Chapter Text
There were no peach trees in the courtyard.
It was an absurd thing to notice now, after more than a decade living here. If he closed his eyes, Zhou Zishu could have listed each rock and flower in the garden from right to left; he could have said whether they’d make decent cover in a fight, or whether they were useful in poisons. But he hadn’t noticed what was missing from the garden until now, lying flat on his back in the gravel next to six empty jars of wine, staring into the black branches of a maple tree.
Were there maple trees in Siji Manor? There must have been. But it was like trying to remember one song while listening to another. All his soggy mind could see were peach trees, heaving over the mountains like a pink wave.
The summer after Qin Huaizhang’s death, Qin Jiuxiao refused to eat anything but peaches.
This was a test, whether Qin Jiuxiao realized it or not. Zhou Zishu did, with the natural instincts that would soon make him the best spymaster in the Central Plains. Qin Jiuxiao was feeling Zhou Zishu out like he’d cross an old wooden jetty, one weighted step at a time, probing for rotted planks. Every time he refused a perfectly good meal, Qin Jiuxiao was asking: Can I trust you? How much is too much? If I push too hard, will you leave me?
“Be good for your older brother,” Qin Huaizhang had said before he died, and Qin Jiuxiao spent the next year picking fretfully at the seams of that command. Every night for a week, he filled Zhou Zishu’s boots with walnut shells; after Zhou Zishu started sleeping in his boots, he took up jumping in decorative ponds and tracking wet silt up and down the manor’s halls like a grubby little ghost.
The worst part of it all, worse than the frogs in Zhou Zishu’s bed or the disappearance of every comb in the manor, was that Qin Jiuxiao was good. Even at his most difficult, he never took anything that couldn’t be found or broke anything that couldn’t be fixed. Even his most outrageous acts of rebellion were sweet. So: peaches.
For a week, Zhou Zishu took Qin Jiuxiao to the orchard every morning to pick his day’s rations. In the early morning light, the peaches looked unearthly, glowing with the warm yellow of a hearthfire. Even though they both knew they wouldn’t be there if not for Qin Jiuxiao’s caprice, Zhou Zishu justified the excursion by dressing it up as a chore. Each of them carried a large wicker basket; to his credit, Qin Jiuxiao filled his with enthusiasm, scrambling up and down the trees like a little monkey. Zhou Zishu stayed on the ground with a bamboo pole, just to make a point. When they were done, they delivered their loads to the kitchen, leaving them to be turned into preserves and teas and roasts.
Zhou Zishu hated peaches. No amount of sweetness could redeem the fact that their skin felt human and tasted like dust. He could never stop thinking about the pit lurking on the inside like a wrinkled little brain. Jiuxiao never bothered with the fibrous meat stuck to the pit; he just spat them out, gleaming with red slime, into the grass for anyone to step on.
It was all worth it, though, to hear Qin Jiuxiao laugh again.
And yet. After ten days, Zhou Zishu handed him a bowl of duck egg congee and said, “Enough.” It wasn’t safe to go out in the orchards alone anymore; the afternoon before, while a junior disciple was picking cherries, a challenger out to make a name for himself had punched a peach-sized hole in the boy’s chest.
“Eat. I won’t leave until you finish,” he’d said, and sat with the boy until the bowl was as empty as Zhou Zishu’s heart.
Unless he focused, Zhou Zishu’s memories of that year smeared together like a mudslide, one good thing after another smothered under its momentum. Until recently, the peaches had been entombed deep under the mud, with all the other places and people that were crushed under Zhou Zishu’s maladroit stewardship of Siji Manor.
Qin Jiuxiao remembered. After Zhou Zishu slaughtered the Jiang family outside the imperial city, Qin Jiuxiao woke up from his drugged sleep and, in the disoriented moments when his feet were still in his dreams, forgot about the monster Zishu had become. “I dreamt about the orchard,” he said, laughing. “You looked happy. You promised we’d return when winter passed. Once the peach blossoms bloomed, we’d roam the jianghu together.”
“Let’s do it,” Zhou Zishu agreed, too late. “When they bloom, let’s go.” But by then, of course, Qin Jiuxiao knew the truth about what he’d done. By then he was gone.
Maybe that was the worst part: that Qin Jiuxiao had been right to doubt him.
o
It had been four days since Zhou Zishu was brought back to Chongming Court to recuperate. He was unconscious for the first two. On the third, he drove off everyone but the cook and one servant, who kept to their own wing, separate from the manor proper. Nevertheless, like clockwork, Duan Pengju and Han Ying had returned again today with a physician and hovered--avidly and fretfully, respectively--while he examined Zhou Zishu’s pulse.
They were waiting to see if he would die of qi deviation. He was resigned to the fact that he would not.
Duan Pengju would get what he wanted soon enough anyway, although he didn’t know it yet. Zhou Zishu was content to let him suffer in suspense until then. Eighteen months wasn’t so long, in the grand scheme of things, and nobody would be more eager for it to end than Zhou Zishu himself. Six nails of torment, three months each. Then the seventh. He could wait. It was no less than he deserved, to wait.
Maybe he’d been wrong all this time. Maybe his shidi’s antics had had less to do with Qin Jiuxiao’s desperate grief than his own. Maybe Qin Jiuxiao had only ever been trying to draw Zhou Zishu out--out of his fear, out of the manor, into the sun.
Zhou Zishu opened another bottle.
o
During festivals, more than any other time, the city was a study in paradox. The main streets churned with bodies; the backstreets were emptied out. Now that the sun had set and taken the last of the warmth with it, the wind carried the sharp, thin taste of winter. But down below, the air was gummy with the warm smells of candies and perfumes, cooking fires and sweat.
Out here, where the rich men’s manors brooded at the edges of the imperial complex like fat hens, the courtyards were chequered with lights. Now that dinner was done, laughing lords passed from house to house, all of them cousins of their cousins’ cousins, piling like ticks into one another’s courtyards to drink and sing and fall into one another’s decorative ponds and fail to admire the moon.
Though it wouldn’t have warranted the notice of the drunk little lordlings on the ground, Wen Kexing noticed when the pattern broke around a small pocket of cold darkness at the very edge of the neighborhood. To one side, the streams of laughing lantern-bearers were funneled across a bridge, over an old canal too narrow and shallow for fashionable boats. To the other lay a gated tract of imperial parkland. In the middle of it all sat a dark, unwelcoming manor with high walls and no festival decorations to speak of.
Although ill-situated, it wasn’t all that different from the hundred other dark houses in the city, waiting for their masters to return from family dinners and lantern-lighting. It was no better or worse a place to stop and finish his wine than any other, and yet: from his vantage point on the roof of the house opposite, Wen Kexing could see the upper branches of a flame tree boiling up from the inner courtyard, scabby with withered red flowers in the moonlight. And he could hear, very distinctly, the sound of six porcelain jars hitting a wall, one after the other, in the darkness.
Wen Kexing pushed off the roof, over the empty street, over the outer gate and courtyard, to the house beyond.
The full moon was unobstructed by clouds or, out here in the imperial neighborhood, the cookfire haze that hovered over the slums. It was a perfect mid-Autumn for little lords pretending at poetry and for Wen Kexing, gliding across the roof to the manor’s inner courtyard. Under its light, the fading flame tree gave way to hidden gold, a warm riot of orange osmanthus clambering along the high eastern wall. A little maple tree bled red leaves onto the pale gravel.
In the middle of it all, the most beautiful man in the world sat hunched in the gravel, staring blankly at a pitted patch of wall.
Mice could not have heard the sound Wen Kexing made when he landed on the roof’s crested central ridge, but the beautiful drunk shot up like a viper.
Without shifting his stance, Wen Kexing eeled out of the way of the porcelain shard aimed at his taiyang acupoint--and the one after that aimed directly for his eye, which put him directly into the path of another aimed at his jugular, as if the man could read his mind. “Isn’t this a bit much?” he called, flicking it away with his fan without taking his eyes from the dangerous beauty, who had pushed off the ground in one powerful leap to join him on the roof. “Shouldn’t you ask questions before trying to kill me?”
At a distance, he’d had the pale, wan look of a thin-blooded clothes-horse; closer now, it looked more like his corpse had been left to bleach in the sun, leaving behind only angry bones. The man’s eyes tracked the course Wen Kexing had taken over the roof and narrowed when they arrived back at him. “Who sent you?”
“ Sent me?” Wen Kexing took an ostentatious drink from his own wine jar and watched the beauty’s bloodless mouth pinch even tighter. “Nobody. Please excuse this humble scholar. I was only looking for a quiet place to enjoy the night. Who knew I’d find a beauty who could hide the moon and shame the flowers?” (1)
“Enough,” the beauty said, pulling a hidden whip sword from his robes and springing forward.
When the beauty’s sword whistled toward his face, Wen Kexing bent back like a blade of tall grass, swiping his closed fan up and out to parry the sword. It was like hitting water, but Wen Kexing hadn’t expected to redirect such a fast strike. In the same moment, he struck out at the other man’s knee with his heel.
“So rough!” Wen Kexing exclaimed, narrowly twisting his ankle free of the beauty’s attempt to hook it and chopping down at the heding acupoint on the beauty’s raised knee with a force that would have split the bone of a lesser martial artist. Something flickered under the surface of the stranger’s flat eyes, like a fish under the surface of dark water: how big, it was impossible to say, but it was the first sign of life he’d seen.
“You don’t need to protect your virtue so fiercely,” Wen Kexing laughed. “Have a drink with me! I won’t take anything--that isn’t freely given.” This time, the man unmistakably grimaced, and brought his sword arcing back down with true killing intent.
Ordinarily, Wen Kexing did not find serious attempts on his life entertaining, and the beauty was entirely serious. His strikes were like fire jumping from one tree to the next: light as the wind, and then comprehensively devastating. It was easy to imagine him burning implacably through lesser men, one bright strike at a time. And yet what a delight to be, quite literally, the fan--to watch the blue heart of him expand until there was nothing but the two of them in the darkness.
At first, Wen Kexing managed to hold onto the wine, which was admittedly a bit of theater he would not have indulged in if the fight had real stakes, or the wine were worse. One-handedly keeping the wine inside the open pot was another matter, and though he dodged neatly the first time the whip sword came close to severing the tendons of his left hand, several measures splashed out when he was forced to block a vicious chop to his temple with his left arm.
“This is 18 year old Nu’er Hong!” he gasped, shaking out his wet sleeve. “Show some respect.”
The beauty regarded the wine pot with something like regret. “That’s unfortunate,” he agreed, and wheeled into a kick aimed directly at Wen Kexing’s kidneys at the same time as his sword swung up toward his neck. He blocked both easily--too easily, as the sword’s momentum suddenly reversed and the man brought the pommel down sharply into the knob of Wen Kexing’s wrist bone. The sudden numbing shock forced his hand open. Before Wen Kexing could shout his outrage or the jar could fall, the beauty danced back across the roof tiles, every step light and familiar as the sound of rain.
Of all places to see the Swift Moving Steps, he didn’t--
The jar hit the tiles with the sharp, scraping clap of a clumsy hammer-strike, and a roof crest dropped open like a wolf unhinging its jaws and spat out a salvo of arrows.
This, Wen Kexing found less amusing.
When he had dodged, parried, or smashed them all and was no longer in danger of losing a kidney, he found the Beauty standing light as a maple leaf on the sloped ridge of the roof, watching him narrowly.
“What are you doing here,” the disciple of Siji Manor finally said, stealing the words from Wen Kexing’s own throat. Somewhere across the flat expanse of his voice, he sounded almost curious.
“Picking flowers!” Wen Kexing called, and launched himself off the roof and into the night.
o
In the grey light of dawn, before the servants were up or his subordinates could even think to come bother him with more doctors, Zhou Zishu leapt onto the manor’s roof. One by one, he carefully tested the pressure traps laid out under the tiles; one by one, the mechanisms clicked cleanly. He reset the tiles sprung by the stranger’s expensive wine jar and fed more arrows into the hinged hook of the roof crest.
He sat for another quarter shichen contemplating the traps the stranger hadn’t set off on his merry jaunt across Zhou Zishu’s roofs: main gate, small gate, eastern wing, and main residence. He could count on two hands the martial artists with qinggong so fast and light that their footfall wouldn’t make a single impression. One of them was Da Wu, who could be eliminated for nearly infinite reasons, the greatest of which--beyond even height, build, and current location several thousand li away--was that he could not have been compelled to flirt with Zhou Zishu by any force on heaven or earth.
This man clearly thought he was a needle concealed in silk floss, when in reality he was a scimitar concealed in noodles. (2) Regardless, there was absolutely no question about whether Zhou Zishu should report the intrusion.
Below, a sudden gust of northerly wind rattled the courtyard; Zhou Zishu’s eyes instinctively tracked the sound, tracing over the blue contours of the garden before he was conscious of doing so. But the only threat hiding in the leaves was the cold air, and though it juddered sharply through his injured core, it didn’t present half the threat the pompous court physicians insisted that it did. What was a chill, when his flesh had survived all that it had, the pains and deprivations?
The body persisted, perversely, when one wished it would not--when one wished that it would be, if not more efficient in its demise, at least a bit more ceremonious in its recovery.
His gaze settled on the orange osmanthus flickering like candlelight in the blue dawn. Others would be awake soon, and he had things to do before they arrived.
The sun was high in the sky by the time Zhou Zishu’s remaining servant showed Duan Pengju and Han Ying to the desolate corner of the courtyard where Zhou Zishu had installed himself, an unnecessary blanket over his lap and a cup of medicinal tea clenched undrunk between his palms. An early frost had shocked the decorative grasses into premature dormancy; they drooped, brown and withering, against a skeletal stone mound. Zhou Zishu watched the corners of Han Ying’s mouth flex unhappily as he took in the scene and said his greetings.
“The imperial physician has already come and gone,” Zhou Zishu said. He’d ensured that by slipping yesterday’s pest a letter on his way out. It had been generous of Jin Wang to volunteer one of his own physicians; doubly so because this saved Zhou Zishu, who compiled a dossier on the vulnerabilities and vices of everyone who served the Prince, a lot of bother. Though Zishu could not avoid scrutiny throughout a year’s convalescence, he also could not afford for anyone to notice the nails that would shortly be driven into his meridians. Happily, after a short chat, the physician had agreed to arrive weekly, take tea by himself, and write up whatever bullshit he felt would satisfy the Prince and confound Duan Pengju.
“He’ll submit weekly reports. You two will be in charge of any fieldwork in the meantime, but you report to me.”
“Ah. Best wishes for your good health, my lord,” Duan Pengju said, belatedly offering Zhou Zishu a pile of papers. “There are a few matters… During a moon viewing party at his manor, General Su discovered a man he’d never met before searching his office. Before the General could question him, he was momentarily distracted by a guest who knocked over an urn in the courtyard. The man escaped, but—“
Zhou Zishu could remember being energized by the apparent danger of this type of bullshit, years ago. Duan Pengju’s eyes still gleamed with it, like a dog who responded to any kind of stimulation by biting. It’s what would make him an ideal successor for Jin Wang’s ambitions. If Jin Wang knew Zhou Zishu’d had an intruder, too, he’d want to tear the city in two looking for him. Neither would care that the two incidents were clearly unrelated: General Su and Helian Zhao were in the middle of a bullshit argument over the supplier for the army’s arrows, which were identical in all ways except who owned stakes in them. Zhou Zishu’s clever housebreaker was as likely to work for Helian Zhao as a snake was to work for a rat.
“…wide nose, small forehead…
A little under 60 cun tall, Zhou Zishu imagined saying. Reeks of brothel incense. Long-fingered hands; no sword. Sharp upper lip, soft lower lip. Eyes like the bottom of a well. Fights like his bones are made of thunder. Voice like a fucking sea bird.
“…robes acquired from a tailor on Pearl Street, who specializes in—“
Duan Pengju was still, apparently, talking.
“Can you read?” he asked, finally.
“Sir?”
“What part of this could not have gone into a report? And this,” he said, brandishing an approval form, “Do you not have a brain of your own? Do you need a half-dead man to show you how to use a stamp? Show me you can think for yourself, or I’ll find someone who can. You’re dismissed.”
Duan Pengju left, face frozen in the peculiar rictus of a man who had spent years at the mercy of a superior who demanded to know everything at all times, from classified troop movements in Hebei, to the color of the deputy minister of finance’s favorite socks.
Before Han Ying could follow him, Zhou Zishu handed him a list of names. “I want an update on all of these files. Current location, changes in circumstances, associates, what they like for breakfast: anything you can get. Use any resources you need.”
“Thank you, my lord.” Han Ying’s sharp eyes flicked over the list, then settled, infinitely heavy, on Zhou Zishu. “Understood. Is there anything else I can...?”
“No,” he said. “Go.”
Alone again, Zhou Zishu watched the wind move through the fading leaves of the courtyard’s trees: maple, cherry, flame, osmanthus, plum. The osmanthus smelled sweet.
Then he got up to find the box of nails and his knife.
❃
The eighth month became the ninth month, became the tenth. The moon grew and withered; the courtyard faded to browns and grays. In the mornings, a Tian Chuang runner delivered a stack of papers; in the evenings, another took them away. The cook delivered food to his door then retreated to her kitchen in the back hall. By mutual agreement, Zhou Zishu and his remaining servant moved through the house like shadows on a sundial, one always a room ahead of or behind the other. More often, he stayed in the inner courtyard and avoided them all. If he was lucky, he could go entire days without opening his mouth, without needing to feel words move like heavy oil over his tongue.
He woke before dawn and felt his qi buzz like smoked bees around the nail in his chest. He put on his black Tian Chuang robes, although no one would see him, and moved through his forms in the freezing darkness. He moved his hands in familiar ways, and did not think about fights that moved through the bones like a drumbeat. He let his mind turn as sluggish as a water wheel in a drought, dredging up silt and mud.
He waited for the moon to turn full for the third time.
No matter how little he tried to think, his eyes could not learn idleness. When he closed them it was worse; no amount of meditation could keep Qin Jiuxiao’s face away for long. So he let himself look. There wasn’t much to see in Chongming Court that he hadn’t already catalogued a thousand times; the only changes came to the courtyard garden, minor variations on the theme of dormant twigs and drooping pines. Late in the ninth month, the clouds spat out a single, foul snowstorm, then roosted low and cold and still. On the roofs, the snow went grey with a patina of cookfire ash; on the ground, Zhou Zishu’s daily practice slurred it into mud. The plum tree drooped wetly at the edge of the gravel, hovering over Zhou Zishu’s exertions like a disapproving old master.
Inevitably, his observations were bound to swim their way to the turgid surface of his conscious mind. One morning early in the eleventh month, sweaty and more exhausted than he should have been, he came to a sliding stop under the plum tree and knew that it was dying too. The flaking black tumors crawling over its branches took on a sudden, vivid solidity. He’d seen them there--he recognized them--and yet.
Another Zhou Zishu, one that seemed to hover an arms-length over his shoulder and exist purely in the realm of mindless reaction, thought: Even that handsome idiot would have a hard time pretending this place is beautiful now. Why should he come back--
“For fuck’s sake.” Zhou Zishu pinched his own arm, and his perception seemed to slam back between his ears where it belonged. A sick plum tree. Of all the problems waiting on his desk and weighing on his soul, this was a snowflake in a storm. Better yet, it was bound to have a simple solution.
“Han Ying,” he said two days later, in the interminable pause Han Ying now habitually inserted between being told he could leave and actually leaving. “Do plum trees need to be pruned before spring?”
Han Ying froze, eyes flickering to the tree like it could tell him the answer. “My lord?” He swallowed, visibly searching for the trap in his question, and eventually settled on, “Please instruct me.”
Zhou Zishu could have said, It was a genuine question. He suspected that would only confuse Han Ying more, and anyway it wasn’t information Han Ying needed. Instead, he said, “You think with your face. Fix it.”
“My lord.” The idiot boy looked heartbroken.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Zhou Zishu snapped. With a face like that, he might as well hand his enemies a letter itemizing his weaknesses. It was going to get him killed one of these days; but with Han Ying’s disposition, saying so wouldn’t be a deterrent if he thought it meant he’d die in his lord’s service. “What kind of spy looks like that? Do you want to help me or not?”
Finally, the emotion drained from Han Ying’s face, like water down a hidden spring. “Always, my lord. I apologize.” He bowed deeply, and Zhou Zishu decided not to mention the tell-tale tension in his knuckles. He would learn, or he would die. Pestering him would not change the outcome. “This one promises to do better.”
❃
Martial arts masters wrote their techniques down all the time. The world might be a more peaceful place if they did not, but minds were weak and hearts feared loss, and most people entrusted their secrets to paper in the end. Surely Madam Qin and her masters were no different, especially since they had nothing to fear. Nobody had ever rampaged through the jianghu to steal a secret fertilizer recipe.
The shelves storing the books and scrolls salvaged from Siji Manor had a funereal air. Zhou Zishu had long ago memorized what he needed and dismissed what he didn’t, and rarely paid them close attention. After Da Wu helped him compile a comprehensive reference on herbal poisons and cures, Siji Manor’s horticultural texts lost any value they might have had to the Leader of Tian Chuang. But there they were, waiting: some copies of old treasures, and one in Madam Qin’s own hand, neatly organized and illustrated.
His attention was arrested halfway through by an ink drawing of a hand holding a knife, absurdly, to a tree branch. The next illustration showed the branch severed in two, at the precise 45 degree angle Zhou Zishu would have used to hit a man in the jugular. Unseen hands wrapped the cut edge in wet scraps of fabric and carried the branch to the next page, where it was whittled down and placed in a pot. Five weeks in sand, a note said. Then check for roots.
On the other side of the page the artist had drawn a sapling, transplanted back into the dirt.
Zhou Zishu turned back to the first page, the stump of plum like an amputated limb. Somewhere under the mud of his memories, 81 sect brothers had picked up what they could of Siji Manor and taken it to the city. This book had been one of those things, though Zhou Zishu certainly hadn’t packed it. What else had his brothers preserved; what else had they loved too much to leave behind?
How big could a cutting grow in a decade?
❃
By month’s end, the north-facing branches of the plum tree were as black and twisted as the half-consumed wreckage of a house fire. If he stood on his roof, Zhou Zishu could see the flecks of budding plum trees painted across the city. His might just be slower--but a hard dark certainty had taken up residence in his gut. It wasn’t going to bloom.
In a week, Zhou Zishu would drive the second nail into his meridians. When he finally departed, Jin Wang would bestow Chongming Court on some other idiot, and that idiot’s gardener would have no use for whatever was left of the plum tree’s husk.
It would meet the same fate as every other piece of Siji Manor entrusted to Zhou Zishu: uprooted, destroyed, forgotten. Another sin to tally up when his soul fried in hell.
Unless.
Zhou Zishu, you delusional fool, he thought. What merits could a murderer earn from a tree?
Madam Qin’s book sat where he had left it: at the very corner of his desk, away from the files and reports and bottles of poison banked on the other side. Outside, the sun had not yet set behind the courtyard’s high walls. The wicker chair someone had long ago placed by the azalea was sticky with frost and disuse. There was just enough light to read by.