On the twelfth morning Yunzhao woke before the candles went out, which he had learned was a mistake.

It gave him too much time. In the minutes between waking and the first white bead, a person could think, and he had been thinking for the better part of a fortnight in the particular patient way of a man circling a locked door. He lay on his back under the blue quilt with his eyes open and watched the grey light crawl across the ceiling, and he thought about a brass key, and an archive he had not yet entered, and a bowl of congee pushed across a table by two cold fingers.

He thought about those fingers a good deal more than the key.

The room was very cold. That was the first thing. He felt it on his face, a thin clean cold like the breath of a well, and he turned his head on the pillow and saw why. The window was white.

The lattice was new, mended by the silent boy after the night of the draft, and its paper panes had been oiled to a thin amber translucence. Now each of them was crusted over from the inside with frost. Great white ferns had grown across them in the night, fine as lace, in curves and spirals and tiny perfect feathers, and the light that came through was pale and strange and faintly blue, like the light at the bottom of a lake. A rime lay along the sill. It lay along the wall below, and across the floorboards in a wide shining fan, and it had crept, he saw, as far as the foot of the bed.

At the center of it, with his back against the wall beneath the window, sat Ling Shuohan.

He was not asleep. Yunzhao had known that before he looked. He had not slept properly since the night of the draft, not really, only dozed upright with a sword across his knees, and the shadows beneath his eyes had begun to look like bruises. He sat very straight. He was gazing at the window, or through it, with the blank, fixed attention of a man listening to a distant sound. His left hand lay flat on the sill beside him, bare, the bracer unbuckled and set aside, and the frost lay thickest there. It had gathered along his shoulder, too. It lay in his hair and on the dark wool of his collar like a fall of fine white sugar, and it had not melted. He did not seem to feel it at all.

He looked like a man who had been left out in the snow, and had decided that it was none of the snow's business.

Yunzhao lay still for a long moment.

There were a number of sensible things he might have done. He might have said good morning. He might have remarked on the weather. He might have turned over, and shut his eyes, and given the man the privacy of his own cold. They had a rule about it, written in two hands on a page by the door. We do not touch except when necessity requires it.

He got up.

* * *

He told himself it was for the window.

That was a perfectly good reason. A lattice choked with frost was a hazard. It could crack, or sag, or let in the draft that the whole of the previous week had been spent keeping out, and a careful man would have wiped it clear. He found a rag by the hearth. He crossed the room in his bare feet, with the cold of the planks biting at his soles, and stopped beside the sill, and began to rub at the nearest pane in long slow circles.

The frost came away in a grey wet smear. Beneath it the paper glowed gold. A little patch of morning opened in the white, and through it he could see a thin slice of the courtyard, the black bones of the old peach tree, the sky going pearl.

He did not look at the man beside him. He was very busy.

"Do not," said Shuohan, in a low voice. "It will only come back."

"Then I shall wipe it again."

"It is my doing."

"I know whose doing it is." He moved the rag to the next pane. "I am not complaining. I am merely cleaning. It is a thing people do in houses."

A very faint sound came from the floor, a short breath through the nose, which might have been the beginning of a laugh. Yunzhao did not turn his head. He worked his way along the lattice, one square after another, and the little windows came clear in a row behind his cloth, each one a small bright eye. He reached the last of them. It was the lowest, and it sat directly above the place where Shuohan's hand lay on the sill, and the frost there was so thick that it had grown into small white spears.

He bent. He put out his hand to wipe it. And he did not look where it was going.

His fingers closed over the other man's.

It was a small thing. A mistake. A rag had slipped, a palm had landed a hand's breadth from where it should have been, and for the space of a heartbeat he had no idea what he was holding. It was cold. It was colder than the sill, colder than the stone floor, colder than anything he had ever touched, a cold so deep and perfect that it did not feel like cold at all but like the edge of a knife. The frost on the knuckles bit at the skin of his palm.

He should have let go. He knew he should. He had a rule.

And then the frost began to melt.

It did not melt quickly. It was not like the hall, with its hissing steam and its thin white mist. It was slow, gentle, almost shy, the way a thaw begins on a river in the first week of spring. Under the pad of his thumb the ice grew soft. It turned to water, and the water turned to warmth, and the warmth moved, not up his arm but out from the center of his palm, in a small widening circle, until the whole back of the hand was lit with it, like a lamp seen through cloth. He felt it as clearly as a heartbeat. He felt the pulse come up under the skin.

He could not breathe.

Beside him, very quietly, Shuohan said, "Yunzhao."

It was only the name. It was spoken so low that it was hardly a sound, a breath with a shape. It was not a warning, and it was not a question. Yunzhao did not know what it was. He knew only that it was the first time the man had ever said it without a surname in front.

Shuohan's hand jerked.

It was pure reflex, the quick flinch of a creature touched on a wound. The hand tried to pull itself out from under Yunzhao's, and the whole arm tightened, and for an instant the frost surged up again, white and bright, across the knuckles, as though the body had remembered its orders. Yunzhao felt the bite of it, and did not let go. He did not know why. He only closed his fingers, lightly, and held.

The hand stopped.

They stayed like that.

It was a very long moment, though it could not have been more than a few breaths. Yunzhao straightened, slowly, and found that he was looking down into a face turned up toward his own. The grey eyes were wide. They were very clear in the new light, a clean pale grey with a ring of darker blue about the iris, and for once there was nothing in them at all that was meant to be seen. No guard. No cold. Only astonishment, plain and total, as of a man who has put his foot on a stair and found it was a different height from the one he remembered.

Neither of them looked away.

It came to Yunzhao, distantly, that the hand beneath his was no longer cold. It was not warm, either. But it was no longer a stone. It lay in his grip, long and heavy and a little rough, and it had stopped trying to leave.

* * *

"You are hurt," he said.

His voice came out strange. It was unsteady, and low, and a good deal softer than he had intended. He cleared his throat. He turned the hand over, palm down, so that the light fell on the knuckles, and he saw what the frost had hidden.

The skin was split.

It was not a deep injury. It was a web of hairline cracks, dry and red and angry, running across the backs of three fingers and down into the soft valley between the thumb and the first joint. In two places it had opened, and a bright bead of blood stood in the fissure and did not fall. The edges of the skin were white and dead, like the skin of a hand left too long in the cold. He had seen it on hunters. He had seen it on a pair of porters who had crossed the high pass in a blizzard. He had never seen it on a man who was, to all appearances, perfectly well.

"It is nothing," said Shuohan.

"It is bleeding."

"A little. It does it every morning. It will close by noon." He moved his hand, once, as though to take it back. "I did not wish you to see it."

"Why?"

There was a pause.

"It is not a thing one shows."

"No," Yunzhao said softly. "I am beginning to understand that you do not show anything." He did not release the hand. He was aware that he ought to. He was aware of a very small, fierce, unreasonable determination in his chest, as of a man who has found a wounded animal and has decided, against all advice, not to walk by. "Hold still."

"Is this necessity?" said Shuohan.

It was dry. It was so dry that for an instant Yunzhao did not understand it, and then he did, and a bright startled sound escaped him, half a laugh and half a gasp. He looked up. The grey eyes were watching him very steadily. In the corner of that stern mouth there was the faintest, most reluctant twitch, as of a muscle that had been given an order and was not at all sure it wished to obey.

"It is medicine," said Yunzhao.

"That is not in the terms."

"Then I shall add it." He tightened his hold, very slightly. "Clause thirteen. Injuries shall be attended to. Without comment. By whoever happens to be nearest and has the sense."

"That is a poor clause."

"It is a perfectly good clause. I wrote it myself."

Shuohan said nothing. But he did not draw back, and his hand lay in Yunzhao's, open and unresisting, and Yunzhao understood, with a small hot dizzy swoop of the heart, that this was permission. It was the only kind the man knew how to give. He had not spoken a word of it. He had simply stopped holding the door.

He bent his head over the cracked knuckles.

He had a little jar of salve in his sleeve, a plain greenish paste of beeswax and comfrey that he had carried for years against the day he cut himself on a sword. He did not reach for it. Not yet. He looked at the split skin, and at the bright bead of blood, and at the delicate pale shiver that ran across the back of the hand where the frost had nearly come back. And he did the first thing that came into his head.

He breathed on it.

It was only breath. A slow, soft, careful exhalation, warm with the heat of his own chest, laid across the knuckles the way one breathes on a child's scraped knee, or a window pane on a cold morning, or a bird gone numb in the snow. It made no sound. He felt it go out of him in a long thin stream, and saw the fine dry cracks darken, and then, very slightly, ease, as the skin drank the warmth.

He did it again.

The room had gone absolutely still. He could hear nothing. The candles had burned down to two bright coins of wax and their flames stood motionless, tall and straight, as if the very fire were holding its breath. The frost on the lattice had stopped its slow creep. A single pale thread of light had found the clear panes and lay across the floor like a path, and in it small motes of rime turned slowly, bright as sparks.

He was aware of the hand in his. He was aware of its weight, and its heat, which had begun to rise, slowly, from somewhere deep in the bone. He was aware of the pulse in its wrist. It was running very fast. It was running, he thought, quite as fast as his own.

He was aware of the man above him, kneeling now, he found, though he did not remember going down, and looking at him with a stillness so complete that it seemed to fill the room.

Neither of them said a word.

There was nothing to say. Yunzhao felt it with a strange, clear certainty, as one feels the moment at which a long note on a flute passes from one sound into another. It was not a thing that could be put into language. It could not be turned into a joke, or a clause, or a careful postponement. It lay between them in the cold bright air, very small and very large, like a stone dropped into a pool, and the rings went out and out, and went on going, and neither of them moved to stop them.

He thought: I should not be doing this.

He thought of the key in his sleeve. He thought of the page on the wall. He thought, quite clearly, that there was a lie in this room, and that it was his, and that every breath he laid on this man's hand was a breath taken on credit.

He breathed once more.

Then Shuohan's fingers moved.

They did not pull away. They closed, very slightly, so slightly that anyone watching would have missed it, around the edge of Yunzhao's palm, and held. It was the lightest pressure. It was no more than the weight of a leaf. And it went through Yunzhao like a struck bell, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, and left him quite unable to remember what he had been going to do next.

* * *

It was the bead that ended it.

A small sound came from the far wall, a soft dry click, like a pebble dropped into a bowl. Both of them turned their heads. On the cord of wooden peaches, at the end of the white row, the twelfth bead had gone pale. The candles had folded themselves out, quietly, without either of them seeing. The room was full of plain grey daylight, and a thin cold smoke curled up from the two black wicks and drifted toward the ceiling.

Shuohan took his hand back.

It was not abrupt. It was careful, even courteous, a slow withdrawal of the fingers, as a man might lift a cup that was not his. He got to his feet. He was very upright, and very quiet, and he looked at nothing in particular, at the wall, at the cord, at a point on the floor three feet to the left of Yunzhao's knee. His ears were scarlet. They were so red that they seemed to glow against the dark of his hair, a clear, fierce, entirely undeniable red, and the color had spread down his throat and into the open collar of his robe.

"I will see to the sword," he said.

"Yes," said Yunzhao.

"It will want oiling."

"I am sure it will."

"I will be in the courtyard."

"Wonderful."

He watched the man cross the room. He walked with his back very straight and his steps a little too even, like someone carrying a bowl filled to the brim, and at the door he paused, with his hand on the latch. He did not turn around. He stood there for the space of three breaths. Then he said, to the wood, in a voice so low that Yunzhao almost lost it, "Thank you."

The door opened and closed.

Yunzhao stayed where he was, on his knees on the cold planks, with his hand still out in front of him in the shape of the thing it had held. He looked at it. It was an ordinary hand. Long fingers, a callus at the base of the thumb from the sword, a faint scar across the heel. It was warm. It was warmer than the rest of him by a wide margin, and it tingled, faintly, from the wrist to the tips, as though he had been holding it too near a fire.

He closed it.

He got up. It took him two attempts. He went to the hearth and found the kettle and filled it from the jug, and set it on the hook, and stood for a while watching the water. His hands were doing something he did not like. When he reached for the tea tin he knocked the lid off, and when he bent to retrieve it he knocked it again, and the leaves went across the floor in a small dark drift, and he said a word that his old master would not have approved of.

"Pull yourself together," he told the kettle.

The kettle began, politely, to sing.

He was pouring the first cup, with a degree of concentration that would have done credit to a surgeon, when he noticed the window. The little clear pane that he had wiped, the lowest, the one above the sill. It had not frosted over again. That was odd. It had stood open to the cold for a full quarter hour, and by every right it should have been white. Instead it glowed gold in the morning light, and the sill below it was dry.

And on the sill, quite alone, lay a flower.

He set down the cup.

He crossed the room very slowly. He did not breathe on it. He stopped a pace from the window and looked down, and for a long moment he could not tell what he was seeing, because it was too ordinary. It was a single peach blossom. Five petals, soft and round and pale, flushed toward the center with a deep rose pink, and a small cluster of gold-tipped stamens trembling in the middle. It was not the translucent, shimmering thing that rose from Taoying's blade, that came and went like a thought. It did not shine. It did not vanish when he looked at it. It was solid, and ordinary, and quite real, with the faint soft fuzz of a living petal and a short green stem, bruised a little at the cut, as though it had been picked.

It smelled of spring.

He put out one finger. He touched a petal, and it was cool and damp and perfectly alive, and a drop of water ran off it, quite clear, and fell onto the wood.

Outside, in the courtyard, the old peach tree stood black and bare against a white sky. Its twigs were as tightly shut as they had been the day he arrived. Nothing else in all that frozen country was in bloom.

He did not look at the sword at his bedside, though he felt it, there, on the edge of his sight, the faint warm pulse of a thing that had done something it had not been asked to do. He did not look at the door, through which a man had gone out with red ears, and a hand that had not been cold when it left.

He stood and looked at the flower, and the flower looked back, and neither of them said anything at all.