The night of the lantern festival, Liuyin forgot how to be quiet.
Zheyu stood on the stone quay below the Willow and Wind with his sleeves tucked in his belt and watched the town turn into a dream. It had begun at sunset. First a few paper lanterns, hung from the eaves by children on stools. Then dozens, then hundreds, a slow tide of gold and red and green climbing the walls of the canal houses and spilling over the bridges. Strings of them stretched across the water from balcony to balcony. Barges had been decked out like floating pavilions, each with its own lamp-lit awning, and on the bank a drum had begun to beat, soft and slow, in the rhythm of a heart.
He had seen festivals before. He had seen them as a pair of eyes in a hilt, dim and distorted, a smear of colour at the edge of a scabbard. He had never seen one with his own eyes, in the open air, with the smell of roasting chestnuts and sugar-glaze and hot oil on the wind, and a hand-in-hand crowd of strangers streaming past him toward the water.
"You are doing it again," said a voice at his elbow.
"What?"
"Standing with your mouth open."
"I am not."
"You are. You look like a carp." Qinghe was at his side, in the faded teal robe she always wore, with the pale-blue ribbon at her crown. She had her arms folded and her chin up, and she was frowning at the lanterns as though they were a company of badly drilled soldiers. But there was a gleam in her eye that she could not quite hide. "Close it. People will think you're a tourist."
"I am a tourist."
"You're a scholar."
"I am a scholar who has never seen a lantern."
"That's unfortunate. You'll have to hide it."
He closed his mouth. He opened it again almost at once. "Qinghe, is it true that they float them on the water? That they write wishes on them?"
"On the paper. Yes. You light a candle in the bottom and set it adrift, and if it floats all the way to the bend without going out, the wish comes true." She said it flatly, as one reciting a recipe. "It's a children's superstition."
"I should like to make one."
"You'd have to know what to wish."
"I know exactly what I would wish," said Zheyu, and was alarmed to hear himself say it.
She shot him a quick glance. He busied himself with the cuff of his sleeve.
"There you are!" cried a voice from above them, and a paper fan descended on his shoulder with a smart rap. "Standing about like two herons! Come, come, I've been looking for you for an hour."
* * *
Shen Meiyan had dressed for the occasion.
She wore a long gown of rose-coloured silk, embroidered with swallows, and her hair was wound in an elaborate coil and stuck through with three jade pins. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips were red. In one hand she carried a fan painted with peonies, and in the other, a basket of unlit lanterns, which she thrust at Zheyu with the air of a general conferring a command.
"Six," she said. "Don't drop them. I've been folding since dawn."
"They are beautiful," said Zheyu, honestly.
"Of course they are. I'm an artist." She took his arm, and then, in the same movement, Qinghe's, and began propelling them down the quay toward the crowd. "Now. The rules. One, we do not leave until midnight. Two, nobody sulks. Three, you will both eat at least four skewers of something fried. Four, you will talk to people, Guniang, you will not stand in a corner and glower. And five," she lowered her voice, "you will dance."
"I don't dance," said Qinghe.
"Everyone dances."
"I've never danced."
"Then it's high time." Mei beamed. "I'll teach you."
"Mei."
"No refusals. It's a festival. It's the law."
Qinghe cast a look of mute appeal over her shoulder at Zheyu. He lifted his hands, helplessly, and tried to look as though he did not find the whole thing profoundly delightful.
* * *
They had reached the third bridge, and the great crush of the crowd, when Mei fell back a pace and slid her hand through his arm.
"A word," she murmured. "Walk slowly."
He walked slowly. Qinghe had gone on ahead, tugged along by a pair of laughing girls who wanted to know whether the famous swordswoman would sign their fans. He could see her at the edge of the throng, stiff and pink with embarrassment, and for a moment the sight so absorbed him that he almost missed what Mei was saying.
"There was a man," she said, quietly. Her face, in profile, was bright and smiling, and her voice was low and even. The fan fluttered idly in her hand. "Three days ago. Asking questions."
Zheyu did not turn his head. "What kind of questions?"
"At the market. At the ferry. At every inn on this side of the canal." She nodded pleasantly at a passing neighbour. "He wanted to know if a woman had come through lately. A swordswoman. Young, dark-haired, tall. Carrying a plain grey-bladed sword in a black scabbard with gold on the hilt."
The noise of the festival seemed, very faintly, to recede.
"He was polite," Mei went on. "Very polite. He spoke softly. He had a way of leaning in when he talked, so you had to lean in to hear him. He never raised his voice once. He gave the ferryman a silver coin just for a yes or a no." Her smile did not waver. "He had a scar behind his left ear. A little round one, the colour of milk. I noticed it when he turned to look at the water."
"Did he," Zheyu's voice was not quite steady, and he steadied it. "Did he say who he was?"
"A scholar. A collector of antiques. He was looking for an old sword." The fan snapped shut. "He said he meant the owner no harm. He said he wished only to make an offer."
A smile that never reaches the eyes, thought Zheyu. A habit of speaking softly. A cold mark behind the ear.
He had told her the signs himself, on the edge of a dark forest, by a little fire. He had recited them like a lesson. And now they were being repeated back to him by a woman in a rose silk gown, on a bridge hung with lanterns, in the middle of the happiest night of the year.
"Did you tell him anything?" he asked.
"Of course not." Mei sounded faintly offended. "I told him I had never heard of such a person. I told him the only swordswoman in Liuyin was a fat old widow who ran the noodle stall, and she'd never been known to carry anything but a cleaver."
A short breath of laughter escaped him. It had nothing in it that resembled mirth.
"I did not tell her," said Mei. She nodded toward Qinghe's distant figure. "I thought you should decide. She has enough weight on her. And she wears it so well that one forgets to look." Her hand tightened on his arm. "But I will not lie to her if she asks me straight. I want you to know that. I am fond of you both. And I am not stupid."
"I know that you are not."
"Good. Then what do I do?"
He did not answer at once.
The crowd flowed past them, laughing, calling, jostling. A small girl ran by with a lantern shaped like a rabbit. Somewhere a flute had begun to play. And in the middle of it all, far off beneath a string of golden lamps, Qinghe turned her head and caught his eye, and lifted one eyebrow in a silent, long-suffering question: Are you coming, or must I save myself?
His heart gave a hard slow beat.
He thought of the dark. He thought of the road, the long wet road, and a hand that had gripped his sleeve in the night. He thought of her face when she had said I wasn't there. She was so tired. She carried so much already, so much grief and so much anger and so much of a past that had no name, and tonight, for the first time since he had known her, she was standing under a thousand lanterns with the light on her face.
If I tell her, it ends, he thought. The evening. The ease. The brief clear hour in which she forgets.
If I do not tell her, she may be walking into a trap.
It was a choice. It was the first true choice he had made in three hundred years. He felt the weight of it settle in his body, cold and heavy and entirely his own. He had never decided anything before. He had never been the one who held a secret. He had only ever been the sword. The thing that was drawn and sheathed. The thing that did not choose.
"Tomorrow," he said at last. "I will tell her tomorrow. Tonight, let her have this."
Mei studied him for a long moment. Something in her face shifted, softened, grew a little rueful.
"You love her," she said.
"I," he began.
"Don't. I'm not asking." She patted his arm, brisk and kind. "It's all right. It's perfectly obvious. I only wanted to make sure you knew." She smiled at him, a real smile, sad and bright. "Now come. She's glaring."
* * *
The dancing was on the east bank, in a broad paved square where the canal widened into a pool.
A platform of planks had been built out over the water, hung with garlands and lit by a hundred lamps. A small band sat at one end, a flute, a zither, a pair of bamboo clappers, and a drum, and their music drifted out over the water slow and sweet and a little melancholy. Couples moved on the boards in unhurried circles. The lanterns on the surface rocked gently, bobbing against the pilings, and their reflections broke and mended and broke again.
"No," said Qinghe, stopping dead at the edge of the square.
"Yes," said Mei.
"I can't."
"You can walk, can't you? Then you can dance. It's walking with a rhythm." Mei took her by both shoulders and turned her bodily to face Zheyu. "He doesn't know how either. You will be dreadful together. It will be charming. Go."
She gave Qinghe a firm push. Qinghe stumbled forward, a half-step, and found herself standing in front of him with her hands clenched at her sides and a flush on her cheeks that rivalled the lanterns.
"This is ridiculous," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm not going to do it."
"No."
"I'm going to stand here and glare until she goes away."
"That seems reasonable," said Zheyu. He was looking at her. He had meant to say something else. He could not remember what. Her hair had come a little loose in the crowd, and a strand of it lay across her collarbone, and the golden light from a hundred paper lamps was moving over her face like water. She had the look of a fighter who has been backed into a corner and does not yet know whether to bite.
He held out his hand.
He did not speak. He did not smile. He only held it out, palm up, between them, in the light, and left it there. It was an offer. He made it as lightly as he knew how, so that she could decline without shame. So that she could laugh, and shake her head, and walk away.
She looked at the hand.
He saw her think of the rain. He saw her think of the road, and the mud, and the way her colour had drained in his arms. He saw her glance at her own fingers, and the faint blue shadow beneath the nails. She was weighing something. He knew, because he was doing the same. It costs her. The thought sat in him like a splinter. Every touch costs. And I am asking.
"I will keep it light," he said, very low. "Only the fingertips. I will keep to the beat. And if you grow cold, you have only to say."
"I'll say."
"Promise."
"I promise." She drew a deep breath, and put her hand in his.
It was cool. It was a little damp. He felt the calluses on her palm, and the tension in every finger, and the faint tremor that ran through the whole slim length of her arm. She was holding herself like a drawn bow. He closed his hand around hers, very gently, and led her onto the planks.
* * *
They were dreadful.
It was exactly as Mei had promised. She trod on his foot within the first four steps, and he walked into the corner of a post. They went the wrong way around the first turn and had to stop and look at one another and begin again. Qinghe's whole body was rigid. She kept her chin high and her eyes fixed over his left shoulder with the expression of a woman being led to execution, and he could feel, through the faint pressure of her fingers, the tight little counting rhythm of her feet. One, two. One, two.
"You are leading," he said.
"I'm not leading."
"You are. You keep pulling me to the left."
"You're going to the right."
"It is a slow dance. One goes in a circle. It is not a sword drill."
"It's the same thing," she muttered. "You keep your balance. You watch the other person's feet."
"Then watch mine."
"I am."
"You are watching the post."
"The post's in the way."
He laughed. He could not help it. The sound came out of him unguarded and bright, and her head whipped round, and for the first time she looked straight at him.
She did not look away.
It happened so slowly that he almost missed it. One moment she was glaring, and the next the glare had loosened into something bewildered, and then the bewilderment melted too, quite suddenly, and left her face open. Her eyes were dark and enormous. They held the lanterns in them like small gold coins. And they stayed on his, unflinching, in the middle of the swaying planks, with the music turning slowly around them.
He forgot his feet.
He forgot the post, and the beat, and the thin sweet wail of the flute. He forgot that he had ever been afraid. There was only her face, and her hand in his, and the long unbroken look that stretched between them like a taut silk thread. He felt, distantly, the boards turning beneath him. He felt her step into the rhythm of it, unthinkingly, as the water takes a boat. His hand had moved to the small of her back. He did not remember doing it. It lay there, light as a leaf, and she did not stiffen.
"You are not looking at the post," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't know." She said it very quietly. Her fingers curled tighter in his. "I think I stopped being afraid of it."
He did not trust his voice.
They turned. The lamplight swung past, and the dark water, and a drift of petals that had blown down from the willows and lay in a scattered pink wreath on the surface. Somewhere a woman was laughing. Somewhere a child was crying with joy. The drum went on, soft and slow, in the rhythm of a heart, and his own heart came into step with it so exactly that he could not tell where the one ended and the other began.
I do not want this to stop.
He had thought it before, in the dark, behind a screen. But it had been a whisper then. Now it was a bell.
"Your hand is cold," he said gently.
"It's fine."
"Qinghe."
"It's fine," she said. She had gone a little pale, and her fingers were icy, but her eyes were shining. "It's nothing. A bit of a chill. Don't you dare let go."
He did not let go.
He thought, with a pang: I should. He thought: It is selfish. He thought of the thin cold ring around her wrist, and the way she had swayed in the road, and the lessening he had felt, twice now, when his warmth went out to her and hers came back to him. And he held her hand anyway, lightly, for the length of that one song, and the guilt rode beside him like a shadow, quiet and patient and entirely unable to take the light from her face.
The music ended on a long low note. The couples drifted apart. Qinghe stood a moment longer with her hand in his, and then, slowly, as if she were coming up from a great depth, she let go.
"That was," she said. She cleared her throat. "That wasn't so bad."
"No."
"We'll never do it again."
"Of course not."
"Don't smile."
"I am not smiling," said Zheyu, smiling.
* * *
They set the lanterns on the water at midnight.
There were hundreds. The whole of Liuyin had gathered at the edge of the canal, on the steps, on the quay, on the arch of the bridge, and the surface of the water was a spread of drifting stars. Each lantern carried a flame and a wish. They went out together on the dark current in a long slow glittering procession, and the people on the bank held their breath and watched them go.
Mei had given him a pen. He crouched on the bottom step with a lantern on his knee, a plain white paper one with a bamboo frame, and he held the brush above the blank page and could not think of a single word.
"You don't have to write it," said Qinghe, crouching beside him. "Nobody's going to read it. You just have to wish."
"What are you wishing?"
"I'm not telling you."
"May I guess?"
"No." She dipped her own brush. She wrote something small and quick, and she folded her arm over it so that he could not see. "It's bad luck."
"Then I shall not look."
He turned his face toward the water. He closed his eyes. He thought: I have wished for a thousand things in a thousand nights, and I have never once been granted one. He thought of the dark inside the sword, and the long grey sleep, and the sound of the rain on a roof of straw. He thought: Let me stay. And then, because that was a lie, because it was not what he truly wanted, he sat for a while in the whirl of his own heart and let the true thing come.
Let her be well.
Let her be happy.
Let her not be alone.
He opened his eyes. He wrote it, in neat brush strokes, on the white paper, in the old script that nobody read any more, and he folded it small and laid it inside the lantern beside the candle. Then he lit it, and lowered it into the water, and let it go.
It rocked. It turned. It caught the current, and slid away between two other lanterns, a small gold glow among the glow, and drifted toward the bend.
Beside him, Qinghe let hers go at the same moment.
They watched the two flames go out together across the water, side by side, bobbing and turning, until they were lost among a thousand others. Neither of them spoke. She had drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, and her shoulder was nearly touching his. In the warm light her face was very still, and very young, and it seemed to him that she was holding her breath.
"They'll make it," he said.
"You can't know that."
"I can feel it."
"That's not how it works."
"No." He smiled. "But I wanted to say it."
She looked sidelong at him. In the lamplight something flickered across her face, a sort of wondering, tender, exasperated fondness, so open and so quickly gone that he almost thought he had imagined it. She turned her head away.
"Idiot," she said, softly.
He had never loved a word so much in his life.
I want things, thought Zheyu. It struck him with the force of a wave. I want things. For myself. I want to stay, and to be warm, and to be looked at like that. I want to be a person, and not a blade. I want to hear her say my name.
He had not wanted anything for three hundred years. He had not dared. And now the wanting ran through him like a river in flood, fierce and clear and terrible, and he did not know how he would ever fit it back inside.
He lifted his eyes to the water.
The bend was far away. The lanterns were small gold motes, thinning, scattering. A fine mist had begun to rise off the canal, and it drifted between the boats in pale curling ropes. He watched it idly, his mind full of her, his heart full of the music, and his gaze wandered across the dark surface to the opposite bank.
A shape was standing there.
It stood under the black fan of a willow, just beyond the reach of the lamps. It was tall, and narrow, and very still. It had no face that he could see. It wore a long dark coat, and the wind did not move it, and the mist curled about its feet without touching. It stood quite alone at the water's edge, with its head a little tilted, in the attitude of one who has been waiting a long time.
He did not breathe.
A cold ran through him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. It was not the cold of the thread. It was older. It was the memory of a smell, and a script, and a long grey corridor that smelled of cinnabar and old iron. I know that coat. The thought rose out of the dark like a corpse out of a pond, and he could not follow it back down.
"Zheyu?" said Qinghe. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said.
He had to say it twice. He tore his gaze away from the opposite bank and made himself smile, and look at her, and say it again, lightly. "A trick of the mist. I thought I saw a heron."
"You went white."
"I am cold. That is all."
"I told you to wear the cloak."
"You did." He rose. His knees were not quite steady. He held out a hand to help her up, and she took it, and he held it a moment longer than he should. "Shall we find Mei? I think it is late."
"All right."
She was already turning, brushing off her skirt, calling something to Mei across the crowd. He let her go ahead. He stood on the step for the space of one breath, with his heart pounding and his palms gone damp, and looked back across the water.
The willow was empty.
There was only the mist, drifting slowly in the dark, and a scatter of fallen petals on the bank, and far out on the canal, small and bright and growing smaller, two lanterns turning in the current as if they had no care in the world.
He stood there a long time. Then he followed her home.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The night of the lantern festival, Liuyin forgot how to be quiet.
Zheyu stood on the stone quay below the Willow and Wind with his sleeves tucked in his belt and watched the town turn into a dream. It had begun at sunset. First a few paper lanterns, hung from the eaves by children on stools. Then dozens, then hundreds, a slow tide of gold and red and green climbing the walls of the canal houses and spilling over the bridges. Strings of them stretched across the water from balcony to balcony. Barges had been decked out like floating pavilions, each with its own lamp-lit awning, and on the bank a drum had begun to beat, soft and slow, in the rhythm of a heart.
He had seen festivals before. He had seen them as a pair of eyes in a hilt, dim and distorted, a smear of colour at the edge of a scabbard. He had never seen one with his own eyes, in the open air, with the smell of roasting chestnuts and sugar-glaze and hot oil on the wind, and a hand-in-hand crowd of strangers streaming past him toward the water.
"You are doing it again," said a voice at his elbow.
"What?"
"Standing with your mouth open."
"I am not."
"You are. You look like a carp." Qinghe was at his side, in the faded teal robe she always wore, with the pale-blue ribbon at her crown. She had her arms folded and her chin up, and she was frowning at the lanterns as though they were a company of badly drilled soldiers. But there was a gleam in her eye that she could not quite hide. "Close it. People will think you're a tourist."
"I am a tourist."
"You're a scholar."
"I am a scholar who has never seen a lantern."
"That's unfortunate. You'll have to hide it."
He closed his mouth. He opened it again almost at once. "Qinghe, is it true that they float them on the water? That they write wishes on them?"
"On the paper. Yes. You light a candle in the bottom and set it adrift, and if it floats all the way to the bend without going out, the wish comes true." She said it flatly, as one reciting a recipe. "It's a children's superstition."
"I should like to make one."
"You'd have to know what to wish."
"I know exactly what I would wish," said Zheyu, and was alarmed to hear himself say it.
She shot him a quick glance. He busied himself with the cuff of his sleeve.
"There you are!" cried a voice from above them, and a paper fan descended on his shoulder with a smart rap. "Standing about like two herons! Come, come, I've been looking for you for an hour."
* * *
Shen Meiyan had dressed for the occasion.
She wore a long gown of rose-coloured silk, embroidered with swallows, and her hair was wound in an elaborate coil and stuck through with three jade pins. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips were red. In one hand she carried a fan painted with peonies, and in the other, a basket of unlit lanterns, which she thrust at Zheyu with the air of a general conferring a command.
"Six," she said. "Don't drop them. I've been folding since dawn."
"They are beautiful," said Zheyu, honestly.
"Of course they are. I'm an artist." She took his arm, and then, in the same movement, Qinghe's, and began propelling them down the quay toward the crowd. "Now. The rules. One, we do not leave until midnight. Two, nobody sulks. Three, you will both eat at least four skewers of something fried. Four, you will talk to people, Guniang, you will not stand in a corner and glower. And five," she lowered her voice, "you will dance."
"I don't dance," said Qinghe.
"Everyone dances."
"I've never danced."
"Then it's high time." Mei beamed. "I'll teach you."
"Mei."
"No refusals. It's a festival. It's the law."
Qinghe cast a look of mute appeal over her shoulder at Zheyu. He lifted his hands, helplessly, and tried to look as though he did not find the whole thing profoundly delightful.
* * *
They had reached the third bridge, and the great crush of the crowd, when Mei fell back a pace and slid her hand through his arm.
"A word," she murmured. "Walk slowly."
He walked slowly. Qinghe had gone on ahead, tugged along by a pair of laughing girls who wanted to know whether the famous swordswoman would sign their fans. He could see her at the edge of the throng, stiff and pink with embarrassment, and for a moment the sight so absorbed him that he almost missed what Mei was saying.
"There was a man," she said, quietly. Her face, in profile, was bright and smiling, and her voice was low and even. The fan fluttered idly in her hand. "Three days ago. Asking questions."
Zheyu did not turn his head. "What kind of questions?"
"At the market. At the ferry. At every inn on this side of the canal." She nodded pleasantly at a passing neighbour. "He wanted to know if a woman had come through lately. A swordswoman. Young, dark-haired, tall. Carrying a plain grey-bladed sword in a black scabbard with gold on the hilt."
The noise of the festival seemed, very faintly, to recede.
"He was polite," Mei went on. "Very polite. He spoke softly. He had a way of leaning in when he talked, so you had to lean in to hear him. He never raised his voice once. He gave the ferryman a silver coin just for a yes or a no." Her smile did not waver. "He had a scar behind his left ear. A little round one, the colour of milk. I noticed it when he turned to look at the water."
"Did he," Zheyu's voice was not quite steady, and he steadied it. "Did he say who he was?"
"A scholar. A collector of antiques. He was looking for an old sword." The fan snapped shut. "He said he meant the owner no harm. He said he wished only to make an offer."
A smile that never reaches the eyes, thought Zheyu. A habit of speaking softly. A cold mark behind the ear.
He had told her the signs himself, on the edge of a dark forest, by a little fire. He had recited them like a lesson. And now they were being repeated back to him by a woman in a rose silk gown, on a bridge hung with lanterns, in the middle of the happiest night of the year.
"Did you tell him anything?" he asked.
"Of course not." Mei sounded faintly offended. "I told him I had never heard of such a person. I told him the only swordswoman in Liuyin was a fat old widow who ran the noodle stall, and she'd never been known to carry anything but a cleaver."
A short breath of laughter escaped him. It had nothing in it that resembled mirth.
"I did not tell her," said Mei. She nodded toward Qinghe's distant figure. "I thought you should decide. She has enough weight on her. And she wears it so well that one forgets to look." Her hand tightened on his arm. "But I will not lie to her if she asks me straight. I want you to know that. I am fond of you both. And I am not stupid."
"I know that you are not."
"Good. Then what do I do?"
He did not answer at once.
The crowd flowed past them, laughing, calling, jostling. A small girl ran by with a lantern shaped like a rabbit. Somewhere a flute had begun to play. And in the middle of it all, far off beneath a string of golden lamps, Qinghe turned her head and caught his eye, and lifted one eyebrow in a silent, long-suffering question: Are you coming, or must I save myself?
His heart gave a hard slow beat.
He thought of the dark. He thought of the road, the long wet road, and a hand that had gripped his sleeve in the night. He thought of her face when she had said I wasn't there. She was so tired. She carried so much already, so much grief and so much anger and so much of a past that had no name, and tonight, for the first time since he had known her, she was standing under a thousand lanterns with the light on her face.
If I tell her, it ends, he thought. The evening. The ease. The brief clear hour in which she forgets.
If I do not tell her, she may be walking into a trap.
It was a choice. It was the first true choice he had made in three hundred years. He felt the weight of it settle in his body, cold and heavy and entirely his own. He had never decided anything before. He had never been the one who held a secret. He had only ever been the sword. The thing that was drawn and sheathed. The thing that did not choose.
"Tomorrow," he said at last. "I will tell her tomorrow. Tonight, let her have this."
Mei studied him for a long moment. Something in her face shifted, softened, grew a little rueful.
"You love her," she said.
"I," he began.
"Don't. I'm not asking." She patted his arm, brisk and kind. "It's all right. It's perfectly obvious. I only wanted to make sure you knew." She smiled at him, a real smile, sad and bright. "Now come. She's glaring."
* * *
The dancing was on the east bank, in a broad paved square where the canal widened into a pool.
A platform of planks had been built out over the water, hung with garlands and lit by a hundred lamps. A small band sat at one end, a flute, a zither, a pair of bamboo clappers, and a drum, and their music drifted out over the water slow and sweet and a little melancholy. Couples moved on the boards in unhurried circles. The lanterns on the surface rocked gently, bobbing against the pilings, and their reflections broke and mended and broke again.
"No," said Qinghe, stopping dead at the edge of the square.
"Yes," said Mei.
"I can't."
"You can walk, can't you? Then you can dance. It's walking with a rhythm." Mei took her by both shoulders and turned her bodily to face Zheyu. "He doesn't know how either. You will be dreadful together. It will be charming. Go."
She gave Qinghe a firm push. Qinghe stumbled forward, a half-step, and found herself standing in front of him with her hands clenched at her sides and a flush on her cheeks that rivalled the lanterns.
"This is ridiculous," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm not going to do it."
"No."
"I'm going to stand here and glare until she goes away."
"That seems reasonable," said Zheyu. He was looking at her. He had meant to say something else. He could not remember what. Her hair had come a little loose in the crowd, and a strand of it lay across her collarbone, and the golden light from a hundred paper lamps was moving over her face like water. She had the look of a fighter who has been backed into a corner and does not yet know whether to bite.
He held out his hand.
He did not speak. He did not smile. He only held it out, palm up, between them, in the light, and left it there. It was an offer. He made it as lightly as he knew how, so that she could decline without shame. So that she could laugh, and shake her head, and walk away.
She looked at the hand.
He saw her think of the rain. He saw her think of the road, and the mud, and the way her colour had drained in his arms. He saw her glance at her own fingers, and the faint blue shadow beneath the nails. She was weighing something. He knew, because he was doing the same. It costs her. The thought sat in him like a splinter. Every touch costs. And I am asking.
"I will keep it light," he said, very low. "Only the fingertips. I will keep to the beat. And if you grow cold, you have only to say."
"I'll say."
"Promise."
"I promise." She drew a deep breath, and put her hand in his.
It was cool. It was a little damp. He felt the calluses on her palm, and the tension in every finger, and the faint tremor that ran through the whole slim length of her arm. She was holding herself like a drawn bow. He closed his hand around hers, very gently, and led her onto the planks.
* * *
They were dreadful.
It was exactly as Mei had promised. She trod on his foot within the first four steps, and he walked into the corner of a post. They went the wrong way around the first turn and had to stop and look at one another and begin again. Qinghe's whole body was rigid. She kept her chin high and her eyes fixed over his left shoulder with the expression of a woman being led to execution, and he could feel, through the faint pressure of her fingers, the tight little counting rhythm of her feet. One, two. One, two.
"You are leading," he said.
"I'm not leading."
"You are. You keep pulling me to the left."
"You're going to the right."
"It is a slow dance. One goes in a circle. It is not a sword drill."
"It's the same thing," she muttered. "You keep your balance. You watch the other person's feet."
"Then watch mine."
"I am."
"You are watching the post."
"The post's in the way."
He laughed. He could not help it. The sound came out of him unguarded and bright, and her head whipped round, and for the first time she looked straight at him.
She did not look away.
It happened so slowly that he almost missed it. One moment she was glaring, and the next the glare had loosened into something bewildered, and then the bewilderment melted too, quite suddenly, and left her face open. Her eyes were dark and enormous. They held the lanterns in them like small gold coins. And they stayed on his, unflinching, in the middle of the swaying planks, with the music turning slowly around them.
He forgot his feet.
He forgot the post, and the beat, and the thin sweet wail of the flute. He forgot that he had ever been afraid. There was only her face, and her hand in his, and the long unbroken look that stretched between them like a taut silk thread. He felt, distantly, the boards turning beneath him. He felt her step into the rhythm of it, unthinkingly, as the water takes a boat. His hand had moved to the small of her back. He did not remember doing it. It lay there, light as a leaf, and she did not stiffen.
"You are not looking at the post," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't know." She said it very quietly. Her fingers curled tighter in his. "I think I stopped being afraid of it."
He did not trust his voice.
They turned. The lamplight swung past, and the dark water, and a drift of petals that had blown down from the willows and lay in a scattered pink wreath on the surface. Somewhere a woman was laughing. Somewhere a child was crying with joy. The drum went on, soft and slow, in the rhythm of a heart, and his own heart came into step with it so exactly that he could not tell where the one ended and the other began.
I do not want this to stop.
He had thought it before, in the dark, behind a screen. But it had been a whisper then. Now it was a bell.
"Your hand is cold," he said gently.
"It's fine."
"Qinghe."
"It's fine," she said. She had gone a little pale, and her fingers were icy, but her eyes were shining. "It's nothing. A bit of a chill. Don't you dare let go."
He did not let go.
He thought, with a pang: I should. He thought: It is selfish. He thought of the thin cold ring around her wrist, and the way she had swayed in the road, and the lessening he had felt, twice now, when his warmth went out to her and hers came back to him. And he held her hand anyway, lightly, for the length of that one song, and the guilt rode beside him like a shadow, quiet and patient and entirely unable to take the light from her face.
The music ended on a long low note. The couples drifted apart. Qinghe stood a moment longer with her hand in his, and then, slowly, as if she were coming up from a great depth, she let go.
"That was," she said. She cleared her throat. "That wasn't so bad."
"No."
"We'll never do it again."
"Of course not."
"Don't smile."
"I am not smiling," said Zheyu, smiling.
* * *
They set the lanterns on the water at midnight.
There were hundreds. The whole of Liuyin had gathered at the edge of the canal, on the steps, on the quay, on the arch of the bridge, and the surface of the water was a spread of drifting stars. Each lantern carried a flame and a wish. They went out together on the dark current in a long slow glittering procession, and the people on the bank held their breath and watched them go.
Mei had given him a pen. He crouched on the bottom step with a lantern on his knee, a plain white paper one with a bamboo frame, and he held the brush above the blank page and could not think of a single word.
"You don't have to write it," said Qinghe, crouching beside him. "Nobody's going to read it. You just have to wish."
"What are you wishing?"
"I'm not telling you."
"May I guess?"
"No." She dipped her own brush. She wrote something small and quick, and she folded her arm over it so that he could not see. "It's bad luck."
"Then I shall not look."
He turned his face toward the water. He closed his eyes. He thought: I have wished for a thousand things in a thousand nights, and I have never once been granted one. He thought of the dark inside the sword, and the long grey sleep, and the sound of the rain on a roof of straw. He thought: Let me stay. And then, because that was a lie, because it was not what he truly wanted, he sat for a while in the whirl of his own heart and let the true thing come.
Let her be well.
Let her be happy.
Let her not be alone.
He opened his eyes. He wrote it, in neat brush strokes, on the white paper, in the old script that nobody read any more, and he folded it small and laid it inside the lantern beside the candle. Then he lit it, and lowered it into the water, and let it go.
It rocked. It turned. It caught the current, and slid away between two other lanterns, a small gold glow among the glow, and drifted toward the bend.
Beside him, Qinghe let hers go at the same moment.
They watched the two flames go out together across the water, side by side, bobbing and turning, until they were lost among a thousand others. Neither of them spoke. She had drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, and her shoulder was nearly touching his. In the warm light her face was very still, and very young, and it seemed to him that she was holding her breath.
"They'll make it," he said.
"You can't know that."
"I can feel it."
"That's not how it works."
"No." He smiled. "But I wanted to say it."
She looked sidelong at him. In the lamplight something flickered across her face, a sort of wondering, tender, exasperated fondness, so open and so quickly gone that he almost thought he had imagined it. She turned her head away.
"Idiot," she said, softly.
He had never loved a word so much in his life.
I want things, thought Zheyu. It struck him with the force of a wave. I want things. For myself. I want to stay, and to be warm, and to be looked at like that. I want to be a person, and not a blade. I want to hear her say my name.
He had not wanted anything for three hundred years. He had not dared. And now the wanting ran through him like a river in flood, fierce and clear and terrible, and he did not know how he would ever fit it back inside.
He lifted his eyes to the water.
The bend was far away. The lanterns were small gold motes, thinning, scattering. A fine mist had begun to rise off the canal, and it drifted between the boats in pale curling ropes. He watched it idly, his mind full of her, his heart full of the music, and his gaze wandered across the dark surface to the opposite bank.
A shape was standing there.
It stood under the black fan of a willow, just beyond the reach of the lamps. It was tall, and narrow, and very still. It had no face that he could see. It wore a long dark coat, and the wind did not move it, and the mist curled about its feet without touching. It stood quite alone at the water's edge, with its head a little tilted, in the attitude of one who has been waiting a long time.
He did not breathe.
A cold ran through him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. It was not the cold of the thread. It was older. It was the memory of a smell, and a script, and a long grey corridor that smelled of cinnabar and old iron. I know that coat. The thought rose out of the dark like a corpse out of a pond, and he could not follow it back down.
"Zheyu?" said Qinghe. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said.
He had to say it twice. He tore his gaze away from the opposite bank and made himself smile, and look at her, and say it again, lightly. "A trick of the mist. I thought I saw a heron."
"You went white."
"I am cold. That is all."
"I told you to wear the cloak."
"You did." He rose. His knees were not quite steady. He held out a hand to help her up, and she took it, and he held it a moment longer than he should. "Shall we find Mei? I think it is late."
"All right."
She was already turning, brushing off her skirt, calling something to Mei across the crowd. He let her go ahead. He stood on the step for the space of one breath, with his heart pounding and his palms gone damp, and looked back across the water.
The willow was empty.
There was only the mist, drifting slowly in the dark, and a scatter of fallen petals on the bank, and far out on the canal, small and bright and growing smaller, two lanterns turning in the current as if they had no care in the world.
He stood there a long time. Then he followed her home.
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