The rules multiplied the way weeds do, quietly and in every direction.

By the second week at the Willow and Wind, Zheyu had counted fourteen of them. Not all had been spoken. A few had been written, in Qinghe's cramped, impatient hand, on a scrap of paper pinned above the washstand, and he had read it so often that he knew it by heart. One. Whoever wakes first lights the fire. Two. No one pays for the other without saying so. Three. The left bed is mine. Four. If I say stay, you stay. Five. If I say run, you do not ask why. There was a sixth that read only Don't be clever, and a seventh, crossed out, that he had never managed to decipher.

Others lived in the air between them. She did not like to be touched while she ate. She did not like the lamp left burning. She never answered questions before her first cup of tea, and a man who tried would receive a look that could curdle milk. She sat with her back to a wall in any room that had more than one door. She always counted the exits.

He learned these things as he had once learned the grain of a new steel, by touch, by patience, by being gently corrected. He found that he liked the learning. He liked being given a shape to fit into, even a narrow one, because a narrow shape meant that someone had thought about where he would stand.

Fifteen, he thought, on the morning it happened. I shall add a fifteenth. I shall not tell her.

* * *

The draught came from under the door.

He noticed it on the third night, in the small hours, lying awake behind the heron screen. The Willow and Wind was an old house, and old houses breathe. Somewhere a gap in the planking opened onto the canal, and when the river wind rose, a thin cold thread of air slid across the floor in a long invisible ribbon. It passed under his bed, and curled around the foot of the screen, and found the left bed, where Qinghe slept.

He heard her draw her blanket higher. Heard the small, irritable shift of a sleeper who is cold and does not wish to admit it.

By the fifth night, he had worked out the route of the wind. By the seventh, he had measured the gap with his hand in the dark.

On the eighth, while she was out in the yard at her sword forms, he moved his bed.

It was heavier than it looked. A frame of black ironwood, a thin mattress, a pile of folded quilts. He shouldered it across the floorboards a hand's breadth at a time, wincing at every scrape, and set it down with its head against the door. The gap was beneath his feet now, a long cold seam, and when he lay down to test it the draught blew straight up the leg of his trousers and made him gasp. But the wind went no further. The screen caught the dregs of it. The left bed, on the far side of the room, stood in a pocket of still, warm air.

He straightened the quilt. He pushed a rolled cloth into the worst of the gap. He looked at the result, and a strange small contentment settled in him, quiet as a cat.

It was nothing. A bed, moved. She would never notice.

* * *

She noticed on the first night.

He lay in the dark with his arms folded behind his head and his eyes on the ceiling, and heard her come in from the yard, shut the door, and stop. The pause was very brief. Her footsteps crossed the room and halted at the edge of the screen.

"You moved your bed," she said.

"The light is better here," said Zheyu, to the ceiling.

"There's no light."

"I find it so."

"That's by the door."

"The door is a very pleasant door."

There was another silence. He kept his eyes on the ceiling. He could feel her standing there, on the other side of the painted herons, a small compact weight at the edge of his attention, and he felt her anger gather like weather. It had a texture. A kind of tightening in the air.

"You're sleeping in the draught," she said.

"I like draughts."

"You're a liar."

"I have been told so."

"I didn't ask you to do that. I didn't ask you to do anything." Her voice was low and even, and that was how he knew it was bad. "Put it back."

"Qinghe."

"Put it back, Zheyu."

"If I may say one thing," he said, and heard how mild he sounded, and could not seem to stop. "It is a small matter. It costs me nothing. I do not feel the cold as you do. It is only a bed."

"That's not the point."

"What is the point?"

She did not answer.

He lay still. After a moment he heard her turn and walk to her own bed, and the creak of the frame as she sat down. The lamp, which she had not lit, remained unlit. Neither of them spoke. A boat knocked softly against the quay outside. The draught slid under his door and crept up his ankles, bitterly cold.

He was a fool, he decided. He had broken a rule she had never written. Do not take care of me without being asked. It was not on the list. But it had been there all along, in the way she moved through a room, in the carefulness with which she repaid every kindness, in the heap of coins she left on the table every morning without comment, always a little more than their share.

She does not know how to be given things, he thought. She does not know where to put them.

He should have understood. In three hundred years he had learned a great deal about people who could not accept a gift. He had been one himself, once, though he could no longer recall the reason.

"I will move it back in the morning," he said at last.

"Fine."

"I am sorry."

"Don't be." She gave a short, tired breath. "You didn't do anything wrong. I just," she stopped. "Go to sleep."

He did not move the bed back in the morning. She did not mention it. Neither of them said a word about it for the rest of the week, and every night he slept with his feet to the cold, and every night, in the dark, he heard her breathing grow slow and even on the far side of the screen.

She did not once ask him to move it again.

* * *

The yaoguai job came on the ninth day.

It was a small matter, by her standards. A village called Pinecrest, an hour's walk from Liuyin along the river, where a pair of fanged hares the size of dogs had been stealing chickens and, on one memorable evening, a cow. The headman had sent a boy to the inn with a purse and a string of promises. Qinghe took the purse, counted it, and tucked it into her sleeve with the air of a woman who had found very little to complain about.

"Fanged hares," Zheyu said as they walked. "I have not heard of those."

"They're new. A kind of mutation. Something in the water, the old woman at the ferry said." She did not look back at him. "They go for the throat. They're fast, but they're stupid. You flush them out, you wait for the lunge, you take the head."

"And what shall I do?"

"Stand where I tell you."

"And where is that?"

She stopped. They had reached the edge of a field, a flat stubbled place with a stand of poplars at its far side, and she turned to him with a thoughtful look. He had come to know that look, and to dread it a little. It was the look of a woman rearranging the furniture in his head.

"Behind me," she said.

"Behind."

"A step to the left. Two paces back. Out of my arm's reach. You don't have a weapon, and you can't be killed, but you can be hurt, and I'm not carrying a man with a broken leg." Her brows drew together. "When the hares come, you do not step in front of me. You do not push me aside. You do not throw yourself at a thing that's about to bite me. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly clear."

"I mean it."

"I have not argued."

"You're about to." Her gaze narrowed. "You've got the face."

"I have no face."

"You have the face of a man who would happily get himself eaten to save someone else the trouble."

He opened his mouth, and found that he could not honestly deny it. He closed it again.

"Behind and to the left," said Zheyu. "Two paces."

"Good."

"May I at least hold your pack?"

She stared at him. Then, with an ill grace that did not conceal a certain flustered something in her cheeks, she shrugged out of the pack and shoved it into his arms. "Don't drop it."

He did not drop it. He held it carefully against his chest, an absurdly pleasing weight, and followed her into the field.

* * *

The hares came out of the poplars at dusk, in a sudden low rush of grey fur and yellow teeth.

There were three, not two. He saw the third a half-heartbeat after Qinghe did, and he felt her body register it, a slight shift in the line of her shoulders. She did not call out. She stepped into the first lunge and took it at the neck with a flat clean cut, and the second came in under her guard, and she pivoted and put her blade through it as if she were threading a needle.

The third was the one that mattered.

It circled wide. It came around the edge of the fight low and silent, and Zheyu watched it with a cold prickle at the back of his neck as it gathered itself on its haunches, eyes fixed on the unprotected curve of her back. She had not seen it. She was occupied with the second. He had perhaps two seconds.

Everything in him wanted to move. Wanted to step in front, to throw out an arm, to put his body between that jaw and her. It was a reflex as old as breath. He had done it a hundred times in a hundred lives, and it had never once occurred to him that it might be wrong.

Behind me. Out of reach. You do not step in front.

He did not step in front. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He stayed rooted, with her pack crushed to his chest, and he lifted his chin and said, clearly and sharply, "Qinghe. Right. Low."

She moved at once.

She did not turn. She dropped, and rolled, and came up on her right knee with the blade swinging, and the hare, mid-leap, met the edge of it in the air. It landed in the stubble with a heavy thud and did not rise.

Silence. The poplars rustled. Somewhere a bird, startled, began to call.

Qinghe got to her feet. She wiped the blade on the grass. Her chest was rising and falling, and she stood with her back to him for a moment, her head slightly bowed, and said, in a voice he could not read, "You warned me."

"Yes."

"You didn't step in."

"No." He found that his hands were not quite steady. "You told me not to."

"I did." She turned. In the fading light her face looked stern, but her eyes had changed. They had a startled, wary brightness, like a bird that had been offered a crumb and was not sure yet that it was safe. "That was the right call."

"I am glad it pleased you."

"It didn't please me. It was correct." She huffed, and shoved her blade into its scabbard with unnecessary force. "Don't look so smug."

"I am not smug. I am relieved. I thought for a moment I was going to be sick."

She stared at him. And then, very suddenly, she laughed.

It was not a large laugh. It was a short rough bark, quickly smothered behind her hand. But it was real, and it startled them both. She stood in the darkening field with her palm pressed over her mouth and her shoulders shaking, and he stood there too, absurdly, with her pack in his arms and his face burning, and neither of them could look at the other.

He thought: I would do almost anything to hear that again.

He did not say it.

* * *

They walked back to Liuyin in the dark, with the dead hares slung on a pole between them, and it was somewhere along the river road, in the warm smell of mud and spring grass, that the quarrel began.

It started with the villagers. The headman had paid them, and then, in a flood of gratitude, had pressed on them a basket of eggs and a jar of pickled turnips and a bolt of coarse blue cloth. Qinghe had tried to refuse. Zheyu, who was holding the basket, had said gently, "It would shame him not to," and she had flushed, and said nothing, and let him carry it.

Then there had been the matter of the ford. A stretch of the road ran through water up to the knees, and he had gone ahead without being asked and tested the stones, and then offered his arm. She had ignored the arm. She had crossed on her own and not looked at him.

Then she had stumbled on the far bank. It was nothing. A loose pebble, a turned ankle, a hiss of breath. He had been at her side before he knew he had moved, his hand under her elbow.

"I'm fine," she said sharply.

"I did not say you were not."

"Then let go."

He let go. She walked on, stiff and straight, favouring the left foot by a hair, and he fell back a step and said nothing.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, after a while.

"No."

"You are limping."

"I'm not limping."

"A little."

"Zheyu." She rounded on him. The moon had risen behind the poplars, and her face was pale and set. "Stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Stop asking. Stop fussing. I said I was fine. I don't need you to hold my elbow, or carry my pack, or move your bed to keep the wind off me like I'm a, a," she waved a hand, "a child. I'm not made of glass."

"I never thought you were."

"Then why do you keep doing it?"

He looked at her. Her fists were clenched at her sides, and a muscle jumped in her jaw, and he saw suddenly how much it cost her to stand there and say it. How much she wanted to say something else.

"Because," he said slowly, "it is the only thing I know how to do."

"What?"

"To look after someone. I know nothing else. It is how I was made." He spread his hands. "I do not mean it as a slight. I only mean that it is what I am for."

"That's not what you're for."

"Is it not?"

"No." She said it too quickly, too harshly. Then she drew a breath and said it again, more quietly. "No. And you can't keep saying it's fine and I do not mind and it costs me nothing. You do it every time. Every single time. I say jump and you say how high, I say sleep in a draught and you say what a pleasant draught. Don't you ever want anything?"

The question struck him oddly, like a stone dropped into a very deep well.

"I," he said.

"Don't always give in, Zheyu." Her voice cracked on his name. "Don't lie down and let people walk over you and call it kindness. Say no. Say you want something. Say you're cold, say you're angry, say anything. I can't," she stopped. "I can't tell what you're feeling when all you do is smile and say it's all right."

He stood very still.

It was a strange thing to be known. It was like being struck in the chest by a hand that did not mean to hurt. He had not been asked that question in three hundred years, and he found that he did not have an answer. Only a vast, soundless pressure behind his ribs, an ache without a name.

"And you," he said at last, quietly, "do not ever stop bracing."

She went rigid.

"You carry everything alone. You do not rest. You hold your hands in your sleeves so that no one can see them tremble. You pay for every kindness twice over so that you will never be in debt." He did not raise his voice. "You tell me not to hide, and you are the most hidden person I have ever met. Do you ever put it down, Qinghe? The weight? Do you ever once let it fall?"

Her mouth opened. Closed.

"You do not have to clench so hard," he said. "I will not think less of you if you loosen your hand."

"That's," she began, and her voice failed.

"I know."

"That's different."

"Is it?"

She did not answer. The silence stretched between them, long and strained, and the river whispered against its banks, and a nightjar called from the trees. A small cold wind rose and stirred the pole on his shoulder, so that the dead hares swung gently, and neither of them noticed.

He saw her swallow.

He saw her look away, and then, slowly, back. There was something in her face he had not seen there before, an unguarded flicker, a look of startled recognition, as if she had caught sight of her own reflection in an unexpected mirror.

And he understood, in the same instant, that he was looking at himself.

She is the one who gives too little, he thought, dazed. And I am the one who gives too much. And we are both doing the same thing. We are both afraid of being a weight.

She seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion. She stood with her arms hanging, her lips parted. The anger had gone out of her all at once and left something raw behind.

"Well," Qinghe said, very quietly. "That's annoying."

A small helpless laugh escaped him. "Yes."

"I don't like it."

"No."

"Don't say anything else."

"I will not."

She turned and started walking. After a moment he followed. They went on together beneath the moon with the road pale in front of them and a long silence at their backs, and neither of them spoke until the lights of Liuyin appeared through the willows.

* * *

He did not sleep that night either.

He lay in the draught by the door, and he thought about the way she had said his name. He thought about the white shape of her hands. He thought about a great many things, in no particular order, and the thoughts were small and bright and sharp-edged, like flakes of mica in a stream.

He had noticed that she pressed her thumb against her left forefinger when she was nervous. He had noticed that she hummed, under her breath, while she cleaned her sword, an old plain tune with no words. He had noticed that she took her tea with one lump of rock sugar and pretended she did not.

And he had noticed, tonight, that she had stopped sleeping facing the wall.

She lay on her back now, he thought. Turned a little toward the screen. As if, in her sleep, some small part of her had started to listen for him.

On the other side of the herons, in the dark, Qinghe was awake as well. He could hear it. She breathed too evenly. After a long while he heard the whisper of a blanket, and her voice, so low that he almost missed it.

"The tea," she said. "In the morning. I'll make it. You've been making it wrong."

He lay very still. His chest was aching in the strangest way.

"How do you take it?" he said.

A long pause.

"One lump," said Qinghe, after a moment. "Of rock sugar. Don't tell Mei."

"I will not tell anyone."

"Good."

Silence again. Gentle, this time. Almost kind.

He smiled at the ceiling, and he did not move his bed.