Lizard Pass earned its name honestly.
It was a long grey throat of rock that wound for nearly three miles between two ridges, narrow in some places and wider in others, with the old trade road threading through it like a stitch. In the days of Master Ye's youth, he had once told her, caravans had come through here in their hundreds, salt from the coast, silk from the south, and the pass had hummed with bells and mule-calls from dawn until dusk. Now it was silent. The wind went through it in a single long note. And the stones, in the afternoon sun, had an odd warmth to them, an oily sheen, as of something that had recently lain there and moved on.
"Mountain lizards," said Qinghe, crouching by a scatter of scales at the roadside. They were the size of her palm, thick and dull brown, ridged along the centre. "Big ones."
"How big?" said Zheyu.
"The guild says the largest are twelve feet long."
"And it has been eating the caravans?"
"It's been eating the mules. Which comes to the same thing, if you're a merchant." She stood and dusted off her hands. "Mei's cousin runs a salt train. They've been stuck at the eastern end for six days. The guild's offering sixty silver to anyone who clears the road."
"That is a great deal."
"It's a great deal because nobody's come back." She shaded her eyes and looked up at the ridges, the high broken ledges where the rock overhung the road. "There's a wide place in the middle. A bowl, they say. That's where the lair is. We go in at noon, when they're sluggish, and we draw it out onto open ground where I can reach it."
"We."
"I'll go. You'll come, because you have to." She turned and gave him a look that was only mostly severe. "Behind me. Left. Two paces."
"I remember."
"Good."
He fell in at her left shoulder, two paces back, and she felt the thread settle with a faint tug of familiarity. It had been nine days since the boar at Greywater. Nine days since he had put his hand on her side and the world had gone gold. He had not touched her again, not once, and she had noticed that she was noticing.
She was tired of it. She was tired of noticing. She kept her eyes on the road.
* * *
The wide place was a bowl of white stone about the size of a village square, ringed by cliffs that rose on all sides to a height of forty feet. A thin trickle of water ran along the far wall, feeding a clump of thorny scrub. At the centre, half buried in a drift of old bones, lay a long, low, humped shape the colour of wet clay.
Qinghe went flat against the nearest boulder. Zheyu crouched beside her.
"That," she breathed, "is not twelve feet."
"No," he agreed faintly.
It was nearer twenty. She counted the length of it twice, to be sure. The beast lay curled in on itself like a cat in the sun, a great ridged coil of muscle and scale with a head the size of a wine barrel resting on its forelegs. Its eyes were closed. Its flanks rose and fell slowly. Every few breaths a thin flicker of tongue slid out and tasted the air.
Around it, in a loose ring, lay at least a dozen smaller shapes.
"Young ones," she muttered. "Damn it. It's a nest."
"Then the plan will not work."
"The plan will work. I just need to adjust it."
"Qinghe." His voice was very quiet, and so level that she turned to look at him. He was watching the great lizard with his head tilted, and a faint line had appeared between his brows. "If you wish to draw it out onto open ground, why not use the ledge?"
"What ledge?"
He pointed. High on the eastern wall, above the water, a narrow shelf of rock ran the length of the cliff. It was no more than three feet wide. It ended, abruptly, in a gap, a cleft in the stone about eight feet across where the cliff had split long ago, leaving a sheer drop on either side.
"If you were to stand on the near side," said Zheyu, "and the lizard were to follow you onto the shelf, it could not turn. It is too narrow. And it could not cross the gap. A beast of that weight would not risk the jump."
"And I'd be trapped on the wrong side of it."
"Only if you stayed there."
"I don't see how I get across."
He did not answer at once. He seemed to be choosing his words with great care. "I could help you. If you trusted me."
She stared at him. "I'm not following."
"The gap is eight feet. I do not think you could leap it without a running start. But I could," he hesitated, and a faint, wary colour rose in his face, "I could give you a footing. A lift. If you stepped into my hands at the edge, I could throw you across."
"You'd throw me."
"With care."
"That's insane."
"It is a little insane."
"The beast would be right behind me."
"It would be a pace behind you. It would be at the lip of the gap with its jaws wide, and you would be on the far side with your blade drawn. Facing it. With the whole width of the cleft between you and the nest." His eyes were on hers now, grave and steady. "You would have the high ground and the first strike. And you would not need to run."
She opened her mouth to say no.
It was an old reflex. No. A bad plan. A reckless plan. She had spent eight years being the one who made the plans, who weighed the risks, who stood at the edge of every drop and counted the cost of every step. She did not hand her weight to others. She did not stand on a ledge in front of a twenty-foot lizard and trust a man who had known how to light a fire for three weeks.
"We do it my way," she said.
"As you wish."
"I'll lure it out. I'll fight it on the flat. I've killed bigger."
"Have you?"
She paused.
"No," she admitted, after a moment, in a smaller voice. "No, I haven't."
He said nothing. He only waited, with his hands loosely folded in his sleeves, looking at her with that terrible mild patience that made her want to throw something.
She looked again at the ledge. At the gap. At the sleeping nest, and the long dull sweep of the beast's tail, and the rubble of old bones. She did the count, as she always did. How many steps. How many seconds. How many places the plan could fail.
The ledge plan had fewer.
"Damn it," said Qinghe softly. "Damn it, damn it. All right."
"All right?"
"All right. We use the ledge." She did not look at him. "But if you drop me, I will haunt you."
"I have been haunted," said Zheyu, with a faint smile. "It is very tedious. I will not drop you."
* * *
It went wrong at once.
She climbed the eastern wall by a gully of broken stone, with the thread tugging at her like a leash, until she stood on the lip of the shelf with the whole white bowl spread out beneath her. She took a slingstone from her belt, weighed it in her hand, and flung it straight down at the head of the sleeping lizard.
It struck just behind the eye with a hollow crack.
Nothing happened for a heartbeat. Then the great head lifted. The eyes opened, yellow and slit-pupilled, as large as dinner plates. A sound came out of the beast, a low rattling hiss that she felt in her breastbone and in the soles of her feet, and the whole coil of its body began to unwind.
It was far larger than it had looked. When it rose onto its forelegs, its head reached the height of the shelf's lower edge. When it opened its jaws, the inside of its mouth was a pale, glistening pink, and she counted three rows of teeth.
Move, she thought. Now.
She ran.
The shelf was narrower than she had judged. Loose gravel skittered under her boots. The cliff pressed against her left shoulder and the drop yawned on her right, and she heard behind her the scrabble and drag of claws on stone as the lizard heaved itself up after her. Its breath was hot. It smelled of carrion and dung and old copper. She did not look back. She ran with her head down and her sword in her hand and her heart hammering a great mad drum.
The gap opened ahead of her.
Eight feet. It looked wider. It looked like the end of the world, a ragged black slot in the grey with nothing at the bottom but a faint cold breath of air. And on the near edge, planted squarely in her path with his feet apart and his hands cupped low in front of him, stood Lan Zheyu.
He had climbed up behind her. She had not heard him. He was breathing hard, and there was dust on his white robes and a bright terrible steadiness in his face. His eyes met hers.
Trust me.
It was not said. It did not need to be.
She did not slow. She had one half-second to decide, and she knew, even as she made it, that it was the most reckless thing she had ever done. She put her left foot into his cupped palms, and she felt the great warm strength of his arms take her weight.
"Now," said Zheyu.
He threw.
There was no other word for it. He heaved her up and out with the whole of his body, in one clean, smooth, impossible arc, and she flew. For a moment there was nothing. The air rushed past her face. The world tilted, sky and stone and distance and the dizzy black gulf below. She saw the far ledge come up and she saw her own boots stretched toward it and she tucked and rolled in mid-air and the rock struck her shoulder, hard, and she skidded, and came up on one knee with her blade swinging.
The lizard hit the edge of the gap with a roar.
It had been a pace behind her, as he had said. Its jaws were wide. Its claws raked the rock at the cleft's lip, and its great head swung out over the void, and for an instant it hung there, snapping, the whole forty-foot length of its neck stretched across the gap. Its eyes were on her. It could not reach. It could not turn.
She struck.
She did not think. The old drill took over, a thousand mornings in a cold courtyard with the dew on the stones. She drove up from her knee on the line of Rising Cloud, with her whole weight behind it, and the blade took the great beast in the soft hollow beneath the jaw, between the first scale and the second, and went in to the guard.
The scream was enormous. It echoed up and down the pass in a cascade of cracked bronze. The head jerked back, and blood fountained, hot and dark and stinking, and the lizard twisted on the lip of the shelf and lost its footing.
It fell.
It fell the whole forty feet, in a sprawling, thrashing crash, and landed on the white stone of the bowl with a sound like a house coming down. It gave one long shudder. Then it was still.
Qinghe stayed where she was, on one knee, with her sword in her hand and the blood running down her arm. She was gasping. Her shoulder was on fire. Across the gap, eight feet of empty air away, Zheyu stood at the edge of the shelf with his hands still half raised, and his face was white as paper, and he was laughing.
She had never heard him laugh like that. It was a bright, shaken, disbelieving sound, a sound with no care in it at all. He had put a hand over his mouth and he was shaking his head, and above his fingers his eyes were shining.
"You caught it," he said. "You caught it."
"I did," she said, and she was laughing too.
* * *
He did not stop looking at her.
She knew it as soon as she had climbed down and crossed the bowl. It was not the way he usually looked at her, with that quiet fixed attention, as if she were a puzzle he was fond of. It was something wider, and warmer, and a good deal less guarded. He walked beside her through the carnage with his hands at his sides and his face slightly turned, and every time she glanced at him he was already looking.
"What?" she said at last.
"Nothing."
"You're staring."
"I am not staring." A pause. "I am, perhaps, a little overwhelmed."
"By what?"
"By you." He said it with no embarrassment. He seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that there was anything to be embarrassed about. "I have watched swordsmen for three hundred years, Qinghe. I watched them from the hilt. From the inside of the blade, on the very edge of the stroke. And I have never," he faltered, and began again. "I have never seen a thing so beautiful as that. When you came off the ledge. When you turned in the air."
She did not know what to say. A hot flush climbed the back of her neck. She looked down at the sword in her hand, which was streaked with black blood, and she said gruffly, "It was your throw."
"It was your landing."
"You threw me."
"And you trusted that I would."
The words hung in the air.
She had not thought about it. That was the strange thing. She had stood at the lip of that cleft with a twenty-foot lizard on her heels, and she had not thought about it at all. She had put her foot in his hands, and she had known, with the same bone-deep certainty with which she knew her own name, that he would not let her fall.
She did not know when that had happened. She did not know how.
She sheathed her sword. It took a long time. Her hands were shaking again, but this time it was not from weakness.
"Don't," she said, "make a big thing of it."
"I would not dream of it."
"It was a good plan. That's all."
"It was a very good plan."
"Stop smiling."
"I cannot," said Zheyu, honestly. "I am so happy that I do not know what to do with my face."
She laughed. She could not help it. It burst out of her, warm and helpless, and she put her hand over her mouth, and he laughed with her, and for a moment they stood in the middle of a field of bones and dead lizards, in the red light of the late afternoon, laughing like fools.
When it faded, she realised she was standing very close to him.
She could not have said when it had happened. The gap between them had simply closed, a pace and then another, until she could feel the heat of his body at her shoulder and smell the faint clean scent of him, peach blossom and woodsmoke and warm cloth. He was breathing hard. So was she. His face was a hand's breadth from her own, and she could see the dark flecks in his eyes, and the sweat gleaming at his temple, and a tiny pale scar through his left eyebrow that she had never noticed before.
Neither of them moved.
She ought to step back. She knew that. Two paces, three. It was nothing. She had stepped back from men a hundred times, in a hundred rooms, with a cool glance and a small turn of the shoulder. It was the easiest thing in the world.
She did not step back.
The wind went down the pass in its long thin note. A fleck of lizard blood slid from her sleeve and dropped to the stone. His eyes dropped to her mouth, and rose again, very fast, as if he had been burned. His throat moved.
"Qinghe," he said. It was hardly a sound.
"What?"
He did not answer. He seemed not to know. They stood there, in the bone-white hush, on the edge of something neither of them could name, and she thought with a strange, light dizziness: I do not want to move.
And then a pebble clattered somewhere above them, and the spell broke.
* * *
She went to the lizard first. She could not have said why. It was easier than looking at him.
It lay on its side in a pool of darkening blood, its great ridged flank rising no more, one yellow eye already filming over. The smaller ones had scattered at the death-cry. She walked around the body with her blade half drawn, checking for movement, and found nothing, until she came to the throat.
She stopped.
There was a mark on the hide.
She would never have seen it if the beast had been alive. It was low on the neck, in the thick fold of skin beneath the jaw, where the scales were small and pale. A small round brand, about the size of a coin, the edges raised and puckered as if it had been burned in with a hot iron. And in the middle of the brand, in thin hooked strokes that curved at the ends like fish-claws, was a character.
"Zheyu," she said.
He came at once. She heard the change in his step. When he reached her side he looked at the mark, and she heard his breath leave him in a thin uneven hiss.
"It has been marked," he said.
"By who?"
"By one of them." His voice was very quiet. He crouched down and held his hand a little way above the brand, not touching it, as if it were hot. "A scout's seal. They brand a beast to follow it. To learn where it hunts, and where it sleeps, and who comes to kill it. They want," he swallowed, "they want to see who clears the road."
The wind seemed to have dropped. All around them, the white stones lay silent in the red light, and the cliffs rose tall and blind.
"The hooked strokes," said Qinghe. "I've seen that."
"Yes."
"On the talisman. In the forest."
"Yes." He looked up. His face was grey. "It is the same hand. The same cut. Qinghe, they are not only hiding in the valley. They are watching the roads."
She stood up slowly. She looked at the ridges above her, the high broken ledges, the black cracks in the rock where a man might sit all day without moving. Nothing stirred. A hawk wheeled, far up, in the empty gold sky.
And she thought, with a slow cold prickle between her shoulder blades: They saw the throw.
She did not say it. She did not need to. She saw in his face that he had thought the same. They stood in the dying light with the dead lizard between them, and neither of them spoke, and in the silence, very faintly, she felt the thread draw tight, and tighter, as he moved a step closer to her.
Not for comfort, she thought. Not for her.
For the only thing in the world that he was afraid of losing.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Lizard Pass earned its name honestly.
It was a long grey throat of rock that wound for nearly three miles between two ridges, narrow in some places and wider in others, with the old trade road threading through it like a stitch. In the days of Master Ye's youth, he had once told her, caravans had come through here in their hundreds, salt from the coast, silk from the south, and the pass had hummed with bells and mule-calls from dawn until dusk. Now it was silent. The wind went through it in a single long note. And the stones, in the afternoon sun, had an odd warmth to them, an oily sheen, as of something that had recently lain there and moved on.
"Mountain lizards," said Qinghe, crouching by a scatter of scales at the roadside. They were the size of her palm, thick and dull brown, ridged along the centre. "Big ones."
"How big?" said Zheyu.
"The guild says the largest are twelve feet long."
"And it has been eating the caravans?"
"It's been eating the mules. Which comes to the same thing, if you're a merchant." She stood and dusted off her hands. "Mei's cousin runs a salt train. They've been stuck at the eastern end for six days. The guild's offering sixty silver to anyone who clears the road."
"That is a great deal."
"It's a great deal because nobody's come back." She shaded her eyes and looked up at the ridges, the high broken ledges where the rock overhung the road. "There's a wide place in the middle. A bowl, they say. That's where the lair is. We go in at noon, when they're sluggish, and we draw it out onto open ground where I can reach it."
"We."
"I'll go. You'll come, because you have to." She turned and gave him a look that was only mostly severe. "Behind me. Left. Two paces."
"I remember."
"Good."
He fell in at her left shoulder, two paces back, and she felt the thread settle with a faint tug of familiarity. It had been nine days since the boar at Greywater. Nine days since he had put his hand on her side and the world had gone gold. He had not touched her again, not once, and she had noticed that she was noticing.
She was tired of it. She was tired of noticing. She kept her eyes on the road.
* * *
The wide place was a bowl of white stone about the size of a village square, ringed by cliffs that rose on all sides to a height of forty feet. A thin trickle of water ran along the far wall, feeding a clump of thorny scrub. At the centre, half buried in a drift of old bones, lay a long, low, humped shape the colour of wet clay.
Qinghe went flat against the nearest boulder. Zheyu crouched beside her.
"That," she breathed, "is not twelve feet."
"No," he agreed faintly.
It was nearer twenty. She counted the length of it twice, to be sure. The beast lay curled in on itself like a cat in the sun, a great ridged coil of muscle and scale with a head the size of a wine barrel resting on its forelegs. Its eyes were closed. Its flanks rose and fell slowly. Every few breaths a thin flicker of tongue slid out and tasted the air.
Around it, in a loose ring, lay at least a dozen smaller shapes.
"Young ones," she muttered. "Damn it. It's a nest."
"Then the plan will not work."
"The plan will work. I just need to adjust it."
"Qinghe." His voice was very quiet, and so level that she turned to look at him. He was watching the great lizard with his head tilted, and a faint line had appeared between his brows. "If you wish to draw it out onto open ground, why not use the ledge?"
"What ledge?"
He pointed. High on the eastern wall, above the water, a narrow shelf of rock ran the length of the cliff. It was no more than three feet wide. It ended, abruptly, in a gap, a cleft in the stone about eight feet across where the cliff had split long ago, leaving a sheer drop on either side.
"If you were to stand on the near side," said Zheyu, "and the lizard were to follow you onto the shelf, it could not turn. It is too narrow. And it could not cross the gap. A beast of that weight would not risk the jump."
"And I'd be trapped on the wrong side of it."
"Only if you stayed there."
"I don't see how I get across."
He did not answer at once. He seemed to be choosing his words with great care. "I could help you. If you trusted me."
She stared at him. "I'm not following."
"The gap is eight feet. I do not think you could leap it without a running start. But I could," he hesitated, and a faint, wary colour rose in his face, "I could give you a footing. A lift. If you stepped into my hands at the edge, I could throw you across."
"You'd throw me."
"With care."
"That's insane."
"It is a little insane."
"The beast would be right behind me."
"It would be a pace behind you. It would be at the lip of the gap with its jaws wide, and you would be on the far side with your blade drawn. Facing it. With the whole width of the cleft between you and the nest." His eyes were on hers now, grave and steady. "You would have the high ground and the first strike. And you would not need to run."
She opened her mouth to say no.
It was an old reflex. No. A bad plan. A reckless plan. She had spent eight years being the one who made the plans, who weighed the risks, who stood at the edge of every drop and counted the cost of every step. She did not hand her weight to others. She did not stand on a ledge in front of a twenty-foot lizard and trust a man who had known how to light a fire for three weeks.
"We do it my way," she said.
"As you wish."
"I'll lure it out. I'll fight it on the flat. I've killed bigger."
"Have you?"
She paused.
"No," she admitted, after a moment, in a smaller voice. "No, I haven't."
He said nothing. He only waited, with his hands loosely folded in his sleeves, looking at her with that terrible mild patience that made her want to throw something.
She looked again at the ledge. At the gap. At the sleeping nest, and the long dull sweep of the beast's tail, and the rubble of old bones. She did the count, as she always did. How many steps. How many seconds. How many places the plan could fail.
The ledge plan had fewer.
"Damn it," said Qinghe softly. "Damn it, damn it. All right."
"All right?"
"All right. We use the ledge." She did not look at him. "But if you drop me, I will haunt you."
"I have been haunted," said Zheyu, with a faint smile. "It is very tedious. I will not drop you."
* * *
It went wrong at once.
She climbed the eastern wall by a gully of broken stone, with the thread tugging at her like a leash, until she stood on the lip of the shelf with the whole white bowl spread out beneath her. She took a slingstone from her belt, weighed it in her hand, and flung it straight down at the head of the sleeping lizard.
It struck just behind the eye with a hollow crack.
Nothing happened for a heartbeat. Then the great head lifted. The eyes opened, yellow and slit-pupilled, as large as dinner plates. A sound came out of the beast, a low rattling hiss that she felt in her breastbone and in the soles of her feet, and the whole coil of its body began to unwind.
It was far larger than it had looked. When it rose onto its forelegs, its head reached the height of the shelf's lower edge. When it opened its jaws, the inside of its mouth was a pale, glistening pink, and she counted three rows of teeth.
Move, she thought. Now.
She ran.
The shelf was narrower than she had judged. Loose gravel skittered under her boots. The cliff pressed against her left shoulder and the drop yawned on her right, and she heard behind her the scrabble and drag of claws on stone as the lizard heaved itself up after her. Its breath was hot. It smelled of carrion and dung and old copper. She did not look back. She ran with her head down and her sword in her hand and her heart hammering a great mad drum.
The gap opened ahead of her.
Eight feet. It looked wider. It looked like the end of the world, a ragged black slot in the grey with nothing at the bottom but a faint cold breath of air. And on the near edge, planted squarely in her path with his feet apart and his hands cupped low in front of him, stood Lan Zheyu.
He had climbed up behind her. She had not heard him. He was breathing hard, and there was dust on his white robes and a bright terrible steadiness in his face. His eyes met hers.
Trust me.
It was not said. It did not need to be.
She did not slow. She had one half-second to decide, and she knew, even as she made it, that it was the most reckless thing she had ever done. She put her left foot into his cupped palms, and she felt the great warm strength of his arms take her weight.
"Now," said Zheyu.
He threw.
There was no other word for it. He heaved her up and out with the whole of his body, in one clean, smooth, impossible arc, and she flew. For a moment there was nothing. The air rushed past her face. The world tilted, sky and stone and distance and the dizzy black gulf below. She saw the far ledge come up and she saw her own boots stretched toward it and she tucked and rolled in mid-air and the rock struck her shoulder, hard, and she skidded, and came up on one knee with her blade swinging.
The lizard hit the edge of the gap with a roar.
It had been a pace behind her, as he had said. Its jaws were wide. Its claws raked the rock at the cleft's lip, and its great head swung out over the void, and for an instant it hung there, snapping, the whole forty-foot length of its neck stretched across the gap. Its eyes were on her. It could not reach. It could not turn.
She struck.
She did not think. The old drill took over, a thousand mornings in a cold courtyard with the dew on the stones. She drove up from her knee on the line of Rising Cloud, with her whole weight behind it, and the blade took the great beast in the soft hollow beneath the jaw, between the first scale and the second, and went in to the guard.
The scream was enormous. It echoed up and down the pass in a cascade of cracked bronze. The head jerked back, and blood fountained, hot and dark and stinking, and the lizard twisted on the lip of the shelf and lost its footing.
It fell.
It fell the whole forty feet, in a sprawling, thrashing crash, and landed on the white stone of the bowl with a sound like a house coming down. It gave one long shudder. Then it was still.
Qinghe stayed where she was, on one knee, with her sword in her hand and the blood running down her arm. She was gasping. Her shoulder was on fire. Across the gap, eight feet of empty air away, Zheyu stood at the edge of the shelf with his hands still half raised, and his face was white as paper, and he was laughing.
She had never heard him laugh like that. It was a bright, shaken, disbelieving sound, a sound with no care in it at all. He had put a hand over his mouth and he was shaking his head, and above his fingers his eyes were shining.
"You caught it," he said. "You caught it."
"I did," she said, and she was laughing too.
* * *
He did not stop looking at her.
She knew it as soon as she had climbed down and crossed the bowl. It was not the way he usually looked at her, with that quiet fixed attention, as if she were a puzzle he was fond of. It was something wider, and warmer, and a good deal less guarded. He walked beside her through the carnage with his hands at his sides and his face slightly turned, and every time she glanced at him he was already looking.
"What?" she said at last.
"Nothing."
"You're staring."
"I am not staring." A pause. "I am, perhaps, a little overwhelmed."
"By what?"
"By you." He said it with no embarrassment. He seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that there was anything to be embarrassed about. "I have watched swordsmen for three hundred years, Qinghe. I watched them from the hilt. From the inside of the blade, on the very edge of the stroke. And I have never," he faltered, and began again. "I have never seen a thing so beautiful as that. When you came off the ledge. When you turned in the air."
She did not know what to say. A hot flush climbed the back of her neck. She looked down at the sword in her hand, which was streaked with black blood, and she said gruffly, "It was your throw."
"It was your landing."
"You threw me."
"And you trusted that I would."
The words hung in the air.
She had not thought about it. That was the strange thing. She had stood at the lip of that cleft with a twenty-foot lizard on her heels, and she had not thought about it at all. She had put her foot in his hands, and she had known, with the same bone-deep certainty with which she knew her own name, that he would not let her fall.
She did not know when that had happened. She did not know how.
She sheathed her sword. It took a long time. Her hands were shaking again, but this time it was not from weakness.
"Don't," she said, "make a big thing of it."
"I would not dream of it."
"It was a good plan. That's all."
"It was a very good plan."
"Stop smiling."
"I cannot," said Zheyu, honestly. "I am so happy that I do not know what to do with my face."
She laughed. She could not help it. It burst out of her, warm and helpless, and she put her hand over her mouth, and he laughed with her, and for a moment they stood in the middle of a field of bones and dead lizards, in the red light of the late afternoon, laughing like fools.
When it faded, she realised she was standing very close to him.
She could not have said when it had happened. The gap between them had simply closed, a pace and then another, until she could feel the heat of his body at her shoulder and smell the faint clean scent of him, peach blossom and woodsmoke and warm cloth. He was breathing hard. So was she. His face was a hand's breadth from her own, and she could see the dark flecks in his eyes, and the sweat gleaming at his temple, and a tiny pale scar through his left eyebrow that she had never noticed before.
Neither of them moved.
She ought to step back. She knew that. Two paces, three. It was nothing. She had stepped back from men a hundred times, in a hundred rooms, with a cool glance and a small turn of the shoulder. It was the easiest thing in the world.
She did not step back.
The wind went down the pass in its long thin note. A fleck of lizard blood slid from her sleeve and dropped to the stone. His eyes dropped to her mouth, and rose again, very fast, as if he had been burned. His throat moved.
"Qinghe," he said. It was hardly a sound.
"What?"
He did not answer. He seemed not to know. They stood there, in the bone-white hush, on the edge of something neither of them could name, and she thought with a strange, light dizziness: I do not want to move.
And then a pebble clattered somewhere above them, and the spell broke.
* * *
She went to the lizard first. She could not have said why. It was easier than looking at him.
It lay on its side in a pool of darkening blood, its great ridged flank rising no more, one yellow eye already filming over. The smaller ones had scattered at the death-cry. She walked around the body with her blade half drawn, checking for movement, and found nothing, until she came to the throat.
She stopped.
There was a mark on the hide.
She would never have seen it if the beast had been alive. It was low on the neck, in the thick fold of skin beneath the jaw, where the scales were small and pale. A small round brand, about the size of a coin, the edges raised and puckered as if it had been burned in with a hot iron. And in the middle of the brand, in thin hooked strokes that curved at the ends like fish-claws, was a character.
"Zheyu," she said.
He came at once. She heard the change in his step. When he reached her side he looked at the mark, and she heard his breath leave him in a thin uneven hiss.
"It has been marked," he said.
"By who?"
"By one of them." His voice was very quiet. He crouched down and held his hand a little way above the brand, not touching it, as if it were hot. "A scout's seal. They brand a beast to follow it. To learn where it hunts, and where it sleeps, and who comes to kill it. They want," he swallowed, "they want to see who clears the road."
The wind seemed to have dropped. All around them, the white stones lay silent in the red light, and the cliffs rose tall and blind.
"The hooked strokes," said Qinghe. "I've seen that."
"Yes."
"On the talisman. In the forest."
"Yes." He looked up. His face was grey. "It is the same hand. The same cut. Qinghe, they are not only hiding in the valley. They are watching the roads."
She stood up slowly. She looked at the ridges above her, the high broken ledges, the black cracks in the rock where a man might sit all day without moving. Nothing stirred. A hawk wheeled, far up, in the empty gold sky.
And she thought, with a slow cold prickle between her shoulder blades: They saw the throw.
She did not say it. She did not need to. She saw in his face that he had thought the same. They stood in the dying light with the dead lizard between them, and neither of them spoke, and in the silence, very faintly, she felt the thread draw tight, and tighter, as he moved a step closer to her.
Not for comfort, she thought. Not for her.
For the only thing in the world that he was afraid of losing.
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