Mei went home alone, which was how Qinghe knew it had been planned.
She had done it so smoothly that there was no way to accuse her. A yawn on the bridge. A hand pressed to the small of her back. A remark about her feet, which were killing her in these ridiculous slippers, and an announcement that she could not possibly walk another step. You two go ahead and see the river. Don't wait up. I have a key. Then she had kissed the air beside each of their cheeks, and swept away through the thinning crowd in a whirl of rose silk, and had not once looked back, which was in itself a form of looking.
"She's a menace," said Qinghe.
"Yes," said Zheyu.
"She did that on purpose."
"Almost certainly."
"I should be angry."
"You are not?"
She considered it. The festival was winding down around them. The musicians were packing their instruments. A man was stacking chairs. Along the quay the last of the lamps flickered and went out one by one, so that the town seemed to be sinking slowly into a warm dim sleep, and the air smelled of snuffed candles and cooling sugar and the wet green breath of the canal.
"No," she said. "I'm not."
It surprised her, how easily it came out.
* * *
They walked along the river path, where the willows grew.
It was a quiet way. It ran beside the water for nearly a mile, a narrow dirt track, packed hard and bordered on the landward side by a low stone wall. The willows leaned over it from the bank. They were very old trees, with trunks as thick as barrels and long drooping branches that swept the ground. Their leaves were new, and they hung in heavy green curtains, so that walking beneath them was like passing through a series of dim cool rooms. Moonlight fell through in pieces. It lay on the path in small pale coins.
She walked slowly.
She had not decided to. She had only noticed, after a minute or two, that her feet had stopped hurrying. The long brisk stride that carried her everywhere, that ate the miles, that had carried her away from every place she had ever lived, had gradually loosened, until she was strolling. She, who had never strolled in her life.
Zheyu was at her side. He kept to her left, a foot away, as he always did. His hands were folded behind his back. He had been quiet since they left the lanterns. It was not a sulky quiet. It was a thoughtful one, edged with something she could not quite name. Twice she had glanced up and found him gazing into the dark between the trees, with a faint line between his brows.
"You're pale," she said.
"Am I?"
"You were pale on the steps. You said it was the cold."
"It was."
"It's not cold."
"I am from a very warm country," said Zheyu, gravely, and she laughed in spite of herself.
"You're from a sword."
"That, too."
They went on. The path curved. Beneath a willow so old and wide that its branches formed a dense green dome, the moonlight failed, and for a few steps they walked in near-darkness, with only the faint gleam of his sleeve to guide her. Then they came out into a small clearing at the river's edge, and she stopped.
It was lovely.
She did not know why she had never seen it before. A little round pool of grass, ringed with willows, open on one side to the water. The moon had come out from behind the cloud and hung low over the canal, huge and round and golden. A scatter of fallen petals lay on the grass like a spilled bowl of pearls. The air was soft, and still, and fragrant. Out on the water a last few lanterns drifted by, lost and small, heading for the bend.
"Oh," she said, softly.
"Yes," said Zheyu.
They stood side by side and looked at it.
* * *
"There is something I wanted to ask you," he said, after a while.
She had expected it. She had been waiting for it, without knowing, like one who hears a footstep on the stair. "Go on."
"The season is not endless." He was looking at the water. His voice was quite even. "I do not know how many days. It has been different for each. But it is not endless, and there will come a morning when the blossoms fall. And I would like to know," he hesitated, "what you will do."
"Do?"
"After. When I am gone."
She did not answer at once. It was the thing she had been avoiding. It had been sitting at the back of her mind for weeks, and she had learned to walk around it, as one walks around a hole in a floor. She watched a petal turn in the air and settle on the grass.
"Work," she said. "I'll take jobs. Escort, guard, hunt. The same as before."
"Alone?"
"I'm used to alone."
"That is not what I asked." He turned his head. The moonlight fell across his face and silvered the edge of his hair. "I did not ask if you were used to it. I asked if you would be all right."
"I'll be fine."
"Qinghe."
"I'll be fine." She heard her own voice roughen. "I don't see why it matters. You'll be asleep. You won't know."
"I will know."
"How?"
"The sword will be in your hand." He said it quite simply. "I will feel it. I always feel it. I will feel your thumb on the hilt, and your breath, and your heartbeat when you sleep. I will feel the road you walk. It is not a thing one can unlearn." A faint smile touched his mouth and went away. "It is why I ask. I would not like to feel you lonely."
She had to look away.
The water slid by. A frog croaked, somewhere, in the reeds. She put her hand on the hilt of Qingming and stood with her thumb moving slowly back and forth over the cord, and she did not speak for a long time.
"What are you afraid of?" he asked, gently.
"Nothing."
"That is not true."
"I'm not afraid of anything. I've," she began, and then, abruptly, the old defence gave out under her. She heard it go. A small dry crack, as of a branch breaking. She stood in the moonlight with her hand on the hilt and her heart beating hard, and she heard herself say, in a very low voice:
"Not being needed."
He did not move.
"That's what scares me." She was not looking at him. She was looking at the river. "It sounds stupid. I know it does. But it's the only thing I've ever been afraid of. Not dying. Not pain. I've made my peace with those. It's the, the day when there's nothing left that I'm for. When the job's done and the client's paid and the road's clear and nobody wants me. When I'm just standing there, with a sword, in a field, and no one needs a thing I can do."
The moon lay on the water in a long broken path.
"I was six," said Qinghe. "He put a sword in my hand and then a bowl of rice. In that order. I've never forgotten. I think some part of me has always known that the rice was for the sword. That I was kept because I was useful. That if I stopped," she stopped.
"If you stopped, they would stop."
"I thought so."
"Is it true?"
"I don't know." Her voice cracked. "He wrote me a letter. He said I was a better daughter than he deserved. He said he thought I knew. And I didn't. I didn't know. And I keep thinking, what if there was never a day, in twenty years, that I could have put the sword down and been just me, just a girl in a courtyard, and he'd still have wanted me there? And I never knew. I never tried."
She had not meant to say any of it. It had come out of her like water out of a cracked jar, and now it stood between them in the moonlight, naked and shaking.
She waited for him to reply.
He was silent. For a long moment, she thought she had made a mistake, that she had spoken too much, that he would say something kind and false and the evening would collapse. She braced herself.
"I do not need you to be useful," said Zheyu.
She turned her head.
He had stepped closer. She had not heard him do it. He stood now in front of her, not a foot away, with his hands at his sides and his face lifted in the moonlight. He looked grave, and very young, and entirely without defence. His eyes were enormous. They held the whole of the night in them.
"I want to say this clearly," he said. "I want to say it so that it cannot be misunderstood." His voice was low, and rough, and quite steady. "I do not need you to fight for me. I do not need you to protect me. I do not need you to be strong, or clever, or quick. I do not need you to carry me, or pay for me, or save my life. I do not care if you can lift a sword or a feather." He drew breath. "I do not need you to be of any use whatever."
"Zheyu."
"I only want you here."
The words fell into the quiet like stones into deep water. She stood and felt them go down. She felt the ripples spread through her, out to her fingertips, to the edges of her skin.
"That is all," he said. "That is the entire thing. I want you to be here. In the world. In the same place that I am. In a room, in a field, on a road. I want to turn my head and find you there. I do not need a single other reason." His mouth trembled. "You have spent your whole life being kept because you were useful. I would like to be the one who wants you for nothing."
She could not breathe.
For nothing. She had never heard anything so astonishing. It sounded like a door opening in a wall that had no door. It sounded like a language she had never learned, and had known, all the same, in the bones of her.
"You can't mean that," she said. It was barely a whisper.
"I mean every word."
"You've known me a month."
"I have known you a lifetime. I have known you since the first night. Since the day you turned in the grass and said who's there? in a voice as steady as a blade." A faint, unsteady smile. "I did not choose to feel it. I do not know if it is mine. But I know what it is, and I know that I would give it to you if I had nothing else to give."
The wind sighed through the willows.
She looked at him. She looked at the tilt of his head, and the line of his jaw, and the tremor in his throat as he swallowed. She looked at his hands, which had curled into loose fists at his sides, and she knew, with a sudden quiet certainty, that he was holding himself back by main force. That every muscle in his body was strained to keep from reaching for her.
And she realised that she wanted him to.
* * *
He lifted his hand.
It came up slowly, as if through water. She watched it, and did not stir. A curl of her hair had come loose in the night. It hung against her cheek, a dark crooked line, and his fingers came toward it with infinite care, and paused, and she thought, He's going to ask. She thought: He's going to ask permission. She thought that if he asked, she would not be able to speak.
He did not ask.
He touched the strand of hair with two fingertips, and drew it back behind her ear.
It was the lightest of touches. It was almost nothing. A brush of skin against the curve of her ear, a whisper of warmth along the line of her jaw. But it went through her like lightning. Every nerve in her body woke at once. She felt her breath stop, and her heart stumble, and a long slow shiver run down her spine from her nape to her heels.
His hand did not move away.
It stayed where it was, cupped against the side of her face, his thumb resting on her cheekbone. She felt the tremor in it. She felt the rough warmth of his palm. Her own hand had come up, she did not know how, and it hung in the air between them, hovering, half raised, not quite touching his wrist.
He bent his head.
She saw it happen. She saw the dark fall of his hair, and the moon behind it, and the slow grave descent of his face toward hers. She saw his lashes lower. She felt his breath on her lips, warm and unsteady, and smelled the faint sweetness of peach blossom, and thought, clearly, with great and terrible calm: This is what I have been walking toward.
They were a hand's breadth apart.
Then half a hand's breadth.
Then she could feel the heat of his mouth against her own, a hair's width away, a breath, less than a breath, so near that all it would have taken was for either of them to sigh. Her eyes closed. Her fingers closed on nothing. Every thought in her head had gone to white, and there was only the dark, and the warmth, and the unbearable sweetness of waiting.
Yes, she thought.
And then, from nowhere, from the bottom of the old cold well where she kept all her fears, a voice spoke up.
What if you are only a habit?
She went rigid.
What if he cannot help it? What if it is the thread, the binding, the leash? What if you are only the nearest warm thing, the hand that holds the hilt? He told you himself. He said he did not know if it was his. And you are standing here with your eyes shut, like a child, like a fool, and in six weeks he will be a sword on your hip and you will be alone in a quiet room with the memory of a kiss that was never yours.
What if he does not want you at all?
What if you are only the cage?
She stepped back.
She did it all at once. Her whole body jerked, as from a blow. Her hand flew up, palm out, between them, and she backed away from him across the grass with her heart hammering and her face on fire. The cold night air struck her cheek where his hand had been. It felt like a slap.
"Don't," said Qinghe.
Her voice came out cracked. It shook so much that she barely knew it for her own.
He stood where she had left him, with his arm still half lifted, and his eyes open now, wide and dazed. He looked like a man who had been woken in the middle of a dream. She saw the colour drain out of his face. She saw his hand fall. She saw him understand.
"Qinghe," he said.
"Don't. Don't." She was shaking from head to foot. "I can't. I'm sorry. I can't."
"It is all right."
"It's not all right!" The words burst out of her, high and wild. "It's not! I can't do this! You don't, I don't know if you, if this is, I don't know!" She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."
"Qinghe, please. You need not,"
"I have to go."
"Wait."
"I have to go."
She turned. She did not remember crossing the clearing. She remembered only the dark of the willows closing around her, the soft green slap of branches on her shoulder, the sound of her own breath coming in hard sobbing gulps. She ran. She ran along the river path with her sword banging on her hip and the moon swinging crazily overhead, and she did not look back.
She knew, without turning, that he did not follow.
She knew, because the thread did not tighten. She had run perhaps thirty paces before she understood what that meant, and by then she was already crying. She slowed. She stopped. She stood alone on the path, in the dark, with her hand pressed against her ribs, and understood that he had not moved from the spot.
He is letting me go.
She could feel it. The thread stretched, between them, thin and taut and aching, a bright fine line drawn through the dark. It pulled at her like a hook in the breast. She thought she could hear the rising of that old ghost-pain, the white tearing hurt at the edge of ten paces, and she knew with a dreadful lurch of the heart that he was standing in the clearing with his teeth clenched and his hand pressed to his chest, and that he would not call after her. He would not say a word. He would let her run until the thread snapped and the pain overtook him, rather than ask her to turn around.
"Damn you," she whispered. "Damn you, Zheyu."
She did not go back.
She did not go forward either. She stood where she was, in the dark, a hundred feet from the clearing, with the willows weeping around her, and she waited. She waited for what felt like a very long time, shaking, with her fists clenched and the tears running down her face. When at last she heard his step on the path, slow and heavy, she did not turn her head.
He stopped ten paces behind her. Exactly ten.
Neither of them spoke.
She walked on. He followed. And all the long way home, through the empty streets of Liuyin, under the last dying lanterns, he kept to that measured distance, never closer, never farther, a patient pale shape at the edge of her sight. She did not look at him. She did not need to. She could feel him, as she always could, like a second shadow, like the sound of a held breath, like the weight of a hand she had been too afraid to take.
It was the longest mile of her life.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Mei went home alone, which was how Qinghe knew it had been planned.
She had done it so smoothly that there was no way to accuse her. A yawn on the bridge. A hand pressed to the small of her back. A remark about her feet, which were killing her in these ridiculous slippers, and an announcement that she could not possibly walk another step. You two go ahead and see the river. Don't wait up. I have a key. Then she had kissed the air beside each of their cheeks, and swept away through the thinning crowd in a whirl of rose silk, and had not once looked back, which was in itself a form of looking.
"She's a menace," said Qinghe.
"Yes," said Zheyu.
"She did that on purpose."
"Almost certainly."
"I should be angry."
"You are not?"
She considered it. The festival was winding down around them. The musicians were packing their instruments. A man was stacking chairs. Along the quay the last of the lamps flickered and went out one by one, so that the town seemed to be sinking slowly into a warm dim sleep, and the air smelled of snuffed candles and cooling sugar and the wet green breath of the canal.
"No," she said. "I'm not."
It surprised her, how easily it came out.
* * *
They walked along the river path, where the willows grew.
It was a quiet way. It ran beside the water for nearly a mile, a narrow dirt track, packed hard and bordered on the landward side by a low stone wall. The willows leaned over it from the bank. They were very old trees, with trunks as thick as barrels and long drooping branches that swept the ground. Their leaves were new, and they hung in heavy green curtains, so that walking beneath them was like passing through a series of dim cool rooms. Moonlight fell through in pieces. It lay on the path in small pale coins.
She walked slowly.
She had not decided to. She had only noticed, after a minute or two, that her feet had stopped hurrying. The long brisk stride that carried her everywhere, that ate the miles, that had carried her away from every place she had ever lived, had gradually loosened, until she was strolling. She, who had never strolled in her life.
Zheyu was at her side. He kept to her left, a foot away, as he always did. His hands were folded behind his back. He had been quiet since they left the lanterns. It was not a sulky quiet. It was a thoughtful one, edged with something she could not quite name. Twice she had glanced up and found him gazing into the dark between the trees, with a faint line between his brows.
"You're pale," she said.
"Am I?"
"You were pale on the steps. You said it was the cold."
"It was."
"It's not cold."
"I am from a very warm country," said Zheyu, gravely, and she laughed in spite of herself.
"You're from a sword."
"That, too."
They went on. The path curved. Beneath a willow so old and wide that its branches formed a dense green dome, the moonlight failed, and for a few steps they walked in near-darkness, with only the faint gleam of his sleeve to guide her. Then they came out into a small clearing at the river's edge, and she stopped.
It was lovely.
She did not know why she had never seen it before. A little round pool of grass, ringed with willows, open on one side to the water. The moon had come out from behind the cloud and hung low over the canal, huge and round and golden. A scatter of fallen petals lay on the grass like a spilled bowl of pearls. The air was soft, and still, and fragrant. Out on the water a last few lanterns drifted by, lost and small, heading for the bend.
"Oh," she said, softly.
"Yes," said Zheyu.
They stood side by side and looked at it.
* * *
"There is something I wanted to ask you," he said, after a while.
She had expected it. She had been waiting for it, without knowing, like one who hears a footstep on the stair. "Go on."
"The season is not endless." He was looking at the water. His voice was quite even. "I do not know how many days. It has been different for each. But it is not endless, and there will come a morning when the blossoms fall. And I would like to know," he hesitated, "what you will do."
"Do?"
"After. When I am gone."
She did not answer at once. It was the thing she had been avoiding. It had been sitting at the back of her mind for weeks, and she had learned to walk around it, as one walks around a hole in a floor. She watched a petal turn in the air and settle on the grass.
"Work," she said. "I'll take jobs. Escort, guard, hunt. The same as before."
"Alone?"
"I'm used to alone."
"That is not what I asked." He turned his head. The moonlight fell across his face and silvered the edge of his hair. "I did not ask if you were used to it. I asked if you would be all right."
"I'll be fine."
"Qinghe."
"I'll be fine." She heard her own voice roughen. "I don't see why it matters. You'll be asleep. You won't know."
"I will know."
"How?"
"The sword will be in your hand." He said it quite simply. "I will feel it. I always feel it. I will feel your thumb on the hilt, and your breath, and your heartbeat when you sleep. I will feel the road you walk. It is not a thing one can unlearn." A faint smile touched his mouth and went away. "It is why I ask. I would not like to feel you lonely."
She had to look away.
The water slid by. A frog croaked, somewhere, in the reeds. She put her hand on the hilt of Qingming and stood with her thumb moving slowly back and forth over the cord, and she did not speak for a long time.
"What are you afraid of?" he asked, gently.
"Nothing."
"That is not true."
"I'm not afraid of anything. I've," she began, and then, abruptly, the old defence gave out under her. She heard it go. A small dry crack, as of a branch breaking. She stood in the moonlight with her hand on the hilt and her heart beating hard, and she heard herself say, in a very low voice:
"Not being needed."
He did not move.
"That's what scares me." She was not looking at him. She was looking at the river. "It sounds stupid. I know it does. But it's the only thing I've ever been afraid of. Not dying. Not pain. I've made my peace with those. It's the, the day when there's nothing left that I'm for. When the job's done and the client's paid and the road's clear and nobody wants me. When I'm just standing there, with a sword, in a field, and no one needs a thing I can do."
The moon lay on the water in a long broken path.
"I was six," said Qinghe. "He put a sword in my hand and then a bowl of rice. In that order. I've never forgotten. I think some part of me has always known that the rice was for the sword. That I was kept because I was useful. That if I stopped," she stopped.
"If you stopped, they would stop."
"I thought so."
"Is it true?"
"I don't know." Her voice cracked. "He wrote me a letter. He said I was a better daughter than he deserved. He said he thought I knew. And I didn't. I didn't know. And I keep thinking, what if there was never a day, in twenty years, that I could have put the sword down and been just me, just a girl in a courtyard, and he'd still have wanted me there? And I never knew. I never tried."
She had not meant to say any of it. It had come out of her like water out of a cracked jar, and now it stood between them in the moonlight, naked and shaking.
She waited for him to reply.
He was silent. For a long moment, she thought she had made a mistake, that she had spoken too much, that he would say something kind and false and the evening would collapse. She braced herself.
"I do not need you to be useful," said Zheyu.
She turned her head.
He had stepped closer. She had not heard him do it. He stood now in front of her, not a foot away, with his hands at his sides and his face lifted in the moonlight. He looked grave, and very young, and entirely without defence. His eyes were enormous. They held the whole of the night in them.
"I want to say this clearly," he said. "I want to say it so that it cannot be misunderstood." His voice was low, and rough, and quite steady. "I do not need you to fight for me. I do not need you to protect me. I do not need you to be strong, or clever, or quick. I do not need you to carry me, or pay for me, or save my life. I do not care if you can lift a sword or a feather." He drew breath. "I do not need you to be of any use whatever."
"Zheyu."
"I only want you here."
The words fell into the quiet like stones into deep water. She stood and felt them go down. She felt the ripples spread through her, out to her fingertips, to the edges of her skin.
"That is all," he said. "That is the entire thing. I want you to be here. In the world. In the same place that I am. In a room, in a field, on a road. I want to turn my head and find you there. I do not need a single other reason." His mouth trembled. "You have spent your whole life being kept because you were useful. I would like to be the one who wants you for nothing."
She could not breathe.
For nothing. She had never heard anything so astonishing. It sounded like a door opening in a wall that had no door. It sounded like a language she had never learned, and had known, all the same, in the bones of her.
"You can't mean that," she said. It was barely a whisper.
"I mean every word."
"You've known me a month."
"I have known you a lifetime. I have known you since the first night. Since the day you turned in the grass and said who's there? in a voice as steady as a blade." A faint, unsteady smile. "I did not choose to feel it. I do not know if it is mine. But I know what it is, and I know that I would give it to you if I had nothing else to give."
The wind sighed through the willows.
She looked at him. She looked at the tilt of his head, and the line of his jaw, and the tremor in his throat as he swallowed. She looked at his hands, which had curled into loose fists at his sides, and she knew, with a sudden quiet certainty, that he was holding himself back by main force. That every muscle in his body was strained to keep from reaching for her.
And she realised that she wanted him to.
* * *
He lifted his hand.
It came up slowly, as if through water. She watched it, and did not stir. A curl of her hair had come loose in the night. It hung against her cheek, a dark crooked line, and his fingers came toward it with infinite care, and paused, and she thought, He's going to ask. She thought: He's going to ask permission. She thought that if he asked, she would not be able to speak.
He did not ask.
He touched the strand of hair with two fingertips, and drew it back behind her ear.
It was the lightest of touches. It was almost nothing. A brush of skin against the curve of her ear, a whisper of warmth along the line of her jaw. But it went through her like lightning. Every nerve in her body woke at once. She felt her breath stop, and her heart stumble, and a long slow shiver run down her spine from her nape to her heels.
His hand did not move away.
It stayed where it was, cupped against the side of her face, his thumb resting on her cheekbone. She felt the tremor in it. She felt the rough warmth of his palm. Her own hand had come up, she did not know how, and it hung in the air between them, hovering, half raised, not quite touching his wrist.
He bent his head.
She saw it happen. She saw the dark fall of his hair, and the moon behind it, and the slow grave descent of his face toward hers. She saw his lashes lower. She felt his breath on her lips, warm and unsteady, and smelled the faint sweetness of peach blossom, and thought, clearly, with great and terrible calm: This is what I have been walking toward.
They were a hand's breadth apart.
Then half a hand's breadth.
Then she could feel the heat of his mouth against her own, a hair's width away, a breath, less than a breath, so near that all it would have taken was for either of them to sigh. Her eyes closed. Her fingers closed on nothing. Every thought in her head had gone to white, and there was only the dark, and the warmth, and the unbearable sweetness of waiting.
Yes, she thought.
And then, from nowhere, from the bottom of the old cold well where she kept all her fears, a voice spoke up.
What if you are only a habit?
She went rigid.
What if he cannot help it? What if it is the thread, the binding, the leash? What if you are only the nearest warm thing, the hand that holds the hilt? He told you himself. He said he did not know if it was his. And you are standing here with your eyes shut, like a child, like a fool, and in six weeks he will be a sword on your hip and you will be alone in a quiet room with the memory of a kiss that was never yours.
What if he does not want you at all?
What if you are only the cage?
She stepped back.
She did it all at once. Her whole body jerked, as from a blow. Her hand flew up, palm out, between them, and she backed away from him across the grass with her heart hammering and her face on fire. The cold night air struck her cheek where his hand had been. It felt like a slap.
"Don't," said Qinghe.
Her voice came out cracked. It shook so much that she barely knew it for her own.
He stood where she had left him, with his arm still half lifted, and his eyes open now, wide and dazed. He looked like a man who had been woken in the middle of a dream. She saw the colour drain out of his face. She saw his hand fall. She saw him understand.
"Qinghe," he said.
"Don't. Don't." She was shaking from head to foot. "I can't. I'm sorry. I can't."
"It is all right."
"It's not all right!" The words burst out of her, high and wild. "It's not! I can't do this! You don't, I don't know if you, if this is, I don't know!" She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."
"Qinghe, please. You need not,"
"I have to go."
"Wait."
"I have to go."
She turned. She did not remember crossing the clearing. She remembered only the dark of the willows closing around her, the soft green slap of branches on her shoulder, the sound of her own breath coming in hard sobbing gulps. She ran. She ran along the river path with her sword banging on her hip and the moon swinging crazily overhead, and she did not look back.
She knew, without turning, that he did not follow.
She knew, because the thread did not tighten. She had run perhaps thirty paces before she understood what that meant, and by then she was already crying. She slowed. She stopped. She stood alone on the path, in the dark, with her hand pressed against her ribs, and understood that he had not moved from the spot.
He is letting me go.
She could feel it. The thread stretched, between them, thin and taut and aching, a bright fine line drawn through the dark. It pulled at her like a hook in the breast. She thought she could hear the rising of that old ghost-pain, the white tearing hurt at the edge of ten paces, and she knew with a dreadful lurch of the heart that he was standing in the clearing with his teeth clenched and his hand pressed to his chest, and that he would not call after her. He would not say a word. He would let her run until the thread snapped and the pain overtook him, rather than ask her to turn around.
"Damn you," she whispered. "Damn you, Zheyu."
She did not go back.
She did not go forward either. She stood where she was, in the dark, a hundred feet from the clearing, with the willows weeping around her, and she waited. She waited for what felt like a very long time, shaking, with her fists clenched and the tears running down her face. When at last she heard his step on the path, slow and heavy, she did not turn her head.
He stopped ten paces behind her. Exactly ten.
Neither of them spoke.
She walked on. He followed. And all the long way home, through the empty streets of Liuyin, under the last dying lanterns, he kept to that measured distance, never closer, never farther, a patient pale shape at the edge of her sight. She did not look at him. She did not need to. She could feel him, as she always could, like a second shadow, like the sound of a held breath, like the weight of a hand she had been too afraid to take.
It was the longest mile of her life.
You've reached the end of this chapter