Wei Xuan came out of the room walking like a man still inside a dream. Wang Shu had said something to him at the end, but none of it stayed. Only one sentence followed him out the door, circling back on itself the whole way: which I didn't want to.
Mr. Yiming had been waiting under the corridor.
He looked at Wei Xuan once, hard and long, then turned and walked forward without a word. Wei Xuan fell in step behind him. Neither spoke. They walked in single file to the plum trees at the far end of the yard, well out of earshot of Wang Shu's room.
Mr. Yiming stopped and spoke first. "Elder Wei. Per our old agreement, you are not to visit without my consent."
"What does that agreement matter now?" Wei Xuan's voice was rough. "Those people already know who he is. Something this serious happens and I'm supposed to stand aside, see nothing, say nothing? This place is no longer safe. We take him back."
"Back." Mr. Yiming repeated the word flatly. "Back where? To Shendu? To the Wang family? Back to the place where that man wanted him dead?"
"Better that than this!" Wei Xuan's voice rose. "He is the young master of the Wang family. How is he supposed to spend his days in a place like this, giving medicine to street peddlers? He deserves better than this dirt."
Mr. Yiming looked at him with contempt. "Dirt. I find Mud Pan Street considerably cleaner than anything your Wang family has to offer."
Wei Xuan drew himself up. "Mr. Yiming. I was entrusted by the Holy Lord and the Goddess. Not you."
"Entrusted to do what?" Mr. Yiming's voice came back hard, eyes lit with anger. "To push him back step by step toward the very place they feared most? They entrusted you with his life. They wanted him to live."
Wei Xuan gripped his cane. He opened his mouth.
Then the corner of his eye caught movement, and everything he had been about to say dissolved. Wang Shu had come to stand under the corridor at some point, quiet and still, watching them.
Mr. Yiming saw it too.
A long silence passed. Then the old man turned away, brushed his sleeve, and said quietly, "Please, Elder Wei. Do not come again. If you do, do not expect me to be polite about it."
He walked back toward the corridor without looking back.
The night was almost spent. The moon had gone behind the clouds, and only a few thin stars remained scattered across the dark sky. The wind carried a thin edge of cold.
Wang Shu stood at the top of the steps and watched Wei Xuan, who stood with his head bowed and did not move for a long time. Then the old man gave a slow bow in Wang Shu's direction, turned, and walked away. The sparse branches of the sick plum trees took him in and let him go, and then there was nothing left of him at all.
Wang Shu's thoughts stirred. "Uncle Wei received my father and mother's wishes. It has not been easy for him, all these years."
Mr. Yiming said, "I know it hasn't been easy. But do I watch him walk you into a fire?"
Wang Shu said nothing.
Mr. Yiming exhaled. When he spoke again, the anger had gone out of his voice, replaced by something older and harder to name. "If you were anyone else, I would not have stopped him at all. But I have practiced medicine for a long time. I have watched more deaths than I can count. I know, I truly know, that there are fates a man cannot outrun. And still these years I cannot make peace with it. I cannot understand it. Heaven has no eyes."
Wang Shu was calm. "Master. My father, my mother, Uncle Wei, you. All of you have been good to me. All of you have wanted me to live. If heaven has no eyes, that means I've been lucky enough to have people looking out for me instead. What's so terrible about that?"
The words came out gentle, almost quiet, and they were aimed entirely at comforting someone else.
But Mr. Yiming found no comfort in them. "Without all of this," he said, "you could have been a fine doctor."
He could still become one.
If not for the diseased bone——
But where in this world is there room for so many "ifs"?
Wang Shu turned and looked at the old man's gray head, and smiled. "Master. Can't I still become a fine doctor?"
Mr. Yiming went still.
Wang Shu looked away again, toward the place where Wei Xuan had disappeared, and said quietly, "I will."
Wei Xuan came out through the nandina bushes alone and stood in the street like a man emptied out.
Pokeweed had been waiting across the road. One look at him and the bad feeling hit. "Elder Wei..."
"He doesn't want to." Wei Xuan's voice was barely above a murmur. "He doesn't want it. Not even the sword bone."
Pokeweed's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Wei Xuan looked years older in a matter of seconds. His shoulders pulled inward. He stood without speaking for a long time.
Pokeweed finally said, carefully: "He doesn't want to. So what happens to it if he had agreed? Give it back to Zhou Man?"
Wei Xuan stood in a kind of fog before he reached into his sleeve and drew out the red heart jade slip. He extended his wrist as though to hand it over.
Pokeweed reached out.
Wei Xuan pulled it back. "No."
Pokeweed blinked.
Wei Xuan closed his fingers around the jade, his grip tight, his face wretched. His voice dropped to something half-dreaming, the voice of a man telling himself something he wasn't sure he believed: "Leave it a while longer. In case he changes his mind."
At the old city gate of Xiaojian, the swords and lights had gone. The Golden Lantern Pavilion monks the Song family had stationed to seal the gate were gone too.
What remained in the middle of Suzaku Avenue was the great sword, forged from a hundred blades fused together, still buried where it had struck at the end of the night, standing alone in the early-morning dark.
Zhou Man paused when she reached the city gate. She looked at it for some time.
Not at the spectacle of it. Not at what the emperor's strike would mean for the Song family's Chachen Temple. What occupied her mind was the peach wood cone pressing against the inside of her thoughts.
The nine-fold talisman of her past life. The two-fold talisman of this one. They kept drifting toward each other, overlapping.
She left the city and did not hurry. She walked the path slowly, letting her feet set a steady rhythm while she sorted through the noise in her head. By the time she reached the school palace, the sky had gone pale and the sun was already up.
The blazing light covered everything.
Zhou Man came through the gate with her sword command at her waist, headed back to Dongshe. Then halfway down the road, she looked up and caught the distant flutter of silk and satin outside Qiluo Hall, lifted by the morning wind.
Her first thought was Zhao Nishang.
The second thought that came right behind it was: the torn sleeve from the night she killed Chen Si. And the eyes she had seen from the tower on Gou Lan Street. Jin Buhuan's eyes.
She changed direction.
It was early. Qiluo Hall held only a few maids who had risen before the others, setting silk threads out to dry. Zhao Nishang wasn't there.
Zhou Man hadn't come for her.
One of the maids recognized her and looked surprised. "Senior Sister Zhou, are you here to see Miss Nishang so early?"
"No." Zhou Man smiled pleasantly. "I'm here on behalf of Jin Langjun. He thinks he left a jade pendant here yesterday and asked me to inquire whether anyone found it."
The maid made a small sound of recollection. "He did come yesterday, yes. Asked a few questions and left. But when we swept the yard, we didn't find any jade pendant. What does it look like? Should we search again?"
Zhou Man had already gotten what she needed. Jin Buhuan had indeed come. The jade pendant was a pretext and nothing more.
She smiled. "He must have remembered wrong. I'll tell him there's nothing to search for." She took her leave without waiting to see what the maid made of it.
Dongshe was still quiet. Most doors along the corridor were shut, the occupants still on rest and not yet returned.
Zhou Man let herself in with her sword command and sat at the desk. While it was still fresh, she picked up a brush and copied down the talisman patterns she had seen on the peach wood cone the night before, line by line, together with the cone's shape.
When she was done, she set that sheet aside and took out a fresh one. This time she wrote in full sentences. It went slowly. Every few lines she had to stop and think, and after almost an hour she had filled only eight pages.
The paper was nearly gone.
She remembered then that during her retreat in Sanjiantang for the sword trials, she had worked through almost all of the paper in the house copying down the sword score.
Outside, she could hear sounds starting up. Two cultivators from Qingcheng and Emei, who could not stand each other's company, had come back from their rest day at the same time.
Zhou Man put down her brush and went to Yu Xiuying's room to borrow half a stack of paper.
She was walking back down the corridor, paper tucked under her arm, when she looked up and saw Jin Buhuan coming from the other end.
Tall. Fan in hand. He had traded the blood-soaked clothes from the other night for a fresh robe, white ground with gold brocade. The wounds on his neck had been dressed but still showed clearly, livid against his skin.
They both stopped. Their eyes met across the length of the corridor.
Jin Buhuan's handsome face arranged itself into a practiced smile. "Junior Sister Zhou. We meet again."
"Jin Langjun." Zhou Man smiled back, equally composed. "I trust you're well?"
"Well enough," he said, "though something's come up that I'd be grateful for your counsel on."
"What a coincidence," Zhou Man said. "I have something to discuss with you as well."
"Then——"
She pushed her door open. "My room is empty. Come in, I'll pour tea, and we can take our time."
Jin Buhuan dipped his head in a courteous half-bow. "Then Jin won't refuse."
Zhou Man stepped aside. He passed in front of her with easy, unhurried grace and walked into the room.
She followed him in.
The moment the door closed behind her, she moved.
Her palm came around fast toward his face.
Jin Buhuan had been expecting something. He twisted aside at nearly the same instant, and her strike passed a breath from his cheek.
But Zhou Man did not stop.
One hand, then the other. She drove him backward from the door, past the table, into the folding screen. Her cultivation far outstripped his, and Jin Buhuan could do nothing but parry with his fan and scramble to stay ahead of each blow. He had no room to attack. He barely had room to breathe.
She swept a palm across the side of his head, forcing him back a step, and in the same motion picked up the cup of cold tea sitting on the table and threw it in his face.
He raised the fan on instinct. The fan blocked the tea and blocked his own sight.
Zhou Man kicked him squarely in the chest.
He flew back and crashed into the edge of the couch, nearly cracking his head on the frame. He was still collecting himself when a bamboo bow tip touched his throat.
He looked up along the dark green length of the Kuci Bamboo Bow. Zhou Man stood over him, one foot planted, leaning in close, her eyes full of bright amusement.
The bowstring was cloud-wire, almost silver-white in the light.
The bamboo tip lay cold as jade against his skin. The curved body of the bow pressed under his jaw, tilting his head back. He looked up at her through his peach-blossom eyes.
Zhou Man took her time. "It's only been two days, Jin Langjun. How are your skills still this poor?"
Jin Buhuan, with a bow tip at his throat, showed no fear. His eyes lit up instead. He glanced along the bow. "So it was you."
Zhou Man laughed despite herself. "You've got nerve. You suspected it was me and still came walking in?"
"The bold die of excess, the timid die of caution," he said without hesitation, still smiling. "I'm an outlaw by nature. What is there I won't dare? Besides, if you meant to kill me, you'd have done it the night I left the city."
Zhou Man's expression shifted slightly.
Jin Buhuan held her gaze. "Yesterday I heard the Golden Lantern Pavilion monks at the gate say that Wang had taken people out of the city that night, and you were among them. Which means when I was talking to Erythrina, you were somewhere close. Lying in wait. When I think about it now, it turns my blood cold. If I had said one wrong thing, I'd have been in pieces by morning."
Zhou Man had not expected him to reconstruct it that cleanly. She was, briefly, impressed. "You're too sharp. I almost don't want to kill you."
"Then don't," he said reasonably. "We've worked well together before. We could again."
She frowned. "Work together?"
Jin Buhuan settled into a calmer tone. "I know you were at Jiajingu. I know you killed Chen Si. Right now you have two choices. Kill me here and seal my mouth, then leave the academy and never come back. Or work with me. Take my money. Do what I need done. If you walk out that door without choosing one of those two options, I report you when I leave, and we both go down."
Zhou Man stared at him.
He was threatening her with exposure.
She followed his logic from start to finish, then looked at him sideways with something like reluctant respect. "You're a real scoundrel."
Jin Buhuan glanced at her, then at the bow still pressed to his throat. "Between the two of us right now, who's the bigger scoundrel?"
Zhou Man looked at him a moment longer.
Then she slowly pulled the bow back.
A red line remained at his throat where the tip had pressed. Jin Buhuan reached up and touched it. He sat up, straightened himself, and said: "All right, forget threatening. Let me ask instead. I have no interest in dying the way Chen Si died."
Zhou Man studied him.
Jin Buhuan tried a smile. "Think about it. Your name is Zhou Man, written as Zhou Buque. My name is Jin Buhuan. Complete and Unexchanged. If we work together, isn't that a perfect match?"
Zhou Man went quiet for a moment. "Zhou Buque?"
She lowered her eyes. She raised her right hand and looked at her right hand, at the place where her little finger was missing.
Jin Buhuan realized what he had said. "That's not what I meant——"
"No." Zhou Man looked back at him. A very quiet smile crossed her face, small and strange and entirely her own. "No apology needed."
She paused.
"I like that name."