From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Preamble: "The Parties shall be punctual, courteous, and keep a straight face."

The night before the Flower Boat Festival, nobody in Yunxi went to bed.

By six in the evening the whole east dock had turned into a workshop. Boats were hauled up on the stone steps and lashed side by side, long and black and slender, and around them swarmed half the town with ladders and buckets and coils of rope. Children ran back and forth carrying armfuls of cut stems. Old men sat on upturned crates and gave advice. Auntie Zhou had set up a table at the head of the steps and was handing out steamed buns to anyone who stood still long enough, and the air smelled of wet reeds and hot dough and the crushed green sweetness of ten thousand flowers.

Wenxi had been awake since four. She stood on the bottom step with a bundle of white jasmine in one arm and a ball of green twine in her teeth, looking at Fang Dehai's cedar skiff, and thinking that she had never in her life been so tired or so unable to stop smiling.

The hat was on her head. It was, as promised, the size of a tray. Tang Rui had made it from straw and silk, and wound round the brim a garland of tiny pink roses, so that she looked like a very small garden that had learned to walk. She had tried to refuse it. Tang Rui had said, in a voice of ice, that the hat was in the schedule, and that the schedule was law.

"Left a bit," called Zhaoyu, from the quay. "No, your left. The boat's left. Wenxi, you are not a signpost."

"I'm helping!"

"You are standing in the way of the peonies."

She moved. Behind her, a pair of schoolboys staggered past with a pole between them and a banner of pale silk rolling out behind it, and a woman with a mouthful of pins was stitching a ribbon to the prow of the nearest boat, and somewhere up the steps an erhu began, tentatively, to play a tune and was drowned out by a roar of laughter. It was loud and sweet and chaotic, and she felt it in her chest like warm water. She thought: this is what it is to belong to a place. It is to be in the way of the peonies.

Then she turned her head, and saw him.

He was on the far side of the dock, up to his knees in the shallows beside the skiff, working a length of cedar lath into the gunwale. His sleeves were rolled and his hair was damp with the evening heat. He had a nail between his lips and a hammer in his fist, and he was frowning at the joint with the absolute attention of a man who has forgotten the world is there. A shaft of low gold light came across the water and lit the side of his face. She stood and looked at it, with the jasmine in her arm, and forgot what she had been about to do.

I have to tell him, she thought. After the race. Everything. I promised.

The thought came with a quiet steadiness that surprised her. It did not feel like dread any more. It felt like the moment before a cake comes out of the oven, when you know it is done and you only have to open the door.

* * *

The flowers took four hours.

Wenxi had designed arrangements for ballrooms, so she knew exactly how long it should take, and it had taken twice as long because every time she stepped back to judge the whole, three people appeared at her elbow with an opinion. Mei Lanying wanted more yellow. Fang Dehai wanted no yellow at all. A very small girl in a straw hat insisted that a boat without a frog on it was not a boat, and a frog was found, a green glass one from the tea house shelf, and wired to the prow with great ceremony.

By ten o'clock the crowds had thinned. The children had been carried home asleep. The old men had gone back to their stools and their tea. The town's boats stood in a long garlanded row along the quay, each one a heap of blossom and silk, and the moon had come up over the roofs, enormous and low and the colour of butter. Zhaoyu and Tang Rui were at the far end of the dock, carrying a banner between them, and appeared to be having an extremely polite quarrel about the knots. The stars were coming out in force. The water lapped at the steps.

There was one boat left to dress, and it was theirs.

She sat in it, in the middle of the dock, with her sleeves pushed up and a coil of wire in her lap. He was in the stern, on his knees, fixing the last of the arches. They had said nothing for some time. The silence between them had a texture to it, warm and close and slightly dizzy, like the air under a quilt. She wound a stem of jasmine round a hoop and twisted it tight. She felt his eyes on her, and when she glanced up they were not there.

She waited for him to say something.

That was the thing she noticed. She was waiting. She had been waiting for three days, in a quiet, low, unreasoning way, as a person waits at a window for a sound. She did not know what she thought he would say. She only knew that every time he drew breath, her own breath stopped, and that every time he said nothing, there was a small sinking in her chest, like a stair that is not there.

He said, "The prow's too high."

"Is it?"

"It will catch the wind on the bend. We should lower the arch by two fingers."

"Right," said Wenxi. "Two fingers."

She wound the stem again. Her hands were not quite steady.

* * *

Chengyan lowered the arch by two fingers, and then by one more, and then he looked at it and did not know why he had done it.

He was kneeling on the stern seat of the skiff, in a nest of wire and cut green stems, with the hammer lying forgotten beside his knee. He had been working on this boat for three hours. He had done it carefully, as he did everything, from the keel up, and he had not once allowed himself to look at the front of it, where a woman in a straw hat the size of a cartwheel sat with her back to him, twisting jasmine. He could see the nape of her neck, and the little curls that had escaped from under the brim, and one bare shoulder where her blouse had slipped. He had counted the buttons on it. There were five.

He had something to say.

He had had it for nine days. He had carried it round with him through the workshop and the market and the long hours at Fang's boat shed, as a man carries a stone in his pocket, turning it over and over with his thumb until the edges wore smooth. It was not a long thing. It had only a few words in it. He had tried it out on the plane, in the small hours, in a whisper, and the wood had not objected.

He set the hammer down.

"Wenxi," he said.

She turned her head. The moon was behind her, and the brim of the hat made a dark ring round her face, and he could see only her eyes, very bright, and the faint shine on her lips. She did not say anything. She looked at him, and he felt the whole stone in his pocket go suddenly hot.

"I wanted to say," said Chengyan.

"Yes?"

"That the, " His mouth was dry. He looked at the arch. "That the prow. It's better."

A tiny pause.

"Is it?"

"Much better."

"Oh," said Wenxi. "Good."

He felt the stone drop back into his pocket and lie there, heavy and cold. He turned back to the arch with a face like a board. He thought, you coward. You have said it to a plane. You said it to a plank of pine, in the dark, forty times. And she was looking right at you.

He picked up a length of wire. It was too thin. He bent it back and forth between his fingers until it snapped.

"Chengyan."

"Mm."

"Could you pass me the white ones? On the seat behind you. The peonies."

He passed them. Their fingers did not touch. He was careful about that, and it cost him more than the rest of the evening put together.

* * *

The last thing was the arch.

It was a long curved hoop of green cane, bent over the middle of the boat, from which the whole garland was to hang. It wanted a final spray of white at the crown. Wenxi had made it herself, in the quiet of the afternoon, a loose cascade of jasmine and peony and trailing ivy, and she stood up in the swaying skiff, with her hat pushed back, to fix it in place.

She was not quite tall enough. The crown of the arch stood a hand above her fingertips.

"Let me," said Chengyan.

"I can do it."

"You can't reach."

"I can if I, " She went up on her toes. The boat rocked. She heard him say her name, sharply, and then he was beside her, one hand flat against the cane and the other coming round to steady her elbow, and they were standing in the middle of a narrow boat in the moonlight with the whole garland swinging gently over their heads.

She turned her face up to see what he was doing.

She had meant to say something light. She had it ready. But he was so close. She could see the pulse in his throat. She could see the fine dust of cedar in his eyebrows, and the small pale scar on his chin, and a drop of sweat running slowly down from his temple to his jaw, and she watched it go. Her hand, which had been holding a spray of jasmine, came up of its own accord. She meant to take a leaf from his hair. She touched, instead, the side of his face.

Her fingertips lay on his cheekbone.

He went entirely still.

The jasmine fell from her other hand and dropped into the water. Neither of them looked at it. His skin was warm and a little rough and she could feel, under her fingers, the quick hard flutter of a muscle in his jaw. His eyes had closed. Not tightly, but slowly, as a man's do at the touch of a hand when he has been a long time cold. And in the hush of the dock, under the enormous moon, with the whole sweet-smelling dark pressing close around them, she felt something go through him, a long, shuddering exhalation, and she knew that she had never in her life been so afraid or so certain.

He opened his eyes.

He lifted his hand. It came up slowly, as if through water. His thumb touched her chin.

It was the lightest pressure, only the callused edge of the thumb against the soft place under her lip, and she felt her whole body tilt toward it, like a flower to a window. He tipped her face up, a fraction. His other hand had left the cane. She did not know where it was. She knew only that the air between them had gone thin and bright and humming, and that she could count his eyelashes, and that the space between her mouth and his was no longer a distance but a held breath.

"Wenxi," he said, so low that she felt it rather than heard it.

"Yes."

"I, "

She lifted her chin the smallest fraction of an inch. He lowered his head. She felt his breath on her lips, warm and unsteady, smelling of cedar and tea and something sweet, and her eyelids were falling shut of their own accord, and the world was reduced to a single point, a hair's breadth wide, toward which they were both drawing, slowly, inevitably, like two boats on a still canal.

"FIRE!"

The scream split the night like a dropped plate.

"FIRE! FIRE! IT'S THE KITCHEN! SOMEBODY BRING A BUCKET!"

They jerked apart.

It was the most violent movement she had ever made. She flung herself backward and the boat bucked. Her heel caught the edge of the seat, and he caught her wrist, and she caught his sleeve, and the two of them swayed on the narrow planks, gasping, with the garland swinging madly overhead and a rain of white petals coming down on their heads.

"FIRE!" bellowed the voice again, from the far end of the quay, and a dark figure came sprinting along the dock with a tea towel in each hand. It was Zhaoyu. His hair stood on end. His face was lit by a faint orange glow from the corner of the tea house, where a thin pillar of black smoke was rising into the moonlight.

"What is it?" shouted Chengyan.

"The brazier! I put the peanuts on! I only turned my back for a minute!" Zhaoyu skidded to a halt on the edge of the dock, panting, and stood there flapping the tea towels. His eyes went to the two of them, standing close together in the boat, with petals in their hair and their hands still locked. A very strange expression crossed his face. It was horror, and it was something else, something glimmering and guilty and extremely complicated. "It's, it's a small fire. It's nearly out. It's mostly smoke."

Tang Rui appeared behind him with a bucket. She looked at the smoke, and at Zhaoyu's tea towels, and at the boat. She said nothing at all. She walked to the end of the quay, tipped the bucket over the smouldering pan with great composure, and stood watching the steam rise.

"It was peanuts," said Zhaoyu again, faintly.

"I can see that," said Tang Rui.

"They were for the judges."

"I am sure they would have been delighted."

Wenxi let go of Chengyan's sleeve.

She did it as one lets go of a hot dish, very quickly, and took a step back, and the boat rocked. The moon was still shining. The petals were still falling. Her mouth tingled as though it had been touched, and it had not been, and she did not know how she was going to live.

He had let go too. He stood with both hands hanging at his sides, rigid, looking at the water. She could see his chest move. She could see that he was trying very hard to be a man who was fixing a boat.

"Clause Six," said Wenxi.

Her voice came out of her throat like a rusty hinge. She heard it, and she could not stop it.

He turned his head.

"One hour," she said. "Notice. Not less than. It's, " She swallowed. "You have to give me notice. So that nobody's ambushed."

A long, long silence. The smoke curled up from the tea house. A dog barked somewhere, and was hushed.

"Yes," said Chengyan. His voice was hoarse. "I know. I wrote, you wrote it."

"I did."

"I, " He stopped. He rubbed the back of his neck with the heel of his hand, hard, and his face did something complicated and brief that she would think about for a week. "I'm sorry. I was out of order."

"No, "

"I was," he said. "I'll, we'll, I should go."

"Chengyan, "

"The prow's fixed."

He stepped over the gunwale onto the quay. He did it carefully, without looking at her, and stood for a moment on the wet stone with his back to her and his head bowed. She saw his shoulders rise, and fall. Then he walked away along the dock toward the workshop, past the string of garlanded boats, with that hesitating heel-first step, until the dark swallowed him.

Wenxi stood in the boat.

She stood there a long time. Flowers lay all around her feet. A single white petal had caught on her sleeve, and she looked at it as if it were a message. Across the water, the last red glow of the brazier went out with a sigh.

After a while she sat down on the seat. She took off the enormous hat and held it in her lap. Then she put her face in it, and her shoulders began to shake, and she could not have said whether she was laughing or not.

She had meant to tell him tonight. She had meant to say it at the end of the evening, with the moon on the water, in the morning light of an honest heart. And she had touched his face instead, and forgotten every word.

After the race, she told the jasmine. I'll tell him after the race. Everything.

But her mouth was still tingling, and for the rest of the night, whatever she told herself, she kept her hand pressed flat against it, as though she could keep something in.