Of all the emotions that had greeted Changling when she first arrived, contempt had been chief among them. After she and Taoist Xu traded strikes, that contempt curdled into something harder and colder: open hostility.
Only Ye Qi seemed unbothered. He blinked once, recovered from his surprise, and smiled at her with unhurried warmth. "Yes."
A single word of agreement, and the room went rigid.
Even Yu Ping found himself quietly worried on Ye Qi's behalf. This girl had just dismantled Taoist Xu without breaking a sweat. If she really wanted to arrange some private conversation between them, what was to stop her from swallowing the prince whole?
No one moved. No one spoke.
Changling crossed the floor toward Ye Qi, step by measured step. Then, without warning, the light dropped out of her vision, her legs dissolved beneath her, and she pitched forward into darkness.
She landed squarely in his arms.
Ye Qi stared at the ceiling for a moment.
"What happened to her?" Yu Ping asked.
Ye Qi pressed two fingers to her wrist. "She fainted."
The tension that had been coiled so tightly in the room simply... unspooled. No one quite knew what to do with that. Before anyone could collect themselves, Taoist Xu leveled one finger at her limp form. "Take her."
A cluster of young disciples surged forward, then stopped. Ye Qi had already gathered her up, one arm beneath her knees and one at her back. His expression remained perfectly mild, his eyes still curved with that same harmless warmth. No one from Taixu Sect quite summoned the nerve to try and take her from him.
Taoist Xu's jaw tightened. "Mr. Ye. What is the meaning of this?"
"I gave Mingyuefei my word," Ye Qi said pleasantly. "I intend to keep it. That means waiting until she can speak for herself."
"The Yan army is combing every road. We don't have time to nurse her." The Taoist stepped closer, his voice dropping. "Mr. Ye, we respect the He family's name, and we have extended you every courtesy, but this demon girl touches the survival of eight factions. If there is even the smallest miscalculation..."
Ye Qi exhaled. "She's injured. Without proper care, she may not wake at all. Is there anyone here more qualified to treat her?" He let the question settle, then glanced around the room as though he expected a volunteer. None came. "We set a nine-curve chain formation through the woods outside the village before nightfall. Tonight we are safe. As for drawing information from Mingyuefei, leave that to me. Prince He sent me here to help you. I'd ask that you trust him, if not me."
His voice carried no urgency and no threat. It was simply calm, and somehow that calmness made argument feel like bad manners. Taoist Xu opened his mouth twice and found nothing to put in it. Ye Qi was already turning for the door.
Yu Ping looked left, then right, then followed.
Changling had not planned to faint.
She had not planned many things over these past few days. She had fled to Tomb King Fort aboard Mingyue's boat. She had been stripped of her charge in broad daylight in front of the Acropolis gates. In the interval between those two events, she had eaten a strip of rabbit meat and a handful of wild fruit, and nothing else.
Her body had simply stopped cooperating.
The moment she surfaced back into consciousness, her first instinct was to scan the room for anything edible.
Instead she found her wrists pulled behind her back and bound, a bamboo couch beneath her, and a stone house around her that held no one else.
She sat up with effort. Her head felt stuffed with wet cloth. She could hear the quiet shifts of weight outside the door and beneath the window, the telltale shuffling of people placed there to watch.
She thought about the crowd of them standing guard over a hungry, bound woman and felt something like exasperation on their behalf.
If she had known it would end like this, she would have kicked the man called Ye out of that carriage when she had the chance. At least she might have eaten something before being taken.
She twisted toward her wrists and studied the knot, then stopped and let her arms go slack. There was no point. She crossed her legs and sat still instead, breathing slowly until the sensation returned to her fingers and feet.
She was debating whether to call for someone when she heard it: a sound from above, so faint she almost missed it. A sigh, barely a breath. Coming from the roof.
She tilted her head back.
Someone was sitting on the tiles overhead.
She did not deliberate. She gathered herself, launched silently upward, and settled without a sound on the wooden beam just beneath the stone roof. The gap was just wide enough for one person. She pressed her ear to the wall and listened.
"...why did Mingyuefei collapse like that? I didn't see Taoist Xu land a hit on her..."
Yu Ping. She recognized the voice immediately.
"She was injured before tonight. She just ran out of strength. A little rest and she'll be fine."
The other voice was mild, unhurried. It could only be Ye Qi.
He had brought her back to the room, and Taoist Xu had promptly deployed a ring of young disciples around the stone house as though she might dissolve through the walls the moment she opened her eyes. Ye Qi had found this more amusing than irritating. He had flicked his sleeve at the lot of them and climbed to the roof, where the tiles were flat and the stars were out, and stretched himself across them at leisure.
He had estimated she would be unconscious for an hour or two, and he had planned to use the time well. Changling's mind was something he had not yet found the bottom of, and he wanted to think.
He had not expected her to come around so quickly. He had also not expected Yu Ping's Qinggong to be quite so thunderous, the noise of his arrival on the roof covering, as it happened, the considerably quieter sound of someone rising toward the rafters inside the house.
"So when you told the Taoist she was seriously injured..." Yu Ping's voice shifted.
Ye Qi rubbed at his brow. "Because Taoist Xu has a temper. If I left her in his hands for ten minutes he might have taken a hand off at the wrist, and then we would have nothing."
"But you said it yourself, Mr. Ye. If we hold the demon girl, the thieves fall apart, and we gain the advantage..."
"That only holds if Mingyuezhou is still inside Tomb King Fort. He isn't. He went back to the Yan army." Ye Qi paused. "I still don't understand how he got out, but the fact is he did. He watched us take her from him in front of a gate full of witnesses. He knows who we are. The moment he moves to guard the Yanjing Pass, we won't be saving anyone. We'll be caught like fish in a barrel."
Silence from Yu Ping.
"Then what are we doing just sitting here? I need to go tell the others..."
He was already rising when Ye Qi caught the hem of his robe and pulled him back down. "Sit. Let me think."
Yu Ping sat. He fidgeted. He watched Ye Qi close his eyes and offer nothing. After a long stretch of nothing, Yu Ping said in a deflated voice: "If only Mr. He were here. He would have found a way out of this by now."
Ye Qi opened one eye and looked at him.
Yu Ping heard himself and flushed. "I mean, of course, Mr. Ye, you were sent by him, and I... I have every confidence in you."
The silence that followed had a particular texture.
Yu Ping arrived, slowly, at the understanding that he should stop speaking.
Ye Qi said nothing. He returned his gaze to the stars. Yu Ping shifted and fidgeted and could not sit still. Eventually, as if he needed to hear his own voice to be sure he was still there, he said: "...I heard the reason all of this started, why the Eastern Xia martial world got tangled up with these thieves, was because of a fan. One that had been missing for ten years and suddenly turned up again. Is that true?"
Ye Qi lifted one eyebrow. "Mm?"
"I don't know much beyond that. But my uncle said our master rode for the border overnight with the leaders of the other six factions, to find someone. The owner of half a fan." He turned it over in his memory. "I never caught the name. Surname Fu, I think. Something about a landscape..."
"Fu Liujing."
Ye Qi's voice was light. Informational.
Changling stopped breathing.
Three words. They passed through the stone wall like it wasn't there and drove straight through her chest, pulling something taut that she had kept knotted for a long time.
She stayed on the beam. She did not move. Around her, the present dissolved into snatches of something older, and it was a while before the room came back.
When it did, Yu Ping's voice was saying: "...so he fell into Yan hands as well?"
Ye Qi neither confirmed nor denied it. "Perhaps. A half-handled fan appeared, which was enough for several faction leaders to follow that thread in search of Fu Liujing. They did not expect to walk into a trap."
A long silence from Yu Ping. "But why go at all? The man has been gone for ten years..."
Ye Qi folded his hands behind his head and crossed his feet at the ankle. "Hard to say. By all accounts he was a figure of his era. Turned the tide. Pulled whole regions back from the edge. Likely more than a few of your masters owe him a debt, or maybe..."
Before he could finish, a sharp crack rang out from inside the stone house. Both men were off the roof in an instant.
They found Changling seated on the floor. Beside her lay a wooden chair, split cleanly in two.
She looked up at the young disciples crowding the doorway with a composed expression. "Nothing. I caught the chair getting out of bed."
No one spoke. Yu Ping's mouth tightened over several things he chose not to say.
Changling moved back to the couch, arranged herself, and let her gaze settle on Ye Qi. Ye Qi looked at the chair, then at the rafters, then pressed a hand briefly to the back of his neck.
"Give us the room," he said.
Yu Ping and the disciples traded glances. The reluctance was visible in all of them. But they went, and the door swung shut, and the room closed around the two of them.
The quiet lasted only a moment before Ye Qi said, with some care: "Did you hear all of it?"
Changling looked at him with something that was not quite irritation but was close to it.
She had been sitting on that beam with perfect steadiness. If she had not heard those final words, if her mind had been less wrecked, she would not have flinched. She would not have flinched, the chair would still be in one piece, and no one would have known she was there.
Fu Liujing.
Famous hero. A figure who turned the tide.
She wanted to laugh.
How had Fu Liujing, who had colluded with foreign soldiers against his own people, who had conspired with Shen Yao to poison the Yue family's army, become a legend in someone's mouth? How did a man like that become a story that sect leaders crossed borders to chase?
Did no one know? Had not a single person found out what he had done?