On the morning of the seventh day they ate breakfast like two men sitting down to negotiate a border.

Yunzhao had made it. That was the first surprise. He had risen before the candles went out, which was not his habit, and padded across to the kitchen the moment the sixth white bead turned over, and by the time Shuohan came in from the courtyard with frost still clinging to his sleeves there was a pot of rice porridge steaming on the table, a dish of pickled greens, two boiled eggs, and a plate of the thin crisp flatbread that Qingyun people ate with everything. Two bowls. Two pairs of chopsticks. A little saucer of dark vinegar, set exactly at the midpoint between them like a flag of truce.

Shuohan stopped in the doorway and looked at it.

"Sit," said Yunzhao, brightly. "It will not poison you. I would be a very poor husband if I poisoned you in the first week."

"We are not..."

"I am joking. It is a thing I do." He pushed a bowl across the table with one finger. "Eat."

Shuohan sat. He ate. The porridge was plain and perfectly cooked, with a thread of ginger in it, and it went down warm and clean, and he did not say that it was good, because that would have been a concession. They ate in silence. The kitchen was small and low and smelled of woodsmoke. Out in the yard a hen was complaining to nobody. Every so often a chopstick clicked against porcelain.

Yunzhao was watching him. He was very good at it. He did it sideways, over the rim of his bowl, with an air of studied innocence, and each time Shuohan lifted his eyes the other man was looking at the eggs.

The silence went on so long that it began to have a sound of its own.

It was not an angry silence. That was what troubled him. He knew angry silences. He had been raised in them, a whole childhood of closed doors and cold halls, and he could have navigated one blindfolded. This was something else. It was the silence of two people who had survived a night in which something had been done to them, and who had not yet agreed on what to call it.

The pry marks lay between them like a third plate.

They had not spoken of it since. They had put the cloak back on its peg and the quilt back on the bed and sat out the rest of that night in a stiff, watchful quiet, each with a sword across the knees. Neither had slept. In the morning Yunzhao had gone to find Chiyan, and returned with the officiant's cheerful assurance that old lodges settled, that frames warped, and that he would send a boy to fix the door. His face had not matched his words. Shuohan had seen the thing in his eyes as he said them, a brief, bright flash, and had understood it. Chiyan knew exactly what the marks meant. He did not intend to say.

And now it was the seventh day, and the night to come was the one the old text had singled out.

"We need rules," said Yunzhao.

Shuohan put down his chopsticks.

"I do not mean the clauses," Yunzhao went on, quickly, before he could speak. "We have the clauses. I mean us. The way we live in that room." He tapped the rim of his bowl. "On the first night I thought it did not matter. We were strangers. We could be as polite as furniture. But we nearly lost the flame on the fifth night because two grown men could not agree who was going to reach for it first, and I should like to avoid dying of embarrassment before I die of the curse."

"We have already agreed on terms."

"We have agreed on three sentences, said aloud, in a hall, after a very long day. I would like them written." He drew a sheet of paper from his sleeve, plain, cream-colored, a little crumpled, and smoothed it flat on the table. He had a brush, too, a small traveling brush with a bamboo handle. He must have brought them from the study. "A document. A treaty. Something we can point to when one of us is being impossible."

"You expect me to be impossible."

"I expect us both to be. That is the point of a treaty."

Shuohan looked at the paper. It was very white. It lay in the pale morning light like a small clean field, and he thought, I have signed a vow in blood-red ink and a contract in vermilion, and I am now going to sign a third thing, in a kitchen, over an egg.

"Give me the brush," he said.

* * *

He wrote it in the plain square script of Hanjian, every stroke exact, and Yunzhao watched his hand move with an expression he was careful to keep neutral.

It was a good hand. That was no surprise. Everything about the man was good, in the controlled, scoured way of a blade that has been honed for years and has never once been allowed to rust. But there was a small hitch at the end of each downstroke, a slight tremor, quickly corrected. Yunzhao had seen it before. He did not mention it.

"One," Shuohan said aloud, writing. "We do not touch except when necessity requires it."

"Define necessity."

"When the flame is at risk."

"And when I am about to fall off a cliff?"

"That also."

"And when I am about to say something very clever and you want to stop me by clapping a hand over my mouth?"

"That is not necessity."

"A pity." Yunzhao rested his chin on his fist. "Go on."

"Two. We do not lie to one another."

The brush went on moving. The words came out of it in clean black columns, and Yunzhao watched them appear with a curious slow sinking in his chest, as a man might watch a tide come in over a path he had meant to use.

We do not lie to one another.

The key lay against his forearm, in the sleeve, where it had lain for six days. He could feel its small brass edge. It had not grown heavier. It had not grown anything. It was simply there, a flat cold fact, and the man beside him was writing, in a hand as calm as a scribe's, a sentence that made it an enemy.

He kept his face still. He kept it still beautifully.

"That is a very strong rule," he said.

"It is the only rule that matters." Shuohan did not look up. "I have no use for a man who says one thing and does another. I would rather you hated me openly than were kind to me falsely. If I ask you something, you will answer or you will say you will not. You will not lie."

"And you?"

"I do not lie."

"No," said Yunzhao, and the word came out softer than he had intended. "I have noticed that."

Shuohan paused with the brush above the paper. For a moment it seemed he would say something. Then he dipped the bristles, and wrote, and said, "Three. We do not speak of our masters."

"You said that in the hall."

"I am saying it again."

"It does not seem to me a rule that serves either of us." Yunzhao spoke carefully. "We both lost them. We both have a great deal to say. I should think a pair of people in a room together for a hundred nights might be allowed to say it."

"No."

It was a flat word, closed like a door. He saw it in the set of the jaw. He saw, too, the thin white line that had begun to creep out along the knuckles of the hand that held the brush, and he thought of the old man's open eyes, which he had never seen but which he could picture with perfect clarity because Chiyan had said, once, in a careless voice, that they had been open.

"Not yet," said Shuohan, in a lower voice. "I cannot. Not yet."

"All right."

"It is not a refusal."

"I know. It is a postponement." Yunzhao smiled, and meant it, a little. "I am very good with postponements. Write it down."

He wrote it down.

* * *

They went on for the better part of half an hour.

It was ridiculous, and it was strangely absorbing. Shuohan offered rules the way a general offered terms: short, hard, and unadorned. No entering the other's half of the room while he slept. No reading private papers. No touching of weapons. Yunzhao countered with the lightness of a man bartering at a market. A rule about tea, which Shuohan found frivolous and Yunzhao defended with passion. A rule about the use of the blue quilt, on which they compromised after a surprisingly acrimonious debate. A rule, proposed by Yunzhao and denied by Shuohan without a flicker, about not looking at one another while changing.

"We are two men," said Shuohan.

"That is exactly why it needs to be written."

"It does not."

"You blushed."

"I did not."

"You turned the color of a boiled prawn. I have the evidence in my mind's eye and I will take it to the grave." He was grinning now, quite openly, his elbow on the table and his eyes bright. "Write it. 'Four: we will each have the grace to look at the wall.'"

Shuohan wrote it, with an expression of profound suffering.

It was only when the list had grown to nine items, and the brush had been refilled twice, and the egg shells lay forgotten in their saucer, that Yunzhao reached for the paper and drew it toward himself.

"One of mine," he said. "If I may."

"Go on."

"We do not leave without notice." He wrote it himself, in the quick, flowing, slightly slanted hand of Qingyun, his own brushwork all curve and flourish beside Shuohan's severe squares. "Not for any reason. Not for a stream, not for a stroll, not for a very interesting rock. If either of us goes beyond the courtyard, we say so. In words. Before."

Shuohan was looking at him. It was a long, still look. Yunzhao felt it on his face like a warm hand.

"That is a good rule," Shuohan said.

"I am told I have them occasionally."

"I have one to add."

"Please."

He took the brush. He dipped it. He wrote four words in the same plain upright hand, and set the brush down, and turned the paper round so that Yunzhao could read it.

No false smiles. Not to me.

The room went very quiet.

Yunzhao read it twice. He had known, in some part of himself, that it was coming. He had been bracing since the first morning. But there is a difference between bracing for a blow and receiving it, and he felt the smile on his face go on, quite smoothly, as it always did, like a lamp that is lit by habit.

"I do not think that is a rule one can enforce," he said lightly.

"Why not?"

"A smile is not a contract. It is not a thing one signs. It is a muscle. People smile for a hundred reasons, politeness, nerves, general goodwill." He spread his hands. "You cannot legislate expression. It is quite absurd. You might as well forbid me to blink, or to look pleasant on a Tuesday..."

He laughed.

It came out perfectly. A warm, easy, rippling laugh, just the right pitch, with just the right amount of breath behind it, and it was only afterward, listening to the echo of it die in the small kitchen, that he understood what he had done.

"That one," said Shuohan.

"What?"

"That one. The one you are wearing now."

It was said very quietly. There was no cruelty in it. If there had been, Yunzhao could have met it. He had met cruelty all his life, with a laugh and a bow and a clever answer, and it had slid off him like rain. But there was nothing here to slide from. There was only a man across a table, grey-eyed, steady, with his hand lying flat on a sheet of paper, who had looked at his face for six days and had learned it.

"I do not mean the laugh," Shuohan said. "I have heard you laugh properly. On the fifth night. On the floor, by the door, with your hair in your eyes. It was a sound like a bird. I have not forgotten it." He stopped, as if surprised at his own words, and went on more slowly. "This is the other one. It is very good. It is better than anyone's I have ever seen. But it is a wall, and I would rather you did not build it in front of me."

The smile went out.

It did not fade. He felt it go. One moment it was there, a bright arrangement of muscle and teeth, and the next the whole front of his face seemed to loosen and drop, like a set of shutters coming down in the afternoon, and he sat looking at the grey-eyed man across the table with nothing at all between them.

He did not know what his own face looked like. That was the strangest part. He could not remember when he had last gone without. He felt exposed, and stupid, and absurdly young, as though he had walked out of a house in his nightclothes and found the whole village standing in the road.

He did not look away. He thought he ought to. He did not.

"That is better," said Shuohan, very low.

Yunzhao drew a slow breath. His voice, when he found it, came out smaller than he had meant, a little rough, with none of its usual polish.

"That is a great deal to ask of a man before breakfast is finished."

"You may refuse."

"Will you stop looking at me like that if I do?"

"No."

It was such a plain, immediate answer that he almost laughed again, and caught it, and let it become, instead, something else: a small, slow, crooked twist at the corner of his mouth, wholly unplanned. He felt it go and thought, with a distant alarm, there it is. The real one. The one that costs.

Shuohan saw it. He knew it by the way his eyes flickered.

"All right," Yunzhao said. "I will not smile falsely at you."

"Say it as a promise."

"You are very exacting."

"I am a Hanjian man."

"You are an impossible man." But he put his hand flat on the table, palm down, as if swearing on a book, and said, "I, Bai Yunzhao, will not smile falsely at Ling Shuohan. I do not promise I will never be irritating. I do not promise I will always be sincere. But I will not wear that smile. Not for you." He paused, and added, because it was true, and because the man had asked for truth: "I may forget. It is a very old habit."

"Then I will remind you."

"I would expect nothing less."

* * *

They signed it at noon.

It was a poor little treaty to look at. Twelve lines on a crumpled page, half in square characters and half in slanting ones, with an ink blot in one corner where Yunzhao had leaned too close, and at the bottom, side by side, two names. Bai Yunzhao, in a long, looping stroke that ended in a flourish. Ling Shuohan, in a plain upright line like a fence post.

Shuohan blew on the ink. He did it gravely, with a faint crease between his brows, as though he were drying something sacred, and Yunzhao felt something in his chest give a strange small turn, and looked at the egg shells.

"We should keep it somewhere," he said. "Where it cannot be lost."

"On the wall." Shuohan rose. "Beside the beads."

He carried it into the candle room. Yunzhao followed. In the daylight the little chamber looked smaller and plainer and somehow more private, like a place that has been slept in. Shuohan pinned the page to the plaster, just beside the cord of wooden peaches, with one of the nails from the broken window frame, and stood back.

The seventh bead was still red. It waited at the end of the white row, patient and small, a drop of ember in the dim.

"Tonight," said Yunzhao.

"Yes."

"If someone comes."

"They will not find us asleep."

He turned his head, and found that Shuohan was looking at him again, and that for the first time since the hall the look had no edge in it. It was not warm. He would not have called it warm. But it was level, and open, and quiet, a look without a shield held up in front of it, and he understood that it was the one he had been given in return for his own. Neither of them was armed. For a single unguarded moment they stood in the middle of a small room with a hundred red beads and a crooked treaty between them and simply regarded each other, and it was not enmity.

It was not anything else, either. He was careful about that. It was a truce, and he had made a promise, and he had a key in his sleeve.

But it was the first time that he did not want to look away.

* * *

The seventh night passed without incident.

Shuohan had expected it to be otherwise. He had sat with Hanxue across his knees from sunset, with the door barred and the shutters double-latched and the new frame, which a silent boy had mended that afternoon, drumming faintly under his fingers whenever the wind touched it. He had listened for footsteps. He had listened for the soft scrape of metal in a seam. He had listened until his ears rang.

Nothing came. The candles burned straight and tall. The wind was only wind. In the small hours the lodge settled around them with a long, easy creak, like an old man turning in his bed.

And he lay awake.

He had not meant to lie down. That was the first concession. At the third hour, when the flames had steadied so completely that the whole room had a drowsy gilded stillness, he had found himself stretched on the red robe with his head against the wall and his sword beside him, one arm bent under his cheek. He had told himself it was to rest his eyes. He had not closed them.

On the bed, a few feet away, Yunzhao breathed.

It was very quiet. It was the sound of a man genuinely asleep, slow and deep, with a small catch at the top of each breath, as though the body were still half minded to stop and listen. Shuohan had never heard it before. On every other night the breathing had been careful, rationed, the breathing of someone playing a part. Tonight it was only breath. Only a man in a room.

He lay in the dark and listened to it.

He thought about the kitchen. About a sheet of paper crumpled in a sleeve, and a brush with a bamboo handle, and a smile going out of a face like a light snuffed in a window. He had not expected it to happen. He had said the words half in anger, half in some more complicated impulse that he had not examined, and he had braced himself for a clever answer, a bow, a cool refusal.

He had not been prepared for what was underneath.

It had been so plain. That was the thing he could not put down. A thin, tired, unguarded face, wide-eyed and flushed and stripped to the bone, looking at him as though he had been caught out in the rain. Not a mask. Not a wall. A person, startled in the middle of his own life.

He knew then that he had been wrong about something. He did not yet know what.

He had thought the smile was a lie. He had thought the whole man was. Light and quick and bright, a flicker of white and pale blue at the end of a blade, laughing in a pass of black rock while he took Shuohan's measure and let him win. A charming, slippery, deceptive thing. He had hated it for six years with the pure, clean hatred of a man who has never been able to read a face and resents those who can.

But a lie did not tremble. A lie did not go still in the middle of a table, and look at him, and say in a small, rough voice, that is a great deal to ask. A lie did not laugh on the floor of a candle room with its hair in its eyes.

Which of them was real?

The one in the hall, in the red robe, with the perfect smile and the perfect stride? The one at the table, wry and sparkling and self-mocking? The one who had crouched at the foot of a door, with a lamp, and said in a very low voice, a man who wanted the wind to do his work for him? Or the one in the kitchen, at noon, with nothing at all on his face?

Or was it all of them? Were they all, somehow, true?

He did not know. He lay and watched the ceiling and could not stop turning it over, the way the tongue goes to a loose tooth, and somewhere in the small hours, with the candles low and the frost lying quiet on his sword, he realized that it had been a very long time since he had wanted to know anything about anyone.

On the bed, Yunzhao sighed in his sleep, and turned, and in the dim gold light his face came round toward the wall. One hand lay open on the quilt. The fingers twitched, once, and curled slowly closed, as though around something small and precious that he was afraid of losing.

Shuohan looked at it for a long time.

Then he shut his eyes, and did not sleep, and listened to him breathe until dawn.