The world was far too loud.

That was the first thing Zheyu understood about being alive again, and it arrived before the second thing, which was that he was standing up. Sound came at him from every direction at once. Wind moving through ten thousand blossoms. A bird that would not stop calling. Water running over stones somewhere below. The creak of a tree. The rasp of his own breath, which he had forgotten could make a noise. In the blade there had been only a long grey hush, a dream-sleep of stillness, and now the whole bright clatter of the living had crashed over him like a wave.

He locked his knees so that he would not fall down.

Three hundred years. He had counted them once, in the first century, scratching marks on the inside of the dark, and then he had stopped counting because the number began to feel like an accusation. He had woken in spring after spring, always in the same way: a hand on the hilt, a shape of warmth, a few days or weeks of borrowed body before the blossoms fell and the sleep took him back. He had stood in other hands' company and breathed other people's air. He knew how this went. He had thought he knew.

But no one had ever looked at him the way this woman was looking at him now, with the point of a sword at his throat and her lips pressed white, and her whole body braced for a lie.

He found that he did not mind the sword. He minded very little at all. There was grass under his feet, and he could feel it, cold and wet and slightly prickling through the soles of boots he did not remember acquiring. There was a smell of crushed peach petals, sweet and a little bitter. There was an ache in his stomach, low and hollow and impatient, and he could not think what it was until it came to him, with a kind of dizzy delight, that he was hungry.

He nearly laughed.

"Don't smile," the woman said. "I haven't decided whether I'm going to kill you."

"Forgive me." He lifted his hands again. "It is only that I have not been hungry in a very long time. It is a surprising feeling."

Her eyes narrowed. She was thin and sharp-boned and very tired, and the ribbon at her crown had come half undone in the fight so that a strand of black hair lay across her cheek. Her left sleeve was torn. There was a drop of blood at the edge of her wrist guard, and he found that he could not stop looking at it. He felt it in his own wrist, a faint answering sting, as though the cut were his.

"You're bleeding," he said.

"I know."

"You should wash it. The foxes' teeth carry rot."

"I know that too." She did not lower the sword. "Sit down. Over there, on the rock. Slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them."

He sat. It was a clumsy business, and the rock was cold, and the new weight of his own body surprised him. She stayed standing. The merchant, a few paces off, had begun humming to himself and examining the lining of his sleeve, and she shot the old man one look, assessed him, and put him from her mind. Her attention returned to Zheyu entire, like a hawk's.

"Start from the beginning," she said. "And don't tell me anything you think I'd like to hear."

He drew a breath. He had rehearsed this, in the way that you rehearse a thing you have never been allowed to say. A thousand different versions in the dark, none of them right. He chose the simplest.

"There is a soul in your sword. It is mine. I was a man, once. I made a thing, and the thing took me in, and now I live inside it." He folded his hands together because they would not be still. "Every spring, when the peach blossoms open, I wake. The blossoms give me a body for a time. When they fall, I go back."

"How long?"

"A season. Not always the same. It depends on," he faltered, "on the hand that holds me."

"On the person who carries the sword."

"Yes."

"And you've done this before. With other people."

"Yes."

"How many?"

He opened his mouth to answer and found there was nothing there.

He knew there had been others. He remembered their voices: a gruff woman who hummed when she walked, a lean grey man with a stammer, a laughing boy who had called him old friend in the dark. He remembered the shapes of their hands on his hilt. He remembered the way each of them had said his name. But when he reached for the end of each memory, for the place where one hand had set him down and another had taken him up, there was a wall. Smooth and blank. Not a closed door. A wall.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "More than two. I'm sorry. There is a gap in me, here." He touched his chest with two fingers. "I have never been able to see across it."

She watched him, and he could not tell what she read in his face. "That's convenient."

"I know how it sounds."

"You know how everything sounds. You seem very good at it." She finally let the sword drop, not sheathing it but holding it low and loose at her side, the point just clear of the grass. He understood that this was not trust. It was a different kind of weapon, the weapon of someone who had decided to wait. "I think you're a fox. A big one. One of the sweet-voiced kind who learns to look like a man. You dressed up in white and walked out of the fog to scare me into handing over the sword."

"If I were a fox," said Zheyu, "I would have taken your sword while you were fighting the others. I stood at your back for the whole of it, and I had my hands on the steel."

"Then you're something else. A ghost. A mountain spirit. A swindler."

"I am all of those things, perhaps." He found, to his surprise, that he was smiling again. "I only ask you to test it."

"Test it."

"There is a rule to my waking. I cannot go far from you." He wet his dry lips. "I do not understand why. I have never been told. But I know that I am tied to this valley's season and to the one who woke me, and if you walk from me far enough, I think I will fall. You can see for yourself."

She stared at him. Then something shifted in her face, a flinty, practical light, as of someone who had been handed an experiment and found she could not refuse it.

"How far?"

"I do not know. Ten paces, perhaps. It has been different with different people."

"Stand up."

He stood. She turned and began to walk.

She walked as she did everything, without any wasted movement. Her boots made no sound in the grass. He watched her go, the straight back, the torn sleeve, the long dark ponytail swinging against her spine, and he was struck with a feeling so strong that for a moment it frightened him. He wanted to follow. It was not the pull of the leash. It was something simpler. It was the way a flower turns toward a window.

At five paces, nothing.

At eight, a faint prickle, like the first cold of evening.

At ten, the world began to go thin.

It happened at the edges first. The colours of the valley drained toward grey. The birdsong stretched out and sagged, like a rope slackening. He felt his own hands become strange, light and numb, as if they belonged to someone half a mile away. He looked down. The ivory of his sleeve had turned translucent. Through his wrist he could see the grass.

"Qinghe," he said, and heard the word come out of his mouth as a thread.

She was at eleven paces. She did not turn around.

The pain arrived then. It did not come in a wave, as pain should. It came from inside, from everywhere at once, a deep tearing as if each fibre of him were being unpicked and drawn off toward her like a spool of silk. His chest seized. He gasped and could not take in air. His knees buckled, and he went down onto the grass with one hand clutched against his ribs and the other flat on the earth, trying to find something solid.

"Wait," he said. "Please. It is," he gasped, "it is true."

He did not know if she could hear him. He did not know if his voice had left his body. The edges of the world went from grey to white, and the white had a sound in it, a ringing, high and thin, the sound the dark makes just before it takes you home.

Then there were hands on his shoulders.

They were rough and warm, calloused across the pads, and they gripped him hard as though she meant to hold him to the ground by force. He felt the tearing stop. It stopped so suddenly that he cried out. The air rushed into his lungs. The grass came back, and the birds, and the smell of the blossoms, and in the middle of all of it was a face, very close to his.

"Breathe," said Qinghe. "Just breathe. Idiot. Look at me."

He looked at her. Her eyes were very dark and very clear, and her face was white to the lips. She was kneeling in the grass with both hands wrapped around his upper arms, and she was shaking. Not much. A little tremor in the fingers. He did not think she knew.

"I'm here," she said. "I'm here. Is it better?"

"It is better," he whispered.

"Does it still hurt?"

"No." He pressed his palm against his sternum, where the pain had been, and found the ordinary rhythm of his heart. "No. It stopped when you came back."

She let go of him at once, as if she had been scalded, and sat back on her heels. "Eleven paces," she said. Her voice was flat. "You started fading at ten."

"Yes."

"That was real."

"I would not have chosen it," he said, a little breathlessly, "as a way to prove myself."

For a moment neither of them said anything. The merchant had stopped humming. A single blossom turned over and over in the air between them and landed on her knee, and she brushed it off with her thumb without looking.

Then she stood, and when she looked down at him again, her face was closed, as shut as a gate.

"Get up," she said. "We're going to try it again."

"Again?"

"Properly. I want to be sure what I'm dealing with." She turned and walked to the rock where he had sat, bent, and laid Qingming down on its flat grey surface as carefully as one lays a sleeping child. She stepped back from it. "You said you live in the sword. So tell me. If I leave the sword and take you, what happens? If I take the sword and leave you?"

He understood what she was doing, and he felt a strange rush of admiration. She was methodical. She would go through the thing to its ground, and she would not let fear or wonder cloud the sum. It was the way a good smith tested an alloy.

"I do not know," he said honestly. "No one has ever asked."

"Then we'll find out." She pointed. "Stay by the rock. Don't move until I tell you."

He stayed by the rock. Qinghe walked away from it, away from the sword, and he stood beside the grey blade with his hand resting near its hilt, and he watched her go. She stopped at ten paces. At twelve. She turned around. At fifteen, he felt the first tug of the thread, and then the cold, and then he was fading again, and the sword was lying right beside him, doing nothing at all.

"Stop," he called, thin.

She came back at a run. When she reached him the pain was gone before she touched him, and he stood on the grass with his ordinary hands and his ordinary breath and said, "It is not the sword."

"No," she said grimly. "It isn't."

She tried it a third way. She picked up the blade, slid it into the scabbard, and then, with a small, unfriendly look at him, walked straight past him down the slope, leaving him a dozen paces from the sword, which she had taken. He followed because he could not help it. He walked at her shoulder with the sword far behind him on its rock. Thirty paces, forty. The valley rolled out below them in a long pink slope. He felt nothing but a pleasant lightness and the wind.

"So you're tied to me," she said without turning. "Not to the blade. Me. My body."

"It would seem so."

"For how long?"

"A season. Until the blossoms fall." He hesitated. "Qinghe, I did not know it would be this way. In the other times, it was always the sword. Always the hilt. They could put me down and go and I would be a little weaker but I would stay." He frowned, troubled. "Something is different about you."

"Wonderful." She did stop then, and turned, and the look she gave him was both weary and furious. "I can't leave you. And you can't leave me. For a whole season."

"I am sorry."

"Don't apologise. I'm not angry at you. I'm angry at," she gestured, at the valley and the sky and the pink fall of the petals and the dead master she could not shout at, "at everything. At him. He gave me this sword and told me to keep it close. He didn't say anything about this. I'd have burned it."

"Would you?"

She did not answer. She looked at the wet green hem of her skirt for a while.

Behind them, a voice came wavering up the hill. "Guniang! Guniang Ye! Is it all right to come down? The mules have been making a terrible fuss."

She closed her eyes briefly. "He thinks you're a hermit," she said. "That you came out of the woods and drove off the foxes with a prayer. Don't correct him. We'll go with that."

"Is that wise?"

"No. It's easy." She opened her eyes. "We have a job to finish. I'm taking him to the far pass, and I'm not going to be paid forty silver for a man who got eaten after I left him alone. So you come with me. You walk where I walk. You keep your mouth shut about swords and blossoms, and when we get to a town, we'll see what I can do about you."

"What will you do about me?"

"I haven't decided." She started down the slope. "Move."

He moved. He walked beside her through the falling petals with the sword on her hip and the old merchant scrambling up to greet them, babbling gratitude, and in the middle of it all he found himself turning his head over and over to look at the sky. It was so blue. He had forgotten how blue.

She was not looking at the sky. She was looking at the ground a little ahead of her feet, and her face was set and cold. She said, without lifting her eyes, "I don't have time to nurse a burden."

It was not a cruelty. He understood that. It was a wall, a thing she put up quickly when something came too close, and he had seen walls like that in other hands. He knew how they were built. He knew what they were built to keep out.

But it landed in him all the same, a small precise blow beneath the ribs, and he found that the hurt was not pain at all, it was only the beginning of something much older, the oldest ache he knew. To be a weight on someone's shoulders. To be a thing that had to be carried.

"Then I will carry myself," said Zheyu gently. "As far as you let me."

She glanced at him. Just once, quick as a bird. She looked away.

They walked on. The merchant reached them, wringing his hands and thanking the hermit effusively in the name of nine gods and his dead mother, and Zheyu bowed and murmured something polite and was hardly listening. His mind kept returning to the thing he had learned. Not the cost of the thread, though that was surely strange enough. The other thing.

He had been bound to a sword for three hundred years. He had thought the sword was the cage. But the sword lay on a woman's hip, in a scabbard, in the sun. It was the woman who held the lock.

And she was the first of them who had ever walked into the pain to come back for him.

He did not say that aloud. He thought about it all the way down the slope, as the petals fell on his hair, and as the first small, treacherous warmth of hope began to bloom somewhere beneath his breastbone. He did not trust it. He had been burned by that feeling before, though he could no longer say how.

He only knew, with a clarity that frightened him, that he would follow her. Whether the thread pulled or not.

They made the far pass by nightfall, which was later than Qinghe liked and earlier than the merchant deserved. The trees thinned there to a few scattered pines and a ruined shrine with half a roof. Merchant Bao set up his crates beneath the better half and fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about silk prices, and the mules, who had forgiven no one, stood in a sulking row and stared at the dark.

Zheyu sat on a low wall at the edge of the firelight. He had been sitting there for some time, with his hands pressed flat against his stomach, in the posture of a man trying to hold something in.

"You're doing it again," said Qinghe from the other side of the fire.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at the food." She did not look up from the knife she was cleaning. "Like you're going to cry."

"I may." He said it with such mild honesty that she did look up. "I do not know what hunger is for. I only know that I want, very badly, to put something in my mouth, and I do not think I am permitted to eat the mules."

Something twitched at the corner of her mouth and was suppressed. She reached into her pack, rummaged, and tossed him something wrapped in a cloth. He caught it, clumsily, against his chest.

It was a rice cake. Cold, a little hard at the edges, dusted with sesame. It was the plainest thing in the world.

He held it in both hands for a moment. Then he took a bite, and his eyes closed.

Qinghe turned her face to the fire very quickly.

"It's only a rice cake," she muttered.

"It is not only anything," said Zheyu, with his mouth full, and he sounded so thoroughly undone by it that she bent her head over her knife and did not speak again for a long time.

When she finally lay down to sleep, she lay with her back to the fire and her hand on the hilt of her sword, and she kept her feet toward him. Not close. Not far. Exactly, he noticed, the distance that would have been eight paces if she stood up and walked away. She did not seem to know she had done it.

He lay awake, listening to her breathe, and counted the ten paces over and over until the stars wheeled.