The hole in the ground gaped like a throat swallowing darkness. The night pearl in the girl's hand threw light no farther than three steps ahead, yet she walked without hesitation. Chang Ning watched the faint glow recede and felt something shift in his chest. The stone steps descended ten paces, bent at a corner, descended ten more, bent again. At the bottom sat a black-lacquered stone chamber, seven or eight feet wide and low enough that a tall man would feel the ceiling pressing on his thoughts. A table, a stool, a bed. Three iron shelves of assorted clutter bolted to the wall. Nothing else. A lamp on the table burned like a dying ember, cold and barely there. It had been only one day. Yet the young man looked as though he had aged three years and shed five pounds in a single night. His fine robes were crumpled, his hair unwashed and unbound. He sat on a straw-covered stone bed with one knee drawn up and no posture worth the name, the other leg dangling, an iron chain still fast...
The sun bled out slowly behind the peaks. A blue-gray mist rose and swallowed the mountains whole. Chang Ning lay in a yellow pearwood bed beneath a fine gauze canopy. His thick black hair spread across half the mattress like heavy silk. He opened his eyes and studied the embroidered patterns overhead — clusters of red flowers stitched beside slate-blue bamboo, and in one corner, a small ginger frog mid-leap. The jade canopy. The lotus-stitch needlework. Cai Zhao's handiwork, every bit of it. Chang Ning's lips curved. He knew the girl was insulting him in thread and pigment. He had always known. He simply chose not to say so. He rose, dressed, and moved to the washstand. The mirror gave back a face mottled with poison sores, features half-obscured. He laughed anyway. The girl had mocked that face more than once. Had recoiled from it. And yet here he was — kept at her side, tended with more care than he had any right to expect. If anyone threatened him, she would fight. If he st...