The job came to them on the sixth day, in the shape of a very frightened farmer.
He appeared at the door of the Willow and Wind in the middle of breakfast, a stocky man in a patched coat with his hat crushed between his hands, and he did not so much speak as spill. His name was Tian. He farmed a stretch of terraced land on the southern lip of Taohua Valley, where the old orchards gave way to rice paddies. Three of his neighbours had gone missing in ten days. A woman who went out to gather bamboo shoots. Her brother, who went looking. A young herdsman who had been seen at dusk walking toward the tree line with his goats strung out behind him, and who had not come back, though the goats had.
"The magistrate won't send anyone," Tian said. "He says it's the season, the wolves come down. But there are no wolf tracks. I've looked." He wrung his hat. "Mistress Shen says you're good with things that aren't wolves."
Qinghe set down her chopsticks and shot a glare across the table. Mei, who had been ostentatiously wiping a spotless counter, became fascinated with a crack in the wall.
"I only said you were reliable," Mei said innocently. "And honest. And very expensive."
"What can you pay?" said Qinghe.
Tian named a figure. It was less than half of what she would have asked. She opened her mouth to say so, and then she saw how his hands shook on the hat, and she closed it again.
"We'll come," she said.
"We?" Tian looked at Zheyu, who sat on the other side of the table with a bowl of congee and a look of polite attention. The farmer's eyes took in the long ivory robe, the hands that held the spoon so carefully, the face that belonged in a scroll painting. "This is the holy man, isn't it? From the foxes?" His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. "They say you can charm the mist."
"I do not think that is quite," Zheyu began.
"He's my assistant," said Qinghe. "He carries things. Do you have a cart?"
* * *
The cart was a rickety, ox-drawn thing that smelled of turnips, and the ride to the southern lip took the better part of a day. Qinghe sat up front beside the farmer with her sword across her knees. Zheyu sat in the back among the sacks, his legs dangling over the edge, watching the world roll away behind them with an attitude of rapt and gentle wonder.
She did not look back at him. She had been very deliberate about it.
It was a small thing, an experiment of sorts. Since the day in the valley she had been aware, in the background of every waking moment, of the exact length of the invisible cord. She could feel it, almost: the place where he stopped and she began, the ten paces' radius like a ring of chalk around her feet. She knew, without turning, that he was seven paces behind her. Then eight, as the cart lurched. Then, because the ox had stopped to drink, nine.
She did not shorten the distance. She sat very still and let it stand at nine, with the skin on her neck prickling, and waited.
Behind her, the sacks rustled. There was a quiet thump. When she finally allowed herself a glance over her shoulder, he had climbed down from the cart and was walking beside the wheel with one hand resting on the ox's flank, matching its slow pace. Seven paces. Then six. Never once closer than she had set the boundary, and never once nearer to the edge than was comfortable.
He had read the distance. He was adjusting to her without being asked.
She faced front again.
"He is a very polite assistant," said Tian, in an undertone.
"He's a nuisance," said Qinghe. "Drive."
But she did not look over her shoulder for the rest of the journey, and the thing that had been tight in her chest for some days eased by a degree she refused to name.
* * *
The southern lip of Taohua looked, in the late afternoon light, like the last place on earth where anything could go wrong.
Terraced paddies stepped down the hillside in green stairs, each one mirroring the sky. Peach trees grew along the dykes, small and tidy, heavy with bloom. A woman sang somewhere, far off, hoeing a row of beans. The air smelled of mud and sweet water and woodsmoke. It was a landscape that had never in its life considered doing harm to anyone.
"There," said Tian. He pointed to the dark line where the orchards ended and the forest began, a wall of old pine and oak that crawled up the slope toward the ridge. "That's where the herdsman went in. The bamboo woman, too. We don't go in there after sundown. We never did, but now we don't go in at all."
"When did you last see someone come out?"
"No one's come out."
She nodded. She stepped off the cart, and she felt the thread settle as Zheyu dropped down beside her, a breath of cool air against her shoulder. "Thank you, Mr Tian. Go home. Stay indoors tonight. Bar the door, and don't answer if anyone calls you by name."
Tian went white. "Is that likely?"
"I hope not." She did not smile. "But don't."
* * *
They went in at dusk.
The forest swallowed the light almost at once. The trees were close and old, their roots heaved up like knuckles, and the ground between them was soft with years of needles. Qinghe went ahead with Qingming drawn and held low, in the way that Master Ye had taught her, the blade a part of her arm and not a thing she carried. The sound of her feet was muffled to nothing. A bird gave a warning cry and fell silent.
She walked deliberately a little too far ahead of him, seven paces, eight, and she heard him follow. He made no sound at all. He walked as though the leaves had agreed to bend for him. She had noticed that about him from the first and had told herself it was a trick of the ghost.
"You are testing me again," said Zheyu, very softly.
"I'm checking the ground."
"You are standing at eight paces and watching the ground at nine."
"Be quiet."
"I only mean that I do not mind. If you wish to know how far it reaches, I would rather you knew than feared it." A beat. "I would rather you were not alone with a wall of uncertainty."
She did not answer. She stepped over a root and her heel came down on something that was not a root.
A hollow crunch. She froze.
It was a small thing, half buried in the needles, a fragment of bone. A rib, perhaps, thin and curved and grey. She crouched and brushed the earth from it with her fingertips, and beneath it there were more. A scatter of them, as if something had been picked clean and the leavings kicked into the leaves.
"Animal," she said, though she did not believe it.
"Perhaps." He had come up beside her. His face in the dusk was very pale. "Qinghe. Look at the tree."
She looked.
It was an oak, huge and gnarled, the oldest in that part of the wood. Its bark was furrowed deep as a rice field. And low on the trunk, at the height of a standing woman's heart, someone had pinned a piece of paper.
It was a talisman. A strip of yellow paper as long as her forearm, stiff with dried cinnabar, written over in red characters. Not characters she knew. They twisted oddly, hooked at the ends like fish-claws, and they seemed to crawl on the page if she looked at them too long. A nail of black iron held it to the tree. Around the nail, the bark had gone grey and soft, rotted away in a ring as if something had been sucking the life out of the wood.
She reached for it. His hand closed on her wrist.
It was not a rough grip. It was almost a plea. But she felt the shake in his fingers, and when she looked up, his face had changed. His eyes were fixed on the paper, wide and unfocused, and the colour had left his lips.
"Don't touch it," he said. "Please. Do not touch it."
"What is it?"
"I know it." The words came slowly, as though dragged from a great depth. "I know that hand. That cut of the stroke. The way the last line hooks." His breath hitched. "It is a binding script. A soul-drawing. It is meant to," he stopped. His fingers tightened on her wrist until it hurt. "It is meant to take what is in a living thing and draw it out. Slowly. Over days. It does not kill. It drinks."
"Who made it?"
"They had a hall." He was shaking. "In the cold. A spring in the mountains that never froze. They called themselves," he pressed his free hand hard against his temple, and his face twisted. "I cannot. It is behind the curtain. But I know the name. I knew it once. Cold Spring."
She did not know the name. But she knew his face, and she knew what it was to see a man's mind trying to climb a wall.
"Zheyu." She turned her wrist in his grip, gently, until her hand lay over his. "Breathe. In. Out. You're here. You're not there."
He breathed. After a moment the grip loosened, and he looked down at their joined hands as if surprised to find them there. A flush crept slowly up his throat.
"I am sorry," he said, and took his hand away. "That was unforgivable. I did not mean to," he gestured, helplessly. "To hold you."
"It's fine."
"It is not. You said no touching."
"I never said that."
"You implied it, in the way you walk."
She stared at him. In spite of everything, in spite of the bones and the cinnabar and the rotting oak, she felt the corner of her mouth twitch. "Zheyu. I'm trying to take this seriously."
"So am I." He sounded wounded. "I am being very serious."
"I know." And then, because it was true, and because the words were out before she could catch them: "Thank you for stopping me."
* * *
The thing in the shadows moved at exactly that moment.
She heard it before she saw it. A soft, wet, dragging sound, like a sack of grain pulled across stone. Qinghe came up from her crouch in one smooth motion and turned. Behind them, ten paces away at the edge of the dark, something was standing among the trees.
It had been a man. She could tell that much. It had a man's shape, a man's broad shoulders and heavy arms, and it was clothed in the rags of a farmer's smock. But its skin had gone the colour of tallow, and its eyes were two pits of grey nothing, and from its open mouth hung a long thread of something pale and shining, like a strand of spider silk. The thread ran back into the trees. When she followed it with her gaze she saw that it went all the way to the talisman.
A guard, she thought. Not a person any more. A thing fed on a person.
"The herdsman?" Zheyu breathed.
"Or the farmer's brother." She settled into her stance. "Stay behind me."
"Qinghe, it is tied to the paper. If you cut the thread, it will."
The creature lunged.
She had expected it to be slow. It was not. It crossed the ten paces in a heartbeat and came at her with its arms outstretched and its gaping mouth wide, and she barely got the blade up in time. The impact jarred her to the shoulder. The thing's weight bore her back, and its hands closed on the steel, and she saw to her horror that the skin of its palms did not bleed.
She kicked it in the knee. It staggered but did not fall. She slashed, and the blade bit deep into its forearm, and the arm came away at the elbow and fell writhing on the needles and went on moving.
"Zheyu!"
"I am here!"
"The thread! Can you cut it?"
"I have no sword!"
"Then do something!"
There was a pause, a half-heartbeat of thought. Then he said, in a tone of sudden, alarmed resolve, "Hold still."
Something warm brushed past her cheek, a movement of air with the scent of peach blossom in it. A rush of pale petals swept out from beside her, small and swift as startled birds, and wrapped themselves around the pale thread where it hung between the creature and the tree. They clung to it. They bunched. And where they touched, the thread grew taut and shuddered and began, slowly, to fray.
The thing howled.
It was a hideous sound, wet and hollow, like a man shouting up out of a well. It twisted in her grip. She felt its strength fail, just a little, and she seized the moment and drove her blade through its chest and wrenched it free.
For a moment the creature stood swaying. Then the grey went out of its eyes, and a look of terrible, bewildered recognition crossed its face, a living look, and a voice that was not the same voice said, quite clearly, "Mother?"
It folded to the ground.
The thread snapped. A sound like a shaken bowl of glass rang through the forest, and the talisman on the oak split from top to bottom and burst into flame. It burned bright yellow for an instant and then went to ash.
Neither of them moved.
The petals sifted down, one by one, and settled on the still shape in the needles. Qinghe stood with her sword hanging from her fingers and her arm aching to the bone. She was breathing in short gasps. Her heart was a hammer. She looked at the dead man's face, which had gone slack and young and rather sad, and at the blossoms lying across his chest like a shroud.
"That was clumsy," she said at last.
"It was," Zheyu agreed faintly.
"You nearly got in my way."
"I did not know where to stand."
"And I almost took your head off."
"I think you were aiming at the thing."
"I was aiming at the thing. I'd have taken your head off if you'd been in the way." She wiped her blade on the ground. Her hand was trembling slightly. "But it worked."
"It did."
He was staring at her. He was pale, and there were petals in his hair, and the look on his face was something between exhaustion and amazement. She realised, with a jolt, that she was looking at him the same way. They had fought together. Badly, graceless, tangled in each other's reach, and it had worked. She had felt his presence at her shoulder like a second pair of lungs.
She looked away first.
* * *
They sat at the edge of the wood, in the dark, by a small fire she had lit with a stern and professional air, and she made him tell her everything.
He did. She watched him do it. He held his hands tightly together between his knees and spoke in a low even voice, and he told her what the talisman was, a soul-drinking script, banned by every sane teacher of the martial world. He told her that the Cold Spring Hall had existed three centuries ago and that it had been destroyed and that it had apparently, God help them, not been destroyed enough. He told her what a refining cauldron was, and what a bound spirit could be made to do, and why a blade that held a thinking soul would be worth more to such people than a hundred ordinary swords. He told her the signs by which she might recognise one of the Hall's disciples. A cold mark behind the ear. A habit of speaking softly. A smile that never reached their eyes.
He did not tell her he was afraid.
She heard it in what he left out. In the way his voice smoothed itself at certain edges, the careful blankness he laid over the word spirit, the shortness of his breath when he said cauldron. He was telling her the facts, in order, like a man laying out evidence. But there was a trembling beneath the facts, and he held it down with both hands.
She did not push. She had never been good at comfort. But she had been, once, a frightened child at a sect gate, and she knew the difference between being asked to talk and being allowed to.
"All right," she said, when he was done. "Here's what we're going to do."
He looked up.
"We find out who's behind this. We find out how many of these papers are in the valley, and we burn them. We don't go near the Hall, and we don't go looking for the Hall, until we know more. And we do it together." She heard herself say the last word and did not take it back. "Temporary. Until the blossoms fall. I'm not asking you to like it."
"I like it very much."
"I'm not asking you to like me."
"That," said Zheyu, with a sudden breath that was almost a laugh, "is a separate matter."
She could not tell whether he was joking. She decided it was safer to assume he was.
"One more rule," she said. "No personal questions. Nothing about before. Nothing about after. We work together and we sleep on opposite sides of a screen and we do not discuss what we are or what we want. Agreed?"
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire popped. A spark rose and went out among the branches.
"Agreed," he said at last. But there was something in the way he said it, a small, rueful tilt, that told her he knew it for the lie it was. "Allies."
"Allies."
"Not friends."
"God, no."
He smiled, then. It was a slow, quiet, private smile, and it lit his whole face like a lamp behind paper. Qinghe found, to her annoyance, that she could not hold her stern expression against it. She turned and busied herself with the fire.
* * *
It was later, much later, when he had gone to lie down at the edge of the firelight and she was supposed to be keeping the first watch, that she noticed her wrist.
She had been sitting with her sword across her knees and her right hand resting on the guard, idly, the way she always did. She went to flex her fingers, and a cold went through her.
It was a very small cold. It did not hurt. It was not even unpleasant. It lay just above the bone of her right wrist, a thin circle of chill, as though someone had slipped an icy bracelet over her hand and then, a heartbeat later, taken it away. She felt it once, clearly. Then it was gone, and the skin was warm again, and she was staring at her own hand in the firelight with her heart suddenly loud in her ears.
She turned the wrist over. Nothing. No mark, no bruise. Only the faint blue tracery of veins beneath the skin, and the ordinary pulse.
The fight, she told herself. Fatigue. Strain. The creature's grip.
She flexed the fingers again, one by one. They moved easily.
She did not look at the man sleeping on the other side of the fire. She did not tell herself why. She only drew her sleeve down over her wrist, firmly, as if closing a door, and fixed her eyes on the dark between the trees, and kept her watch.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The job came to them on the sixth day, in the shape of a very frightened farmer.
He appeared at the door of the Willow and Wind in the middle of breakfast, a stocky man in a patched coat with his hat crushed between his hands, and he did not so much speak as spill. His name was Tian. He farmed a stretch of terraced land on the southern lip of Taohua Valley, where the old orchards gave way to rice paddies. Three of his neighbours had gone missing in ten days. A woman who went out to gather bamboo shoots. Her brother, who went looking. A young herdsman who had been seen at dusk walking toward the tree line with his goats strung out behind him, and who had not come back, though the goats had.
"The magistrate won't send anyone," Tian said. "He says it's the season, the wolves come down. But there are no wolf tracks. I've looked." He wrung his hat. "Mistress Shen says you're good with things that aren't wolves."
Qinghe set down her chopsticks and shot a glare across the table. Mei, who had been ostentatiously wiping a spotless counter, became fascinated with a crack in the wall.
"I only said you were reliable," Mei said innocently. "And honest. And very expensive."
"What can you pay?" said Qinghe.
Tian named a figure. It was less than half of what she would have asked. She opened her mouth to say so, and then she saw how his hands shook on the hat, and she closed it again.
"We'll come," she said.
"We?" Tian looked at Zheyu, who sat on the other side of the table with a bowl of congee and a look of polite attention. The farmer's eyes took in the long ivory robe, the hands that held the spoon so carefully, the face that belonged in a scroll painting. "This is the holy man, isn't it? From the foxes?" His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. "They say you can charm the mist."
"I do not think that is quite," Zheyu began.
"He's my assistant," said Qinghe. "He carries things. Do you have a cart?"
* * *
The cart was a rickety, ox-drawn thing that smelled of turnips, and the ride to the southern lip took the better part of a day. Qinghe sat up front beside the farmer with her sword across her knees. Zheyu sat in the back among the sacks, his legs dangling over the edge, watching the world roll away behind them with an attitude of rapt and gentle wonder.
She did not look back at him. She had been very deliberate about it.
It was a small thing, an experiment of sorts. Since the day in the valley she had been aware, in the background of every waking moment, of the exact length of the invisible cord. She could feel it, almost: the place where he stopped and she began, the ten paces' radius like a ring of chalk around her feet. She knew, without turning, that he was seven paces behind her. Then eight, as the cart lurched. Then, because the ox had stopped to drink, nine.
She did not shorten the distance. She sat very still and let it stand at nine, with the skin on her neck prickling, and waited.
Behind her, the sacks rustled. There was a quiet thump. When she finally allowed herself a glance over her shoulder, he had climbed down from the cart and was walking beside the wheel with one hand resting on the ox's flank, matching its slow pace. Seven paces. Then six. Never once closer than she had set the boundary, and never once nearer to the edge than was comfortable.
He had read the distance. He was adjusting to her without being asked.
She faced front again.
"He is a very polite assistant," said Tian, in an undertone.
"He's a nuisance," said Qinghe. "Drive."
But she did not look over her shoulder for the rest of the journey, and the thing that had been tight in her chest for some days eased by a degree she refused to name.
* * *
The southern lip of Taohua looked, in the late afternoon light, like the last place on earth where anything could go wrong.
Terraced paddies stepped down the hillside in green stairs, each one mirroring the sky. Peach trees grew along the dykes, small and tidy, heavy with bloom. A woman sang somewhere, far off, hoeing a row of beans. The air smelled of mud and sweet water and woodsmoke. It was a landscape that had never in its life considered doing harm to anyone.
"There," said Tian. He pointed to the dark line where the orchards ended and the forest began, a wall of old pine and oak that crawled up the slope toward the ridge. "That's where the herdsman went in. The bamboo woman, too. We don't go in there after sundown. We never did, but now we don't go in at all."
"When did you last see someone come out?"
"No one's come out."
She nodded. She stepped off the cart, and she felt the thread settle as Zheyu dropped down beside her, a breath of cool air against her shoulder. "Thank you, Mr Tian. Go home. Stay indoors tonight. Bar the door, and don't answer if anyone calls you by name."
Tian went white. "Is that likely?"
"I hope not." She did not smile. "But don't."
* * *
They went in at dusk.
The forest swallowed the light almost at once. The trees were close and old, their roots heaved up like knuckles, and the ground between them was soft with years of needles. Qinghe went ahead with Qingming drawn and held low, in the way that Master Ye had taught her, the blade a part of her arm and not a thing she carried. The sound of her feet was muffled to nothing. A bird gave a warning cry and fell silent.
She walked deliberately a little too far ahead of him, seven paces, eight, and she heard him follow. He made no sound at all. He walked as though the leaves had agreed to bend for him. She had noticed that about him from the first and had told herself it was a trick of the ghost.
"You are testing me again," said Zheyu, very softly.
"I'm checking the ground."
"You are standing at eight paces and watching the ground at nine."
"Be quiet."
"I only mean that I do not mind. If you wish to know how far it reaches, I would rather you knew than feared it." A beat. "I would rather you were not alone with a wall of uncertainty."
She did not answer. She stepped over a root and her heel came down on something that was not a root.
A hollow crunch. She froze.
It was a small thing, half buried in the needles, a fragment of bone. A rib, perhaps, thin and curved and grey. She crouched and brushed the earth from it with her fingertips, and beneath it there were more. A scatter of them, as if something had been picked clean and the leavings kicked into the leaves.
"Animal," she said, though she did not believe it.
"Perhaps." He had come up beside her. His face in the dusk was very pale. "Qinghe. Look at the tree."
She looked.
It was an oak, huge and gnarled, the oldest in that part of the wood. Its bark was furrowed deep as a rice field. And low on the trunk, at the height of a standing woman's heart, someone had pinned a piece of paper.
It was a talisman. A strip of yellow paper as long as her forearm, stiff with dried cinnabar, written over in red characters. Not characters she knew. They twisted oddly, hooked at the ends like fish-claws, and they seemed to crawl on the page if she looked at them too long. A nail of black iron held it to the tree. Around the nail, the bark had gone grey and soft, rotted away in a ring as if something had been sucking the life out of the wood.
She reached for it. His hand closed on her wrist.
It was not a rough grip. It was almost a plea. But she felt the shake in his fingers, and when she looked up, his face had changed. His eyes were fixed on the paper, wide and unfocused, and the colour had left his lips.
"Don't touch it," he said. "Please. Do not touch it."
"What is it?"
"I know it." The words came slowly, as though dragged from a great depth. "I know that hand. That cut of the stroke. The way the last line hooks." His breath hitched. "It is a binding script. A soul-drawing. It is meant to," he stopped. His fingers tightened on her wrist until it hurt. "It is meant to take what is in a living thing and draw it out. Slowly. Over days. It does not kill. It drinks."
"Who made it?"
"They had a hall." He was shaking. "In the cold. A spring in the mountains that never froze. They called themselves," he pressed his free hand hard against his temple, and his face twisted. "I cannot. It is behind the curtain. But I know the name. I knew it once. Cold Spring."
She did not know the name. But she knew his face, and she knew what it was to see a man's mind trying to climb a wall.
"Zheyu." She turned her wrist in his grip, gently, until her hand lay over his. "Breathe. In. Out. You're here. You're not there."
He breathed. After a moment the grip loosened, and he looked down at their joined hands as if surprised to find them there. A flush crept slowly up his throat.
"I am sorry," he said, and took his hand away. "That was unforgivable. I did not mean to," he gestured, helplessly. "To hold you."
"It's fine."
"It is not. You said no touching."
"I never said that."
"You implied it, in the way you walk."
She stared at him. In spite of everything, in spite of the bones and the cinnabar and the rotting oak, she felt the corner of her mouth twitch. "Zheyu. I'm trying to take this seriously."
"So am I." He sounded wounded. "I am being very serious."
"I know." And then, because it was true, and because the words were out before she could catch them: "Thank you for stopping me."
* * *
The thing in the shadows moved at exactly that moment.
She heard it before she saw it. A soft, wet, dragging sound, like a sack of grain pulled across stone. Qinghe came up from her crouch in one smooth motion and turned. Behind them, ten paces away at the edge of the dark, something was standing among the trees.
It had been a man. She could tell that much. It had a man's shape, a man's broad shoulders and heavy arms, and it was clothed in the rags of a farmer's smock. But its skin had gone the colour of tallow, and its eyes were two pits of grey nothing, and from its open mouth hung a long thread of something pale and shining, like a strand of spider silk. The thread ran back into the trees. When she followed it with her gaze she saw that it went all the way to the talisman.
A guard, she thought. Not a person any more. A thing fed on a person.
"The herdsman?" Zheyu breathed.
"Or the farmer's brother." She settled into her stance. "Stay behind me."
"Qinghe, it is tied to the paper. If you cut the thread, it will."
The creature lunged.
She had expected it to be slow. It was not. It crossed the ten paces in a heartbeat and came at her with its arms outstretched and its gaping mouth wide, and she barely got the blade up in time. The impact jarred her to the shoulder. The thing's weight bore her back, and its hands closed on the steel, and she saw to her horror that the skin of its palms did not bleed.
She kicked it in the knee. It staggered but did not fall. She slashed, and the blade bit deep into its forearm, and the arm came away at the elbow and fell writhing on the needles and went on moving.
"Zheyu!"
"I am here!"
"The thread! Can you cut it?"
"I have no sword!"
"Then do something!"
There was a pause, a half-heartbeat of thought. Then he said, in a tone of sudden, alarmed resolve, "Hold still."
Something warm brushed past her cheek, a movement of air with the scent of peach blossom in it. A rush of pale petals swept out from beside her, small and swift as startled birds, and wrapped themselves around the pale thread where it hung between the creature and the tree. They clung to it. They bunched. And where they touched, the thread grew taut and shuddered and began, slowly, to fray.
The thing howled.
It was a hideous sound, wet and hollow, like a man shouting up out of a well. It twisted in her grip. She felt its strength fail, just a little, and she seized the moment and drove her blade through its chest and wrenched it free.
For a moment the creature stood swaying. Then the grey went out of its eyes, and a look of terrible, bewildered recognition crossed its face, a living look, and a voice that was not the same voice said, quite clearly, "Mother?"
It folded to the ground.
The thread snapped. A sound like a shaken bowl of glass rang through the forest, and the talisman on the oak split from top to bottom and burst into flame. It burned bright yellow for an instant and then went to ash.
Neither of them moved.
The petals sifted down, one by one, and settled on the still shape in the needles. Qinghe stood with her sword hanging from her fingers and her arm aching to the bone. She was breathing in short gasps. Her heart was a hammer. She looked at the dead man's face, which had gone slack and young and rather sad, and at the blossoms lying across his chest like a shroud.
"That was clumsy," she said at last.
"It was," Zheyu agreed faintly.
"You nearly got in my way."
"I did not know where to stand."
"And I almost took your head off."
"I think you were aiming at the thing."
"I was aiming at the thing. I'd have taken your head off if you'd been in the way." She wiped her blade on the ground. Her hand was trembling slightly. "But it worked."
"It did."
He was staring at her. He was pale, and there were petals in his hair, and the look on his face was something between exhaustion and amazement. She realised, with a jolt, that she was looking at him the same way. They had fought together. Badly, graceless, tangled in each other's reach, and it had worked. She had felt his presence at her shoulder like a second pair of lungs.
She looked away first.
* * *
They sat at the edge of the wood, in the dark, by a small fire she had lit with a stern and professional air, and she made him tell her everything.
He did. She watched him do it. He held his hands tightly together between his knees and spoke in a low even voice, and he told her what the talisman was, a soul-drinking script, banned by every sane teacher of the martial world. He told her that the Cold Spring Hall had existed three centuries ago and that it had been destroyed and that it had apparently, God help them, not been destroyed enough. He told her what a refining cauldron was, and what a bound spirit could be made to do, and why a blade that held a thinking soul would be worth more to such people than a hundred ordinary swords. He told her the signs by which she might recognise one of the Hall's disciples. A cold mark behind the ear. A habit of speaking softly. A smile that never reached their eyes.
He did not tell her he was afraid.
She heard it in what he left out. In the way his voice smoothed itself at certain edges, the careful blankness he laid over the word spirit, the shortness of his breath when he said cauldron. He was telling her the facts, in order, like a man laying out evidence. But there was a trembling beneath the facts, and he held it down with both hands.
She did not push. She had never been good at comfort. But she had been, once, a frightened child at a sect gate, and she knew the difference between being asked to talk and being allowed to.
"All right," she said, when he was done. "Here's what we're going to do."
He looked up.
"We find out who's behind this. We find out how many of these papers are in the valley, and we burn them. We don't go near the Hall, and we don't go looking for the Hall, until we know more. And we do it together." She heard herself say the last word and did not take it back. "Temporary. Until the blossoms fall. I'm not asking you to like it."
"I like it very much."
"I'm not asking you to like me."
"That," said Zheyu, with a sudden breath that was almost a laugh, "is a separate matter."
She could not tell whether he was joking. She decided it was safer to assume he was.
"One more rule," she said. "No personal questions. Nothing about before. Nothing about after. We work together and we sleep on opposite sides of a screen and we do not discuss what we are or what we want. Agreed?"
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire popped. A spark rose and went out among the branches.
"Agreed," he said at last. But there was something in the way he said it, a small, rueful tilt, that told her he knew it for the lie it was. "Allies."
"Allies."
"Not friends."
"God, no."
He smiled, then. It was a slow, quiet, private smile, and it lit his whole face like a lamp behind paper. Qinghe found, to her annoyance, that she could not hold her stern expression against it. She turned and busied herself with the fire.
* * *
It was later, much later, when he had gone to lie down at the edge of the firelight and she was supposed to be keeping the first watch, that she noticed her wrist.
She had been sitting with her sword across her knees and her right hand resting on the guard, idly, the way she always did. She went to flex her fingers, and a cold went through her.
It was a very small cold. It did not hurt. It was not even unpleasant. It lay just above the bone of her right wrist, a thin circle of chill, as though someone had slipped an icy bracelet over her hand and then, a heartbeat later, taken it away. She felt it once, clearly. Then it was gone, and the skin was warm again, and she was staring at her own hand in the firelight with her heart suddenly loud in her ears.
She turned the wrist over. Nothing. No mark, no bruise. Only the faint blue tracery of veins beneath the skin, and the ordinary pulse.
The fight, she told herself. Fatigue. Strain. The creature's grip.
She flexed the fingers again, one by one. They moved easily.
She did not look at the man sleeping on the other side of the fire. She did not tell herself why. She only drew her sleeve down over her wrist, firmly, as if closing a door, and fixed her eyes on the dark between the trees, and kept her watch.
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