The storm took two more days to die, and when it was finally gone it left behind a silence so bright that Shuohan woke on the twenty-third morning with his eyes already watering.

He lay for a moment on the floor, on the red robe, where he had gone back on the second night without a word from either of them. The lodge was quiet. Light came through the mended window in a clean gold slab and lay across the planks, and the air held no rime at all. He could hear water. It was the dripping of a thaw, a slow steady ticking from the eaves, as though the whole roof were counting.

The silent boy had come on the second day, wading through drifts to the thigh, with a sled of coal and a pot of glue and a face of immense solemnity. He had mended the window frame without speaking. He had set out a fresh tray of candles on the veranda cabinet. When Shuohan thanked him he had turned very red and fled, and Yunzhao had said that it was the first time he had ever seen the boy run, and that he suspected that Chiyan had told him what we were. Neither of them had pursued the point.

Chiyan himself had not returned. A note had arrived, tied to the boy's belt, saying that Lanxi was buried to the rooftops and that he was perfectly comfortable and was in fact teaching a baker to play chess. Be good, it said. Be warm. I am told that is the usual order.

Shuohan got up. He folded the robe. He went to the door to look at the day, and he opened it, and stopped.

The courtyard was white. It lay under a skin of new snow, unmarked and glittering, rolling in long clean waves to the wall. The sky above it was a deep, rinsed blue. And in the middle of it, beside the well, stood the old peach tree.

It was in bloom.

He did not understand it at first. He thought that it was frost, or sun on a rime of ice, some trick of the light on bare branches. Then the wind moved, and a breath of fragrance came across the snow, sweet and green and impossibly warm, and he saw that every twig was crowded with flowers. Thousands of them. They covered the black boughs in a great pink cloud, soft as breath, heavy with snow, and the snow lay on them in small white caps and slid off in glittering sprays when the wind passed. A drift of petals lay beneath the tree. They were pink on white, scattered across the courtyard like a spill of wine.

It was the dead of winter.

"Ah," said a voice at his shoulder. "So that is what it was."

He did not turn. He had known who it was by the sound of the step, light and unhurried and slightly out of rhythm. Yunzhao came and stood beside him in the doorway, wrapped in the blue quilt, with his hair in a wild tangle and his face still creased from the pillow. He was gazing at the tree with an expression of such open wonder that Shuohan had to look away.

"It was a bud," said Yunzhao. "All this time. I looked at it every day. I was sure it was dead."

"It was not dead."

"No." A pause. "It was only waiting for the cold to be over."

He said it lightly. But there was something at the edge of the words, like a thread of silk caught on a nail, and neither of them touched it.

* * *

He went out to look at it, and Shuohan went after him, because there was nothing else to do.

The snow squeaked under their boots. The air was cold, but it was the clean cold of a clear morning, with nothing in it of the knife. Overhead the blossoms moved and shifted, and light poured through them in rosy shafts, and beneath the old black trunk the ground was thick with petals. Yunzhao walked into them up to the ankle, with the quilt trailing behind him like a cloak, and stopped at the foot of the tree with his head tipped back.

He looked, Shuohan thought, like a man who had been given something he did not know how to hold.

"May I?" said Yunzhao.

"It is not mine."

"I know. But you have the look of a man who might object."

He reached up and broke a branch. It was a slender one, no longer than his forearm, with seven or eight blossoms crowded along it and a few fat buds still tightly shut at the tip. It came away with a small dry snap, and a shower of snow fell from it onto his hair. He stood a moment with the cold shining on his lashes, holding it in both hands, and then he turned and went in through the veranda door.

Shuohan followed.

He found him in the candle room, standing on the bed in his stocking feet, reaching up to the lintel of the door. He had taken a length of the red cord that had bound the candles. He was knotting it around the branch with quick careful fingers, and he hung it, with some difficulty, from a nail in the wood, where it swung gently and filled the room with a scent like the first hour of spring.

"There," said Yunzhao, stepping down. "It will not last. In three days it will be brown. But I wanted to see it hang there once."

"Why?"

"I do not know." He tilted his head, considering it. "I think I wanted something to be allowed to bloom in this room."

Shuohan stood in the doorway and looked at the branch.

It hung against the grey lintel, small and pink and absurdly bright. Beneath it, on the sill of the window, still lay the flower that Yunzhao had found twelve days ago, dried now, pressed flat against the wood like a thing in a book. He had not moved it. Neither had Shuohan. They had both walked around it every day.

He thought of a lacquered box on a shelf in a cold room, and a petal on white silk.

"I have something for you," he said.

* * *

He had not known he was going to do it. He had carried the little packet in the bottom of the basket for nine days, among the wicks, and had told himself every night that he would find a reason. It was a stupid thing. It was a stick of wood. He had bought it from an old man who had called Yunzhao his wife, in a moment of weakness, in a market full of drums, and it was a ridiculous object for a man of Hanjian to be carrying about.

He took it out. The scrap of paper was crumpled. He held it out in his open hand, and did not look at the face above it, and said to the floor, "It is not for the candles."

There was a silence. Then he heard the paper unfold.

He forced himself to look up.

Yunzhao held the pin between two fingers, in the light of the open door. It was a slim thing, pale pink, with the faint watered grain of peach wood, and at its head a single blossom was cut so fine that every petal seemed to tremble. He turned it. The light slid down its length. His face was entirely without expression, and then it was not, and Shuohan watched a great many things cross it in quick succession and be put away.

"The wicks," said Yunzhao, quite unsteadily.

"Yes."

"The fine wicks. That you were counting."

"I was lying." He said it flatly, because it was true, and because the rule was still on the wall. "I saw it, and I thought of your hair. You tie it back with strips of cloth. You have been doing it since we came. I thought, he ought to have something that is not a torn hem."

There was a long, long pause.

"You noticed that," said Yunzhao.

"I notice a great many things."

"Do you?" The voice was very low. "I have been wondering."

He lifted the pin. He lifted both hands, and gathered the loose dark hair at the back of his head, a heavy rope of it, and twisted it up into a knot, and fixed it there with the pin. It took him two tries. When it was done a few loose strands lay against his neck, and the little peach blossom stood out above his ear like a drop of color on a brush.

He turned his head. "Well?"

Shuohan could not answer.

He was looking at the line of the throat, the small hollow beneath the ear, the pulse that beat there a little fast. The light from the window lay across the cheek and the corner of the mouth. He could have said a great many things. He had never in his life had the words for any of them.

"It suits you," he said.

It was such a small, such an inadequate thing. But the face before him did something he had not seen it do. It did not smile. It simply opened, the whole of it, like a door going back on its hinges, and what lay behind was so young and so astonished and so unguarded that Shuohan felt the breath go out of his chest.

* * *

We do not touch except when necessity requires it.

He thought of the rule. It was on the wall behind Yunzhao's shoulder, in a square black hand, a line like a fence. He had written it himself. He had been so sure.

"I no longer hate peach blossoms," he said.

It came out of him without warning. He heard it as one hears a stranger speak in the next room. "I wished to say it. For six years I have hated them. I kept a petal in a box so that I would not forget what I hated. And I was in this room one morning, and it was in my hand, and I could not remember why."

Yunzhao stared at him.

"That is a very strange thing to say to a man," he said faintly.

"It is true."

"I know that it is." He laughed. It was a thin cracked sound, and he put his hand over his mouth as though to catch it. "I am sorry. You have said something grave, and I am being a fool. It is only that I had a joke ready. I had several. And I cannot find a single one." He took a step back. "I think I had better go and see about the kettle."

He turned.

Shuohan's hand closed on his wrist.

He had not decided it. It was the oldest instinct he had, the one that had put him between a boy and a drawn sword on the bank of a stream, the one that had lunged for a failing flame. He had reached out and caught the thing that was going, and now he stood holding it, a slender wrist, warm and fine-boned, with a pulse leaping under his thumb like a trapped bird.

Yunzhao did not pull away.

He stood quite still with his back half turned and his face averted, and a long moment went by. The branch above the door swayed. A single petal came loose and floated down between them in the gold light.

"Shuohan," said Yunzhao, to the wall.

"Yes."

"You are holding my wrist."

"I know."

"It is not in the terms."

"No."

"Is it necessity?"

He thought about it honestly. He had never been able to do otherwise. He thought of the fastenings of his own rules, and the long narrow road of the last twenty-three days, and the face of a man who had put his body in front of a drawn blade, and a flame, and a storm, and had not once been asked to.

"No," he said. "It is not."

Yunzhao turned around.

* * *

He was very close. They were both very close. Somewhere in the last few moments the distance between them had diminished without either of them taking a step, and now Yunzhao stood so near that Shuohan could see the individual lashes on his cheek, and the faint scar through the left brow, and a tiny grain of sugar still caught at the edge of his mouth from some forgotten breakfast. His eyes were enormous. They were not guarded. They were the color of strong tea held up against a window, and there was a thing in them that was very like fear.

"If you kiss me," said Yunzhao, in a whisper, "I will not smile."

The words went through him like a struck bell.

He did not answer. He could not. He lifted his free hand, slowly, as one lifts a hand toward a bird that has landed on a sill, and laid it against the side of the other man's face. The skin was warm under his palm. It was so warm. A faint tremor ran through it, and was still.

He thought: I am frightened.

He thought: I do not care.

He bent his head.

It was not like anything he had imagined, in the few unguarded hours when he had allowed himself to imagine it. It was slow. It was shy, almost, a touch no firmer than a breath, a bare pressure of lips against lips that tasted faintly of tea and of cold air. It lasted no longer than a heartbeat. He drew back an inch to look, and saw that the dark eyes had closed, and that there was a faint line between the brows, as of a man in pain.

He kissed him again.

This time the hand that he held turned in his grip. Long fingers slid between his own and closed. The other hand came up, uncertain, and lay flat against the front of his robe, over his heart, and he knew that it could feel how fast it was going. The kiss deepened by a degree. It was careful, and trembling, and quite without art. It was the kiss of two men who had spent their lives learning to hold things at arm's length, and who had forgotten, for a moment, how to do it.

And Hanxue sang.

He heard it from a long way off. A low, pure, ringing note, not the high keen of the frost but something rounder, deeper, almost like a voice. It came from the stand beside the table, where the sword lay in its sheath, and it filled the room like a held breath let go. He felt the cold that had lived in his left hand for three months, the dull white ache at the base of the bone, give way. It did not vanish. It simply changed. It loosened, and spread, and went soft, as ice goes soft in the first hour of the thaw, and what lay under it was not emptiness. It was warmth. It poured up his arm like honey, through his chest and his throat and into the hand that lay against Yunzhao's cheek, and he felt, as clearly as he felt his own pulse, the frost on the blade across the room melt, and run, and fall in bright drops to the floor.

On the lintel, above their heads, the branch of peach blossom shook out all its buds at once.

* * *

It was the petals that broke it.

They came down like a gentle rain. Dozens of them, then hundreds, drifting from the branch and from the air and from the blade at Yunzhao's side, soft pink and white against the gold. They settled in his hair. They settled on Shuohan's sleeve. One of them lit on the tip of his nose, and he felt it there, as light as a thought.

Yunzhao opened his eyes.

He saw it all in a single glance. The hand on his face. The room full of falling flowers. The frost running from the sword in a hundred small bright rivers. And the look on the face before him, which was naked, and shy, and so tender that it hurt to see, the look of a man who has put down something he has carried all his life and is waiting, with his hands open, to be told that he has not made a mistake.

A key lay against his forearm.

It was warm. It had always been warm. It lay in the lining of his sleeve, a small flat shape, and he felt it as one feels a stone in a shoe, sharp and specific and undeniable. It had a hammer on it, and an anvil, and three small flames. It said: you have not told him. It said: you are standing in his arms, and you are a thief.

He took one step backward.

It was a very small movement. But Shuohan's hand fell away from his face as if it had been struck, and the warmth went out of the air with a sound that was almost audible. The petals fell. The note of the sword died. And Yunzhao, standing in a ruin of pink blossoms with the taste of another man's mouth still on his own, felt the old thing rise in him from somewhere very deep, as automatic as breath.

The smile came.

It came smoothly, and beautifully, and without a flaw. He felt it settle over his face like a hand drawing a curtain, the lift of the cheek, the crease at the eye, the warm perfect curve of the mouth. It was the best he had ever worn. He heard himself say, in a voice as light as a bell:

"Well. That was unexpected."

Shuohan did not move.

He stood quite still, in the middle of the room, with his hand still half raised and a pink petal on his shoulder. All the light had gone out of his face. It was not that it had changed. It was that it had been closed, quietly, in a single instant, like a book, and what remained was the stern cool mask of the Ice Swordsman of Hanjian Peak, as clear and hard and distant as a mountain.

"I think," said Yunzhao, brightly, "that we have both had a trying few days. The storm, and the cold. Nerves. One does strange things, when one has been shut up in a small room, and frightened, and has not eaten properly. I should not like you to think..." He stopped. The words came very smoothly. He could not seem to stop them. "Let us forget it. It was nothing. Let us forget that it happened."

There was a silence.

It was a very long one. Outside, the old peach tree shook down a little weight of snow, and it fell with a soft thump. A drop of water ran from the eaves. On the wall, the cord of beads hung quiet, twenty-two white and seventy-eight red, and beside it, in two hands, the crooked treaty said, in small square letters, that there would be no false smiles. Not to me.

Shuohan looked at it.

He looked at the paper for a long time. Then he looked at the face before him, which was smiling at him, warmly, and wrongly, and with enormous care.

"Forget it," he said.

He said it in a perfectly even voice. He did not raise his eyes. He bent, and picked up Hanxue from its stand, and settled it at his hip, and his thumb found the hilt and moved along it once, slowly, back and forth. Then he walked past Yunzhao, very straight, and out of the room, and did not close the door behind him.

The peach branch swayed in the draft. The last of its flowers let go, and fell.

Yunzhao stood in the candle room, in the falling petals, with a pin of peach wood in his hair and a smile on his face that no one was left to see. He stood there until the sound of footsteps had died away across the courtyard. Then he put his hand over his mouth, and the smile went out of it like a lamp, and he sank down onto the edge of the bed and sat there, quite alone, with the key burning against his arm.