The note was pinned to the kitchen door with a hairpin, and it was written in the officiant's hand, which meant it was cheerful.

*Dear bearers, I have gone to Lanxi to see a man about a donkey, and a woman about a roof, and I fear I shall be stranded there overnight. The sky has a look I do not like. Reinforce the shutters. Bring in what you will need. Tonight's candles are in the veranda cabinet as always. The boy will carry them to you at the usual hour, God willing, and if God is not willing, I advise you to fetch them yourselves, and quickly. With deepest affection, and a great deal of nervousness, G.C.*

Yunzhao read it twice and then read it aloud, in a voice of such mournful theatricality that the hen, who had wandered in for her breakfast, stopped and stared at him.

"A great deal of nervousness," he said. "From a man who once talked a mountain bandit into returning a stolen goat. I think we are to be buried alive."

"We are to be careful," said Shuohan.

He was standing in the doorway with his arms folded, looking at the sky. It had been a strange morning. The air was thick and still and the color of old pewter, and the snow on the courtyard had a dull, bluish, listening look, and in the east, low on the horizon, a long band of bruise-colored cloud was creeping up the sky with the slow deliberation of a thing that knows it has all the time in the world. The swords had been restless since dawn. Hanxue had frosted over the entire rack in the night, and Taoying, when Yunzhao had lifted it from the stand, had given off a thin high wailing note that made his teeth ache.

"How long?" said Yunzhao.

"By afternoon. Perhaps sooner."

"You are certain?"

"I was born on a mountain." Shuohan did not look away from the sky. "I know what that color means. It is the kind of storm that kills shepherds."

Yunzhao looked at the profile beside him, the hard jaw and the shadowed eyes and the faint rime along the black hair at the temple, and he said, more quietly, "Then I suppose we had better get to work."

* * *

They worked all day, and it was oddly pleasant.

It was a thing he would remember afterward, with a faint unsteady wonder, when he had a great deal of time to look back over the strange small history of those days. They did not talk much. They did not need to. There was a great deal to be done, and each of them, it emerged, knew a different half of how to do it. Shuohan knew the weight of snow on a roof and where a beam would give first. Yunzhao knew where the nails were kept and how to coax a stubborn hinge. They went round the lodge together like a pair of oxen in a double yoke, shoring and bracing and battening.

They hauled coal in a dented bucket from the lean-to behind the stable, eight trips, until the bin by the candle-room hearth was full to the lip. They carried firewood in armfuls, split and stacked and wedged against the wall. They filled every jug and kettle and pot with water from the well, and set them in a row on the kitchen floor like a small ceramic army. They nailed boards across the windows of the hall and the storeroom. Yunzhao held the planks. Shuohan drove the nails with the flat of an axe-head, and the sound went out across the courtyard in great flat cracks that rang off the stone.

At noon they stopped to eat. It was cold rice and the last of the pickled radish, standing, in the kitchen, with the shutters already closed and the whole room smelling of resin and damp wool. Yunzhao ate three bites and found that he could not taste any of it. His hands were stiff. His ears ached with the cold. And across the table the other man was watching him, with that steady grey look, and said nothing at all, and after a while pushed the last of the radish across.

He took it.

They had not spoken of the morning before. Of the kitchen, or the veranda, or the shadow at the wall. It lay between them, quietly, like a sleeping dog, and each of them stepped around it with the elaborate care of men who had not yet decided whether it would bite. But Yunzhao had begun to notice that Shuohan watched him now with a different quality of attention. It was not suspicious. It was something much worse. It was patient. It was the look of a man who has put a stake in the ground and is waiting.

He wished he would shout. He thought that he could have borne that.

"Come," said Shuohan. "The sky has changed."

It had. When they stepped out into the courtyard the light had gone strange, a sulphurous yellow-grey that made the snow look sick, and the wind, which had been entirely absent all morning, had begun to move. It came in thin quick breaths from the north, lifting the loose powder from the courtyard in little spirals and flinging it against the wall. The black branches of the peach tree rattled. The paper lanterns on the eaves had started to swing.

The sun was an hour from setting. It could not have been later than the fourth bell.

"The candles," said Yunzhao.

He felt Shuohan go still beside him.

"The boy has not come," he said. "It is past the hour. He is always here by the third bell with the tray, and if he is not here, then Chiyan's note is... Oh, for the love of all the gods." He turned toward the veranda, at the far corner of the courtyard, where a squat carved cabinet stood in the lee of the hall wall. "It is forty paces. Less. We can be there and back in five minutes."

"We must light them at sunset."

"Then we have an hour."

"We do not," said Shuohan. He had lifted his face to the north. His eyes were narrowed, and the muscles of his jaw were standing out like cords. "Listen."

Yunzhao listened.

It was a very faint sound at first. A deep, low, steady note, like a great cello being drawn out across the ridge, so low that he felt it in the soles of his feet before he heard it. It rose, and swelled, and then, quite suddenly, resolved into something else, a long roaring susurrus, enormous and soft, as of a thousand horses galloping across a field of silk.

The far side of the valley vanished.

It did not fade. It was simply gone, between one breath and the next, wiped out in a single white sweep, as though a hand had passed across a painted screen. A wall of snow was coming down the hill toward them. It was a quarter of a mile off. Then it was an eighth. The pines on the near ridge bent flat. The sound rose to a shriek.

"Inside," said Shuohan, and shoved him toward the door.

* * *

The storm hit the lodge like a thrown anvil.

It struck with such force that the whole building shuddered, a long groaning tremor that ran through the beams and set every pot in the kitchen ringing. Yunzhao slammed the door behind him. He had a moment of absolute darkness, with the roar of the gale like a wild beast on the other side of the wood, and then a sharp scratch and a flare as Shuohan struck a lamp.

They stood in the kitchen and looked at each other.

The walls were shaking. The shutters, barred and nailed, strained at their frames and shrieked. From somewhere above them came a dreadful tearing sound, like a sheet being ripped in two, and a small rain of dust came down from the rafters. The lamp flame ducked and recovered. Through every crack of the old stone a thin high whistle rose, and the cold came in after it in wires.

"The candle room," said Shuohan.

They ran.

The passage between the kitchen and the little chamber was twelve paces long, and by the time they reached the end of it the roar had grown so loud that Yunzhao could not hear his own breath. The door of the candle room stood open. He saw it at once. Through the lattice of the north window, which had been nailed and braced and double-latched that very morning, a long splintered gap had opened in the frame. The shutter hung from a single hinge, banging like a drunken flag. Wind poured through the break in a solid white column, flinging snow across the floor, the bed, the table.

The quilt had been caught by it. It lay in a sodden heap against the wall, soaked through, already stiffening at the edges with ice. The little hearth had been half smothered. The coals glowed dull and sullen under a crust of white, and the wind was driving the heat out of the room in great hungry gulps.

"The window," Yunzhao gasped.

"I have it."

Shuohan was already moving. He went across the floor in three strides and hit the shutter with his shoulder, and the whole frame boomed, and the hinge gave a final scream and tore out of the wall. He caught the wooden panel in both hands as it fell. It was as long as a man, and heavy, and the wind was pulling at it like a living thing. He braced his boots against the sill, and shoved, and Yunzhao saw the muscles of his back strain under the wet wool, and saw the frost go racing up his forearms in a long white fur, as though in answer to the cold.

He flung himself at the other side of the panel. Together they wedged it into the gap and held it there, boots skidding on the icy boards, shoulder against shoulder, and for a long, long minute the whole world was nothing but noise and the shaking of the wood and the sharp tang of cedar and frost.

"Nails," said Shuohan, through his teeth.

"In my pocket."

"I cannot let go."

"I know. Turn your hip."

He dug into the other man's coat. It was an absurdly intimate act, and neither of them acknowledged it. His hand went into the pocket and closed over a fistful of iron, and he pulled out a dozen cold square nails and a flat stone, and drove the first one home with the stone as a hammer. It took eleven strokes. Then the second. By the sixth nail the panel held, quivering, and the wind outside shrieked at the new barrier like a creature denied.

They stood panting. The air in the room was a grey fog of blown snow.

"The candles," said Yunzhao.

He did not have to say anything more. They both looked at the window, where the last light of the day had dwindled to a dim brown smear behind the boards. The sun was going down. They could feel it. It was a faint settling in the air, a kind of hush beneath the shrieking wind, the slow closing of a door.

The second clause. At every sunset, the bearers shall together light a pair of red candles.

The candles were in the cabinet. The cabinet was forty paces away, in the blizzard.

* * *

He never decided to go. It was one of the things about that night that he turned over most often afterward. There was no choice. There was a door, and the dark behind it, and a man with frost on his sleeves who had already moved.

"No," said Yunzhao. "Wait. We have to..."

"There is no time."

"We cannot go out in that."

"If the flame is not lit by the end of the dusk, the night is void." Shuohan was shrugging out of his coat, throwing it over his arm. "We would lose nothing, if we are lucky. We are on night twenty. We would lose twenty nights, up to the limit of seven. And the swords would wake. I will not have it." His voice was very steady and very flat. "I will be five minutes."

"You will be dead in five minutes. You cannot see your hand in front of your face."

"I know the courtyard."

"So do I!"

He was not sure which of them was more astonished by the shout. They stood face to face in the freezing dark, and the lamp guttered and went out, and in the dim brown dusk he saw a look cross the other man's face that he had never seen before. It was not anger. It was something simpler and far more terrible. It was the look of a man who has come to the end of an argument, and found there, instead of the wall he expected, a person.

"Then tie a rope," said Yunzhao, more quietly. "To the doorpost. To your waist. You do not go anywhere I cannot pull you back from."

"That is not necessity."

"It is sense. Which I have also decided to add." His hands were shaking. He found the coil of hemp on its peg by the door, the one that Chiyan used for the well, and he began to knot it around the other man's middle with fingers that would hardly bend. He did it hard. He did it badly. He pulled the last knot so tight that Shuohan grunted. "There. If you die, I will be extremely annoyed."

Shuohan looked at him.

He said nothing. But his hand came up, slowly, and closed for a moment over Yunzhao's wrist, over the cold knot of his fingers, and tightened. Then it let go.

"The other end," he said. "To you."

"What?"

"You will go to the door. You will hold the rope. If I pull twice, you pull back. If I pull once, you let it run."

He did not argue. He knew when he was beaten. But when the man stepped out through the door into the black howling dark and the rope began to pay out through his hands, a foot, a yard, three yards, he stood for exactly the space of five breaths. And then he tied the end around his own waist.

He stepped out after him.

* * *

The world was white.

It was not a color. It was a condition. It was a roaring blind howling void in which there was no up and no down and no ground beneath his feet, and the snow struck his face like handfuls of broken glass. He could not see the lodge. He could not see the courtyard. He could not see his own hands, though he held them in front of his face. He felt the rope go taut against his ribs and followed it, bent double, with his arm across his eyes, and every step was a small act of faith.

The wind knocked him down.

He went sideways, onto his shoulder, and slid. There was a terrifying moment of weightlessness, and then the rope snapped tight and brought him up short against something hard and warm that grunted. A hand fastened on his collar. A voice, shouting into his ear, so close that he felt the breath of it, and still he could hardly hear: "I said you were to hold the door!"

"You are not the only one who may be a fool!"

"Stay close!"

"I am as close as I can get!"

They went on together. It was a thing he did not, afterward, have the means to describe. They crawled. They stumbled. They clung to each other's sleeves, and the rope looped and snarled between them, and the cold went through his clothes and his skin and into the very marrow, a dull thudding ache that began in his fingers and climbed his arms and settled in his chest like a stone. He lost track of time. He lost track of direction. He kept his eyes shut and followed the sound of the man in front of him, a rough low grunt with every step, and the faint, steady, unfailing note of a sword singing at a hip.

Hanxue was lit. He could see it, even through his closed lids. A long, pale, shimmering thread of frost-light, trailing in the dark ahead of him like a lantern. It cut through the white. It drew a narrow track in the swirling storm, and he fixed his eyes on it and put one foot in front of the other.

A wall struck him in the face.

It was stone, cold and rough and real, and he nearly wept. He ran his hands along it, blind, and found a carved corner, a post, the edge of a deep wooden step. The veranda. They had crossed forty paces of open ground in a blizzard, and they had come out exactly where they meant to.

"The cabinet," said Shuohan, in his ear. "Left. Three paces."

It was where it should be. It was a squat black carved box, half buried in drift, with a brass handle gone numb with cold. He dragged it open. The door tore out of his hands and slammed against the wall, and a drift of snow slid in over the shelves. But inside, wrapped in a dry square of oiled cloth, tied with a piece of red string, lay two fat red candles, as heavy and cool as a pair of sleeping creatures.

He snatched them up. He clutched them to his chest under his coat, and put his body around them, and felt a hand close on his arm.

"Now," said Shuohan. "Back."

* * *

He did not remember the return clearly. He remembered pieces. The rope, a thin strip of iron-hard hemp. The roaring. A moment when he stopped, kneeling in the snow, and could not seem to find the will to rise. A hand on the back of his neck. A voice saying his name, over and over, harsh and urgent and furious. He remembered getting up.

They came to the door together.

They hit it with their shoulders, both at once, and it burst inward with the weight of the wind, and they fell through in a tangle of limbs and rope and snow. Shuohan was under him. He landed on a chest like a plank, and lay there with the breath knocked out of him and the candles crushed between their ribs, and the door slammed behind them with a bang that shook the walls, and the roaring stopped.

It did not stop. It was only shut out. But the silence that fell inside the passage was so complete that he thought for a moment that he had gone deaf.

He lay still.

He was aware of the floor, hard and gritty with melted snow. He was aware of the body beneath his own, warm in a way that he had not expected, the heave and fall of a broad chest, the thud of a heart as fast as a bird's. He was aware of a hand on his back. It had closed over the wet wool at his shoulder blade, hard, and was holding on.

"Are you hurt?" said Shuohan.

"No."

"Your hands."

"I cannot feel them."

"Give them to me."

He was pulled upright. His fingers were wrenched out of his sleeves and taken between two long warm palms, and he looked down and saw that they were bone-white to the wrist, curled like claws, stiff as dried fish. Shuohan was chafing them, hard, in quick brisk strokes. His own hands were not warm. They were blue at the nails, and rimed with ice. But they were moving, and the white crept back from the knuckles, and the pain, when it came, was so enormous that Yunzhao gasped aloud.

"Good," said Shuohan. "That is good. That is blood."

"It does not feel like good."

"It never does."

* * *

They lit the candles in the last of the light.

It was an absurd, shaking, desperate thing. The candle room was a ruin, the window boarded and groaning, the floor awash with slush, the hearth a heap of damp black ash. The air was so cold that his breath hung in front of him in clouds. But the table stood where it had always stood, with its two brass holders waiting, and Shuohan set the candles into them one at a time with hands that shook so badly that the first one fell over.

He set it up again. He did not say anything.

The second clause. They shall not be lit by one hand alone.

Yunzhao took the flint from the mantel. He could not close his fingers on it. It slipped, and clattered, and fell. Shuohan caught it in the air. He held it out. He did not hand it over. He held it out, on his open palm, and said, in a very low voice, "Together."

He put his own hand over the other man's.

The skin was freezing. Both of them were freezing. Their fingers were as stiff as twigs, and the stone and the steel scraped together in a series of ugly dry rasps, and the first spark fell on the wick and died. The second died. He felt the dusk slipping from the sky behind the boards like water down a drain. He felt a panic rise in his throat, tight and sour.

Then a large calloused thumb pressed down gently over his, and held, and steadied, and the third spark caught.

It took. A tiny blue bead of fire appeared on the wick, trembled, spread, and stood up gold. He touched the flame to the second candle. It lit with a soft, pleased sound, like a sigh. And the two flames rose side by side, tall and clear, and the little ruined room filled with a warm rosy light that gilded the wet floor and the broken window and the two white faces bent over the table.

The last bead on the wall, the twentieth, glowed for an instant like a coal.

Neither of them said a word.

He was shivering now. He had not noticed it begin. It started at his knees and traveled up through his spine until his teeth were chattering and his whole body shook like a leaf, great wracking shudders that he could not stop. He stood staring at the flames and felt himself falling apart, a seam at a time. And something heavy and warm settled across his shoulders.

It was a coat. It was the wet, dark, heavy coat of Hanjian blue, soaked with snow, and it had been wrapped around him from behind with a care that was almost clumsy, the collar turned up around his ears, the front pulled closed under his chin. Two hands lingered at his lapels. Then they were gone.

"You will freeze," said Yunzhao, through chattering teeth. "You are in your shirt."

"I am used to it."

"That is not the point."

"It is exactly the point." Shuohan's voice was tired and rough and oddly gentle. He was standing very close. He did not move away. "Take it. You went out into the dark after a rope that I tied badly. It is the very least that I can do."

"You tied it very well."

"You tied it to yourself."

"I did."

"Why?"

It was a plain question. Yunzhao opened his mouth, and found that he did not have a lie ready. For the first time in nearly twenty years, there was nothing on the shelf. He stood with his hands bunched in the heavy wet wool, looking up into a pair of clear grey eyes that were very close and very dark, and said, slowly, because it was true, "Because I did not want you to go alone."

The silence that followed was long.

Shuohan did not answer. But his gaze moved over Yunzhao's face with a slow, strange, searching tenderness, as though he were learning it by touch. His throat moved. He opened his mouth, and shut it. And then, instead of speaking, he reached up with one stiff blue hand and brushed a snowflake out of Yunzhao's hair, so lightly that he hardly felt it.

The frost came then.

It came all at once, with a great ringing note from the sword at the other man's hip. It burst from the blade in a pale blinding wave and rolled out across the floor, across the walls, the table, the bed, and where it passed the slush froze with a crackle like breaking glass. The air stung. A fine white fur sprang up on the beams. The candle flames shrank down to the size of a thumbnail, and leaned, and wavered.

"Shuohan," said Yunzhao, sharply.

"I know." The man's face had gone grey. "I cannot stop it. It is the cold. It is the..."

Taoying sang.

It rang out from the sheath at Yunzhao's side like a struck bell, and a flood of translucent petals poured out into the room, hundreds of them, pink and gold and white, whirling up from the blade in a great glittering spiral. They met the frost in the center of the floor. They did not fight it. They folded into it, soft as breath, and where they touched, the rime blurred and softened and ran. A warm wind went through the little room. The ice melted into a thin bright film of water, and the water steamed, and the candle flames stood up straight again.

It was very quiet.

The petals drifted down. They settled on the floor, on the table, on the shoulders of the two men, and lay there like snow that had decided to be spring.

"Thank you," said Shuohan, very low.

"It is not me. It is the sword."

"I know whose sword it is."

He was looking at Yunzhao with a look that was almost anguish. And Yunzhao, wrapped in a stranger's coat in the middle of a ruined room, with petals in his hair and a lie still lodged beneath his ribs, felt his heart do something enormous and painful and entirely beyond his control.

* * *

It was Shuohan who found the coal.

He went to the hearth to build up the fire, because it was the only practical thing left to do, and Yunzhao heard him stop. He heard a long, quiet, careful silence. And then the man said, in a voice that was so carefully neutral that it was almost a joke, "The bin is empty."

"It cannot be. We filled it this morning."

"The wind came through the window. The snow came in on the coal. It has all gone to water." He lifted a handful of black sludge and let it fall. "There is nothing here that will burn."

Yunzhao stared at him. And then, slowly, helplessly, he began to laugh. It was an odd, hiccuping, exhausted sound, half sob and half hysteria, and he sank down on the edge of the bed, with the heavy blue coat wrapped around him and the petals falling from his hair, and put his face in his hands.

"Of course," he said. "Of course it has. Naturally. What else would it do?"

"There is wood in the kitchen."

"Under a roof that is, if I do not mistake it, no longer attached to the wall."

"There is the stable."

"Which is forty paces away, in the dark, in a blizzard. No. No. I will not go out there again. I have lost all sensation in my feet and I should like to die with them." He lifted his head. His eyes were bright and wet. "What is dry? What do we have? Tell me. What is left?"

Shuohan looked around the room.

He looked at the sodden quilt, a heap of ice on the floor. He looked at the cloak, which hung from its peg by the window, soaked to the hem. He looked at the red robe, folded against the wall, damp at the edges. He looked at the bed, the straw mattress, the pillow with its blue linen case.

He went to the chest at the foot of the bed. He knelt. He lifted the lid, and rummaged, and drew out a single folded blanket, a thick grey wool one, a little moth-eaten at one corner, smelling of cedar and camphor and years. He held it up. It was perfectly dry.

He shook it out.

It was a very small blanket. It was barely wide enough for one man.

The wind howled. Somewhere above them a beam creaked, long and slow, like a ship in a swell. The candles burned, steady and gold, and the petals went on falling, one by one, through the warm still air.

They looked at the blanket.

They looked at each other.

And neither of them, for a very long time, said a single word.