Gu Chiyan arrived on the fourteenth morning with a list, a basket, and the look of a man who has been planning something for a week and is trying very hard not to enjoy it.

Shuohan saw him from the courtyard, where he had just finished the closing form and was standing with Hanxue lowered and his breath smoking in the cold. The officiant came across the snow in a quilted coat the color of plums, holding a slip of paper out in front of him between two fingers, like a fish he had caught and was not sure he wished to keep.

"Wicks," Chiyan announced, without greeting. "Twelve bundles of the fine grade, cotton and not hemp. Lamp oil, two jars. Beeswax, one block, unbleached. A pot of the green salve from the apothecary on Willow Street, the good one, for the hands." His eyes flicked, very briefly, to Shuohan's knuckles, and away. "And whatever else you may fancy. Within reason."

"You have a servant," said Shuohan.

"I have one silent boy and one hen. Neither can be trusted with the apothecary." Chiyan held out the paper. "Lanxi lies two hours down the valley road. The third clause allows half a day at a measured pace, which is six hours out, and I have measured the distance myself with a cord and a very patient donkey. You are well within the law. I would not suggest it otherwise."

"It is not necessary."

"It is a very great necessity," said a voice from the doorway, and Shuohan did not turn his head, because he knew exactly what face would be attached to it. "I have not seen a human being who was not you in nearly a fortnight. I am beginning to talk to the kettle."

"You have always talked to the kettle."

"But now it answers."

Chiyan pressed his lips together over something that might have been a laugh. "You will go together, of course. There is no rule against it, and in my experience two people who have been shut in a small room for two weeks are much improved by a crowd. You will be back by sunset to light the candles. Do not be late." He set the basket at Shuohan's feet, patted it as one pats a horse, and went away across the yard whistling.

Shuohan looked at the list. It was written in the officiant's quick, pleased hand, and at the bottom, in a different ink, as if added afterward, were three more words. Buy something sweet.

"I do not eat sugar," he said, to no one in particular.

"I will remember you said that," said Yunzhao, "when I am eating it in front of you."

* * *

They walked down the valley road in plain coats.

That had been Yunzhao's idea. He had gone into Chiyan's wardrobe room and come out with two heavy brown wool garments of no particular country, lined with sheepskin, and had held one out to Shuohan with the air of a man presenting a sword. "If you walk into Lanxi in Hanjian blue they will bow, and if I walk in in Qingyun white they will spit, and I should like to be allowed to buy a dumpling in peace." The coat was a little short in the sleeve. Shuohan had put it on without comment, and had felt, to his alarm, almost light, as a man feels who has put down a pack he did not know he was carrying.

It was a bright, hard, windless day. The road ran down between white hills where the pines stood shouldering their loads of snow, and now and then a clump of snow let go with a soft thump and a spray of glitter. The swords knocked quietly against their hips. Neither had said anything for the first mile. It was not an uncomfortable silence. It had the loose, sleepy quality of the silences that came after a meal, and Shuohan found, with some surprise, that he was not composing anything to break it.

He was aware of the man beside him in small ways. The creak of his boots on the packed snow, a half-step quicker than his own. The faint scent of cedar and peach that clung to the borrowed wool. The way he walked with his hands tucked into his sleeves and his face turned up, drinking the light, like a cat that has been let out of a cellar.

"You are staring," said Yunzhao.

"I am watching the road."

"The road is on the other side."

Shuohan looked at the road.

Lanxi lay in a bowl of hills at the point where two rivers met, and it came into view all at once, as a thing does that has been hidden behind a shoulder of rock: a spill of grey tile roofs, a tangle of stone bridges, a white pagoda with a crooked top, smoke going up from a hundred chimneys into a sky as blue as a bowl. The sound reached them before the smell did. It was a low, busy murmur, like bees in a hive, threaded through with the clang of a smith's hammer and the thin cry of a peddler selling something that began with the word hot.

Yunzhao stopped at the top of the last rise and let out a long breath.

"I love this place," he said, and it came out so simply that Shuohan turned to look at him. "I used to come here as a boy, when I could slip the Pavilion. I would stand on this very spot and think that it was the largest town in the world."

"It is not large."

"No. But I did not know that then." He smiled, a small crooked one, and set off down the slope. "Come. There is a lane you must see. It is the best thing in Lanxi and it is entirely useless."

* * *

Lantern Lane ran from the old market gate to the river, and it was roofed.

Someone, a century ago, had strung oiled paper across the whole width of it from eave to eave, so that the lane lay under a long pale ceiling like the inside of a drum, and since the sun could not get in, the town had given up on the sun altogether. The lanterns were lit by noon. There were hundreds of them. They hung from every beam and awning and doorpost in tiers and clusters and long swaying strings, round ones and square ones and ones shaped like gourds and swallows and fat cheerful pigs, red and gold and a pale moon-colored white, and the light that came down from them was soft and warm and faintly rosy, as though the whole street were lit from inside a peach.

Shuohan stopped in the entrance.

He had been in cities. He had been to the great sect gatherings at the capital, where the lanterns were the size of houses and the noise was so loud he had spent three days with a headache. This was not that. It was small and crowded and unpretentious and it smelled of roasting chestnuts and star anise and hot sugar, and every few paces there was someone calling out from behind a stall in a voice that rose and fell like song. A man was selling spiced tea out of a brass urn on his back. A girl in a red scarf was frying something in a pan the size of a cartwheel. Children ran underfoot, and one of them, a boy with a fish-shaped lantern on a stick, collided with Shuohan's knee, looked up, went quite pale, and fled.

"You frightened him," said Yunzhao, delighted.

"I did nothing."

"You looked at him. It is the same."

He took Shuohan by the sleeve. It was done so naturally, so entirely without ceremony, that Shuohan did not notice it until they were ten paces into the crowd. Two fingers on the wool at his elbow, light as a leaf. He opened his mouth to say, we do not touch except when necessity requires it, and found that the lane was very full, and that if he said it he would have to say it loudly.

He closed his mouth.

They went down the lane at the pace of the crowd. Yunzhao led, and he did it superbly. He knew where to turn, and when to wait, and which stall sold the good ginger and which sold the sort that tasted of dust. He bargained for the wicks with a stout woman in a quilted hat, and won, by some means that Shuohan did not follow, a free packet of dried plums into the bargain. He bought the oil and beeswax from a one-eyed man who called him young master and asked after the old master by name, and Yunzhao said, easily, that the old master was in good health, and Shuohan watched his face while he said it and saw nothing at all go across it. Not a flicker. It was very well done.

It was only afterward, when they had moved on, that he saw the hand on his sleeve tighten for a moment, and relax.

"Here," said Yunzhao. "Stand there. Do not move. Do not look fierce."

"What are you doing?"

"Buying you something sweet."

"I said I do not..."

"You said you do not eat sugar. I am not asking you to eat it. I am asking you to hold it."

He vanished into the crowd. Shuohan stood where he had been put, with the basket over one arm and a bundle of wicks under the other, and a passing grandmother looked at him, and at the sword on his hip, and at his face, and gave him a wide berth. He stood very straight. He examined the nearest lantern with what he hoped was the air of a man who had a purpose.

It was shaped like a rabbit. It looked back at him.

"Here," said Yunzhao, reappearing at his elbow, slightly out of breath, and pressed something into his hand.

It was a stick. A thin bamboo skewer, and threaded on it a row of small dark red fruits, each one glazed in a shell of clear amber sugar that shone under the lanterns like jewels in a case. They were round and bright and slightly sticky, and there were six of them, and Shuohan held them in front of him as he would have held a blade handed to him by a stranger.

"What is it?"

"Candied haws. Tanghulu. It is the finest thing ever made by man."

"It is a fruit in a coat."

"Eat it."

"I do not..."

"Ling Shuohan." Yunzhao had a stick of his own. He was holding it up like a lantern, and his eyes were bright, and there was a smear of sugar on his lip that he had not noticed. "We have a rule. No lying. If you try it and do not like it you may say so, and I shall be crushed, and shall eat yours. But you cannot decide you dislike a thing you have not tasted. That is not a Hanjian principle. That is only cowardice."

He knew it was a trap. He saw the whole shape of it, clear as a drawn diagram. The man was baiting him, and he was going to take the bait, because the alternative was to stand in the middle of a lantern-lit street with a stick of fruit in his hand and be called a coward by someone whose mouth was sticky.

He bit.

The shell broke with a sharp small crack, like thin ice under a boot, and the sugar went to splinters against his teeth. Then the sourness came. It came all at once, bright and fierce and utterly unexpected, a clean cold burst of tartness that went up behind his eyes and made his whole face tighten, and a moment after, softly, the sweetness rose to meet it, and the two ran together in his mouth like water and wine.

He stood quite still.

"Well?" said Yunzhao.

Shuohan chewed. He swallowed. He looked at the stick as one looks at a creature that has bitten one's hand and then, to one's confusion, licked it.

"It is loud," he said.

Yunzhao stared at him. And then, with a suddenness that made two passersby turn their heads, he began to laugh. It was not the bright polished laugh. It was the one from the candle room floor, helpless and low and slightly cracked, and he doubled over with one hand on his knee and the stick held carefully out of harm's way in the other, and said in a strangled voice, "Loud. It is a fruit and he says it is loud."

"It is accurate."

"It is the most beautiful review I have ever received."

Shuohan took another bite, to give himself something to do with his face.

* * *

The crowd came in from the left.

Yunzhao did not see it until it was upon them. He had been looking at a stall of paper fans, and the first he knew of the thing was a roar, a great ragged cheer from somewhere up the lane, and a brass clash of cymbals, and then the whole street was moving. People poured in from the side alleys. A drum started up, fast and hard. Over the heads of the crowd a long, swaying, brilliantly colored shape came undulating down the lane, red and gold and green, with a gaping paper mouth and a hundred little bobbing lanterns for scales. A dragon. A festival dragon, carried on poles by twenty boys in yellow tunics, and behind it, whooping, came every child in Lanxi.

There was nowhere to go. The lane was twelve feet wide. The dragon was coming at a run.

He turned, to find an alcove, a doorway, anything. And an arm went around him.

It was not gentle. It was swift and hard and certain, a forearm across his chest and a hand spread flat against his ribs, and he was pulled backward off his feet and set down again, in a single movement, with his shoulders against a wall of warm wool and a hard chest at his back. A coat. A scent of snow and iron and, faintly, sugar. Then the dragon went past in a blaze of color and a thunder of drums, so near that its paper mane brushed his hair, and the entire world was noise and light and heat.

He did not hear it end.

He was aware that the arm was still there. It lay across his chest like a bar, and under his shoulder blades he could feel a heart beating, steady and strong and rather faster than he would have expected. A breath stirred his hair. He could have stepped away. The crowd had passed. The lane was filling again with the ordinary slow movement of people on their way to somewhere else.

He did not step away. He stood with his back against Ling Shuohan and looked at the lanterns, and the lanterns blurred a little.

"Are you hurt?" said Shuohan, very close to his ear.

"No."

"They came from nowhere."

"It is a festival. They come from everywhere." His voice sounded strange to him. "You may let go, I think. We are quite safe."

The arm went away. It went away at once, and abruptly, as though it had been burned, and the sudden cool where it had been was so sharp that he almost reached back for it.

"Ah, now," said a voice at his elbow. "That is how it is done."

He turned. An old woman sat on a stool behind a small table crowded with paper cranes and tiny clay animals, a round brown-faced woman in a patched red jacket, with a pipe in the corner of her mouth and a gleam in her eye like the gleam on a very new coin. She was looking at the two of them with enormous satisfaction.

"Forgive me," she said. "I do not mean to stare. But in forty years of selling toys on this lane I have seen a great many young men take a great many young men out of the way of the dragon, and I can always tell the ones who are brothers, and the ones who are friends, and the ones who are courting." She drew on the pipe. "And the ones who have just been married and have not got used to it."

Neither of them spoke.

"You are the red candle pair, are you not?" The old woman beamed. "Do not look so alarmed. Everyone knows. The whole valley has been talking since the ceremony. Husband and husband, from the feuding sects, locked up together for a hundred nights." She nodded, with deep approval. "It is the best news we have had in years. My granddaughter has already written a song."

Yunzhao heard himself make a sound that might have been a laugh. He felt, rather than saw, the man behind him go absolutely rigid.

"Is it not a wonderful thing?" said the old woman. "The two of you, so polite, standing a hand's breadth apart. You, young sir, with the sugar on your mouth, you look like a man who has never been held in your life, and your husband looks like a man who has just discovered how."

"He is... very protective," said Yunzhao, faintly.

"Of course he is. Look at the ears on him."

He looked. He could not help it. He turned his head a very little, and there, a pace behind his shoulder, stood the Ice Swordsman of Hanjian Peak with a tanghulu stick in one hand and a bundle of wicks in the other, staring at the middle distance with the expression of a man who is being slowly lowered into a vat of something. His ears were the color of the lanterns. His jaw was set. He said nothing at all.

He did not say, we are not. He did not say, you mistake us. He did not say a single one of the dozen things that he would have said a fortnight before.

Yunzhao looked at him, and something in his chest turned over, slowly, like a fish.

"Take one," said the old woman, pressing a small clay figure into his palm, and then another into Shuohan's. "For luck. No, no, no charge. It is a pair of mandarin ducks. They mate for life. They always come in twos, you see."

It was a tiny thing, no larger than a walnut, glazed in green and gold, with a round smug face. Yunzhao closed his fingers on it, and could not think of a single clever word to say.

* * *

They won the lantern at the riddle stall, and Shuohan would have said afterward that he had not intended to.

It stood at the bottom of the lane, near the river gate, where the crowd thinned and the light turned amber. A thin old man with ink-stained fingers sat behind a long table with a brazier at his feet and a hundred small paper lanterns hanging from a rope above his head, and on each lantern, on a narrow slip, a riddle was written. The rules were chalked on a board. A copper for three guesses. Answer three correctly in a row and take your pick of the prizes.

"Do not," said Shuohan.

"I have said nothing."

"You are about to pay a copper."

"I am about to pay two. One for me and one for you." Yunzhao had already dropped them into the dish. His eyes were bright and merry, and he had not stopped smiling since the toy seller, a small private slant of a smile that had no particular audience. It was, Shuohan observed, the real one. He had stopped keeping count of the times he had seen it. "You are very good at things that involve not talking. I am very good at things that involve talking. Between us we shall have the whole of the art."

The old man took down the first lantern. He held it up to the light and read in a thin quavering voice, "I grow shorter as I grow brighter. The more I give, the less I have. What am I?"

"Candle," said Shuohan and Yunzhao, in the same breath.

They looked at each other.

The old man peered at them over the paper with an expression of mild delight. "Ah," he said. "You two have had some practice with that one."

"Next," said Shuohan, rather quickly.

The second lantern was green. "I write on every window without a brush," the old man read, "and I am gone before the sun has finished her tea."

Shuohan did not have to think. He had written on a great many windows himself, in the dark, against his will. "Frost," he said.

"He knows it well," Yunzhao murmured, and the corner of his mouth went up.

"Quiet."

"I did not say a thing."

The third lantern was white, a plain round globe with a single thin slip of paper tied to its handle. The old man read it slowly, as though savoring a sip of wine.

"Easy to give, hard to keep, and cheaper broken than mended. What am I?"

There was a silence.

Shuohan knew the answer. He knew it at once, with a small hard clarity, the way one knows the name of a man one has been trying not to think about. But he did not say it. He found that his throat had closed, and that he was looking, without having decided to, at the profile beside him.

Yunzhao had gone still.

The smile was still on his face. But it had stopped moving, like a leaf on a pond when the wind drops, and his eyes were fixed on the little white lantern with an expression Shuohan could not read. It lasted perhaps two breaths. Then he said, in a light even voice that was almost his usual one, "A promise."

"A promise," the old man agreed, and unhooked the lantern with a flourish. "Three for three. Choose your prize, young gentlemen."

The prizes hung on the back wall. There were paper birds and silk purses and little painted drums. Yunzhao scanned them with an air of enormous concentration, as a man scans a map, and then reached up and took down, with a flourish, a lantern the size of a melon in the shape of a large and extraordinarily stupid pink carp.

It had round golden eyes. It had a gaping smile. Its fins were fringed with long red paper streamers that fluttered when it moved, and it looked, in the amber light of the river gate, exactly like the sort of fish that would offer to lend you money.

"This one," said Yunzhao.

"No."

"It is lucky."

"It is ridiculous."

"They are the same thing." He was holding it out. His eyes were brimming with such unholy glee that Shuohan, who had come down the valley road with every intention of being dignified, felt his resolve crumble like an old wall. "You carry it. You have the basket arm free."

"I do not have a free arm."

"You have the wick arm. It is a fine arm. Take the fish."

He took the fish.

He held it before him, gravely, by its little bamboo handle, and the fins swayed, and the golden eyes rolled in the lantern light. He did not smile. He was quite certain that he did not smile. He stood there, a tall man in a borrowed brown coat with a sword at his hip and a candied haw in one hand, carrying a pink paper carp through the heart of Lanxi with the absolute gravity of a man bearing the imperial seal.

And Yunzhao laughed.

It came up out of him as if it had been waiting. He put his head back and let it go, a great ringing helpless peal that bounced off the paper roof and rang down the lane, and people turned and smiled to hear it, and a small girl nearby began to laugh, too, without knowing why. His eyes had closed. His shoulders shook. A strand of black hair had come loose from its ribbon and lay across his mouth, and he did not push it back, and he looked, in that warm rosy light, so entirely and unguardedly happy that Shuohan felt something twist in his chest like a key in a lock.

He had seen the man smile a hundred ways. He had never seen him look like this. It was the face of someone who had been let out, for an hour, of a house with no windows.

He stood and held the fish and let it go on. He thought that he would carry a hundred carp, if that was what it cost.

He did not examine the thought. He had stopped examining a great many of them lately.

* * *

The woodcarver's stall was at the edge of the market, between a stall of lacquer boxes and a stand selling roasted sweet potatoes, and Shuohan found it only because Yunzhao had gone to argue with the sweet potato man.

He had not been looking for it. He had been looking for a quiet place to stand. But the stall was small and shadowed, hung with strings of wooden beads and carved combs and little turned boxes, and the old carver, a stooped man with sawdust in his eyebrows, was working at a block of pale wood with a knife no bigger than a thumbnail and did not look up.

It was the pins that caught him.

They lay on a square of blue cloth in a neat row. Boxwood and ebony, sandalwood, bone. Plain ones, and ones carved into the shapes of cranes and plum sprigs and small coiled dragons. At the end of the row lay one that was neither plain nor ornate, a slim straight pin of a pale pinkish wood with a faint grain like watered silk, and at its head, cut with such delicate economy that it seemed less carved than grown, a single peach blossom. Five petals. A tiny round bud at the heart.

He thought of a strip of cloth torn from a shirt hem. He thought of dark hair knotted back with whatever lay to hand, day after day, in a small kitchen, in a candle room, over a stove.

"Peach wood," said the carver, without raising his eyes. "Keeps off bad luck. Grandmothers swear by it."

"How much?"

The old man named a price. It was absurdly small. Shuohan put down a good deal more, and the carver looked at the coins, and then at him, and then, for the first time, smiled a slow wrinkled smile and said, "For your wife?"

"For the candles," said Shuohan.

It was out before he could stop it. It was not even a lie that made sense. The old man's smile broadened into something very like a grin, and he folded the pin in a scrap of paper without another word and tucked it into the bundle of wicks. "Of course," he said. "Candles. A fine thing. Very fine wicks, they say, in Lanxi."

Shuohan retreated with his ears on fire.

* * *

They started back at the fourth bell.

The snow had begun again as they climbed out of the valley, very lightly, a drift of small dry flakes that hung in the air like dust in a sunbeam. The sky had gone lavender over the western ridge. Yunzhao walked a little ahead with his hands in his sleeves and the carp lantern swinging from one wrist, its stub of a candle lit now, so that the whole fat pink creature glowed from inside and cast a small warm wobbling circle of light on the road. He had been humming since the river gate. It was a little four-note tune, repeated over and over, which he did not seem to know he was making.

Shuohan walked behind him with the basket.

He was carrying a great many things. He thought, idly, that a man might have been forgiven for finding it all a burden. Twelve bundles of wicks. Two jars of oil. The beeswax, the green salve, a paper twist of dried plums, and in his sleeve a small clay duck that was one of a pair, and in the pocket of his coat, wrapped in a scrap of paper and tucked in among the wicks, a hairpin of peach wood that he had no earthly business buying.

"What is in the little parcel?" said Yunzhao, without turning.

"Wicks."

"It seems a rather small parcel for wicks."

"They are fine wicks."

"I see." He did glance back then, and for a moment his dark eyes held a gleam of such pure unsuspecting amusement that Shuohan nearly dropped the basket. "I did not know wicks could be so decorative. You were looking at it all the way down the hill. I thought you might be about to propose to it."

"I was counting."

"Of course you were." He turned back to the road, smiling. "Wicks. How curious. Do not mind me. I am a very incurious man."

He was not. They both knew it. But he did not press, and Shuohan, walking behind him in the lavender dusk, with snow in his hair and the taste of sugar still faint at the back of his tongue, was surprised to find that he did not mind being known to have a secret. It was a strange, small, unfamiliar kind of ease. He wondered if it was what other people called trust.

He looked at the man ahead of him, at the straight back and the loose dark hair and the little fat paper fish glowing at his wrist, and he thought, I am happy.

It was a very simple thought. It frightened him more than the sword.

* * *

The road crested the last rise, and Yunzhao stopped to let the other man catch up, and turned to look back at the town.

Lanxi lay below them in its bowl of hills, a smear of gold in the lavender dusk. The lanterns were coming on, street by street, like a slow spreading sunrise, and the river caught them and held them and doubled them. He could still hear, very faintly, the drums. It was the loveliest thing he had ever seen, and he was so full of a sweet, aching, entirely foolish contentment that he thought he might cry.

He thought: I will remember this. Whatever happens. I will remember that I had a day.

He thought: I should tell him.

It came all at once, without warning, like a hand on his shoulder. The key. The archive. The plan that he had come here to carry out and had not once, in a fortnight, taken a single step toward. He saw it with perfect clarity, the lie he had written his name beneath, and the man who stood beside him, trusting, with a hairpin in his pocket that he thought no one knew about. He opened his mouth.

And saw someone standing at the foot of the rise.

It was a long way below. A quarter of a mile, perhaps, where the valley road turned out of the town, at the place where the last lanterns gave out and the shadows began. A figure in a long grey coat, with a wide-brimmed hat pulled low against the snow. It stood quite still in the middle of the road. It was not buying. It was not hurrying home. It was simply standing, face upturned, as a man stands who has been following something for a long time and has at last come within sight of it.

Yunzhao did not move.

He felt the cold go through him from crown to heel. He watched the figure as it stood, and he saw that it did not look at the lanterns, or the river, or the road behind it. It looked up the slope, at the two of them, with the patient attention of a hawk. And then it shifted its weight, a small, careless, practiced movement, and he saw, quite clearly, in the last of the light, that one of the boots turned slightly inward at the toe.

A boot. A deep clean print in new snow, with a small scuff where the walker had turned.

"What is it?" said Shuohan, beside him.

He looked again. The road was empty. There was nothing there but snow, and the long blue shadows of the pines, and the first thin star over the western ridge.

"Nothing," said Yunzhao.

It was the first lie he had told in a week that he could not take back, and it lay in his mouth like a coin of cold iron. He turned toward the lodge, and the little pink fish swung at his wrist and cast its warm light on the snow, and behind them, in the dusk, in the place where no one stood, something went on watching.