Morning came up grey and wet, and the valley was gone.
Qinghe had not slept. She had sat with her back against the trunk of the nearest ancient peach with Qingming across her knees, and every time she looked down into the steel she saw only her own face: narrow, pale, shadowed under the eyes, the face of a woman who had stayed up too long with a bad idea. The eyes she had seen in the night did not come back. By the time the sky lightened, she had almost convinced herself they never had been there.
Almost. The hilt was still warm. She had decided not to think about that.
She sheathed the blade at first light, stiff in every joint, and stood to find that the world had been rubbed out. The mist had rolled in during the last hour of darkness, thick and low and the colour of old milk. It filled the upper terrace to the brim. She could see the stream at her feet and the dark bulk of the tree beside her and nothing beyond a dozen paces. The blossoms overhead had become pink smudges. Even the sound had changed. The stream seemed to run underwater, and the morning birds had not started.
"Bao," she called. "Merchant Bao."
Nothing answered. She walked to where she had left him, against the crates, and found the crates and the rice cakes and the half-empty wine skin lying on its side in the grass. The blanket was still warm when she laid her palm on it. The three mules stood in a huddle, ears flat, eyes rolling white. One of them lifted its head and made a thin, frightened sound.
"Easy." She put a hand on its neck. It trembled under her palm like a plucked string. "Where did he go?"
The mule could not tell her. But the ground could. Qinghe crouched and looked, and the mist, which had hidden so much, had not hidden this. Soft earth beside the stream held the merchant's prints, small and shuffling and wandering a little as if he were walking in a dream. They led away from the camp toward the upper slope. And beside them, pressed into the mud with a delicacy that made her skin prickle, were other prints.
Narrow. Four-toed. Each with a tiny, precise puncture where a claw had gone in.
She knew them at once. She had hunted mist foxes in the southern marshes three winters back, and she remembered how pretty the tracks were and how cruel the animal. They did not kill from the front. They sang. The old herders called it the sweet voice, a low, wordless hum that settled on a sleeper's mind and drew him out into the dark on his own feet, smiling, to be eaten somewhere quiet. A mist fox on its own was a nuisance. A pack of them in a valley that already hung heavy with fog was a trap built by the weather.
And the prints she was looking at overlapped. Twelve, fifteen, more. The pack was large.
"Stupid," she said under her breath. She was not sure whether she meant the merchant or herself. She had walked the edges of the camp all evening and had been so busy being watched by a sword that she had not once checked the sky for fog.
She tied the mules to a tree with a quick knot. Then she drew Qingming, and this time she did not hesitate about it, because a blade was for the moment you had no other choice, and this was that moment.
The steel came out cold and silent. She waited for something, for a flutter in the hilt or a shift in the weight, and nothing came. Whatever had looked at her in the night had gone back to sleep or had never existed. She felt a stupid little pang of disappointment and put it away.
She followed the prints.
The mist pressed in on both sides as she climbed. It beaded on her sleeves and clung to her lashes. Somewhere ahead, so faint she thought at first it was her own blood in her ears, came a low humming. Not a tune. A pull. The kind of sound that made her want to stop thinking and lie down in the wet grass and let the day go by.
She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, until she tasted iron. The humming loosened its grip a little.
"Bao!"
A thin, vague voice answered from somewhere above. "Guniang? Is that you? I am coming. I am only going to see the, the lovely lady. She is asking for me."
"There is no lady," Qinghe said, quickening her pace. "Stay where you are."
"She sings so well."
The slope steepened. Roots broke through the earth like knuckles, and she took them at a half-run, using her free hand to catch at the trunks. Then the ground levelled into a small hollow ringed with boulders, and she saw him.
Merchant Bao was sitting with his back to a rock and a smile on his face like a child's, his hands loose in his lap. His eyes were open and unfocused. Around him on the boulders, patient as cats, sat the foxes.
They were not the foxes of a farmer's nightmare. They were larger than any fox had a right to be, the size of well-fed hounds, and the mist seemed to cling to their coats so that they looked made of it: smoke-grey, silver-white, with long narrow faces and eyes the colour of pale amber lamps. She counted nine on the rocks. More moved at the edge of sight, shapes within the fog, their humming rising and falling together in a chord that made her teeth ache.
Every one of them turned to look at her.
"Well," Qinghe said. "You've got my customer."
The nearest fox opened its mouth, and the hum became a laugh.
She did not wait for the rest of them. She came off the slope in a low rush and cut across the hollow, and the first fox leapt to meet her and she took it through the shoulder on the rising line of Parting Reed. It went down screaming, a sound too like a woman's voice for her comfort. The second came from her left. She turned the blade and let it slide past and took it across the ribs. Two down. Bao did not move.
Then the mist came alive.
They had been waiting. All of the ones she had not seen came out of the fog at once, from every side, silent now that the humming had done its work, and she felt the shape of the trap close around her. This had never been about the merchant. He was bait. The pack had wanted whoever came looking.
Qinghe fought the way she always fought, which was without wasted motion. She turned and cut and stepped, and the foxes flowed around her like water around a post. She took one at the throat and kicked another aside and lost count. Her breath came hard. She was good, she knew she was good, she had been the best student the Ye sect ever had, but the thing about numbers was that they did not care how good you were. For every fox she dropped, two moved into its place.
A jaw closed on the edge of her sleeve and tore. Teeth grazed her forearm through the leather guard. She slammed the pommel into a narrow skull and felt it crack.
"Back," she said through her teeth. "Back, you."
They did not go back. They pressed forward in a slow tide, and she was being herded. She understood it a moment too late. Every time she cut one down, the others shifted so that the free space opened on one side only. Behind her was the lip of the hollow, and past that lip, she saw when she risked a glance, the ground fell away into the grey where the slope broke into a ravine.
They meant to drive her off the edge.
She set her feet at the brink of the drop. Her heart was pounding. Her arms had begun to feel heavy, and in the heaviness she found a thin, clear fear. Not of dying. She had made her peace with that, in the way people do who have no one waiting. She was afraid of dying useless. Of failing a job, an old man who hummed, a hollow full of silver foxes. Of being the sword that broke.
And then Qingming trembled in her hand.
It was not the soft shiver of the night before. It was a hard, urgent shudder, a pull so strong she nearly lost her grip. The steel hummed, but a different humming, deep and clear, set against the foxes' sweet drone like a bell struck in a sickroom. The hilt went hot against her palm. Hot, not warm.
"What are you doing?" she gasped.
It tugged her arm toward the ground, then toward the sky, then toward her own chest, and she did not understand, and the foxes sprang.
"Don't fight it."
The voice was a man's. It came from behind her, from the ravine's edge, quiet and a little hoarse, as though it had not been used for a long time. She did not turn, because turning would cost her the fox that was already in the air, and she cut it down in a spray of silver. But the words went through her like a drawn line.
"Let it go through you. Please. It wants to help."
She risked one glance over her shoulder.
A man was standing at the lip of the drop, where no one had been a heartbeat earlier. He was tall, and he wore robes of pale ivory that fell to his boots, belted with undyed cloth, and his hair was long and very dark and hung unbound down his back. The mist moved around him, but it did not touch him. His sleeves were dry. There was not a single bead of damp on his shoulders. He looked about twenty-eight, and he looked at the foxes with an expression she could not name, a kind of stricken courtesy, like a man apologising to a crowd for the trouble he was about to cause.
"Who are you?" she snapped. "Get back, you'll be killed."
"No," he said gently. "I think not." And he stepped forward and laid his bare hand flat against the blade of her sword.
She almost cut his fingers off. That was the first thing she would remember afterwards, the way she nearly maimed him out of pure reflex, and the way her wrist refused to complete the motion. The steel under his palm sang once, a single clear, aching note. His eyes closed.
Then the air around them tore open.
It was not wind. It was not any technique she had a name for. A ring of force rolled out from the blade, from his hand, from the place where their two bodies stood, and every petal on every branch for a hundred paces shook free and rose. Pink fire. A whirlwind of blossoms blasted out across the hollow with the sound of a thousand silk banners snapping, and the foxes, caught in the full strength of it, went flying. Bodies slammed into boulders. The humming broke off mid-note. The mist itself was torn into streamers and flung away from the hollow, and for the length of three breaths Qinghe could see the whole of the valley, green and gold and rose, under a white morning sky.
Then it was over, and the petals came down like rain.
The foxes that could still run ran. The ones that could not lay still, and the hollow was silent except for the soft patter of falling blossoms and Merchant Bao, who had woken with a start and was sitting up blinking and saying, "Eh? What? Did I miss breakfast?"
Qinghe stood with her sword out in front of her and her chest heaving. Her arm ached to the shoulder. Her skin felt as though she had been dipped in cold water and pulled out again. The man in ivory stood beside her with his palm still pressed to the flat of her blade, and when he opened his eyes she saw that they were dark, long-lashed, startled and tender at once.
She knew those eyes.
She turned the sword so that the point lay at the hollow of his throat. He did not flinch. He did not step back. He only looked down along the length of the steel and then up at her, and in his face there was not fear, nor anger, nor the polite blankness of a man caught in a lie. There was wonder.
"Don't move," she said. Her voice shook, and she hated it.
"I am not moving," he said. "I don't think I know how, yet."
"Who are you? What are you?"
"I will tell you. I will tell you everything, if you will let me." He lifted his free hand, slowly, with his fingers spread, and laid it flat against his own chest. He stood like that for a moment with his head tilted, listening to something inside himself. "It is doing it again," he said softly. "Do you feel that? No, you cannot. It is only me. My heart. It is beating." He looked up. The wonder in his face broke a little and became something rawer. "Is that real? Tell me it is real. It has been so long."
She did not know how to answer him. In twenty years of training and eight of travelling, no one had ever asked her a question like that.
"Your hand," she said at last. "Your hand was on my blade. You made the, the blossoms. How?"
"It is not mine." He glanced at the sword. "It is ours. Or it is hers, and I only borrow it." He stopped, and she saw him trying to choose the right words, and failing, and choosing simpler ones. "I should say first that I am very sorry to have frightened you. I did not mean to look at you last night. I could not help it. I have been asleep for such a long time, and then there was a hand on my hilt, and the hand did not shake."
The point of her sword dipped half a finger's width. She jerked it back up.
"Who are you?" she said again.
He took a slow breath as if he were practising the act of breathing, and he said, "My name is Lan Zheyu. I was given that name a very long time ago, by a man who made swords. For a while now I have lived in yours."
"Mine?"
"The grey blade. The one that sits at your hip when you sleep." A faint, shy smile touched his mouth and left it again. "You call it Qingming. I think you should know that it listens when you speak to it."
The mist was almost gone. Light spilled down through the blossoms and caught on the stray hairs at his temple. She saw that his lashes were wet. Not with fear. He was just unused to looking at the world and having it look back.
Behind them, Bao scrambled to his feet, patting his chest and his hair. "Guniang? Who is the gentleman? Did he beat off the foxes? I must thank him, I do thank him, may Heaven bless his house." Neither of them looked around. The merchant, sensing perhaps that he was not wanted, sat back down on his rock and began quietly to count his fingers.
Qinghe lowered her sword by a hand's breadth. She did not sheathe it.
"If you are lying to me," she said, "I will put this through you, and I will not be sorry."
"I know," said the man who called himself Lan Zheyu, and he smiled at her, unafraid. "I have been put through by better swordsmen."
She felt a laugh climbing in her throat and swallowed it. She was angry. She was shaking. She was a person who did not believe in ghosts or spirits or talking blades, and yet the sword in her hand was warm, and the man in front of her had dry sleeves in a wet valley, and the blossoms were still coming down as gently as snow.
"Tell me one thing that proves it," she said. "One thing a stranger could not know."
He thought about it for a long moment. Then he looked at her with his head slightly bowed and said, "You are the first one who has never drawn me to frighten anyone. In all the years I have waited, in all the hands I have known, you are the first who has held me only when you had no other choice. You never once showed me off. You never once used me to win an argument." His voice dropped. "I felt that. Even when I was asleep. I felt it."
Qinghe did not move.
It was a rule she had never said aloud. She had never told Master Ye, or the other students, or a single person on the road. It lived in her the way her own heartbeat lived in her, so deep she had stopped hearing it. A blade was for the moment you had no other choice. And she had just heard it spoken back to her by a stranger in white robes in the middle of a wrecked hollow full of pink petals.
The cold ran down her spine in one long, slow wave.
"Don't," she said, very quietly, "do that again."
"Do what?"
"Know me."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he lowered his hand from his chest and held both of his open at his sides, palms out, the way one does to a frightened animal. "I will try," Zheyu said. "I cannot promise. I think it may already be too late."
The last petal fell between them. Somewhere above, the first bird of the morning began to sing.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Morning came up grey and wet, and the valley was gone.
Qinghe had not slept. She had sat with her back against the trunk of the nearest ancient peach with Qingming across her knees, and every time she looked down into the steel she saw only her own face: narrow, pale, shadowed under the eyes, the face of a woman who had stayed up too long with a bad idea. The eyes she had seen in the night did not come back. By the time the sky lightened, she had almost convinced herself they never had been there.
Almost. The hilt was still warm. She had decided not to think about that.
She sheathed the blade at first light, stiff in every joint, and stood to find that the world had been rubbed out. The mist had rolled in during the last hour of darkness, thick and low and the colour of old milk. It filled the upper terrace to the brim. She could see the stream at her feet and the dark bulk of the tree beside her and nothing beyond a dozen paces. The blossoms overhead had become pink smudges. Even the sound had changed. The stream seemed to run underwater, and the morning birds had not started.
"Bao," she called. "Merchant Bao."
Nothing answered. She walked to where she had left him, against the crates, and found the crates and the rice cakes and the half-empty wine skin lying on its side in the grass. The blanket was still warm when she laid her palm on it. The three mules stood in a huddle, ears flat, eyes rolling white. One of them lifted its head and made a thin, frightened sound.
"Easy." She put a hand on its neck. It trembled under her palm like a plucked string. "Where did he go?"
The mule could not tell her. But the ground could. Qinghe crouched and looked, and the mist, which had hidden so much, had not hidden this. Soft earth beside the stream held the merchant's prints, small and shuffling and wandering a little as if he were walking in a dream. They led away from the camp toward the upper slope. And beside them, pressed into the mud with a delicacy that made her skin prickle, were other prints.
Narrow. Four-toed. Each with a tiny, precise puncture where a claw had gone in.
She knew them at once. She had hunted mist foxes in the southern marshes three winters back, and she remembered how pretty the tracks were and how cruel the animal. They did not kill from the front. They sang. The old herders called it the sweet voice, a low, wordless hum that settled on a sleeper's mind and drew him out into the dark on his own feet, smiling, to be eaten somewhere quiet. A mist fox on its own was a nuisance. A pack of them in a valley that already hung heavy with fog was a trap built by the weather.
And the prints she was looking at overlapped. Twelve, fifteen, more. The pack was large.
"Stupid," she said under her breath. She was not sure whether she meant the merchant or herself. She had walked the edges of the camp all evening and had been so busy being watched by a sword that she had not once checked the sky for fog.
She tied the mules to a tree with a quick knot. Then she drew Qingming, and this time she did not hesitate about it, because a blade was for the moment you had no other choice, and this was that moment.
The steel came out cold and silent. She waited for something, for a flutter in the hilt or a shift in the weight, and nothing came. Whatever had looked at her in the night had gone back to sleep or had never existed. She felt a stupid little pang of disappointment and put it away.
She followed the prints.
The mist pressed in on both sides as she climbed. It beaded on her sleeves and clung to her lashes. Somewhere ahead, so faint she thought at first it was her own blood in her ears, came a low humming. Not a tune. A pull. The kind of sound that made her want to stop thinking and lie down in the wet grass and let the day go by.
She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, until she tasted iron. The humming loosened its grip a little.
"Bao!"
A thin, vague voice answered from somewhere above. "Guniang? Is that you? I am coming. I am only going to see the, the lovely lady. She is asking for me."
"There is no lady," Qinghe said, quickening her pace. "Stay where you are."
"She sings so well."
The slope steepened. Roots broke through the earth like knuckles, and she took them at a half-run, using her free hand to catch at the trunks. Then the ground levelled into a small hollow ringed with boulders, and she saw him.
Merchant Bao was sitting with his back to a rock and a smile on his face like a child's, his hands loose in his lap. His eyes were open and unfocused. Around him on the boulders, patient as cats, sat the foxes.
They were not the foxes of a farmer's nightmare. They were larger than any fox had a right to be, the size of well-fed hounds, and the mist seemed to cling to their coats so that they looked made of it: smoke-grey, silver-white, with long narrow faces and eyes the colour of pale amber lamps. She counted nine on the rocks. More moved at the edge of sight, shapes within the fog, their humming rising and falling together in a chord that made her teeth ache.
Every one of them turned to look at her.
"Well," Qinghe said. "You've got my customer."
The nearest fox opened its mouth, and the hum became a laugh.
She did not wait for the rest of them. She came off the slope in a low rush and cut across the hollow, and the first fox leapt to meet her and she took it through the shoulder on the rising line of Parting Reed. It went down screaming, a sound too like a woman's voice for her comfort. The second came from her left. She turned the blade and let it slide past and took it across the ribs. Two down. Bao did not move.
Then the mist came alive.
They had been waiting. All of the ones she had not seen came out of the fog at once, from every side, silent now that the humming had done its work, and she felt the shape of the trap close around her. This had never been about the merchant. He was bait. The pack had wanted whoever came looking.
Qinghe fought the way she always fought, which was without wasted motion. She turned and cut and stepped, and the foxes flowed around her like water around a post. She took one at the throat and kicked another aside and lost count. Her breath came hard. She was good, she knew she was good, she had been the best student the Ye sect ever had, but the thing about numbers was that they did not care how good you were. For every fox she dropped, two moved into its place.
A jaw closed on the edge of her sleeve and tore. Teeth grazed her forearm through the leather guard. She slammed the pommel into a narrow skull and felt it crack.
"Back," she said through her teeth. "Back, you."
They did not go back. They pressed forward in a slow tide, and she was being herded. She understood it a moment too late. Every time she cut one down, the others shifted so that the free space opened on one side only. Behind her was the lip of the hollow, and past that lip, she saw when she risked a glance, the ground fell away into the grey where the slope broke into a ravine.
They meant to drive her off the edge.
She set her feet at the brink of the drop. Her heart was pounding. Her arms had begun to feel heavy, and in the heaviness she found a thin, clear fear. Not of dying. She had made her peace with that, in the way people do who have no one waiting. She was afraid of dying useless. Of failing a job, an old man who hummed, a hollow full of silver foxes. Of being the sword that broke.
And then Qingming trembled in her hand.
It was not the soft shiver of the night before. It was a hard, urgent shudder, a pull so strong she nearly lost her grip. The steel hummed, but a different humming, deep and clear, set against the foxes' sweet drone like a bell struck in a sickroom. The hilt went hot against her palm. Hot, not warm.
"What are you doing?" she gasped.
It tugged her arm toward the ground, then toward the sky, then toward her own chest, and she did not understand, and the foxes sprang.
"Don't fight it."
The voice was a man's. It came from behind her, from the ravine's edge, quiet and a little hoarse, as though it had not been used for a long time. She did not turn, because turning would cost her the fox that was already in the air, and she cut it down in a spray of silver. But the words went through her like a drawn line.
"Let it go through you. Please. It wants to help."
She risked one glance over her shoulder.
A man was standing at the lip of the drop, where no one had been a heartbeat earlier. He was tall, and he wore robes of pale ivory that fell to his boots, belted with undyed cloth, and his hair was long and very dark and hung unbound down his back. The mist moved around him, but it did not touch him. His sleeves were dry. There was not a single bead of damp on his shoulders. He looked about twenty-eight, and he looked at the foxes with an expression she could not name, a kind of stricken courtesy, like a man apologising to a crowd for the trouble he was about to cause.
"Who are you?" she snapped. "Get back, you'll be killed."
"No," he said gently. "I think not." And he stepped forward and laid his bare hand flat against the blade of her sword.
She almost cut his fingers off. That was the first thing she would remember afterwards, the way she nearly maimed him out of pure reflex, and the way her wrist refused to complete the motion. The steel under his palm sang once, a single clear, aching note. His eyes closed.
Then the air around them tore open.
It was not wind. It was not any technique she had a name for. A ring of force rolled out from the blade, from his hand, from the place where their two bodies stood, and every petal on every branch for a hundred paces shook free and rose. Pink fire. A whirlwind of blossoms blasted out across the hollow with the sound of a thousand silk banners snapping, and the foxes, caught in the full strength of it, went flying. Bodies slammed into boulders. The humming broke off mid-note. The mist itself was torn into streamers and flung away from the hollow, and for the length of three breaths Qinghe could see the whole of the valley, green and gold and rose, under a white morning sky.
Then it was over, and the petals came down like rain.
The foxes that could still run ran. The ones that could not lay still, and the hollow was silent except for the soft patter of falling blossoms and Merchant Bao, who had woken with a start and was sitting up blinking and saying, "Eh? What? Did I miss breakfast?"
Qinghe stood with her sword out in front of her and her chest heaving. Her arm ached to the shoulder. Her skin felt as though she had been dipped in cold water and pulled out again. The man in ivory stood beside her with his palm still pressed to the flat of her blade, and when he opened his eyes she saw that they were dark, long-lashed, startled and tender at once.
She knew those eyes.
She turned the sword so that the point lay at the hollow of his throat. He did not flinch. He did not step back. He only looked down along the length of the steel and then up at her, and in his face there was not fear, nor anger, nor the polite blankness of a man caught in a lie. There was wonder.
"Don't move," she said. Her voice shook, and she hated it.
"I am not moving," he said. "I don't think I know how, yet."
"Who are you? What are you?"
"I will tell you. I will tell you everything, if you will let me." He lifted his free hand, slowly, with his fingers spread, and laid it flat against his own chest. He stood like that for a moment with his head tilted, listening to something inside himself. "It is doing it again," he said softly. "Do you feel that? No, you cannot. It is only me. My heart. It is beating." He looked up. The wonder in his face broke a little and became something rawer. "Is that real? Tell me it is real. It has been so long."
She did not know how to answer him. In twenty years of training and eight of travelling, no one had ever asked her a question like that.
"Your hand," she said at last. "Your hand was on my blade. You made the, the blossoms. How?"
"It is not mine." He glanced at the sword. "It is ours. Or it is hers, and I only borrow it." He stopped, and she saw him trying to choose the right words, and failing, and choosing simpler ones. "I should say first that I am very sorry to have frightened you. I did not mean to look at you last night. I could not help it. I have been asleep for such a long time, and then there was a hand on my hilt, and the hand did not shake."
The point of her sword dipped half a finger's width. She jerked it back up.
"Who are you?" she said again.
He took a slow breath as if he were practising the act of breathing, and he said, "My name is Lan Zheyu. I was given that name a very long time ago, by a man who made swords. For a while now I have lived in yours."
"Mine?"
"The grey blade. The one that sits at your hip when you sleep." A faint, shy smile touched his mouth and left it again. "You call it Qingming. I think you should know that it listens when you speak to it."
The mist was almost gone. Light spilled down through the blossoms and caught on the stray hairs at his temple. She saw that his lashes were wet. Not with fear. He was just unused to looking at the world and having it look back.
Behind them, Bao scrambled to his feet, patting his chest and his hair. "Guniang? Who is the gentleman? Did he beat off the foxes? I must thank him, I do thank him, may Heaven bless his house." Neither of them looked around. The merchant, sensing perhaps that he was not wanted, sat back down on his rock and began quietly to count his fingers.
Qinghe lowered her sword by a hand's breadth. She did not sheathe it.
"If you are lying to me," she said, "I will put this through you, and I will not be sorry."
"I know," said the man who called himself Lan Zheyu, and he smiled at her, unafraid. "I have been put through by better swordsmen."
She felt a laugh climbing in her throat and swallowed it. She was angry. She was shaking. She was a person who did not believe in ghosts or spirits or talking blades, and yet the sword in her hand was warm, and the man in front of her had dry sleeves in a wet valley, and the blossoms were still coming down as gently as snow.
"Tell me one thing that proves it," she said. "One thing a stranger could not know."
He thought about it for a long moment. Then he looked at her with his head slightly bowed and said, "You are the first one who has never drawn me to frighten anyone. In all the years I have waited, in all the hands I have known, you are the first who has held me only when you had no other choice. You never once showed me off. You never once used me to win an argument." His voice dropped. "I felt that. Even when I was asleep. I felt it."
Qinghe did not move.
It was a rule she had never said aloud. She had never told Master Ye, or the other students, or a single person on the road. It lived in her the way her own heartbeat lived in her, so deep she had stopped hearing it. A blade was for the moment you had no other choice. And she had just heard it spoken back to her by a stranger in white robes in the middle of a wrecked hollow full of pink petals.
The cold ran down her spine in one long, slow wave.
"Don't," she said, very quietly, "do that again."
"Do what?"
"Know me."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he lowered his hand from his chest and held both of his open at his sides, palms out, the way one does to a frightened animal. "I will try," Zheyu said. "I cannot promise. I think it may already be too late."
The last petal fell between them. Somewhere above, the first bird of the morning began to sing.
You've reached the end of this chapter