Shuohan hated the color red.

He had not known it until the robe was laid across his arms by two silent Lodge servants an hour before sunset. It was a beautiful garment. Heavy crimson silk, embroidered across the shoulders and down the sleeves in gold thread, with panels of deep blue let into the sides as a courtesy to Hanjian, and a belt of black lacquer set with small dark jewels. A whole workshop had gone into it. But it was red, so red that it seemed to hum against his eyes, and when he held it up in the grey light of the guest room he could not stop seeing the snow beneath the plum trees and the dark stain that had spread, years ago, from his own sleeve when he cut his hand lifting his master.

He had not remembered that either, until now.

He dressed in silence behind a painted screen. The silk was cool, and then not. The belt cinched tight. A servant, very young, pinned his hair back with the silver pin and then, trembling, stood back as though expecting to be struck.

"It is well done," Shuohan said.

The boy bowed so low his forehead nearly touched his knees, and fled.

He stood a moment alone in the little room, with the frost already crawling up the legs of the table where he had set his hand, and he looked at himself in the polished bronze by the door. A tall man in a red robe. Dark hair, dark brows, grey eyes. The face of a stranger being sold to the highest bidder.

"Be still," he said to it, and it was.

* * *

Yunzhao had been dressed for twenty minutes and had spent nineteen of them fussing.

It was ridiculous. He had been dressed for a hundred occasions. He had worn mourning white and festival gold, and once, on a dare, an entire costume of green feathers that he did not like to think about. But he stood now in the center of the long hall that Chiyan had given over to the guests' preparations, with a pair of attendants kneeling at his hem, and he could not keep his hands still.

The robe was the right red, a warm red, a color of lanterns and of the inside of a peach. White silk shot through the sleeves and the lining, and pale blue at the cuffs, which was Qingyun's color, and a dozen small gold cranes stitched along the collar. A single red jade drop hung from his left ear. The attendant who had pierced it for him, years ago, now stood back and sighed over the effect.

"You look like a bridegroom in a painting," said the old woman who held his sash. She was a servant of the Lodge, bent as a question, with hands as dry as paper. "A very handsome one."

"A terrified one," said Yunzhao, in a tone that made her laugh.

He was not terrified. He was a man with a sword at his hip, a key in his sleeve, and a very clear idea of what he was about to do. There was nothing to fear. But there was a drum in his chest that would not be reasoned with, and under the drum, the thing that had been trying to rise in him since the previous evening, since the long table and the humming blades and the sight of Ling Shuohan's face when he said the word master.

He had not expected to see grief on it. That was the trouble. He had been prepared for contempt. He had come with all the tools for dealing with contempt. He had not come with anything for the man who stood at the head of a table with his hands shaking and said, in a voice like a cracked bell, that it was a very convenient sorrow.

He took a long breath, and put the smile on.

It came easily. It always did. He felt the warm familiar mask settle on his face, bright and sharp and impeccable, and for a moment the drum in his chest slowed, and the room returned to a comfortable distance.

"Ready," he said, and stepped out.

* * *

The hall of the ceremony was the long hall itself, stripped of its table, hung with red silk, and lit by forty lanterns. Shuohan saw it all at once when the doors opened, and for the first time in his life he wished to turn around and walk away.

Two lines of witnesses stood along the walls. On the left, in deep blue with gold at the collars, stood Elder Lu and Elder Shen and Elder Qu, and behind them a row of Hanjian disciples with their hands tucked into their sleeves and their faces shut like doors. On the right, in white and pale blue, Elder Fen sat in a chair that had been brought for her, ramrod straight, with two other Qingyun elders behind her and a dozen young disciples at their backs. The gap between the two lines was exactly seven paces wide. It had been measured, Shuohan suspected.

No one spoke. A thin ghost of incense drifted from the brazier in the corner. The only sound was the flame of forty lanterns, and under it, a long cold hush of snow against the shutters.

He walked to the center of the floor. The boards were warm beneath his boots, too warm. At the far end of the hall, on a low table draped in red silk, stood the two ceremonial candles in their brass holders, thick and tall and unlit. Behind them, in the lamplight, with his arms folded and a stole of gold cloth around his shoulders, waited Gu Chiyan. He caught Shuohan's eye and gave the smallest nod in the world.

Then the opposite doors opened, and Yunzhao came in.

Shuohan had not intended to look. He had promised himself on the way across the courtyard that he would look at the candles, and at nothing else, for the whole of the rite. But the room went quiet in a certain way, and he turned his head before he could stop it.

The man came across the floor in a red robe with white at the sleeves, long dark hair loose over his shoulders, a drop of red jade swinging at his ear. He was smiling. It was a magnificent smile, easy and radiant and perfectly timed, the smile of a man walking into a feast. The Qingyun disciples straightened a little as he passed, and one of the young women at the back lifted a hand to her mouth. Even the Hanjian line stirred, grudgingly, as if a breeze had passed over it.

Shuohan watched him cross the seven paces, and thought: he is acting.

It was not an insight. Anyone who had watched the man for ten minutes would have seen it. But Shuohan had watched him for a day and a half, across a table and across a courtyard, and he knew now how the real smile differed from this one. The real one came slowly and unwillingly, and went crooked at one side, and had never once reached the eyes without costing him something. This one reached the eyes and cost nothing. It was a very good piece of work.

It made his chest ache in a way that annoyed him.

"You are early," Yunzhao murmured, as he took his place a pace and a half away.

"The sun is not yet down."

"Then we have time to run."

He said it with the smile still firmly in place, and for a second Shuohan could not tell whether he was joking. Then he saw the thin, fast pulse in the side of the man's throat, and understood that he was not. He did not answer. But he turned, very slightly, so that his shoulder blocked the line of sight between Yunzhao and the Hanjian elders, and he was aware, without looking, of the man beside him taking a very small, very quiet breath.

"Honored guests," said Chiyan, in a voice that carried to the rafters. "Honored elders, honored kin. We gather at the turning of the day to witness a binding that is older than any of us and wiser than all of us together. Before the candles, before the swords, before the sun, let the bearers come forward."

They went forward.

The table stood at the end of seven more paces, and when they reached it Shuohan saw that the candles were already lit. He had not seen it done. Two flames stood in the lamplight, tall and clear and steady, with a faint golden halo around each, and they leaned a little toward one another, as flames do when two people stand close.

"The first bow," said Chiyan, "to heaven."

They bowed. Shuohan felt the silk of his sleeve shift. He felt the cold touch of the air on the back of his neck, and the warmth of the flame on his face, and the faint bright presence of the other man at his shoulder.

"The second bow, to the ones who are gone."

This time he did not bow cleanly. The words went through him like a blade, and something in his chest caught and held. He lowered his forehead until it nearly touched the cold floor, and thought, I am sorry, Shifu. I am sorry, I am sorry. Then, because it was simple and ugly and true, he thought: I did not choose this either.

He straightened. Beside him, a half-second behind, Yunzhao rose. The smile had slipped. Only by a hair, only for the space of a single breath, but Shuohan saw it, and saw what lay beneath it. A narrow, bloodless face, wet at the lashes, looking at the flame with the open, bewildered stillness of someone who has stepped on a stair that was not there.

His hand was trembling.

It hung at his side, half hidden in the fold of the red sleeve, and the fingers were jumping very slightly, a fine fast tremor like the beat of a moth's wing. He seemed not to know it. His eyes were on the candles.

And Shuohan thought, with a feeling he could not name, that he had seen that tremor before, in a frozen yard on a bright morning, in his own left hand.

Hanxue, at his hip, began to sing.

The frost came without warning. It leapt from the sheath, ran up the lacquer of his belt, and spread across the back of his hand like a spill of milk. He felt it climb to the wrist, felt the old cold at the bone, and he clenched his jaw and thought, no, not now, not here, in front of them all. But it was no use. White ferns bloomed across his knuckles, and the crystalline fur of it brushed against the silk of his sleeve, and a thin chill spread out from him across the floor. A ripple of unease went down the Qingyun line. One of the elders, Shuohan saw, had half risen from her seat.

"Steady," said Chiyan, softly, without moving his lips.

Shuohan could not. The tide had turned. He could feel Hanxue pulling at him, pulling, a thin cold hunger at the base of his spine, and he thought of his master in the snow, and of the way the old man's lips had been blue.

Then a hand closed over his.

It was not a gentle hand. It was a quick, hard grip, long fingers wrapped around his knuckles in front of the whole hall. And it was warm. Very warm. Yunzhao's palm was damp with sweat and still shaking, but it was warm, and the frost where it touched the skin hissed faintly and slid away in threads of mist.

"The third bow," said Chiyan, with remarkable composure, "and the cup."

* * *

He had not meant to do it.

It had been instinct, pure and unthinking. He had seen the frost go up Shuohan's arm and the elders begin to turn their heads, and he had felt, with a clarity that surprised him, a kind of horror. Not at the curse. At the audience. At all those watching eyes. He knew exactly what it was to stand alone in front of a roomful of people and feel something rise in you that you could not hide.

So he had caught the man's hand, and it was freezing.

It was like holding a stone from the bottom of a river. The cold bit at the skin of his palm, and he felt the frost crawl toward his wrist, and he thought with great calm that he had made a mistake. His own hand was still trembling, and the contact only made it worse, a rattling vibration that ran from his knuckles to his teeth.

But the frost did not climb. It touched his fingers and stopped, and then it began, quite slowly, to melt.

He stared at their joined hands.

A thin white steam rose between his fingers and Shuohan's. Fine as breath. It curled up into the lantern light and vanished, and the frost on the back of that large pale hand was shrinking, shrinking, withdrawing toward the wrist. He felt the cold ebb out of the other man's palm by degrees. Beneath it, he thought, with a strange lurch, was warmth, very faint, like a banked coal.

He looked up.

Shuohan was looking at him. Not at the hand, not at the candles. At him. The grey eyes were wide and dark, and the controlled calm had fallen out of them entirely. They were the eyes of a man who has been struck by something he did not see coming and does not know yet whether it will hurt.

Neither of them moved.

"The cup," said Chiyan, very gently, and put it into their hands.

It was a small cup of red lacquer, tied with a long silk thread to a twin. They were meant to drink from one and then the other, with their arms crooked, the way couples did in ordinary ceremonies in ordinary houses. Yunzhao had seen it done a dozen times. He had never imagined it. He took his cup. Shuohan took his. The thread between them drew taut.

They crooked their arms.

It brought them very close. He could smell the cold on the other man, snow and iron and a thread of cedar from the guest room. He could see the fine dark line of his lashes, and a small scar that ran through the left eyebrow, and the place on his throat where the pulse beat a little too fast. The wine was warm and sweet and far too strong. It went to his head at once, or something did.

"Do not spill it," Shuohan muttered, so low that no one else could have heard.

"I never spill anything," Yunzhao breathed.

"You are shaking."

"So are you."

They drank. They turned the cups and drank again. And the moment the second swallow went down, the candles flared.

Both flames leapt, tall and white, nearly to the height of a man's head, and a great rush of wind went through the hall, sourceless and silent, setting every lantern swinging and every robe snapping. The shutters rattled. Someone cried out in the Qingyun line. And Yunzhao felt, from the sword at his side, a hot bright answering pulse, as if something had woken in it, and saw with horror that the nearer flame was bending. Not toward the other. Away. Leaning like a reed in a gale, thinning, guttering, a thread of smoke curling from its tip.

It was going out.

On the very first night. In front of every witness. He saw it as clearly as a figure on a page: the flame failing, the elders rising, the curse waking in the steel, and himself, once again, the one who had been sent and was not enough.

His hand tightened convulsively on the other man's.

* * *

Shuohan did not let go.

He understood afterward that he had never decided to hold on. There had been no moment of choice. There was the failing candle, and the pale fear on the other man's face, and the cold, clear knowledge that if he drew back now, the thread between them would slacken and the flame would die. And there was a hand locked around his own, fingers biting into his knuckles, clutching at him as though he were the only fixed thing in a spinning room.

He turned his own palm, and closed it.

They stood there in the roaring, silent wind, with their arms hooked and their hands fastened, and he did not look at the elders, or the witnesses, or the flame. He looked at the man in front of him. The man was staring at the candle with an expression of pure naked terror, and it came to Shuohan that this was the first true thing he had ever seen on that face, and that it was a shame it had to be this one.

"Look at me," he said.

Yunzhao looked.

"It will not go out," said Shuohan. "I will not allow it."

It was absurd. It was the kind of thing a child said. He had no authority over a candle, no power to command a flame. But he said it with all the weight of a man who had never in his life made a promise he did not keep, and he saw it land. He saw the wide brown eyes steady. He saw the breath go out of the man's chest, and then come in again, slow, and deep.

The wind faltered.

The flame shuddered. It bent, as if considering. And then, slowly, in a long uncurling motion like a hand opening, it rose. It straightened. It steadied into a tall bright thread of gold, leaning gently toward the second flame, and the second flame leaned toward it, and the two met above the table and braided into one.

The hall let out its breath.

"The vow," Chiyan said, and his voice shook very slightly, "is sealed."

The elders were rising now, murmuring, and the Qingyun disciples had begun to clap, awkwardly, and then stopped when no one else did. Elder Fen's face was a mask. Elder Lu's was something much worse. He stood motionless at the head of the Hanjian line, and he was looking at Shuohan's hand, and at the hand holding it, with an expression Shuohan could not bear to read.

He let go.

It took a conscious effort. His fingers had locked, and he had to straighten them one by one. He took a step back and the thread of silk between the cups stretched and went slack. His palm felt strange, bare and sudden, like a shorn thing.

"Honored guests," said Chiyan, stepping forward, and the buzz of the hall rose to cover him. "Honored elders, the bearers will now retire to the candle room, where they will begin the first of the hundred nights. Refreshment is laid in the east hall. I ask you all to leave them in peace."

They went out, slowly, in clots and whispers. A young Hanjian disciple looked back from the door with a face like a closed fist. A Qingyun girl was crying quietly and trying not to be seen. Elder Fen went last, supported by two attendants, and she paused on the threshold and looked back at Yunzhao for a long moment, and said nothing at all.

Then the doors closed.

* * *

The candle room was small.

Yunzhao had known it would be. He had seen the plan, drawn on a scrap of yellowed paper in the Pavilion's own records. But knowing was one thing, and standing in the doorway with the red silk sleeves of his robe still stiff with perfume was another. It was a square room with a low ceiling, plain plaster walls, a single window with a lattice screen. A table stood against the far wall with a long red cloth on it, and the two ceremonial candles, carried here with great care by the attendants, burned on it in their brass holders. One narrow bed, with a quilt. A hearth, banked low. Two cushions on the floor. Nothing else.

There was no door to another room. There was only the one they had come in by.

He shut it behind him, softly, and stood with his back against it.

Shuohan was already inside. He stood in the center of the floor with his arms at his sides and his head bowed slightly, looking at the candles. The red robe made him look larger, somehow, and more remote, as though he had been cut from a different cloth than the world around him. The lantern light picked out the gold at his shoulders. His hair, loosened a little from the pin by the wind in the hall, lay along his cheek.

There was a long silence. Somewhere beyond the walls, faintly, the guests were being fed.

"Your hand," said Yunzhao.

Shuohan turned his head slightly.

"Is it all right?"

"It is well." His voice was a little rough. He held up the hand in question and examined it, and Yunzhao saw that the frost had not entirely gone. A thin lace of white still clung between the knuckles and ran up the inside of the wrist in a fine delicate pattern, like breath on a window. "It will pass."

"It was bad."

"It was a thing that happens."

"In front of the elders."

"They have seen it," said Shuohan. "They know."

He did not say anything more. But he did not turn away, and Yunzhao, who had been braced for an hour for the cold shutting of a door, found that he did not know what to do with a man who simply stood and looked at his own ruined hand and let it be seen.

He came across the room without quite deciding to.

"Give it here," he said.

"I do not..."

"I am not going to bite it."

Shuohan hesitated for a very long moment. Then, with an air of enormous reluctance, he held out his hand.

Yunzhao took it in both of his own. The skin was cold again, though less than before, and the frost lace fretted against his fingertips. He turned the hand over, and ran his thumb slowly down the length of the palm, and watched the pattern retreat under the heat of his skin. It melted in tiny crystals, one after the other, and a faint damp stood where it had been.

"Your hands are cold," he said.

"Yours are not warm," said Shuohan.

It was only half true. His own palms were damp and hot, and the right one was still trembling a little, the fine fast tremor he could not seem to stop. But he understood what the man meant. There was a kind of cold that had nothing to do with temperature. He had it. He had had it for a very long time.

He looked up, and found Shuohan watching him.

They were very close. Closer than at the table. Closer, even, than in the hall. The candles threw a warm light across the side of Shuohan's face, and in that light his eyes were no longer the grey of a winter lake, but something deeper and softer, almost the color of smoke. He looked tired. He looked younger than he had that morning. Yunzhao thought of the line of dark thread running down the blade, and of the tremor in this man's left hand, and of an old man he had once watched forget how to hold a cup.

He thought: we are going to die of this. Both of us. If I do nothing, and he does nothing, and no one finds out what happened.

He thought: I will find out.

And then, treacherously, from some place he had no key for: and I would like him to live.

He let go of the hand.

"Well," he said, and the smile came back on, a little crooked this time, a little worn. "That went better than I expected."

"We nearly lost the flame."

"Nearly is a fine word. It means we did not."

"Because you caught my hand."

"Because you would not let it go." Yunzhao shrugged, light and easy, and turned toward the bed with elaborate unconcern. "We will say it was teamwork, and never mention it again. I am an excellent liar, and you are a terrible one, and between us I think we can manage a hundred nights of mutual silence on the subject."

He heard nothing behind him. When he glanced back, Shuohan was standing exactly where he had been, with his hand slightly raised, looking at the palm where the frost had been. He seemed to be thinking about something very hard.

"I did not say that to be kind," said Shuohan at last.

"Say what?"

"In the hall. That I would not allow it."

"I know."

"It was a vow."

"I know that too." Yunzhao pulled off the red outer robe, and laid it over the foot of the bed, and stood in his white under-robe with his hair falling forward, feeling suddenly very much like a man who had come in out of a storm and was not sure whether the house he had reached was friend or foe. "I heard it. I would be a fool not to. I am merely saying that I will not hold you to it, because I am not accustomed to being held to things."

"I am accustomed," said Shuohan.

It was said very simply. It was not a threat, or a boast. It was a fact, like the weather. And Yunzhao, who made a living reading faces and had never in his life been at a loss for a reply, found that he could not think of one.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and looked at his hands, and said nothing at all.

The candles burned on the table, steady and bright. The night had not yet begun, and ninety-nine more stretched ahead of them like a road into snow.

* * *

Shuohan did not undress.

He sat down on one of the floor cushions with his back to the wall and Hanxue laid across his knees, as the fourth clause required, and watched the flame. Across the room, Yunzhao had stretched himself out on top of the quilt with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, ostentatiously at ease. It was not convincing. His breathing was too even.

The hall had gone quiet. The last of the guests were gone. The attendants had been dismissed. There was a faint noise from the corridor, now and then, the creak of a board, the soft shush of a broom. Then nothing.

Hanxue was still frosted.

He had not realized it until he looked down. The whole length of the blade lay white beneath his hands, rimed and glittering, and the frost on the hilt cord had spread in delicate feathers up to the wrapped leather. It should have faded by now. After every rite, after every practice, it faded. Tonight it clung. It lay against his fingers like a second skin, and the humming in it was low and steady, a long drawn note, like a held breath.

He did not think it was the curse. It did not feel like the curse. It felt, to his bafflement, more like waiting.

He looked up. Across the room, in the shadow of the quilt, Yunzhao's eyes were open. They were watching the candle, not him. The thin edge of the flame was reflected in them, two tiny gold points, and beyond them, deep and still, something Shuohan could not read.

"You are staring," said Yunzhao, without turning his head.

"I am watching the flame."

"You are watching me watch the flame."

"It is the same."

"Is it?" The ghost of a smile touched the corner of his mouth, tired and amused. "Goodnight, Ling Shuohan."

Shuohan did not answer. He was listening.

Beyond the lattice window, outside in the snow-lit dark, there were footsteps.

They were very soft. They came down the length of the courtyard from the east, slow and measured, the steps of someone who did not wish to be heard and had spent a long time learning how. They paused beneath the window. He heard the faint crunch of a boot settling into the snow, and the faint scratch of a sleeve against the stone.

His hand moved to the hilt of Hanxue.

Across the room, without a sound, Yunzhao had gone completely still.

They did not look at each other. They listened. The candles burned. Somewhere above them the wind rose, and a clot of snow slid from the roof and fell with a soft thump, and when the sound had passed there was no one under the window at all. Only the long white silence, and the print of a single boot, already filling with snow.

Shuohan sat for a long time with his thumb on the hilt, and the frost on the blade did not fade.