."

"I'll put my bedroll against the wall. It'll be less."

"Qinghe." He was surprised at how quietly he said it. "It is a long corridor. A drover will walk past at midnight, and you will move, and I will wake in the dark with the world coming apart at the edges." He did not want to say it. He said it anyway. "I would rather not do that tonight. If it can be helped."

She did not answer. She stood in the lantern light with her arms crossed and her jaw tight, and he saw the argument pass across her face. Pride. Reason. The pain, in the valley, with his hand clutched to his ribs.

"One room," she said finally. Her voice was strange. "Fine. I'll take the floor. You take the bed."

"I will take the floor."

"You will take the bed."

"Qinghe, you are hurt. Your shoulder."

"It's a scrape."

"You landed on stone."

"I have a mat coming."

"You have straw."

"Zheyu." She leaned toward him a little, and her voice dropped to a furious whisper. "Take the bed."

He took the bed.

* * *

The room was a narrow wooden box under the eaves, with a sloping ceiling, one tiny window, and a bed that did indeed take up most of the floor. A lamp had been left burning on a shelf. A folded blanket lay at the foot. And in the corner, rather alarmingly, stood a single panel of paper stretched over a bamboo frame, scarcely taller than Qinghe, with a faded painting of a crane on it that had been repaired in two places with tape.

She looked at it for some time.

"That," she said, "is not a screen."

"It has a crane."

"It has a hole."

"Where?"

"There. By the foot. You could put your arm through it."

He looked. It was true. A rent a hand's breadth across ran through the lowest corner of the paper, where somebody's boot had once gone through. He felt a strange, light, nervous excitement stir in his stomach, and he suppressed it at once.

"We could patch it."

"With what?"

"A page of your notebook."

"I'm not going to waste a page on," she stopped. She pressed her lips together. "Never mind. Put it up. We'll make do."

They put it up. It took five minutes and a good deal of swearing. When it was done, the room had been cut into two unequal halves, the larger with the bed and the smaller with the straw mat, and between them stood a thin, trembling wall of old paper, through which every sound could pass and, if the lamp was lit on the right side, every shadow.

"I'll put out the lamp," said Qinghe.

"Yes."

"You'll turn over. Face the wall."

"Of course."

"And you'll go to sleep."

"I will do my very best."

She snorted, and snuffed the lamp, and the dark fell like a blanket.

* * *

He had thought it would be easier in the dark. It was not.

The bed was soft. It was far softer than anything he had lain on in the inn at Liuyin, a thick feather-stuffed monstrosity that sank beneath him like a cloud and smelled of cedar and the cook's cousin. He lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest and stared up at the ceiling, which he could not see. The window showed a faint blue square. Below him, through the floor, he could hear the post station going on with its business, the creak of wheels and the scrape of a bench and, at long intervals, a roar of laughter.

On the other side of the paper, perhaps four feet away, someone was lying very still.

He knew she was awake. He did not know how he knew. It was nothing as simple as a sound. It was a kind of pressure in the air, a faint taut hum, the feeling of a bowstring drawn and held. He listened to her not moving. He listened to the careful regularity of her breath. It was too steady. It was the breath of a woman counting.

He turned onto his side.

The paper stood between them, a dim pale rectangle in the dark. He could make out the shape of the crane, faintly, a smudge of white. Beyond it there was only blackness, and in the blackness a woman, lying on a bundle of straw with a sword beside her, not sleeping.

Do not think, he told himself. Do not think about it.

It was an excellent instruction. He had no idea how to follow it.

She turned over. The straw rustled. She turned back.

He lay very still, with his heart going in great slow thuds. He thought about the way she had stood in the pass, with her face lifted and the red light on her hair. He thought about her hand on his arm, at the ledge, the quick hard clasp before the throw. He thought about the half-second at the end, in the bone-white bowl, when she had not stepped back.

She did not step back.

It had been all he could think about for three hours. It was a small thing, a very small thing, a distance of two or three inches. But he had stood in that distance with every nerve alight and he had thought, quite clearly: If she had leaned in, I would not have stopped her. I would not have been able.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes.

It was the thread. Of course it was the thread. Three hundred years had taught him that. The tie between them made him want her. It made him hungry for her nearness, and the hunger put on a thousand disguises. It was the oldest trick of the binding, and he had been taken in by it before. Four times, at least. He did not remember the endings. But he remembered how it had begun, always like this, in the dark, with a heartbeat that did not feel like his own.

"Are you awake?" said Qinghe.

He nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Yes," he said.

"Good. I thought you'd stopped breathing."

"I am sorry. I was thinking."

"I could hear." The straw crackled. Her voice came out of the dark very softly, from just beyond the paper, and he could tell that she had turned her face toward him. "Can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Don't say anything. It's a stupid thing to say." There was a pause. "Are you afraid?"

He lay still.

It was not the question he had expected. He had thought she would ask about the pass, or the scout's brand, or the thing that had passed between them at the end. She had asked, instead, the one question he had spent three centuries not answering.

"Of what?" he said, to gain a moment.

"Of any of it." She hesitated. "Of going back. When the blossoms fall."

The room was dark and silent. He could hear the beat of his own pulse.

"Yes," he said.

He had not meant to say it. It rose out of him like water from a spring, clear and cold. "I am afraid every night. Not of the sleep. The sleep is not so bad. It is only a long grey quiet, like being under ice." He took a breath. "It is that I do not know, when I go under, whether I will wake. I have always woken. But each time it is the same. I lie down in the dark, and I think: this may be the last of me. And there is no one to tell. There is only the sword, and the dark, and a thin small voice that says you were a person once."

She did not say anything.

"I have never told anyone that," said Zheyu.

"Why not?"

"Because it did not matter. Because I was a sword." He laughed, a short rough sound without any humour in it. "Because nobody asks a sword if it is afraid."

"I'm asking."

"Yes. You are." His voice shook. He steadied it. "You are the first."

There was a very long silence.

He heard her breathe in. He heard it catch. When she spoke, it was in a voice he had not heard before, stripped and low and a little unsteady, the voice of someone speaking across a great distance. "I'm afraid of sleeping alone."

"What?"

"That's what scares me. That's all." The straw rustled. "It sounds stupid. I know it does. I'm twenty-six. I've killed things. I've slept in graveyards. And I lie down in an empty room and I can't stop listening for a sound that isn't there." She stopped. "My master. At the end. I used to hear him through the wall. His breathing. And then one night I didn't."

"Qinghe."

"I'm not asking for pity. I'm only telling you." She gave a tiny shaken laugh. "I've been sleeping better. Since you came. That's the truth. Since I started hearing you breathe on the other side of that damned screen. And it makes me furious, because it's wrong. It's a binding. A curse. A thing I never asked for. And I don't want to be a person who sleeps better because a ghost is in the room."

He lay with his hand pressed hard against his mouth.

Something enormous had happened in his chest. It felt like a weir giving way. A great slow rush of feeling, hot and aching and terrifying, that he could not stop and could not name. He thought: She said it. She said the thing. And then, with a sudden icy clarity: It is the thread. It is only the thread. She sleeps well because of the thread.

But it did not feel like the thread. It felt like her.

"I do not think," he said carefully, when he could trust himself, "that it is wrong."

"You wouldn't."

"No. Listen." He sat up on one elbow in the dark. "I have slept near a great many people. I know what the binding does. It gives me a shadow of their warmth. It does not give them any." He swallowed. "If you sleep better, Qinghe, it is not because of a spell. It is because you were lonely. And now you are less so. That is all. That is the whole of the magic."

Silence.

Then, very faintly, from the other side of the paper: "That's a nice thing to say."

"I am capable of occasional nice things."

"Don't let it go to your head."

"I will try."

She laughed. It was the soft, tired, real laugh, the one that he had heard only twice before, and it went through him like a bell.

* * *

They talked until the window grew grey.

He could not afterwards say what about. It was nothing, and everything. The names of their favourite dishes, and the smell of the sea, which she had seen twice and he never. The stories her master had told, and the songs the ferrywoman had hummed. The best way to hold a sword. The worst way to cook an egg. Once she asked him what the stars were called, and he told her the ferrywoman's wrong names, and she laughed so hard that she had to bury her face in her bedroll. He told her about the first fire he had ever seen, in a forge, three hundred years ago, and how the maker's hands had looked in the light. She told him about the winter she had been nine, when she fell through the ice on the sect's pond, and her master had fished her out and put her in a barrel of hot water and given her half a bowl of rice and the single warmest look she had ever received.

He lay on his side with his cheek on his arm and listened, and every word she said came to him through the thin pale paper like a gift passed hand to hand. Somewhere in the middle of it, he stopped being afraid. The fear did not leave. It only sank, quietly, to the bottom, beneath a warm bright layer of something else.

"Zheyu," she said, at some very late hour.

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For not telling me it'll be fine." Her voice was slurred with sleep. "Everyone says that. It'll be fine. And it never is."

"I would not lie to you."

"I know. That's why." A great yawn. "That's why it's. It's nice."

He smiled into the dark. He did not trust himself to speak.

After a while her breathing slowed. It deepened, and lengthened, and took on the soft uneven catch of true sleep. He lay listening to it, with a feeling in his chest like a held note.

I do not want it to end, he thought. I do not want the blossoms to fall.

And he lay very still, and did not let himself think what that meant.

* * *

The grey light woke him.

He had not meant to sleep. He found that he had, and for a long moment he lay without moving, blinking at the ceiling, trying to remember where he was. The window was a pale pearl square. Down in the yard a cock was crowing, flat and furious, and a cart was creaking out of the gate. The smell of woodsmoke drifted up through the boards.

He turned his head.

The paper screen had shifted in the night. Some draught, or some restless turn of a sleeping foot, had nudged the bamboo frame, so that it leaned a little askew, and the gap at the bottom, the torn corner where a boot had once gone through, lay open. Through it he could see the edge of the straw mat. And beyond that, in the grey half-light, the dark curve of a sleeve.

It was her hand.

She had flung it out in her sleep, he supposed. It lay palm-up on the floorboards, half through the rent in the paper, the fingers curled loosely inward, the wrist pale in the dawn. It was so close that he could see the faint lines of her palm, and the scar across the heel of her thumb, and the small dry calluses where a sword-hilt had worn her skin.

His own hand lay on the very edge of the bed.

He did not know when he had put it there. In the night, some dream had carried it down over the side, and now it hung in the morning air, a few inches above the floor, open, reaching. The distance between his fingertips and hers was perhaps the width of a bowl.

He did not move.

He did not breathe.

He thought: I should pull it back. He thought: This is the thread. He thought: She is asleep, and it would be a theft. But he lay quite still, with his heart beating in his throat, and found that he could not make himself lift so much as a finger.

On the other side of the broken paper, Qinghe stirred.

He saw her eyelids flutter. He saw her draw a breath, sharp and sudden, as consciousness returned. She lay for a moment with her face turned toward the wall, and then, slowly, she turned her head.

Her eyes opened.

They looked at him through the gap in the paper. Dark, slightly bleary, a little puzzled. They travelled down the line of his arm to his hand, and from his hand across the narrow strip of floor to her own, which lay, he saw her realise, hardly a finger-length from his.

Neither of them said a word.

The cock crowed again. A door banged somewhere below. In the pale grey light of the room, the two hands lay on the boards, each reaching halfway, and not touching.

Pull back, he thought, at her. Pull back. Please. Or do not.

She did not pull back.

She lay looking at him, and he looked at her, and the whole world seemed to narrow to the small bright space between their fingers. He saw her lips part. He saw the faint rise and fall of her breath. He saw something dawn in her face, slow and astonished and quite without fear.

Seconds passed. Perhaps ten. Perhaps a hundred.

Then, very gently, she drew her hand back through the gap.

She did it slowly. The fingers slid across the floor, one after the other, until they disappeared beneath the paper and were gone. He lay with his own hand still open on the air. He felt the loss of it like a cold draught on his skin.

But it was later than it should have been, he thought. It was a half-beat later. She had had time to snatch it back, if she wished, in the very first instant. She had not.

She had let it stay.

He closed his fingers, slowly, over nothing, and brought his hand to his chest. On the other side of the paper, he heard her sit up, and begin, with brisk and clumsy haste, to roll her bedroll.

"Morning," said Qinghe, and her voice was a little too bright.

"Good morning," said Zheyu.

Neither of them looked at the gap in the screen.