The boot print was still there when Shuohan went to the window.

He stood at the lattice with one hand on the sill and looked down at it for a long time. It was a clean, deep mark in the new snow, heel and sole and a small scuff at the toe where the walker had turned. A man's boot, not a servant's slipper. Already the fall had begun to soften its edges, and by morning it would be nothing at all.

"Do not," said Yunzhao, from the bed.

"I have not moved."

"You are measuring the distance to the door with your eyes. I can feel it from here."

Shuohan did not turn around. "Someone stood beneath this window and listened to us."

"Someone stood beneath this window and was cold, and bored, and curious about the bridegrooms. It is a wedding. Half of Qingyun would have crept up here if they had thought they could get away with it." There was a rustle of quilt. "Go out and chase them, if you like. I will keep the candles company."

It was said lightly, and it was a very good answer, and Shuohan found that he did not believe a word of it. But the fourth clause lay across his mind like a bar across a door. The flame must be within sight of both of them for the length of the night. If he stepped out into the courtyard, the man on the bed would be alone with the candles, and the candles would be alone with the man, and he did not yet know what that arrangement meant.

He did not know whether the thing that frightened him was the flame going out or the man he would be leaving beside it.

"No," he said at last. "The clause."

"The clause," Yunzhao agreed, in a tone of warm, tired approval, as though a pupil had at last answered correctly. "Come away from the window, Ling Shuohan. You will frost the lattice."

He looked down. A fine white bloom had indeed begun to spread from his fingers across the dark wood of the sill. He took his hand away and the frost lingered a moment, stubborn and delicate, before it sank back into the grain.

He went and sat down against the wall, where he had been, with Hanxue laid across his knees.

The room settled around them. The wind lifted and fell outside, sorting through the roof tiles. On the table the two great candles stood in their brass holders, burning with a steadiness that was almost insulting after the wild leaping of the hall, and above them, pinned to the plaster wall, hung a cord that Shuohan had not noticed before. It was a long red cord strung with a hundred small wooden beads, each carved in the shape of a peach, and the first of them, the one nearest the floor, glowed very faintly, like an ember seen through paper.

Gu Chiyan had said nothing about beads. Shuohan decided not to ask.

* * *

He took off the wedding robe in the end because the alternative was to sleep in it.

The outer garment came away heavy and stiff, and he stood holding it for a moment in the lamplight, the crimson silk spilling over his arms, the gold thread winking. He hated it. He had hated it since the moment it was laid across his arms, and he had not been able to explain why, and now, with the quiet pressing down on him, he found he did not need to. It was the color of that morning under the plum trees. It was the color of a stain spreading across a sleeve.

It was also the only thing in the room that could be spread on a floor.

He folded it once, lengthwise, and laid it on the boards between the hearth and the wall, a narrow red strip against the pale pine. It was not much of a pallet. He had slept on less. He sat down on it in his white under-robe with his back against the wall, and drew Hanxue across his lap, and felt the cold of the floor come up through the silk as a familiar, almost friendly thing.

From the bed there came a long, slow, theatrical exhale.

"You are going to sleep on your wedding robe," said Yunzhao. "On the floor."

"It is serviceable."

"It is the finest garment you will ever own. It has a dragon on it." He had propped himself on one elbow and was regarding the arrangement with an expression of dazzled horror. "If Qingyun heard of this they would put it in a ballad. The Ice Swordsman and the Bridal Rug. I should be obliged to flee the country."

"No one will hear of it."

"Chiyan will tell them. He tells everyone everything. It is how he stays so cheerful." Yunzhao studied him a moment longer, and the joking drained slowly out of his face, leaving it quiet and rather tired. "Take the bed."

Shuohan looked at him.

"I mean it. I have no objection. I am used to floors, and you are the one with a hand full of frost." He said it very evenly, as if remarking on the weather. "There was a winter when I slept in a stable. It was a perfectly good stable. The horses were very decent about it."

He was smiling as he said it, but it was a small, flat smile, a thing set down on his face like a lid, and Shuohan understood, with a faint unpleasant lurch, that this was not a joke. It was a fact being offered as one, so that it could be refused without being seen.

He thought of the wedding hall. He thought of the elders at the long table and the whole careful structure of the thing, the seven measured paces, the one disciple who could be spared. He had not known that a person could be raised to be spared. He had been raised to be the one who stood in front.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"You will sleep in the bed."

"That is a very generous command."

"It is not generosity. It is a matter of which of us will be less of a nuisance to the other." He heard how stiff it sounded, and did not know how to unstiffen it. "I do not sleep much. I will be awake. You will be warmer than I am, and I would prefer not to hear you complain of it."

Yunzhao stared at him. Then, very slowly, the corner of his mouth tipped upward, and it was not the lid-smile. It was crooked and quick and surprised.

"You would prefer not to hear me complain," he said.

"Yes."

"That is the closest thing to a kindness I have ever heard from a Hanjian."

"It was not a kindness."

"No, of course not." He lay back and drew the quilt up to his chin, and turned his face toward the candles. "A matter of nuisance. I understand perfectly. Goodnight, Ling Shuohan."

He said it as he had said it before, but it landed differently. Shuohan sat for some time with the words in his ears, like a coin he did not know where to put.

* * *

The night was long.

He had known it would be. He had sat many vigils, over the years, on the anniversary of his master's death and on the eve of every blood-feud duel the sect had ever sent him to, and he knew the particular texture of a night spent awake: the way the hours did not pass but accumulated, one on another, each a little denser than the last. He had no quarrel with it. It was something to be endured, like frost.

The flames did not flicker. That was the first strangeness. In an ordinary room a pair of candles would have shivered with every breath and every draft, but these stood tall and still, leaning very slightly toward one another, and the light they cast was gentle and gold and entirely without shadow. It lay across the plaster and the table and the quilt on the bed. It lay across the face of the man sleeping under it.

He was not asleep. Shuohan could tell from the breathing. It was too regular, too carefully paced, and every so often it caught, a tiny hitch, like a thread snagging on a nail.

He did not look at the face. He looked at the hand.

It had come out from under the quilt, as though of its own accord, and lay across the red outer robe that Yunzhao had folded at the foot of the bed. The long fingers were moving very slightly. They found the sleeve, slid inside it, and rested there a moment on something small and hard, and then withdrew, and the hand lay still again, curled and open and quite innocent.

The key.

Shuohan did not move. He did not let his breathing change. He sat with his eyes on the candles and the cold of the floor in his spine, and he thought: he is checking that it is still there. Like a man touching a wound.

It was none of his business. They had agreed. Two pieces of furniture, sharing a house. He had said it himself, and it had seemed a very sensible arrangement at the time. A man was allowed his secrets. A man from Qingyun, in particular, was probably owed a few, and Shuohan had not come to this room to be his keeper.

He thought of a short brass key winking between two palms, and the speed with which a smooth face had closed over it.

He did not forgive it. But he found, to his irritation, that he had stopped being angry about it, which was worse.

The wind rose. Somewhere, a shutter knocked. The candles burned on. The bead on the red cord glowed its small steady ember, and beneath his hand the frost on Hanxue settled and settled, a fine white fur, and the hum in the steel was so low he felt it more in his bones than in his ears. A held note. A held breath.

He told himself he would not sleep.

* * *

He was nineteen, and the millet was hot in the bowl.

That was the thing he always remembered first, afterward. The warmth of it. The steam going up in the cold air, a little white ghost, and the way the heat came through the clay into his palms as he walked down the eastern path in the blue before dawn, because his master liked it hot, and had not been eating well, and Shuohan had decided that if the old man would not come to the kitchen then the kitchen would go to him.

The plum trees were black against the snow. The sky was the color of a pearl. He was thinking about nothing at all. He was thinking that he would practice the third form before the morning meal, and that the old man's cough had sounded a little better.

Then the path turned, and there was a shape in the snow.

He set the bowl down. He did it carefully, because he was a careful boy, and the bowl was a good one, and it was only afterward, when it had tipped and the millet had run out in a long pale stain across the white, that he understood he had not set it down at all.

"Shifu," he said.

The old man lay on his back with his sword half drawn and his eyes open. The frost lay on his beard and brows in a fine, gleaming crust. His lips were blue. And in the hollow of his throat, bright as a drop of blood, lay a single petal, pink and perfect and quite unfrozen.

"Shifu."

He knelt. He put out his hand and the hand was white. The white ran out from his fingers over the old man's robe and over the snow, in ferns, in lace, spreading across the clearing faster than it had ever spread before, climbing the trunks of the plum trees and silvering every twig. He tried to pull it back. He tried to stop it. The harder he tried the faster it went, and the old man's face disappeared beneath it, layer on layer, until there was nothing left but a white mound and a pink petal, and the petal was in his own palm now, and he could not close his fingers over it, and the cold was in his chest, and he could not breathe...

He could not breathe, and something was dragging at the edge of the dream, a small thing, a scrape of iron on stone.

The snow shivered. The white mound shuddered and cracked.

A warmth began somewhere to his left. It came softly, like the first breath of spring across a frozen river, and with it came a faint smell, cedar and charcoal and, under them, something sweet and green and impossibly out of season. Cloth moved. A weight settled across his shoulders, heavy and soft, and his father's voice, or his master's, or no one's, said very low, so low it was almost not a sound: "Hush. Hush. It is only the cold."

He opened his eyes.

* * *

The room was gold and quiet and smelled of burning coal.

He did not move. He had learned long ago that a man who wakes from a nightmare should do it slowly, as one eases a foot into a stream, and he lay as he was, half curled on the red robe with his cheek against the wall, and let the room assemble itself around him. The candles. The table. The hearth, which had been banked and was now bright, a deep clean orange, with the iron tongs lying across the fender.

His left hand lay on the floorboards in front of his face, and the frost on it had spread outward in a wide shining fan. It covered the planks to the length of his arm. It had crept up the leg of the table and begun to climb the red cloth, and the flame nearest it had bent, just slightly, into a pale thin lean.

He sat up fast. Hanxue slid off his knees with a clatter. And the frost, touched by the heat that had begun to flood the floor from the hearth, withdrew from the table leg in a long, slow, reluctant retreat, as a tide goes out, and the flame stood straight again.

Then he saw the man at the hearth.

Yunzhao was crouched on his heels with his back to the room and a scuttle of coal at his side. He had not put on the outer robe. He wore only the white under-robe, and his hair was loose and rumpled from the pillow, and in the firelight the line of his back looked narrower than Shuohan had expected, and tenser. He was feeding the fire one lump at a time, carefully, listening, and he did not turn around.

He knew, Shuohan thought. He knew I was awake.

The quilt was on his own shoulders. He looked down at it. It was the quilt from the bed, thick and faded blue, patched at one corner with a square of red silk, and it was still faintly warm from another body.

He should have thrown it off. That was the sensible thing, the Hanjian thing. A disciple did not accept comforts from a man who had a secret in his sleeve. A disciple did not accept comforts at all.

He sat there with the blue quilt around him, and the fire on his face, and did not move.

Yunzhao set down the tongs. He rose, and turned, and for one moment the two of them looked at one another across the length of the little room, with nothing in between but the candlelight. Yunzhao's eyes were dark and a little swollen with sleeplessness. The smile was nowhere. It had not been put on yet, and Shuohan understood that he had caught him between faces, as one might catch a man between one step and the next.

Neither spoke.

It seemed to Shuohan that a great many things might have been said. That there was a space in the air in which words might have gone, thanks, or an apology, or a question about the key, or the plainest sort of explanation about the dream. He could feel their shapes. He could not make himself say any of them.

Yunzhao seemed to understand. Something in his face eased, very slightly, and he gave a small nod, the nod of a man agreeing to a bargain he had not been asked to make. Then he crossed to the bed, took the red outer robe from its foot, shook it out, and lay down under it with his back to the room.

Shuohan sat for a long time with the quilt held closed at his chest.

Then he turned his face toward the wall, so that no one could have seen it, and let his eyes close.

* * *

Dawn came the way it had come the night before the ceremony, without announcement. The lattice paled. The grey crept in across the floor, thinned the gold of the candlelight to a washed and fading yellow, and found Shuohan sitting upright against the wall with the quilt in his lap and every nerve in his body awake.

The candles were very low.

They had burned all night without a single guttering, and now they stood in their brass holders as two squat stumps of red wax, their flames no taller than a thumb. The swords lay quiet. Across the room the man in the bed slept at last, truly, his face half buried in the red silk and one hand hanging limp over the edge of the mattress, and Taoying lay in its sheath at the foot of the bed with a few translucent pink petals scattered across the quilt beside it, like something that had been spilled.

Shuohan watched the flames.

He watched them with the grim attention of a man counting the last strokes of a bell, and when the first true light slid through the lattice and lay across the table in a thin white blade, he saw them lean toward one another a final time and bow, together, and go out. They did not gutter. They did not smoke. They simply folded, as a pair of hands might fold at the end of a prayer, and the room was grey and ordinary and smelled of warm wax.

On the wall, the first red bead went white.

It did it quietly, like a held breath let go. One moment it was glowing. The next it was pale and cool as a river pebble, and the cord above it was just a cord again, with ninety-nine red beads waiting in the dim.

One night.

He sat and looked at it. He thought he ought to feel relief. He thought he ought to feel something like triumph, a first stone laid, a first hurdle crossed. Instead he felt a strange unsteady tenderness, like a man who has been carried a long way on a litter and set down, and does not know whether to be grateful or ashamed.

He set the blue quilt on the foot of the bed, folded, with great care, and did not look at the sleeper. He picked up his sword. He took up the red robe from the floor and shook the creases from it and could not, for the life of him, make himself hate it quite so much as before.

He was halfway to the door when he realized that his right hand was closed.

He had not been holding anything. He was sure of that. He had been holding the sword with his left, and the quilt, and the robe, and his right had hung at his side the whole of the time, loosely, as it always did. But the fingers were curled tightly, as though around something small, and when he looked down at them he felt a prickle at the back of his neck, as if a window had been opened somewhere in the house.

He opened his hand.

On the pale unlined palm, damp and warm and quite unmistakably alive, lay a single peach petal.

It was fresh. He could smell it, a faint wet green sweetness, the smell of orchards in the first week of the thaw. It had not been dried in any box. It had not been kept. It lay there trembling very lightly in the breath of the room, as though it had only that instant let go of the branch.

He turned his head.

On the far side of the room, on the bed, Taoying lay sheathed and still, a good twenty feet from his hand and a world away from anything that bloomed. The man who bore it slept on with his face in the silk.

Shuohan looked at the petal for a very long time. The frost on Hanxue did not stir. And from the window, faint and far, there came the first thin note of a bird, as if the whole cold world had decided, in spite of everything, to begin again.