Qinghe had been counting days since the first, though she would have died before admitting it.

She had begun without meaning to. The morning after the valley, she had found herself looking at the sky and thinking one. The next day, two. It was a habit of the road, a way of marking time, the same as counting steps on a long march. But somewhere in the second week the numbers had started to mean something else. They had acquired weight. She had learned to feel them, like pebbles dropped one by one into a jar, and she had learned that the jar was filling.

On the morning of the ninetieth day, she woke in the dark and lay with her eyes open, and the number sat on her chest like a hand.

Ninety.

Ten left.

She stared at the ceiling. It was a long way up. She could hear the first birds, faint and cold, beginning their ragged chorus in the willows. Beyond the screen, Zheyu's breathing came slow and soft and even. He had been sleeping badly. She had known that for a week, from the shadows beneath his eyes and the stiff way he rose, but he had said nothing, and she had said nothing, and they had gone on like two people carrying a full bowl of water across a room.

Ten days.

Her hand rested on her stomach. She noticed that it was cold.

It was always cold, these mornings. She had not mentioned it. The cold started in the fingertips and crept along the wrist, a thin chill, a little like the touch of a knife-blade laid flat against the skin. It was not painful. It came and went. She could warm her hands at the stove and be rid of it by breakfast. But it had been getting worse for a month. She had begun to keep her sleeves down. She had started wearing her wrist guards in the house.

Fatigue, she told herself. You are working too hard. You have not been eating.

She got up, quietly. She dressed in the dark. She went down to the yard, and began the forms.

* * *

By noon, the tremor had come.

It was a small one. She was in the middle of Winter River, the long slow arc that took the blade from low on the left to high on the right, and she felt her grip shiver. A faint, fine, unbidden shake, like a wire in the wind. The point of the sword wavered. She corrected it. She finished the form. She stood for a moment with her chest heaving and the sword hanging at her side, and she looked at her right hand.

It was shaking.

Not much. A quiver, no more. But she could see it, a delicate flutter in the knuckles, and the tips of her fingers had gone a pale bloodless blue. She curled them into a fist. She flexed them. She held the sword up and tried a series of quick cuts, left, right, left, and each one wavered a hair's breadth off the line.

It's nothing.

She said it to herself calmly, as she would say it to a frightened horse. It's the cold. The damp. It's the long sleeplessness. She wiped her palm on her robe and took up her stance again.

At her back, through the open kitchen door, she heard the faint clink of a spoon.

He was watching her.

She did not turn. She had learned to feel it, the quiet weight of his attention, like a hand laid gently between her shoulder blades. She had felt it for ten days, ever since the willows. He had not spoken of it. He had not said a word about the moonlight, or the near-kiss, or the way she had run. He had simply gone on being there, a quiet pale figure at the edge of every room, making congee and carrying water and keeping, to the inch, the distance that she had set.

And every day, the gap had closed a little.

She had not meant it to. It was not her doing. But she had found, as the week wore on, that her feet kept stopping at nine paces, then eight and a half, then eight. She had found that she sat nearer the end of the table. She had found that she lingered in the kitchen doorway in the evenings, with a cup of tea she did not want, and that he would look up, and neither of them would say a word.

She was a coward. That was what it came to. She was a coward, and a liar, and she was running out of days.

* * *

She found him in the orchard at dusk.

It was the old one, up behind the town, where the hillside broke into terraces. The trees were ancient. She had walked there often in the last week, in the evenings, to be alone. Their trunks were black and twisted as old iron, and their branches arched overhead in a vast dim canopy, laden with bloom. Petals lay on the ground in drifts. The light came through slantwise and golden, and the air was thick with the sweet, heavy, dizzying scent of peach.

He was sitting on a root with his back against a trunk.

He did not rise when she came. He looked up, and she saw something shift in his face, a flicker of surprise and a careful, wary pleasure, and he said, "Qinghe."

"Zheyu."

"Was there something you needed?"

"No." She stood a few paces off with her hands in her sleeves. "I just," she began, and could not finish. She looked at the ground. A petal had fallen on the toe of her boot. "I wanted to say."

"You need not."

"I do." She drew a breath. It trembled. "I'm sorry."

He said nothing.

"I'm sorry for the willows. For running. For the week." She forced the words out one by one. "I was a coward. I did a stupid, cruel thing, and I let you think it was about you. It wasn't. It was never about you. It was me. I was afraid, and I did what I always do, I put up a wall, and I didn't care who was standing behind it." Her voice cracked. "You didn't deserve it."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"There is."

"Then it is forgiven." He said it so simply that she had to look up. He had not moved. He sat with his hands on his knees and his head tilted, and the light lay on his face like gold leaf. "Truly. I have not been angry. Not for one hour."

"You should have been."

"I do not think so."

"You were hurt."

"Yes." He did not deny it. "I was. But hurt is not the same as angry. And I would rather be hurt by you than be spared by anyone else."

She sat down on the opposite root. She did it abruptly, as if her legs had given way. They sat for a while in silence, with the petals falling around them, and the last of the sun burning on the highest branches.

"Ten days," said Qinghe.

"Yes."

"I've been counting."

"So have I."

"I hate it."

"I know."

"I'm trying not to." She laughed shortly, without humour. "I keep telling myself it's only a season. That you were never mine. That I'm a, a holder, a, a keeper of the sword. That it's what happens to everyone who carries it. They hold you for a while, and then you go."

"It is not quite so simple."

"No."

"May I tell you something?"

She nodded.

"There is a thing I have been meaning to say. I tried to tell you, after the festival. You did not wish to hear." He folded his hands. The tone of his voice had changed, grown quieter and graver. "It is not about us. It is about the town."

* * *

He told her.

He did it quickly and plainly, with no embellishment. The man at the market. The soft voice. The scar behind the left ear, round and pale as a coin of milk. The questions. The silver coin for the ferryman. The boy who had been paid to watch the inn. He told her about the shape beneath the willow, on the opposite bank, on the night of the lanterns, and the way the mist had curled about its feet.

She listened without moving. She felt her face go still.

"How long?" she said, when he had finished.

"Twelve days. Since the first."

"And you've known."

"Mei told me on the night of the festival. I meant to tell you the following morning." He lifted his hands, helplessly. "I could not find the way. I am sorry, Qinghe. I should have found it. I did not wish to," he swallowed, "to take the last of it from you. That night. It was the first time I had seen you laugh without looking over your shoulder."

She was silent for a long moment.

She wanted to be angry. She felt the anger there, in her chest, hot and ready. Twelve days. He sat on it for twelve days. But beneath the anger, quite distinct, was something else. She remembered the night. The dance. The lanterns on the water. The way she had stood on that bridge with her face in the gold light and felt, for a few unguarded hours, as though she had been let out of a cage.

He had given her that. He had known, and he had kept it back, and he had paid for it in sleepless nights. She had seen him. She had seen the shadows under his eyes.

He has been keeping watch, she thought. Hasn't he? Sitting up by the door.

"You've been awake," she said.

He did not answer.

"Every night. Haven't you? Since the festival. Sitting there in the dark."

"A little."

"You idiot."

"Yes."

"You should have told me. I could have watched with you. I could have," she stopped. Her voice was unsteady. She put the heel of her hand against her eyes. "Damn it. Damn it, Zheyu. I'm angry. I'm so angry at you I can't see. And I don't know what to do with it, because I can't be, I can't be, when you've done it for me."

"Then do not be angry."

"I can't help it."

"Then be angry." He smiled faintly. "I do not mind. I would rather you were angry and knew than calm and in the dark."

She laughed. It was a cracked, painful little sound, and it turned halfway into something else. She took her hand away from her eyes. "We leave," she said. "After the hundredth day. After you've, after the blossoms. I'll take you somewhere. Somewhere further. Somewhere they can't," she faltered, because it was nonsense, because he would be asleep, because there would be no you to take. She broke off.

"I will be asleep."

"I know."

"You will be alone."

"I know."

"Then you must be very careful," said Zheyu, quietly. "You must be the sort of careful that one is when one carries a lantern through a storm. You must not do anything brave. I have a great fear that you will do something brave."

"I never do anything brave. I do what's necessary."

"That is the same thing."

"It isn't."

"In you, it is."

She had no answer. She sat looking at him in the golden light, and a strange, soft, unwilling tenderness rose in her, so sudden and so strong that she looked away.

* * *

They walked for a long time.

They did it side by side, without speaking, along the winding paths of the ancient orchard, beneath the great black boughs. The light failed slowly. The petals came down in the dusk like fine pink snow. She had not planned to walk. She had risen to leave, and he had risen with her, and the path had simply gone on.

She did not notice, until they were nearly at the top of the hill, that her steps were dragging.

It had come on by degrees. A heaviness in the legs. A dull ache behind the knees. The path rose steeply there, between two terraces, over a bank of roots, and each step seemed to take more out of her than the last. Her breath was coming short. She told herself it was the slope. She told herself it was the long day.

She stumbled on a root.

It was nothing. A catch of the toe. She would have recovered in an instant. But her right hand shot out for the trunk, and missed, and she found herself clutching at air with a pale shaking fist, and before she could steady herself, a hand closed around her wrist.

It was gentle. It was very warm. It held her upright, with no pressure at all.

"Qinghe," said Zheyu.

"I'm fine."

"You are shaking."

"I tripped."

"You did not trip. You have been walking like a woman climbing out of a well for the last quarter of an hour." He had not let go. His thumb lay lightly on the inside of her wrist, over the pulse. She felt him go quiet, and still, and attentive. "May I?"

"May you what?"

"Your hand."

"No."

"Please."

"There's nothing wrong with my hand."

"Then you will not mind if I look."

She opened her mouth to protest. She closed it. She saw his face, in the dim blue dusk, grave and intent and shadowed with fear, and she thought: He knows. She thought: He has known for weeks. She stood perfectly still while he turned her hand over in both of his, palm up, and drew it into the last of the light.

His fingers closed around hers.

She felt the heat of them go through her like a blow. And she felt something else beneath it, a hard clear contrast, a sudden vivid sense of how cold she was. Her hand lay in his like a stone drawn out of a river. He held it, and his breath stopped.

"Qinghe," he said again, very low.

"It's the weather."

"It is not."

"It's the damp. It's nothing. It always happens."

"It does not always happen."

"Zheyu."

"Your hand is the temperature of a winter well." He spoke slowly, as if the words were weights. "I held it in the pavilion, on the night of the rain. It was warm. I held it on the quay, at the festival. It was cool. I held it a moment ago, and it is," he stopped. His face had gone the colour of ash. "How long?"

"I'm not."

"How long, Qinghe?"

"A while." It burst out of her. She was suddenly furious, shaking with it. "A few weeks. I don't know. It doesn't hurt. It comes and goes. It's nothing. It's a chill."

"It is not a chill."

"You don't know that."

"I do." His voice cracked. He held her hand between both of his, pressed hard against his chest, and she felt his heart hammering beneath her knuckles. "I know. I have felt it. I felt it in the road, and on the bridge, and at the festival. Every time I touch you. Every time you give me something. It goes out of you like water out of a cracked cup." He drew a sharp, painful breath. "I did not want to believe it. I told myself it was the rain."

"Stop."

"It is me."

"Stop it." She wrenched her hand free. It hurt. The cold came flooding back into her fingers, and she clamped them into her sleeve, and glared at him, white-faced, trembling. "I said I'm fine. I said it's nothing. I don't want you looking at me like that. I don't want you doing the sum. I'm not a candle, Zheyu, I'm not a, a cost. I'm a person. I'll decide what I can bear."

"I am not saying that you cannot."

"Then what are you saying?"

"That I am afraid." He said it simply. It fell between them like a stone. "That I have been afraid since the first day. That I have been afraid for you, and of you, and of myself, and that every moment I am with you, I think: this is the one that will break her." His mouth shook. "I came to you to be warm, Qinghe. I did not come to be fed. And I cannot tell, any longer, which of them I am doing."

"You're not feeding on me."

"You do not know that."

"I do."

"You do not." He closed his eyes. "I do not know, myself. That is the horror. I have never known. I only know that it is real, and that it is growing, and that there are ten days left, and I do not know what they will cost."

She stood very still.

She could feel the old terror rising. The cold well. The voice that whispered at the bottom of it. He sees it. He knows. He will go to the sword early. He will leave you before the hundredth day, to spare you, and you will be alone in a dark room with a grey blade and no one to say your name.

She could not bear it.

"It's nothing," she said, again. She heard her own voice go flat and bright and false. "It's a little cold. It'll pass. When the season's over, it'll go away. You'll see. It'll be gone by summer."

"Qinghe."

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't say anything. I don't want to talk about it. Not tonight. We have ten days. I want ten days. I want to walk in an orchard with you, and eat bad congee, and not think about anything. Can we do that? Can you just, can you give me that?"

He looked at her.

For a long moment, he said nothing. His eyes were very dark. She saw the struggle in them, the battle between pity and pain and some old, bitter, hopeless kind of love. She saw him weigh it. She saw him reach, as he always did, for the thing that would cost her least.

"Ten days," said Zheyu, at last.

"Ten days."

"Without fuss."

"Without fuss."

"I will not say another word about it."

"Thank you."

"I do not think," he said, very gently, "that you should thank me."

* * *

They sat together on the crest of the hill.

It was full dark by then. The stars had come out, thick and bright, in the clear cold sky. Below them lay Liuyin, a scatter of tiny lamps along the black thread of the canal. The wind had dropped. The air was sweet and still. A few petals drifted down from the branches overhead and lay on their hair and shoulders.

She sat close.

She had not decided to. It had happened by degrees, as everything did. She had lowered herself onto the ground, and he had lowered himself beside her, and the space between them, which had been a pace, and then half a pace, had dwindled to the width of a hand. She could feel the warmth of him against her arm. She could smell the peach on him. Neither of them said a word.

Nearer than we have been in a fortnight.

She did not lean on him. She did not touch him. She only sat, with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, and looked at the lights of the town, and thought about nothing at all.

Beside her, very softly, he began to hum.

It was a tune she did not know. Slow, and plain, and sweet, in a mode she had never heard. It had no words. It wound through the dark like a thread of smoke, and she realised, after a moment, that it was the song the ferrywoman had hummed. Four notes, always the same, falling and rising. The song of a woman who had walked beside a river and told the wrong names of the stars.

She closed her eyes.

Ten days.

She would hide it. She knew that now, with a cold clarity that frightened her. She would hide the cold, and the shaking, and the dwindling of her strength. She would wear her sleeves long. She would keep her hands in her lap. She would train in the yard, in the early hours, when he was asleep, and walk with a straight back, and eat as much as she could, and say I'm fine, with a smile, again and again, until she had said it a hundred times.

He cannot know how bad it is.

If he knows, he will go.

It was an ugly little thought. She was ashamed of it. But it sat in her heart like a splinter, hard and bright and quite immovable, and she knew that she would not give it up. She would take his hand in the dark and tell him it was warm. She would hold her breath for ten days, if she had to.

She would be a liar, and a coward, and a fool.

And she would have him for ten more days.

The song went on, soft and low, and she kept her eyes closed, and did not let herself weep.