She was gone before dawn.

Zheyu knew it before he opened his eyes. He had learned to feel her in the room the way one feels the sun through closed lids, a faint warmth on the skin, a gentle pressure at the edges of the dark. This morning it was missing. The air on the far side of the heron screen lay empty and cool. He lay still for a moment with his heart sinking, listening to the quiet, and then he rose and went to the window.

She was in the yard.

It was the grey hour, before the birds. A mist lay over the flagstones. The old well stood like a shadow in the middle of it, and beyond the well, under the dripping eaves of the woodshed, a lone figure was moving through the forms.

He watched her.

She had always been beautiful at the sword. He had thought so since the first night, in the valley, with the petals turning around the blade. But this was different. There was something almost savage in it. She went through Rising Cloud, and Parting Reed, and the long slow cut called Winter River, over and over, without pause, her whole body drawn into a single hard line. Her breath smoked in the cold. Her sleeves were soaked with sweat. The blade moved so fast that it seemed to blur, and when it stopped, at the end of each form, it stopped dead, as if it had struck a wall.

She did not look up at the window. She did not look at anything.

She has been out here for hours, he thought. The flagstones around her feet were scuffed pale in a ring. A line of dark footprints marked the wet grass. She must have risen in the black of the night, after hours of lying awake, and come out here to beat the thing out of herself.

He put his palm flat against the cold glass.

The thread tugged at him, gently. It was not painful. She was well within the ten paces. But it carried a sensation that he had never felt through it before, a flickering, raw, jagged thing, like a nerve laid bare. It was her. It was all that she was feeling. It came to him in pieces, in a bright tumult of shame and fear and anger and an ache so deep that he drew breath through his teeth.

I did that, he thought. I frightened her.

He did not go down.

* * *

She avoided him for four days.

It was done with great skill. He had to admire it, in a bleak sort of way. She rose before him. She ate standing up in the kitchen, in the time it took to boil a pot of tea. She went out to the yard and trained until noon, and then went out to the market, or the river, or the shop of a man who sold bowstrings, and came back after dark and went directly to bed. She spoke to him when she had to. Pass the salt. Don't wait for me. I'll be back late. She spoke in a flat polite voice and kept her eyes on a point just past his left ear.

And the whole time she kept the ten paces.

He had never seen anything like it. She calculated it to the inch. She walked ahead of him on the stairs, ten paces up. She sat at the far end of the table in the kitchen, ten paces from his chair. When she went to the yard, she stood at the farthest corner, where the wall stopped, and he understood that she must have paced it out in the night. She stayed right at the edge of the thread, as a swimmer clings to the very edge of a pool, and she did not step an inch beyond.

She was so careful of him that it made his teeth ache.

She will not let me fall, he thought, watching her from the doorway on the third evening as she drew a bucket from the well. She stood exactly nine and a half paces from him. She had her back turned. She will not let the pain take me. She will keep me alive, and she will never come one step closer.

He did not know whether to laugh or weep.

He kept the distance too. He did it silently, without comment, in the way that she did, and he took a bitter private pleasure in meeting her measure for measure. He did not crowd her. He did not follow her into corners. He did not speak unless she did. When she walked to the end of the quay, he stopped at the head of the steps and stayed there, with his hands folded and his eyes on the water, until she came back.

He thought: If it is what she needs, I can do it.

He had done it before, for other hands. He had stood at the edge of rooms. He had given people their silence, and the dark, and the long space to grieve. He was extremely good at it.

It had never hurt like this.

* * *

"She is not angry," said Mei.

It was the fourth morning. He was sitting on the back step of the kitchen with his hands hanging between his knees, watching the light climb the willows on the opposite bank, when a shadow fell across the flagstones and a cup of tea appeared in front of his face.

He took it. "I did not say that she was."

"You have the look of a man who thinks he is on trial." Mei sat down on the step beside him, in a clean apron, with her sleeves rolled. She smelled of flour and wood smoke. She cradled her own cup in both hands and looked out across the water with her head tilted. "I'll tell you what I told her, since you won't ask. She's frightened. She's not angry. There's a great difference."

"She said, don't."

"She did."

"She ran."

"She did." Mei took a sip. "I'd have run too."

He turned his head. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I'm not stupid, my dear, and I've been a woman in love." She gave him a small crooked smile. "It's a terrible thing, to find you want something so badly you'd turn yourself inside out for it. It makes you reckless. It makes you want to scream. And it makes you so afraid that you can't stand still. Did you think you were the only one who was shaking?"

His fingers tightened on the cup.

"She told you what frightens her," said Mei, more gently. "I heard. She told me. She was in the kitchen at midnight, the night of the lanterns, sitting in the dark with a candle, and she told me everything in one breath and then asked me not to say a word." She paused. "I haven't. I won't. But I'll tell you this. She is not afraid of you. She is afraid of what she is going to lose."

"She will lose nothing."

"She will lose you."

He closed his eyes.

"When the blossoms fall," said Mei, quietly. "In a month, perhaps. Six weeks. And she knows it, and you know it, and every day it gets nearer. And you stood in front of her, in the moonlight, and you said you wanted her for nothing." Her voice shook very slightly. "Zheyu. If I were a girl who had been taught all her life that love was something you earned, and a man said that to me, I would go out of my mind."

He said nothing.

He sat with his head bowed over the cup, and the tea went cold between his hands, and he saw the clearing in the moonlight, and the dark curve of her lashes, and the moment, the single bright shining moment, when she had leaned into him and he had felt her breath catch.

She wanted it, he thought. She wanted it as much as I did. I felt it.

And then she remembered what I was.

"I should not have spoken," he said.

"I disagree."

"I should have waited. I should have let her find her own way."

"You said what was true. It was the first time anyone had ever said it to her." Mei laid a hand on his shoulder, briefly, and took it away. "Don't punish yourself. Give her time. She will come round. She is a very stubborn woman, but she is not a foolish one."

"And if she does not?"

"Then you will have loved her anyway," said Mei, "and that is not nothing."

She rose, brushing flour from her apron. She stood a moment looking down at him, with the sun on her hair and a strange, soft, rueful look on her face, as of a person who has seen two small birds trying to fly through a window.

"One more thing," she said.

"Yes?"

"The man with the scar. He has not come back. But he has not gone away, either. I saw a boy at the ferry yesterday who said he'd been given a coin to watch the Willow and Wind." Her voice was very low. "Have you told her?"

He had not.

He had tried. That was the shame of it. On the morning after the festival, with his stomach in knots, he had gone down to the kitchen and found her pouring tea, and he had said, Qinghe. There is something I must tell you. And she had gone rigid, and set down the pot, and said in a clipped, cold voice, If it's about last night, I don't want to hear it. And he had said that it was not. And she had said, Then it can wait. And she had walked out of the room.

Work, she had said, when he followed her. She had not even turned her head. I have work to do.

"I tried," said Zheyu.

"Try again."

"She will not let me near her."

"Then find another way." Mei's mouth set in a firm line. "I'll keep my eyes open. But she must know, Zheyu. It's her life, and her sword."

He nodded. He could not speak.

When she had gone, he sat alone on the step with the dead tea in his hands, and he thought: I will tell her. I will find a way. But I will not do it as a weapon. I will not use it to make her turn. She must come to me in her own time, or it is worth nothing.

It was a poor sort of plan. He knew that. But it was the only one he had.

And in the meantime, he thought, with sudden grim resolve, he would not sleep so deeply.

* * *

He started keeping watch that night.

It was a small thing. He did not tell her. After she had gone to bed, with her back to the screen and her breath gone slow and even, he rose from his own bed by the door and sat on the floor beside it with his back against the wood. He did not light a lamp. He sat in the dark and listened, with all the attention of three hundred years of waiting, to the sounds of the house.

The creak of a floorboard. The slap of the canal. A cat on the roof. The distant rumble of a cart.

Nothing else.

He sat until the east began to pale. Then he went back to bed and lay for an hour with his eyes shut, and did not sleep, and rose with the dawn and went about his day, and the next night he did the same.

She will not have to face it alone, he thought. Whether she wants me or not.

It was, perhaps, the only gift he could give.

* * *

On the fifth night, he made the congee.

It was nearly midnight. The house had gone quiet. Mei had retired. Qinghe had come in from the yard at the last hour of the evening, soaked and silent, and had gone straight upstairs without eating. He had heard the door close. He had heard the creak of her bed.

He had stood in the kitchen with his hands on the cold stove, and he had thought: She has not eaten since morning. She has not sat at a table in five days. She is going to make herself ill.

She will not take it from me, if I offer.

He lit the fire.

He did it carefully, the way she had taught him, with thin dry shavings and a spark and a patient breath. He washed the rice. He rubbed it between his palms until the water ran clear. He measured out the water, and set the pot on the flame, and stood over it in the dim red light with a wooden spoon, stirring slowly in the one direction. He did it exactly as Mei had shown him. He did not hurry. He added ginger, and a little salt, and three thin slices of the dried scallop that she liked. He stirred, and stirred, and the porridge thickened, and the whole kitchen filled with a soft sweet steam.

It took an hour.

When it was done, he ladled it into a small blue bowl, and set a spoon beside it, and covered it with a plate to keep in the heat. He carried it up the stairs in both hands, step by careful step, with the candle guttering on the rail. He stopped at the door.

There was no light under it.

He stood a long moment, with the bowl warm against his palms and his heart in his throat. He could hear her breathing, faint and uneven. She was awake. He was sure of it. She lay on the other side of the wood, perhaps three paces away, and he knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that she was listening.

He did not knock.

He bent, and set the bowl down on the floorboards, at the foot of the door. He straightened. For a moment he stood with one hand lifted, as if he might still touch the wood.

I am here, he thought at it. That is all. I am here.

Then he turned, and went softly away down the corridor.

* * *

In the morning, the bowl was empty.

He found it on the landing, when he came up from the yard. It had been washed. It stood upside down on a folded cloth, on the sill of the little window, in the clean white light of dawn. The spoon lay beside it. And beneath the bowl, tucked against the cloth so that one corner stuck out, was a scrap of paper.

He picked it up.

It was torn from the margin of an old almanac. The paper was cheap and yellow. The writing was small and square and quick, in black ink, and it said only one word.

Good.

He stood quite still.

It was nothing. It was a single syllable on a torn scrap. She had not written his name. She had not signed it. She had not said thank you, or I'm sorry, or I forgive you. She had simply stated, in the manner of a woman marking a ledger, that the congee had been acceptable.

And he thought that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever read.

He turned the scrap over in his fingers. Somewhere below him, in the yard, he could hear the whistle of a blade through the cold air, the hiss and thump of her forms. She was out there, in the light, nine and a half paces away through the wall. He could feel the thread, bright and steady and humming. Something in it had changed. The raw edge was gone. A warmth had crept in, faint and shy, like the first thin green of a field after fire.

He smiled.

He could not help it. It spread across his face slowly, until his cheeks ached, and he had to put his hand over his mouth and lean his shoulder against the wall. He stood like that for some time, a long white-robed figure in a dim corridor, grinning like a fool at a piece of paper.

She has not forgiven me, he told himself. She has only eaten.

But she ate.

* * *

He wrote his reply that afternoon.

He did it in secret, in the empty room, at the little table by the window, while she was out. He tore a strip from the same almanac. He ground a little ink on the stone, and wet the brush, and sat for a very long time with the tip hovering over the paper.

He did not know what to say.

It seemed a very serious matter. There were so many things he wished to tell her. That he was sorry. That he was not sorry. That he had meant every word in the moonlight, and would say it again, and did not need her to answer. That he would stay at the ten paces, or the twenty, or the hundred, for as long as she asked. That he had been afraid for three hundred years and had not known what he was afraid of until she was standing in front of him with her thumb on a hilt.

He wrote: I am glad it was warm.

He looked at it.

It was a stupid sentence. It said nothing. It was the sort of thing a servant might write, or a child.

He crossed it out. He wrote: Thank you for eating.

That was worse. It sounded like a reproach.

I did not mean to frighten you. No. That was a lie, in a way, and an accusation, in another.

I will wait.

He sat with the brush trembling in his fingers and the ink drying slowly on the tip. The afternoon light came in through the window and lay across the table in a long yellow bar. A leaf drifted past on the wind. Far off, a bell was ringing in a temple, slow and deep, and he listened to it fade.

I will wait for as long as it takes. Until the blossoms fall. Until the last petal. I will wait and I will ask nothing and I will be glad of every crumb you give me.

He wrote it all out in one swift line, in a clean small hand. He did not stop to think.

Then he read it over.

It was true. Every word. And it was terrible, because it was a net. It was the thing that he had promised himself he would not do. I will wait, he had written, and underneath it, quite clearly, in letters invisible to the eye: And you will feel it. And you will owe me.

He could not send it.

He sat for a long moment with the scrap in his hand. Then he rose and crossed the room to the little brazier by the window, where a few coals still glowed beneath the ash, and he held the paper to them.

It caught at once. A thin bright flame climbed the edge, curling the yellow, turning the black ink to a delicate gold lace. He watched it go. The smoke rose in a thin blue thread, and the ash fell into the brazier in a soft grey flake, and the words were gone.

He stood looking at the empty place where they had been.

Not yet, he thought. Not like that.

He would find another way. A better way. A way that left her free. He did not know what it was. But he knew, with a calm, aching conviction, that it was out there somewhere, in the long days that were left, and that he would find it if he had to turn the whole world over.

He went to the kitchen. He began to wash the rice.