Chapter 31: Even the Fish Know

The hook came up empty again.

Song Huiya sat up, elbowed her senior brother out of the way, threaded half an earthworm back onto the hook with the efficiency of someone who has done this many times and feels no particular way about it, and cast the line back into the lake.

Song Shicheng tucked his hands into his sleeves and regarded her sideways with the expression of a man about to say something instructive. "A frog at the bottom of a well looks up and assumes the sky is only as wide as the opening above it. Thinks climbing to heaven must be easy from there. Even when it finally leaves the well and stands at the edge of a pond, all it sees is the light on the surface. It has no idea how deep the water goes."

"I know it's difficult to be a good person," Song Huiya said, with a particular quality of disdain she reserved for lectures she'd already considered and rejected. "But why should I bother being the kind of great person the world writes poems about? When I knelt before those dogs at the city gate, I understood what this world actually runs on. Reason is useless. Dignity is useless. Kindness burns out like a mountain firefly before morning — it means nothing. The only thing that gives a person the right to be decent is a sword good enough to back it up."

Song Shicheng slapped his thigh with great drama. "Magnificent! Truly, I have taken on the most gloriously cynical disciple the martial world has ever produced! But I'll tell you this — with that much bitterness soaked into your bones, the fish won't come to you sitting here, let alone the heroes and righteous men you plan to become out in the world. I fear you'll never leave Illusion Mountain at all."

The float sank the moment he finished.

Song Huiya was already on her feet. The fish came up fighting, hooked and airborne, twisting silver in the afternoon light.

She laughed. "Heaven still favors me."

"The fish in this lake are idiots," Song Shicheng said, visibly aggrieved. "They'll bite anything. Don't mistake it for a compliment. Try your luck somewhere else and see how far that gets you."

Song Huiya ignored him, dropped the fish into the grass basket, and looked up at him with deeply satisfied eyebrows.

Song Shicheng's dignity took a blow from which it did not recover gracefully. He pressed on regardless. "When I take disciples of my own someday, I will specifically seek out the kind, the humble, the studious, the quiet. Someone who has read books and doesn't want to fight anyone."

"Can you read?" Song Huiya asked pleasantly.

Song Shicheng chose to continue as if she hadn't spoken. "Then I'll take the two of you out together. If anyone asks, I'll point to the refined one and say: that is my disciple. As for you — you're technically my younger sister's responsibility, I'm merely correcting her oversight. Within a season, my reputation as a master teacher will have spread across the entire martial world."

Song Huiya looked at him. She bent down, picked up her fishing things, and moved.

"What are you doing? Where are you going?"

"Away from you," she said. "I'd rather fish alone."

She relocated a comfortable distance down the bank. While she was resettling, she noticed, without appearing to notice, a figure standing in the shade of a distant tree. Green robes. A sword held loosely at the side. Perfectly still, and had been for some time.

Song Huiya pulled her straw hat lower and sat cross-legged, eyes on the water.

That gaze stayed with her. Through seasons, through weather, through years.

---

The mountain kept its green peaks half-hidden in cloud. White cranes drifted over the ridges. By spring, the wildflowers on the upper slopes bloomed in such reckless abundance that you could smell them before you saw them.

By the time Song Huiya was twelve, she had run herself across every summit and ledge on Illusion Mountain until the mountain had essentially conceded the territory to her. She had become a sort of self-appointed monarch of the high places, and felt this was appropriate.

On the Spring Equinox, Song Xiwei called her inside and told her they would be traveling to Maoheng Mountain.

---

Visitors had been coming to Buliu Mountain since Song Huiya first arrived — some seeking martial guidance, some after medicinal herbs from the back slopes. She had crossed paths with them in passing over the years. They gave her cold looks; she returned them in kind. The habit of mutual irritation had settled comfortably between both sides, and nothing further was communicated.

She knew them only as Maoheng Sect disciples. That was sufficient.

What she knew beyond that she had assembled from observation: that they were another sect's people who behaved on Buliu Mountain like they owned it, on the strength of Song Xiwei's patience alone. They had not produced a fighter worth mentioning in years. Their primary skill, as far as Song Huiya could identify, was extracting money from situations, paired with an impressive ability to look down at people from a considerable moral height. The population at the foot of the mountain had developed a corresponding fondness for Song Huiya, on the logic that at least she was an honest variety of difficult.

Song Huiya found this maddening. To be favorably compared to that particular group was its own kind of insult.

Song Xiwei, inexplicably, adored them. After each visit she would watch them go with a small, warm smile and remark on how beautifully they carried themselves, inside and out. Song Huiya had privately translated this as: utterly ornamental and entirely useless.

So when the trip to Maoheng Mountain was announced, her face closed like a door in winter.

"Does Buliu Mountain need to borrow Maoheng's ancestor to pay respects?" she said. "We have graves enough on our own back mountain. Are we going to theirs because we don't have a decent plaque to our name?"

Song Xiwei, displeased, kept her patience. "Buliu Mountain and Maoheng Sect share a history. Twenty years ago, Buliu Mountain operated under Maoheng's name. There was a separation later, for various reasons. The connection remains."

Song Huiya had pieced this together already from things overheard at the mountain's base, and the conclusion had seemed obvious to her. "I know," she said. "The ones who wanted to survive stayed at Maoheng. The ones who were willing to—"

"Song Huiya."

Song Xiwei's voice carried an edge that appeared rarely and meant something when it did.

Song Huiya changed course without losing composure. "I won't say it in front of them. If it upsets you, I won't say it at all."

Song Xiwei's frown remained. After a moment she continued, carefully: "There will be a test between disciples when we arrive. Don't concern yourself too much. It's a formality — make your point cleanly and step back. The elders will offer gifts and may say a few words. Whatever they say, you will not answer back."

"There are gifts?" Song Huiya said, in the tone of someone whose integrity has been underestimated. "Master. Even without the gifts, I know how to conduct myself. I would never embarrass you."

She packed nothing for the trip. She was treating it as a walk.

---

The two mountain gates stood close to each other in distance and had almost nothing else in common.

Song Huiya followed her master up the mountain. The compound unfolded as they climbed — a thriving, well-staffed, well-funded operation with the ease of an institution that had never had to wonder whether it would survive the next season. The servants moved in constant streams. The architecture said: we have been here for a very long time, and we will be here long after you.

Song Huiya began to understand where the arrogance came from.

Her uncle-master appeared at her shoulder and dropped a large hand on top of her head, shaking it. "What? Envious?"

She knocked his hand aside. "Of what? Does a whale envy small fish?"

Song Shicheng tugged his sister's sleeve behind her. "Don't look at me. I can't take her. She talks about swallowing rivers whole. Anyone who didn't know her would think she was unwell. Who raised her mouth like that?"

Song Xiwei glanced at him without warmth and walked faster.

Song Shicheng turned to Song Huiya, aggrieved. "You see how she treats me? No respect whatsoever for her elders."

---

The training ground was bright and crowded and very loud with midday sun. Song Huiya worked her way to the back of the assembly, found a patch of adequate shade, and went most of the way to sleep standing up.

When her name was called, she heard it at a remove and surfaced slowly, making her way through the crowd to the platform without particular urgency.

The old man at the head of the table indicated a young man — half a head taller than her, probably five years older, wearing the expression of someone who expected this to be simple.

Song Huiya glanced toward her master first. Song Xiwei's face was composed and gave nothing away. She looked toward her uncle, whose usual warmth had been replaced by something held in careful check — it relaxed only slightly when their eyes met.

She had enough information.

She picked a longsword from the rack without examining it, gave it a single casual spin, and pointed it at the young man opposite. She raised her chin.

He had a workable frame and no particular skill to fill it with. His grip was wrong. He had been trained to lead with his right hand and apparently assumed everyone would accommodate this.

Song Huiya attacked from the left.

With the most elementary approach, she had him dizzy in three exchanges and disarmed in fewer than ten blows. He went down.

The training ground went quiet in the way that follows something unexpected.

The boy lay where he had fallen, staring at his empty right hand. He stayed there a long time, as though the outcome required additional processing.

Song Huiya surveyed the crowd, felt nothing in particular, and remembered her promise. She had knocked him down without saying a word. She considered this generous. She yawned and turned to step off the platform.

The boy on the ground moved.

It was subtle — a shift of the head, a feigned effort to wipe at his face. His wrist angled downward. In the moment her attention had drifted, he snapped his sleeve back and sent a volley of silver needles into the air.

She heard them before she turned. The longsword came up and swept them aside, the needles scattering wide.

She looked at his face. The shame and fury there, the complete absence of anything like remorse. Something lit up in the back of her mind — something bright and not entirely safe. The corners of her mouth moved.

Her sword shifted. The angle changed. The point moved toward his throat.

Song Xiwei's hand appeared between them.

Two fingers pressed against the flat of the blade with a concentrated force. The crack was sharp and immediate, the sword splitting clean, both pieces spinning out into brilliant fragments.

For one second the training ground held absolutely still.

The old man's expression collapsed. He was already moving — palm off the armrest, splinters in the air — and his strike, when it came, was aimed at no safe place. It was the kind of blow you throw at someone you want to end.

Song Xiwei turned a fraction. Her left hand rose. The exchange lasted less than a breath.

The old man landed two steps back, his footing recovered with visible effort, his face stripped of its composure entirely.

Song Xiwei had not moved from where she stood. She smoothed the red tassel of her sword with one unhurried hand, then pressed that hand to Song Huiya's shoulder and drew her close.

The middle-aged man beside the table was on his feet. The words that came out of him had the quality of something stored up over a long period, finally finding its exit.

"What kind of creature crawls out of a mountain ditch and calls it a sect? Unruly, violent, displaying this behavior in front of everyone — where is the propriety? Where is the righteousness your master was supposed to teach you? Where are the basic human decencies?" His eyes moved, briefly and pointedly, to Song Xiwei. "Our Maoheng Sect has never once produced a person like this. Sect Master, I ask that you correct this feral little—"

Song Shicheng's sword sheath connected with the side of his face.

The man spun, lost his footing, and sat down hard into the arms of the disciples behind him, who scrambled to receive him.

Song Shicheng looked at him with an expression of cold satisfaction. "Who exactly do you think you're talking to?"

He exhaled, adjusted his expression to something approximately civil, and addressed the room. "Children don't always know better. A word of correction is sufficient. Let's not make this an incident between our own people."

The training ground reassembled itself in confused silence. The moment had turned and stopped turning, and most of the disciples present were still trying to account for how it had happened at all.

The Maoheng Sect leader descended from the platform with his back turned, one hand concealed within his robe. He regained his seat, pulled his expression into its proper arrangement, and pronounced his verdict:

"Song Huiya has behaved with arrogance and disrespect, failing in both fraternal duty and reverence for her teachers. This is a violation of Maoheng traditions. She will undergo a period of seclusion and be re-examined."

He reached into his sleeve, produced a jade pendant, and summoned the injured disciple forward. He placed the pendant in the boy's hand with the practiced warmth of a performance, offered a few encouraging words, and patted his shoulder.

The boy bowed, beaming, and withdrew.

Song Shicheng's jaw tightened at the sight of the pendant. He moved forward. Song Xiwei's hand stopped him without looking at him.

She put her hand to her disciple's back and walked toward the stone steps, ignoring everyone in the room equally.

---

Song Huiya cleared the training ground quickly, putting distance between herself and her master as she went. She dusted her sleeves with the air of someone concluding an unremarkable afternoon.

"What a wasted trip," she announced to no one in particular.

She turned and offered Song Xiwei a bright, antagonistic smile. "Grandmaster doesn't seem especially fond of Master. And Master has never seemed especially fond of me. What a sorrowful chain of affection."

She sauntered off like someone who had come out ahead.

---

Song Shicheng was still standing at the top of the steps, unable to swallow what had just happened and unwilling to pretend otherwise.

Song Xiwei stopped him before he could turn back.

"Go down with her," she said, eyes half-closed. "Take her home before she finds somewhere new to cause trouble."

"And you?"

Song Xiwei's red tassel moved as she turned and walked back into the training ground without answering.

Song Shicheng rubbed his forehead. He sighed in the direction of the sky and jogged down the path.

He caught up with Song Huiya halfway down. She was moving fast and radiating heat. He shoved her from behind without ceremony.

"You actually held your tongue through all of that? I was standing there waiting for you to start something so I could come in behind you and smooth it over afterward. Instead you stood there like a saint and now you're furious in private. What kind of backwards arrangement is that?"

"I promised Master before we left," Song Huiya said. "I didn't want to hand them an excuse."

She rubbed the calluses on her palms and said, more quietly, "Why do they hate me that much? Is it jealousy?"

"Partly," Song Shicheng said. "But the fault today wasn't yours. You're taking the weight of something much older than you."

He walked for a moment before continuing. "Buliu Mountain has come down a long way in a generation. By now it's barely holding on. They had already counted it as theirs — the name, the land, the income. Then you showed up and inconvenienced all of that. Of course they resent you. Your master knew the history and didn't want to break what remained of the old ties, so she endured it. For years. And now they've taken that endurance for permission."

Song Huiya pulled a blade of grass from the side of the path. "A thing that can be endlessly squeezed eventually stops being anything at all."

Song Shicheng's voice shifted, gentler. "Don't be too hard on her for not fighting back openly. There are tens of thousands of people living at the foot of Buliu Mountain. They've sheltered under the mountain's name through years of chaos, and this year they've finally found some peace. Your master couldn't hold the mountain itself — so she held what she could. A quiet life for the people at the bottom of it."

Then he raised his voice again, shading into exasperation: "The real trouble is that she knows she can't trust you with any of it yet. So here you are. If you want her to believe otherwise, do something worth believing in."

Song Huiya looked at him with a flat expression. "Uncle-Master, your approach to moral instruction is genuinely terrible."

Song Shicheng made a sound of deep injury and pressed a hand to his chest. "I am giving you the unvarnished truth, and you repay me with criticism. You are more stubborn than men twice your age who are actively dying."

Song Huiya was already moving faster down the path, leaving him behind.

---

She went home and picked up her wooden sword.

She practiced until her arms stopped cooperating. Then she bathed and lay down.

The moon that night was the kind that turns the air silver, the Milky Way stretched wide overhead. Song Xiwei pushed the wooden door open quietly and came in.

She stood by the bed for a moment in the thin light from the window, looking down at her disciple. Then she bent and pulled the blanket up and around.

She saw Song Huiya's left hand, the web of it marked with fresh sword cuts — the kind that come from hours of practice without a care for what the weapon does on the way back. She knew what it meant. She sat on the edge of the bed, took out medicine from her sleeve, and bandaged the hand with the focused quiet of someone who has done a great many things in their life and finds this among the more important.

When she was finished, she set a jade pendant on the pillow beside Song Huiya's head. She sat in the dark and said nothing. After a while she blended into the stillness of the room so completely she might have been part of it.

---

"...Master."

A child's voice, coming from far away.

Song Huiya felt herself moving at the edge of sleep, surface and depth alternating. She saw Song Xiwei's face, calm and clear, and reached out without thinking. The gesture felt remembered, though from where she couldn't place.

The fragments wouldn't hold. Every time she reached for them, they dissolved.

The voice came again from somewhere above everything.

"Master."

Then the child, crying: "Don't leave me. You're all I have left. If you go, I'll be an orphan all over again. Master, please—"

Something in those words caught her from wherever she had drifted and pulled her back. A thread, thin and insistent, returning her to herself.

In the silence that followed, a single line moved through her like an echo: I have no master anymore.

But her master — where was she?

Song Huiya remembered the book.

She had filled more than ten pages the night before the parting. Song Xiwei's voice, their last conversation, everything she had needed to record before morning. Those words brought the dream's dissolving image back into clarity — the face, the stillness, the particular quality of light in the room.

"Huiya. Huiya."

Someone took hold of her shoulder and the weight of the dream broke apart. Song Huiya opened her eyes.

Song Xiwei was sitting at her bedside.

The night before the departure, returned exactly.

Song Huiya held still and looked at her without blinking, as if looking carefully enough might fix the image somewhere permanent.

Song Xiwei lifted a black iron sword in both hands and presented it formally. "Song Huiya. This sword belongs to you now. Your apprenticeship is complete."

Song Huiya moved to sit against the wall, drew the sword, and ran her thumb lightly along the edge. The blade drew blood before she had finished the motion. She pressed the cut to her mouth and looked up, suddenly awake in a way sleep couldn't replicate. "What is it called?"

"It's your sword," Song Xiwei said. "Call it whatever you like."

She reached into her robe and produced a letter, and held it out. "The men who drove your parents to their deaths scattered afterward. I have spent years tracking them. Most of those I found have already died in the chaos of the times. The others — I have settled those accounts for you. One remains: the one who led them. That one is yours to deal with, when you're ready."

Song Huiya went still. She set the sword down. She reached out and took the envelope with both hands.

Song Xiwei was quiet for a long time before she spoke. She seemed to be selecting each word carefully, checking it before setting it down.

"I carry everything about you in my memory. I have never spoken to you of debts and grievances because such things don't balance cleanly, and balancing them is not a cause for happiness. Every life rests on layers of dust, and every sword's edge leads to a storm without warning. The only thing that lets a person stand upright in all of it is a clear conscience." She paused. "This is something you don't yet understand, and I haven't managed to teach it to you."

Song Huiya held the letter and raised her eyes.

Song Xiwei's gaze was like still water — deep and clear, and carrying something that had not appeared there before. Something soft in it that looked like it had always been there, waiting for the right moment to be visible.

"You believe people are corrupt by nature and cannot be trusted. But think for a moment — you were a child with no one, in a world that was falling apart. How did you survive to where you're sitting now?"

"You remember your mother's body against the doorpost. Your father's head on the city wall. But do you remember the people who threw themselves on their knees and begged for your life?"

"You say cutting things to people, and to yourself. But have you ever looked back at those bent figures, too exhausted to lift their heads, wiping their faces so you wouldn't see?"

"Do you remember the scarred hands that were hungry and still broke what little they had to give you half a bowl?"

"That is how you grew up."

"You look at the ordinary people of this world — the ones who simply move with whatever current they're caught in, trying not to drown — and you find them contemptible. But what exactly is their crime? That they wanted to live?"

"Song Huiya. You cannot allow a group of wicked people to be the only ones you see."

She placed her hand gently against Song Huiya's face.

"A person's life in this world is like a seed blown by wind. Uncertain where it will land, uncertain what will take root. You move through your days in fear, driven by force and restlessness. Why not, just once, stop and look back at where you've already come from?"

Master, something said inside her. I understand. I know I was wrong.

But in the dream she only sat there, watching Song Xiwei rise and turn, watching the door close slowly on her face until there was only the door.

Then light, from somewhere, falling across her eyes. The world going white and coming apart.

She turned her head and woke.

"Master?"

Song Zhiqie's voice was close and quiet. A hand rose and wiped the tears from her face with careful fingers.

Song Huiya lay still.

Her mouth tasted of bitterness and herbs.

She was awake.