The mask he had believed impossible to remove came free without warning. Mingyuezhou was entirely unprepared. Only when Changling prodded him to move did he brace the iron framework with both hands and lift it slowly from his head.
In the faint, shifting light, a curl of dark hair fell loose. The face beneath had strong, clean lines, but his eyes carried something unexpectedly gentle. In Beiyan, a man who looked like that was called refined.
Changling stared.
She was not naive about handsome men. In her years of glory, every person in her orbit had been striking in one way or another. But she had always pictured Mingyuezhou as rough-hewn, the kind of northern face carved by weather and war. To find this beneath the iron was genuinely surprising.
He looked no older than twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. Changling folded away the ten years she had slept and smiled at him the way she might smile at a younger brother. "You're quite good-looking."
She had used words like that in army camps a hundred times. Yo, you've got a strong build. Boy, you were born with a decent face. No soldier ever took it wrong. She had been a man then, and soldiers traded that kind of remark freely. Only someone with a particular bent would read anything else into it.
But she was a woman now.
And in Mingyuezhou's eyes, she was a beautiful, seemingly fragile young woman -- leaning against his arm, looking up at him, offering that blunt assessment of his face with a relaxed smile.
It knocked something loose in him.
He turned away before his expression could betray him. He spent a long moment arranging his thoughts and found no suitable response to any of them. The mountain crevice was dim. Changling could not see the color rising in his face. He stood stiffly and said, frowning: "The mask is off. Why are you still standing there?"
"Hm?"
Changling had long suspected that keeping this man as a companion was a lost cause.
As it turned out, the soldiers of Tomb King Fort were more reckless than either of them had counted on. Eyes shut, they grabbed a lone man, struck his pressure points, stripped him, dressed him in the iron frame, and released him into the hills -- drawing a flood of pursuers and their shouts of kill him after him. That chaos was all the opening Changling and Mingyuezhou needed.
They did not slow down. After clearing Luming Mountain, they ran east through the rest of the day. By nightfall, two more high peaks were behind them. In a place quiet enough to risk sitting still, they finally stopped.
They had not touched water in days. Changling's hunger had passed the point of pain and settled into a flat, body-wide exhaustion. She dropped into the grass and lay on her back, too depleted to locate any particular sensation. Mingyuezhou, still favoring his injured side, looked at her -- a person who seemed prepared to starve rather than move -- and pushed himself up to find water. He came back with a broken jug of it and two hares. Changling was asleep.
How could she sleep out here, in open land like this?
He gathered dry grass and laid it over her. While the hares cooked, he let his gaze drift to her face. The corners of his mouth moved without his permission.
It was cold, heavy with dew, and he was exhausted. His chest felt warm anyway.
Changling dozed only briefly. The smell of roasting meat pulled her back. When she opened her eyes, Mingyuezhou was staring at the rabbits with a faint, unguarded smile on his face.
"What are you laughing at?"
He startled. Turned. Coughed loudly. "...Cough. Should we eat the rabbit?"
She took one without asking, checked the meat, found it underdone, and held it back over the fire herself. Mingyuezhou picked up the jug beside him. "Water."
She was parched enough to drain it in one pull. "Where did you find this?"
"By the stream, just below."
"Then there's probably a village not far."
She turned the rabbit on its stick, lifting it now and then to test it, blowing on a hot piece before tasting it -- unhurried, precise. Every small movement caught Mingyuezhou's attention in a way he could not quite account for. "You don't carry yourself like a criminal," he said. "How did you end up in Tomb King Fort?"
"I fell into the water by accident." Changling rotated the stick. "The current carried me in."
He blinked. "So where is your... home?"
"No home."
He could see she had nothing more to say on the subject. He shifted. "Why did you save me?"
Changling bit into the rabbit, chewed, decided it was good. "Your grandmother saved me first. She asked me to take you out with her. I refused without thinking, so you owe me nothing."
The implication -- that they could part at any time -- sat poorly with him. "Then why didn't you leave at Luming Mountain when you had the chance?"
Changling paused. Something heavy moved behind her eyes. "That's because..."
She couldn't say it either.
Maybe it was the conversation she had overheard in that prison cell. Maybe because she herself had been destroyed by exactly that kind of treachery, and she could not stand by and watch it happen to someone else.
She let the silence close over the question. Her gaze drifted to his left ear, and she noticed the earring looped around it. Something in her expression softened into something close to amusement.
Mingyuezhou caught it immediately. "What now?"
She held up two fingers and measured the distance. "A grown man in an earring. I'm not allowed to find that interesting?"
His face went red. "It's a coming-of-age ceremony in the Yan Kingdom. Many men wear them. Have you truly never heard of it?"
"I'm not from Yan." She chewed. "But it's a nice piece."
He unhooked it from his ear and held it out to her. "If you like it, take it."
She laughed, short and dry. "My ears aren't pierced. What use would I have for it?"
"It can be worn as a ring as well." He did not meet her eyes. He pressed it into her palm. "Consider it a small return for what you've done."
The earring was worked with dragons and phoenixes in fine relief, a red gem set in the center. It would fetch enough to see her back to the Central Plains with ease. Changling studied it, hooked it over the tip of her finger, tested the weight, found the balance right. She did not offer a single word of polite resistance. "Thank you," she said, and went back to her rabbit.
He had not expected her to accept so cleanly. A faint smile crossed his mouth before he could stop it, and then it was gone. "What are your plans? Will you come with me to Yandu?"
"I'm returning to the Central Plains."
His expression tightened. "As long as Cangyun remains free, you may be in danger. Come back with me first. Once the matter is settled, I'll arrange your passage--"
"I don't know your full situation," Changling said, "but if you're returning to Yandu, dealing with Cangyun shouldn't take long. He's fighting to survive himself. He has no room to come looking for me."
He had expected her to be vague, to sidestep. She had cut straight to the center of it. He had more questions, but watching her now -- her clarity, the economy of her thinking -- he knew she would not answer them.
If they went separate ways here, the world was large and trackless. Where would he ever find her again?
Mingyuezhou looked down. "I was hoping to find a reason to ask her to stay." He paused. "But I don't even know her name."
Changling glanced at him sideways, unsmiling. "We met by chance and survived together. Knowing more than that would only complicate things."
"If we meet again someday," he said, "we won't even know what to call each other."
"And if we do meet again -- how do we know which side of things we'll be on? Friends or enemies?"
"The girl has saved my life more than once," he said, with something like real feeling. "I could never be her enemy."
Changling looked away and said nothing aloud. But she answered him in the quiet of her own mind: Nothing in this world stays fixed.
She tilted her face toward the stars. "My name is Changling. The character for tomb, the character for hill."
Mingyuezhou went still. He looked at her for a long moment and did not speak.
"What?" she said.
"It's just... I heard that name once before. Years ago."
Changling let mild curiosity show on her face and nothing else.
"The person who carried it was a man. He died more than ten years ago." Mingyuezhou's voice was careful. "I didn't expect anyone to share it."
She let her lashes drop. "Who was he?"
"He commanded the Yue armies in the Central Plains. A figure of legend -- soldiers from Yan would stiffen just hearing his name. I was ten when he first made a name for himself." Mingyuezhou's voice carried reverence he did not try to hide. "Our armies went south several times with full confidence and came back destroyed. Every one of those soldiers feared him. Every one of them respected him just as much."
"Defeated so many times, and they still respected him?"
"Men of the Yan Kingdom respect strength above all." A faint smile. "My older brother always said that Changling fought openly, without the hidden schemes the southerners relied on. An enemy, but an honorable one. Even as a boy I had made up my mind to face him in battle one day." The smile faded. "He died within two years of that. I never got the chance."
The fire crackled. The flame caught her eyes for a moment, then subsided. Something dry and bitter settled in the line of her mouth. "If he was as formidable as you say, how did he die?"
Mingyuezhou shook his head. "The Central Plains records say he was surrounded and killed by our forces. But the Yan army was nearly destroyed in that same engagement. The survivors who made it home refused to speak of it. No one has ever said clearly what happened."
"No one knows?"
She had died in plain sight. Before tens of thousands of witnesses. How could anyone call that unknown?
Mingyuezhou was still somewhere inside that memory. He did not see the change in her face. "If not for that battle eleven years ago," he said quietly, "if the Central Plains had not been left unguarded -- the man on the throne there today would not carry the name Shen."
Every muscle in her body locked.
A thought rose up that she had not permitted herself, not once in ten years. She stared at him. "You said... the emperor of the Central Plains -- his surname is Shen?"
Mingyuezhou frowned, suddenly confused. "You're not from the Central Plains, but you truly don't know? The Eastern Xia emperor is Shen Yao."
Author's note -- Small Theater:
Shen Yao: As the architect of the protagonist's downfall, I am probably the most inconsequential villain in this entire story.
Old Fu: That's because everyone's keeping a running tab with me instead.
Xiao He: Everyone thinks I took the throne... I genuinely do not know how to face my sister Ling.
Changling: Who said sister?