Liuyin was a town built by people who loved willows more than they loved sense.

The trees grew along every canal and over every bridge, great green curtains of them trailing in the water, so that walking through the lanes felt like being led through a dozen quiet rooms. Boats nosed under the arches. Laundry hung from the upper windows. A man was selling steamed buns off a barge, and the smell drifted up the bank, warm and yeasty and slightly burnt, and Qinghe heard her companion make a small, helpless noise in his throat.

"No," she said without turning her head.

"I did not say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was about to observe," said Zheyu, "that the buns are shaped like little peaches."

"No."

"They are very well made."

"We are not buying buns. We are finding a bed." She shouldered through a knot of market women with their baskets and kept walking, and he followed at her elbow, as he had followed for four days, with exactly the same expression of grave and radiant interest in everything. He had looked at a dung cart that morning like it was a temple. He had asked the price of salt, then asked what salt was for, then asked if it was true that people ate the sea. Qinghe had stopped answering after the first hour and had started merely walking faster.

It had made no difference. He kept pace without effort.

She had paid Merchant Bao's forty silver out of her own sense of honour, because he had insisted on giving her fifty, and she had refused the extra ten because it would have felt like being paid for something she could not name. He had blessed her at length. He had also, to her dismay, told three separate innkeepers on the road that the swordswoman's scholar friend was a saint who drove off foxes with a prayer. By the third day, strangers were bowing to Zheyu in the road. He bowed back with a faint, bewildered smile and a politeness so complete that she could not tell if he was joking.

She had spent a lot of those four days thinking about how to explain him.

A man who cannot be more than ten paces from you. Nobody was going to believe that was a medical condition. A man who does not know how to eat. A cousin from the mountains, perhaps, brought up by monks. A scholar, deaf to the world, who had never seen a town. She had been working on the story and it was a poor thing and it would have to do. A sword spirit was a prize. In the wrong hands, he was a fortune. She did not know yet who the wrong hands might be, but she knew the kind of person who would pay to find out.

"There," she said. "Third bridge. The one with the red lantern."

It was a narrow, tilting building of old grey timber, three storeys of it, leaning over the canal with the comfortable slouch of a house that had weathered many floods and decided not to mind. A sign over the door said WILLOW AND WIND in cheerful, smudged characters. Under the eaves, a clay pot of peach branches stood blooming in defiance of the season, and beside it a woman in a faded green apron was sweeping the step.

She looked up as they approached.

She was about thirty, round-cheeked and small, with a coil of dark hair held in place by a bone pin and an expression of lively and unhurried curiosity. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. A smear of flour lay across one cheekbone, and her eyes, which were large and tilted and shrewd, travelled over Qinghe in a single head-to-foot sweep and then did the same to Zheyu. Then back. Then to Qinghe again.

Something in her face lit up like a lamp.

"Well, well," she said. "A sword and a scholar. And neither of them has eaten. I can see it from here."

"We need two rooms," said Qinghe. "Adjoining, if you have them. For a few weeks, possibly more."

"Two rooms." The woman leaned on her broom. "Adjoining. For the sword and the scholar." Her smile widened. "I have one room. Two beds. It overlooks the water, and no one else is staying this month, because the spring floods have frightened the pilgrims off. It is a very good room. It is the only room."

"Two rooms," Qinghe said again, more firmly.

"There is only one." The woman's innocence was dazzling. "I am so sorry, Guniang. Truly. But I will tell you what. I will put a screen between the beds, a good tall screen, and I will not charge you for the second bed. Will that do?"

Qinghe opened her mouth, and then she thought of the ten paces. Two rooms down a corridor would put them at thirteen, fifteen paces apart, through a wall.

She shut her mouth.

"That will do," she said.

"Wonderful." The woman put her broom aside and bowed, a short, brisk dip. "I am Shen Meiyan. Everyone calls me Mei. This is my house, my kitchen, and my terrible opinions. Come in. Come in out of the noise. You," this was to Zheyu, and she gave him a kind, appraising look, "look as though you have been asleep for a thousand years."

Zheyu went absolutely still.

"Three hundred," he said, before Qinghe could stop him, and then caught her eye and added, with a wan attempt at lightness, "Only a figure of speech. I am a poor traveller."

Mei burst out laughing. "Oh, I like him. Come."

* * *

The room was small and clean and smelled of cedar and old rain. Two narrow beds, an oil lamp, a washstand, a window that opened over the canal so that green light came wobbling up the wall. A painted screen of herons stood between the beds, as promised. It was a very thin screen. Qinghe looked at it for a long moment and said nothing.

"Sit," she told Zheyu. "Before you fall over."

He sat on the nearest bed and bounced, slightly, experimentally, and then looked up at her with an expression so exactly like a child discovering a trick that she had to turn around and unbuckle her sword belt with great concentration.

"Rules," she said, facing the wall.

"Yes."

"One. Your name is Lan Zheyu, you're a scholar, you were raised in a mountain monastery, and you have never been to a town. All of that is true except the monastery, which is close enough that you can stop looking worried."

"I was not looking worried."

"You were. Two. You don't talk about swords. You don't talk about blossoms. You don't talk about being three hundred years old, which you did, I will point out, in front of a stranger."

"I am sorry about that."

"Three. If I say we leave, we leave. If I say stay quiet, you stay quiet. This is not a joke and you are not on a holiday. People will pay a great deal of money to know what you are, and some of them won't be careful about how they find out."

She turned. He was sitting with his hands folded in his lap and his head slightly bowed, and she had expected, God knew why, protest. An argument. Some small, sulky insistence. But he only nodded.

"I understand," he said. "I will do as you say."

"Good."

"May I say one thing?"

She exhaled. "What?"

"Thank you." He raised his eyes, and she saw that they were serious, and a little shy. "For all of this. I know it is a trouble to you. I will try to make it as small a trouble as I can."

She did not know what to do with that. It was easier when he was irritating. "Don't thank me yet," she said, which was weak, and then, because she could not stand to be looked at, she picked up her pack and went to wash her hands.

When she came back he was asleep.

Not entirely asleep. He had lain down on the narrow bed, fully dressed, boots on, with one arm flung over his eyes, and his chest rose and fell evenly. A sliver of green light lay across his cheekbone. He looked young, suddenly. Not twenty-eight. Younger than that. It was as though the weight of three centuries had slid off him the moment he stopped holding it up.

Qinghe stood at the foot of the bed for longer than she meant to.

* * *

Mei brought up supper herself.

She came in without knocking, carrying a tray balanced against her hip, kicked the door shut behind her, and put the tray down on the washstand with a clatter that woke Zheyu at once. He sat up, blinking, and Mei looked at him with her head tilted, and said, "It's only congee. Plain. I thought you'd want something gentle."

"Congee," Zheyu repeated.

"Rice porridge." Mei ladled a generous bowl and held it out. "Dried scallop, a little ginger, a drop of sesame oil. Eat it slowly. It's hot."

He took the bowl in both hands. The steam rose against his face. He looked down into it for a moment, as if it were a thing he would have to be introduced to, and then he lifted the spoon and put it in his mouth.

Qinghe, watching from the window, saw it happen.

She had seen men taste good food before. She had seen starved men fall on bread. This was neither. He closed his eyes, and the whole of his face changed, softened and opened, as if someone had unlatched a door in him. The spoon hung at his lip. His throat moved. A breath went out of him, long and unsteady, and when he opened his eyes again they were bright and wet and he looked across the room at Qinghe with such open, helpless joy that something turned over under her ribs.

"It is warm," he said. "It is warm all the way down."

"That is generally how porridge works," said Mei, but her voice had gone gentle.

"I did not know." He took another spoonful, slower. "I had been told. But I did not know."

Qinghe found that she had forgotten to be angry. She had been angry for four days, and she had been very good at it, and now she was standing by a window with an empty cup in her hand watching a man eat porridge as though it were the first dawn of the world. She did not want to look away. She wanted to see it again. The way his lashes lowered, the small inward smile, the careful way he held the bowl, as if it might break.

It took her a moment to realise she was smiling too.

She stopped at once. She set down the cup and turned to the window and stared at the canal until her face went back to normal.

"You are very kind to him," Mei remarked, lightly, to no one in particular.

"I'm not kind. I'm responsible."

"Of course." Mei gathered the empty tray. She passed close by Qinghe on her way to the door, and she dropped her voice to a murmur that carried exactly as far as it was meant to. "Responsible people don't usually watch like that. His hands are warm, did you notice? I took the bowl back from him. They're warm as bread. A man who has been walking in the cold and hasn't eaten in a week, and his hands are warm." She smiled sweetly. "Funny thing."

Qinghe's ears went hot.

"He's just made that way."

"Hm. Most men aren't." Mei opened the door with her hip. "Sleep well, both of you. The screen is very sturdy. I checked."

The door closed behind her. In the silence that followed, Zheyu said, with great care, "I think she knows something."

"She knows nothing."

"She said a sword and a scholar. Before we spoke."

"She says a lot of things."

"Qinghe."

"Go to sleep."

He lay back down. After a moment, he said into the dark, quite softly, "Your ears are red."

"They are not."

"They were. I saw it in the lamplight."

"Go to sleep, Lan Zheyu."

He laughed, a low, surprised sound, as if the laugh had startled him by coming out. Then there was a rustle, a shifting of blankets, and a silence that stretched.

* * *

Sleep did not come at once, for either of them.

"Qinghe," said the voice from behind the screen, after the lamp had been blown out. "May I ask how a scholar behaves?"

"Quietly."

"That is very little to go on."

She stared at the ceiling. "He bows from the waist, not the neck. He says this humble person when he means I. He doesn't look a woman in the eye unless she looks first. He drinks tea with two fingers under the cup and one on the rim, and he never, ever asks the price of salt."

"I only asked once."

"You asked six times."

"The first answer was unsatisfactory." There was a rustle as he turned. "Shall I practise? I should like to be good at it. I should like not to embarrass you."

"You can't embarrass me. I don't have a reputation."

"You have one," he said mildly. "The merchant spoke of it for two days. Guniang Ye, who has never lost a client. He said it as though it were a title."

She did not answer. Her mouth had gone dry in the dark.

"I think," said Zheyu, carefully, "that it is a very fine thing to be known for. But I have noticed you do not seem pleased by it."

"Go to sleep."

"I am only observing."

"Observe it quietly."

A short silence. Then the screen creaked, and something small and cloth-wrapped skidded across the floorboards and stopped against the leg of her bed. She sat up, startled, and groped for it. A rice cake. The last of the sesame ones from the road, rather squashed.

"I saved half," he whispered. "You did not eat at supper. You watched me eat."

"I wasn't hungry."

"You were looking at the bowl as though you had forgotten what to do with one."

She held the rice cake in her palm. It was cold and slightly crushed and it had been carried, she realised, in the sleeve of a man who had been hungry himself for three hundred years and had still thought to keep half.

"Idiot," she said. It came out softer than she intended.

"Yes," Zheyu agreed contentedly. "Eat it, Qinghe."

She ate it. In the dark, with her back against the wall and her heart behaving strangely, she ate the whole thing, crumbs and all, and did not tell him that it was the best thing she had tasted in a year.

* * *

It was the breathing she could not stand.

She lay with her face to the wall, with Qingming on the floor by her bed within arm's reach, and the screen of herons stood between her and the other side of the room, and she listened to him sleep. Slow in, slow out. A faint catch at the top of each breath, like a man still learning how. Now and then a small sound escaped him, not quite a word, a murmur from the bottom of a dream. Once he turned over, and the bed creaked, and her whole body went tense and then slowly relaxed.

It was the most ordinary sound in the world, and it had been months since she had heard it.

Master Ye had breathed like that, in the last winter. In the next room, through a thin wall, all through the long nights. She had lain awake and listened to it get shallower and slower, and she had counted the gaps between breaths, and then, one night, she had counted a gap that did not end. She had lain in the dark for an hour after that without moving. It had seemed wrong to get up. It had seemed a kind of rudeness, to leave the sound behind.

Since then she had slept in empty rooms. Cheap inns, roadside shrines, the open ground under pines. It had not bothered her. She had told herself she liked the silence. She had told herself a lot of things, and for four months nobody had been there to hear them argue.

Tonight there was breath in the room.

Warm, living, close enough that she could have thrown a boot at it. And her body, which had been wound so tightly for so long that she had stopped noticing the strain, did something she had not given it permission to do. It let go. The knot at the base of her skull came loose. Her shoulders dropped. Her hand, which had been curled around the edge of her blanket, unclenched.

She was asleep before she realised.

* * *

She woke once in the grey hour before dawn. For a moment she did not know where she was. The ceiling was wrong. The light was green and soft. She turned her head, and the screen was there with its painted herons, and behind it, quiet and steady, someone was still breathing.

Oh, she thought.

It was not a happy thought. It came with a cold, small pang of dread, as if she had stepped on a stair that was not there. Because she knew what this was. She had been trained to know it. A body was an instrument, and an instrument could be dulled by comfort. She had seen soldiers go soft at a good bed and a warm meal. She had seen swordsmen lose their edge to a woman's laugh. A blade that wanted things was a blade that could be bent.

She had gone four days. Four. And already, in the dark, with a stranger's breathing on the other side of a painted screen, she had slept better than she had since the funeral.

He will go back, she told herself, flat and fierce. When the blossoms fall. A season. That's all. He's going to leave, and you will be here, and the room will be quiet, and you will have to remember how to sleep.

She lay there in the greying light, listening.

It was only a day. She had only known him a day, in any way that mattered. But her body had learned the sound already, and it would take much longer to unlearn.

That frightened her more than the foxes had.