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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.

Chapter Text

Zhou Zishu slept shallowly. Any sound or movement was a fishhook in his sleeping mind, dragging it raggedly back from the depths of true rest again and again. He was already halfway out of bed, disturbed by some intangible shift in the air, by the time he heard a mechanical volley of arrows slap into wood, dirt, and meat. He was on his feet, knife in hand, when he heard the distinctive sound of someone falling to their knees, then the scrape and crunch of a body toppling over into the snow.

It might be one of Helian Zhao’s lackeys, or one of a thousand others seeking revenge. But Zhou Zishu didn’t think so.

The moon was nearly full again, bright enough that its light diffused through the thin cloud cover and cast freak shadows over the courtyard. Zhou Zishu paused just at the edge of the lattice door, silently pulling his outer robes closed as his eyes adjusted to the moonlight. The air was very still; the only sounds in the courtyard were the clicking whirr of a trap winding down, the grumble of snow settling under an unexpected weight. And, very faintly, the animal wheeze of a wounded man. His body spilled out from the edge of the garden, halfway onto the gravel, cast up on a foam of green and white silk like a wave from some invisible tide.

“You’re back.”

“Ah!” At the sound of Zhou Zishu’s voice, the man rolled his head back in the snow, one arm skidding on the snow as he tried to push himself further onto his side. Not like he was trying to get away--like he was trying to get a better look. Zhou Zishu obliged him by kicking him on the shoulder, sending him sprawling onto his back.

“Too rough! Ah, the price of seeing this beauty again is very high!”

“The price will only grow higher the longer you waste time with nonsense,” Zhou Zishu assured him. The stranger had managed to dodge all but two of the bolts shot by the decorative lantern under the plum tree. However, just as he had that time on the roof, he’d evidently jumped up and to the left -- directly into a spray of needles spat out by a stone lion crouching in the dead begonias.

It was difficult not to feel some professional satisfaction.

One bolt was lodged diagonally in the stranger’s calf; the other had scored his thigh, which was bleeding freely onto the torn skirts of his robes. On their own, neither would kill him, or even slow down an escape attempt very much. But: “The needles are poisoned.” His shoulder and left arm bristled with them; the majority, however, had cratered his lower abdomen. The waist of his robes was pulpy with blood, but the real problem would be the paralytics flooding his meridians. Zhou Zishu glanced significantly at the stranger’s sluggish attempt to shift his leg so that the bolt no longer pressed into the ground. “Without the antidote, you have about an incense stick’s time until it stops your lungs and heart. Time to talk.”

The stranger’s eyes danced with a strange, happy light. “Really, there's no need to go this far. If you desired my conversation, you only had to ask.”

“I’m asking now. What’s your name?”

“Wen. Wen Kexing,” he said, smiling languidly and somehow giving the impression that he was introducing himself in court, not flat on his back in a pile of half-decomposed yard waste.

He could smile all he liked; Han Ying had dutifully updated all the dossiers he’d been given over the past three months, and Wen Kexing wasn’t a known name or alias for any of them. Whether “Wen Kexing” was a bullshit artist or an unknown quantity, he needed to offer something more than a worthless name if he wanted to live. Still, Zhou Zishu drew a handkerchief from his sleeve and tossed it on Wen Kexing’s leg, to show that he’d reward cooperation.

Wen Kexing ignored it, eyes still locked on Zhou Zishu’s face. “And you are…? This is where you tell me your name,” he added patiently, as if Zhou Zishu had hired him for the world’s most absurd lessons in etiquette.

“This isn’t a conversation. Do you want to die?” he asked, after a long moment, plucking the man’s elegant hand up by the wrist and dropping it on the arrow wound. He’d seen plenty of men pretend their lives didn’t matter to them, but never this thoroughly. He wondered what point Wen Kexing was trying to make. “Press down.”

Wen Kexing’s right hand came up in a hazy lurch, like it was controlled by too few puppet strings, and settled with a slap on top of his left. The cloth creased and pinked under the combined weight, but his eyes never left Zhou Zishu’s. “How silly of me. I was so... distracted"-- Zhou Zishu ignored the flash of bright teeth--"I completely forgot this little issue."

“Bullshit.” By now, the poison would be running through Wen Kexing’s veins like stinging ants. Zhou Zishu held a little pot two handspans above Wen Kexing’s wandering eyes. “If you want this, tell me what you’re doing here.”

“I’m sure I’ve survived worse,” he said, smiling widely with his soft, pampered-looking mouth. “You know, a fortune teller assured my parents that I would die of peaceful old age, surrounded by my wife and children.”

“Which do you believe: someone paid to tell your parents nice things, or the hole in your gut?”

“Now that you mention it, it is suspicious…” Wen Kexing’s mouth quirked. “I like men.”

“...Wen Kexing, don’t waste your breath telling me things I already know.”

Laughing must have hurt: Wen Kexing couldn’t hide the way his lungs caught with every inhale. “It pays to be sure! A rare jade like you must hear so many compliments every day; I was afraid you’d think this was just how people talk.”

“I do not,” said Zhou Zishu, who had been certain of very little for a long time but was quite certain about this, “think this is how all people talk.”

“Ah, well, then.” A muscle had started twitching under his eye, like a moth battering itself against the light of his skin. “As long as you know I’m special.”

Something in Zhou Zishu’s chest twinged. He pushed the stopper from the jade bottle of antidote, one-handed. The smell was heavy as fog in the cold air -- mandrake and poria, licorice and honeysuckle. Bright as spring, sweet as rot. It said what he didn’t: no time, no time. “I’m serious. What are you here for?”

“I am, too. ‘For every second that remains, I want to see your beautiful face.’ (1) Won’t you tell me what to call you?”

The odds that this man had jumped into the home of Tian Chuang’s leader by pure chance, and returned to his booby-trapped manor for purely aesthetic reasons, seemed significantly lower than the odds that he was after something. If Zhou Zishu pointed this out, though, Wen Kexing would only say something stupid about Zhou Zishu’s face. Again. So instead he said: “You haven’t earned that yet.”

“So heartless! Is my life so cheap? Ah--.” His jaw clenched. Trying not to vomit, maybe. His eyes opened one at a time; it didn’t look entirely voluntary. “Ahh. They say murderers pay with their lives, don’t they? And I only…Hah, I’m always paying for the wrong things.” A laugh skittered out from his seizing throat and spidered across the suddenly burning cold of Zhou Zishu’s skin. Murderers pay with their lives, brother! “You can call me Philanthropist Wen.”

Brother, Qin Jiuxiao had said. Brother, you--! “You can call me Zhou Xu,” his mouth said. At least it had enough sense to lie.

“Ah hah...light, fine willow catkins...” This time, Wen Kexing’s laugh was definitely garbled by his stiff lips. “Playing with...with...a heartless creature.” (2)

“Why did you come here?” Zhou Zishu tried again.

“You promised…'' Wen Kexing’s eyes tracked vaguely over the scabby plum branches. “Ah....Well, what’s one more broken promise in this lifetime?”

“When did I ever promise you anything? Wen Kexing!”

“Ha! ‘The flowers bloom in four seasons, knowing everything.’ But.”

“ What --”

Wen Kexing’s eyes refocused just long enough to find his again, although he seemed to be seeing something further--deeper--sweeter. “Zhou Zishu! You lied.” And then his breath stopped.

“Shit,” said Zhou Zishu. “ Shit. ”

❃

Waking up was like trying to breathe facedown in mud. His whole mind was a sucking sound, solid where it should be light and wet where it should be warm, heavy in his lungs and thick in his teeth.

Sometimes he surfaced long enough to hear someone else breathing-- in the darkness-- close enough to touch the soft, useless meat of his sleeping body--

He had learned early in life that platitudes about dying--“he fought hard”--meant little. People loved like dogs, people fought like vipers, and then they died anyway. No matter how determined you were to survive, there were some tides you couldn’t swim against. All you could really do is decide how many people drowned with you.

The small, gasping mouth at the very edge of his awareness fought anyway--until he could feel daylight roiling against the soft meat of his mind-- until he felt bloated and claggy with waking--until--

Time meant very little. When he finally woke up, the room was empty.

His mind still felt sticky with exhaustion; just moving his eyes from one side of the blank ceiling to the other felt like pushing a rock three times his size up a hill. His body thrummed with the throbbing, unnatural absence of pain. “Ah,” he said, and held himself still against the riptide of sleep long enough to bite his lip, hard enough to bleed. The sharp sting of pain tore something loose; it gave him just enough control over his limbs to heave himself on his side before he vomited stale blood across the sheets and floor and, possibly, the wall. But not, at least, down his own throat.

Somewhere several rooms away, a screen slapped open and shut. One set of footsteps: peevish, deliberate. And then the Manor Lord himself whisked the door open, face artfully blank, mouth poised to say something. It probably hadn’t been “Disgusting!”, but that’s what came out anyway, his foot frozen in midair over a globule of black blood.

“Many apologies, this one hadn’t realized you were afraid of blood.” Wen Kexing flapped his hand clumsily to indicate his torso and leg, both barrel-shaped with bandages. “I’ve put you out.”

“No,” he said, and stepped briskly around the mess to stand at the head of Wen Kexing’s bed roll. No, he wasn’t afraid, Wen Kexing assumed, not no, you haven’t put me out , judging by the forbidding look on his face.

The angle was awkward; Wen Kexing’s eyes nearly crossed, but if Zhou Zishu thought it would embarrass him, he was seriously underestimating Wen Kexing’s willingness to look ridiculous. Maybe he was just trying to dispel the impression that he was Wen Kexing’s nursemaid. Wen Kexing grinned up at him. Someone had fed him the antidote, stripped him, cleaned him, and treated his wounds, and he couldn’t hear anyone else in the house. “I’m alive,” he noted. “Still so eager to talk to me?”

“You wish,” Zhou Zishu snapped, and then looked irritated by his own unexpected flash of personality. “If you’re well enough to run your mouth, I’ll assume you’re well enough to clean up your own messes.” He turned sharply on his heel and made for the door.

“Ah! Lord Zhou will never have a more quiet prisoner...Lord Zhou? Brother Zhou? Ah--!”

He was gone.

It took more effort than he’d ever admit to roll onto his back again, away from the wet patch of bloody sheets. The plasma had already soaked into the fabric, leaving only black clots of old blood curled on the mat. Like little chicken foetuses, he thought hazily, the image as much pulled from memory as from the blurring sight before him.

Sleep took him. When he woke up, the blood had been roughly cleaned, and there was a cold bowl of medicinal tea waiting on the floor.

❃

By the third time Wen Kexing woke up, he was strong enough to wriggle his way to a halfway sitting position up against the wall. Lord Zhou watched impassively from a desk on the other side of the room, fortified against Wen Kexing’s whining by an impressive wall of scrolls and papers. There was another bowl of medicinal soup on the tray, but it had once again gone cold, negating at least half of its salutary effects, if there were any. Under Zhou Zishu’s calculating gaze, Wen Kexing managed to bring the bowl to his mouth without losing more than a spoonful over his knuckles and sleeve.

What had been in that evil poison? Wen Kexing’s meridians felt claggy and torn as the banks of a river after a flood; and if he couldn’t circulate his qi , then his recovery would be at the mercy of his poisoner’s cures. Wen Kexing sniffed the soup carefully, and then, when he only detected the familiar smells of mung bean, licorice root, and fu ling, sniffed it again more loudly just to see what Zhou Zishu would do. The answer was nothing, although he seemed to come to some conclusion when Wen Kexing managed to sip from the bowl without dribbling the soup down his chin.

“If you want to keep breathing, there are rules,” he said. “Don’t touch anything unless I give it to you, or tell you that you can touch it. Don’t leave this room without me. No talking to anyone else.”

“ Is there anyone else?” Wen Kexing mused. The remains of the poison lay damp and heavy on his senses, but his instincts told him that if he could have extended his awareness across the manor, he’d find the same thing he had the first two nights he jumped over Lord Zhou’s roof: an echoing rectangle of empty halls. There were at least two people living in a small building behind the back courtyard, but that didn’t make sense for a manor as large and well-appointed as this one.

Even if he had no family in this world, no man this wealthy should have an empty household, never mind the Master of a major sect. Where were the retainers, the servants and slaves, the runners, the guards? Where were his martial siblings?

“The one you should worry about is me.” Zhou Zishu’s eyes were very dark. In the thin afternoon light, they reflected back nothing. “The herbs in the arrow poison can’t be found in the Central Plains. Only I can say when you’ll need the antidote again. If I were you, I’d stay put.”

Wen Kexing tipped the cold contents of the detoxifying soup down his throat. It really was awful. “Brother Zhou, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

❃

The awful soup and equally-awful tea made repeat appearances over the next several days. Whether due to their effects or despite them, on the third day Wen Kexing managed to stand up long enough to lurch to the water closet and back again on his own. Insultingly, Zhou Zishu did not consider this a prelude to an escape attempt, and merely called out, “Don’t fall in. I’ll leave you there if you do,” from his desk as Wen Kexing passed.

If anything, having a newly ambulatory captive only seemed to make Zhou Zishu more determined to complete Wen Kexing’s recovery. Why this should be true remained a mystery; in the same position, Wen Kexing would have put his head on a flagpole outside his hall. He had, in fact, put heads on flagpoles. If Zhou Zishu really wanted to keep him alive to question him more, shouldn’t he do it now, while Wen Kexing was weak?

Instead: “Sunlight will be good for you,” Zhou Zishu declared at midday, with the unshakable confidence of a man who wanted a problem to go away as quickly as possible. When Wen Kexing failed to respond with alacrity, his eyes narrowed. “What?”

“The poison you gave me created an excess of yang energy. I’m overheated already.”

“And? It’s cold outside, isn’t it?” To his credit, his explanations pivoted as quickly as his feet; he looked absolutely certain this was what he’d meant in the first place.

Wen Kexing considered arguing that the wind would dry him out, but he didn’t want his new companion to simply storm out and lock him in this room alone again, as he did every morning at dawn for a full shichen . Zhou Zishu’s weight was already leaning onto the balls of his feet. “Of course, course,” he said instead. In his experience, it was best to keep unpredictable monsters where you could see them. At least looking at Zhou Zishu was no hardship. “Naturally, the great Lord Zhou is correct.”

Zhou Zishu huffed, and herded him out the door with a flat-eyed look that suggested he was always right and was beginning to find it tiresome.

The air outside was freezing, damp and ugly, clinging possessively to the inside of his lungs. It was always worst, he found, just before the spring. Zhou Zishu let Wen Kexing clutch his elbow as they made their way down the treacherous, unswept stairs to the courtyard.

“I’ll admit, you haven’t shown this guest much of your manor yet, but you aren’t poor,” Wen Kexing mused. “Shouldn’t a garden like this have a gardener?”

“He’s dead.” His tone did not invite further comment; Wen Kexing watched the absolute stillness of his bone-pale face, and kept his thoughts about this to himself.

Together, they passed the place where Wen Kexing nearly died, now indistinguishable from the rest of the garden, as if he had never been. Someone -- Zhou Zishu himself, apparently? -- had filled in the crater his body had left; the slurry of footsteps from his morning forms now extended into the garden proper. Wen Kexing wondered what he had done with the bloody snow. Buried it? His mind conjured red flowers, wild roses choked with needles up and down their backs, climbing up out of the place where his blood was rotting underground.

Ah-- still drugged, then. Or it was the old insanity, brought back to the surface like a lanced wound. He’d have to be careful.

Zhou Zishu’s hand was cold and inflexible around his elbow as he led the way around the plum tree, past the vicious garden statues and around a lumpen, waist-high rock pile to a clear spot against the western wall. There were two chairs and a little stone table, tilted gracelessly before a ghastly scholar’s rock and a spray of dead sedge. Zhou Zishu settled himself wordlessly on the cleaner chair, leaving Wen Kexing to collapse into the one covered in dead leaves and creeping mildew. Well. What was a grimy chair, compared to all the other places Wen Kexing’s body had been? With every step, the pain from his wounds gurgled up through the fog of drugs, like water from an underground spring, and he was tired. He sat.

“Such hospitality,” Wen Kexing said, and tilted his face toward the sky. Ah. At this hour, the chairs were positioned to face directly into a shaft of sunlight. They sat in silence until, half a shichen later, the sun passed behind a ragged screen of evergreen bamboo.

Only then did Zhou Zishu tilt his face toward Wen Kexing’s, and repeat, “Wen Kexing, what are you doing here?”

“Contemplating my good fortune, that I should be invited into a peerless beauty’s inner chambers.” He held Zhou Zishu’s eyes, and drank the last of his now stone-cold tea with a smile.

This repeated over the next several days, until it had the uncanny force of ritual. True to his word, Zhou Zishu never left Wen Kexing alone for long. Once he was coherent enough to notice anything more complicated than his own hands and feet, Wen Kexing realized that his sleeping mat had been placed across the room from Zhou Zishu’s bed. It was hard to imagine that a man whose roof tiles and garden statues were full of projectile weapons did not have an oubliette, or even just a locked cellar, but he must have had his reasons for keeping a wounded snake so close to his own bed.

At least for now, Wen Kexing posed no threat, and Zhou Zishu clearly knew it. The more the paralytic effects of the poison wore off, the more the rents in his skin and muscles screamed. He’d have trouble moving quickly, even if his mind could come unstuck long enough to command his limbs to move--and, for now, it couldn’t. Something of the hallucinatory effects of the poison clung stubbornly to the deep grooves of his mind. The same thing had happened, he remembered vaguely, to the men and women who came to the Healers’ Valley for surgery; for weeks, sometimes months, they couldn’t shake the sticky pull of the draughts that had kept their bodies still while the Divine Hands carved wet shapes out of them. The prospect sent cold fire through his veins. The past two decades had only reinforced the lesson that deep sleep was a sure way to wake up with a knife in your kidneys. But every morning, Wen Kexing had to claw his way free of his muddy dreams like a river crab. And every night, he went to sleep with Zhou Zishu’s flat eyes still fixed on him, two black pebbles in the moon-pale void of his face, wreathed in a fog of detoxifying incense.

At dawn every morning, while Wen Kexing’s animal mind was still struggling against the trap of sleep, Zhou Zishu rose and went on his own mysterious errands. Waking up felt like chewing his own leg off. By the time he opened his eyes, Zhou Zishu would be back at his desk with a new pile of papers and scrolls, and another bowl of tepid medicinal soup would be at Wen Kexing’s elbow. He spent his afternoons and evenings the same way; twice a day, the manor’s unseen cook deposited a tray outside the bedroom door and scurried away again on feet light as a rabbit’s outside a wolf’s den.

Their only reprieves, such as they were, consisted of the mid-morning excursions into the wasteland at the manor’s heart. Day by day, Zhou Zishu rose from his tower of papers and hauled Wen Kexing outside to sit in the bitter cold for a half-shichen; day after day, he asked the same question. He hardly acknowledged Wen Kexing otherwise, and he was impervious to any amount of chatter, no matter how provocative. On the second day, he brought a well-used book with him and focused on it with an intensity that men usually reserved for death matches.

Wen Kexing was left with nothing but his own thoughts to distract him from the pain that seared through his leg and gut every time the wind blew. Probably, Zhou Zishu suspected that there could be no worse torture for Wen Kexing than prolonged exposure to the inside of his own head. Ordinarily, he’d be right. He could feel the old violence seething deep in his cracks and fissures, volcanic under the heavy waters of his healing mind. But for now, for a change, his thoughts felt slippery and buoyant, brushing past one another with the unconcern of algae-eating fish. Nobody had come this close to killing him since he was a child, and yet. He remembered the graceful way that Zhou Zishu had crouched next to him in the snow, watching with detached focus as Wen Kexing drowned in his own lungs.

Watching Zhou Zishu in turn was, all on its own, nearly enough to consume his attention.

“Is Ah Xu hoping I’ll sit here and think about what I’ve done? I suppose since poisoning me and stabbing me all full of holes didn’t work, you realized that only a truly novel kind of pain could break a formidable opponent like me.” Wen Kexing smiled into the trees. “How flattering that you think I’m up to the task.”

Zhou Zishu tucked away his book and hauled Wen Kexing up by the elbow, face tight as a lateen sail, blown taut by some mysterious wind. “I wouldn’t have had to do any of those things if you’d used the front door like a normal person. Wen Kexing, what are you doing here?”

Wen Kexing had no intention, originally, of returning to the imperial capital. The risk was greater than the reward: it was far away and full of eyes, and by the end of his first visit he’d known there wasn’t any advantage to be found here. The imperial capital was a world apart, as oblivious to the petty aspirations of the jianghu’s backwater tyrants as a pleasure boat sailing over fish.

He’d only found one tiny scrap of jianghu in the imperial city’s churning crowds--what did it mean that it was the one piece he might have found beautiful?

“You think I talk so much that I’ll eventually say something you can use,” Wen Kexing speculated the next morning, fanning himself idly despite the bitter cold. He’d stolen a painted fan from the wall of Zhou Zishu’s bedroom. Zhou Zishu had done nothing to stop him or take it back, despite having seen Wen Kexing fight with one on the roof all those months ago, and despite having hidden the one Wen Kexing arrived with. “Or that I’ll become so irritating that I’ll tell you what you want just to shut myself up.”

“Take a rest after this,” Zhou Zishu murmured, without looking up from his book. He kept it angled away, but when he turned the pages, Wen Kexing could sometimes catch glimpses of diagrams, the curling edge of flowers. “You’ve worked hard.”

Wen Kexing was not so pathetic that he’d forget the finer things in life after fighting one drunken disciple-- one man who may, once, have been a child. He’d spent his first night back in the city at one of its finest brothels, drinking in the bright music and soft skin like a camel about to cross the desert. If the encounter had left him cold, that was only because capital courtesans usually catered to bureaucrats, and had been thoroughly divested of any personality they had the misfortune to be born with.

But if he hadn’t visited the brothel’s pristine premises, he might have mistaken the grounds spread out beneath him now for the natural consequence of winter in a city, rather than what he could now only assume was malicious neglect. He knew, for instance, that it was possible to sweep away the old snow, rather than kicking it into a shit-colored slurry, and could guess that the delicate clay pots should have been brought inside before they cracked and spilled dead orchids into the decorative pond. He was resolved not to look too closely there, on the chance that it had once been stocked with fish.

It felt like it should have been a metaphor for the jianghu’s rotten promises—inevitable that a sect that failed to protect his family couldn’t even keep a potted plant alive. He’d seen plenty of that hypocrisy on his previous expeditions, though, and it tended to look like useless opulence, arrogant spectacle. This was something else, something that felt like it had been pulled from the bottom of his gut, where he’d never quite managed to digest or throw up the things he’d eaten to stay alive. A bezoar made of trees.

“I take it back, Ah Xu,” he said, another morning, another day. “You truly are a genius at torture. Nothing I’ve ever seen hurts me like looking at this garden. Hah, what secrets is that plum tree keeping, that you did all this to it?”

Zhou Zishu’s head snapped up, and for just a moment, something wild ran across the pale, treacherous peaks of his face. For just a moment, Wen Kexing was absolutely sure that Zhou Zishu was going to snap his neck-- knew that he would feel as much doing it as he would stepping on a twig. Then it passed into the shadows under his brow and was gone.

“Wen Kexing, what are you doing here?” Zhou Zishu asked, in a voice like ice just before the spring: still and flat, cracking just beneath the surface.

Wen Kexing settled in to wait for the thaw.

❃

Like most other wealthy houses in the imperial city, Chongming Court’s south wing was set apart from the main house. It sat alongside the main gate, hunched backwards so that its windows faced the house rather than the road. In order to reach the main house, one would have to pass through a second gate, and an outer courtyard so barren and anemic that it made the chaos of the inner courtyard seem comparatively cheerful. At dawn, when Zhou Zishu rose to accept the most recent delivery of reports and queries, the south wing was black with silence.

A week before the Lunar New Year, Zhou Zishu found Han Ying waiting in the gatehouse, a bundle of reports under one arm and a determined grimace on his face.

Zhou Zishu frowned. “Han Ying. What’s happened?”

“Nothing, my lord,” Han Ying took a half-step forward, then stopped, and hastily put down the pile of reports. “It’s all in here. Which is why, actually...My lord, the imperial physician’s report says that your internal injuries are not improving. You’re still taking so much on, and with nobody here to support you. Not even--many apologies for overstepping, but if my lord is worried about having others around while his strength is compromised--he has to know that there are those of us who are absolutely loyal--even just to bring tea, or--”

“Han Ying. Enough.” Every bone in his body felt brittle at their proximity, and talking seemed to bring up the shards; Han Ying flinched as if he had been struck. “This is the last time I’ll warn you. What I need is quiet, not this endless rattling.”

Still, the boy hesitated. “Is there nothing I can do?”

The problem here was clear. Han Ying was pathologically determined to be useful; now that he had completed Zhou Zishu’s dossiers on the jianghu’s strongest known practitioners, he would hover like a hapless mosquito until his attention was diverted by some new act of service. There was something delicate in his posture that recalled Madam Qin’s illustrations of sprouts that must first be grown inside--tender things that would need to be hardened off in the wind and the rain come spring.

“Seeds,” he said, and went to write a list on the scrap left by the gate for runners to use. “The physician said that working on the garden will improve the circulation of my qi. Get me these, specifically, for now.”

Zhou Zishu knew he shouldn’t encourage him: it could only end badly. It was clear now that anyone Zhou Zishu favored was marked for death, and the least Zhou Zishu could do was keep Han Ying, Bi Chengfeng, and Bi Chengfeng’s disciples far away. And yet, by the very same token, Qin Jiuxiao’s voice echoed through his gut, and he could not--

And. Well. There was also the matter of the bizarre intruder Zhou Zishu was hiding in his bedroom.

“Ahh, every morning my husband sneaks out of our chambers before dawn, and returns smelling of other men,” Wen Kexing complained groggily from his pile of quilts, as soon as Zhou Zishu unlocked and disarmed the bedroom door.

“The only thing that smells in here is the crap coming out of your mouth,” Zhou Zishu returned, twisting the traps back into place behind him.

“What have I done to deserve this treatment?” Wen Kexing continued, as if he had not spoken. “I keep you company day in, day out, and yet I must endure long nights, quilt and pillow cold.” (3)

“Truly, your suffering is infinite.” Zhou Zishu fished a freshly-ground packet of wound powder from his pocket and tossed it onto Wen Kexing’s lap. The dried san qi and bai ji had come from the garden, tended in better years by Siji juniors; after this batch, he would either need to place an order for more, or stop getting stabbed. Or successfully rehabilitate the necessary plants, but he was as likely to achieve that on his own as he was to avoid stab wounds for more than a year. “Move. I need to take out your stitches.”

“As much as I would like your lovely hands on my skin,” he said, “how could I bear for you to begin with something this ugly?” Wen Kexing, leg freed from the quilts, robe and trousers hoisted carelessly above the knee, prodded unflinchingly at the row of black stitches on his calf, where the arrow had gone through. The skin was livid with bruises, but all Zhou Zishu could see was the way the morning light traced over the fine bones of Wen Kexing’s ankle and wrist. “Hai, it’s like fat black ants marching off to dinner.”

“Take them out yourself, if they’re so bad,” Zhou Zishu snapped, and did not throw their water basin at Wen Kexing’s head. None of his men had ever complained about his work before. If they survived a wound, they were glad to have survived it, whatever the stitches looked like.

To his credit, Wen Kexing’s capacity for pain was greater than his vanity; he picked the stitches free and patted the powder on in frankly unsettling silence. After Wen Kexing swanned off behind a screen for a sponge bath, Zhou Zishu waited for him to comment on the pitted wreckage of his lower abdomen, where the needles had torn their way across the elegant line of his hip. But he washed himself silently, and emerged afterward with his borrowed robes knotted closed, and his face still as an empty room.

“Come on,” Zhou Zishu said. “I need to show you something.”

Once they made their usual, shuffling way to the courtyard, Wen Kexing finally frowned. “Ah Xu,” he said, “I know you do not treasure our time together as I do, but I assure you that we were here together yesterday. And the day before that. In fact, we met right over there--the moon was shining in your eyes, and I--”

“Do you think I’ll forget the time you crashed onto my roof like a wild goose any time soon?” Wen Kexing squawked in outrage, and then pulled up short, looking furious with himself.

“Ah Xu, that was a dirty trick,” he fumed. “At this rate, I might come to think you actually hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, or anyone else,” Zhou Zishu said, flexing his free hand against the cold. “What a waste of energy.”

“That’s hard to believe, coming from a man whose flower beds have barbed spikes hidden in them.”

“Hating is hating.” Zhou Zishu shrugged. “Killing is killing. You noticed the flower beds? Good. I’m going to show you the rest. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Rather than being deterred by Zhou Zishu’s speech about cold-blooded murder, Wen Kexing seemed energized, bright with a nervy curiosity. “Why would you? Are you trying to make it easier for me to escape?”

“No. Don’t touch that pillar,” Zhou Zishu said, pointing to a spot at hip-height, right where someone would be likely to rest their hand for support if they tried to crane around the corner. There had always been snares set throughout the courtyard for the average--creeping, crouching, shrubbery-destroying--homebreakers, things Zhou Zishu had imitated or outright gutted from Siji Manor’s defenses. Wen Kexing was many things, but he was rarely stupid and never subtle. From their first meeting, Zhou Zishu had known that any trap premised on an intruder’s stealth would be unlikely to deter him.

“Wen Kexing!” Zhou Zishu snapped, when it seemed like his erstwhile patient was preparing to wobble over to a nearby scholar rock. “What did I just say? Stay out of the rockery. The gravel’s only held up by a reed mat--there’s a pit under it.”

Wen Kexing’s eyes were oddly bright for someone who had just been told that everything within a fifty-cun radius had been rigged to maim him. Someone who was only standing here now, left arm braced around his shredded abdominal muscles, because he’d already been maimed by one of those things. “Ah Xu, you’re truly bloodthirsty!” It sounded like a compliment. “Explain those abominable garden statues to me.”

He did. The statues flanking the garden path had been designed so that a trip wire could be strung between them. Zhou Zishu had always found it a bit useless; unless he was willing to kill anyone who crossed the garden, it had to be reset every night, and anyone too inept to watch where he put his feet was bound to be killed by something or someone else in the manor fairly quickly. Three months ago, however, he wove the wire through the trees and across the garden path, 60 cun off the ground. Too high to impede the only person who stepped foot in the courtyard anymore--Zhou Zishu didn’t even have to duck to walk under it--or even most intruders, except one confident enough to waltz in at his full height, still wearing his bright robes and tall guan.

After all, too much power was its own trap. Zhou Zishu did not say so, but Wen Kexing seemed to understand anyway; his hand clenched on Zhou Zishu’s arm, and the smile he turned on him was eerily still. “You made this just for me?” The smile did not change, even as his voice imitated the sounds of his usual flirtation. “You must have been waiting eagerly for my return. Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

There was something odder still in his tone, a kind of gritty drag like sandy gears turning against one another. Return. Waiting. Zhou Zishu, you lied. “I knew you’d turn up eventually,” he said, experimentally, and Wen Kexing’s already-tight grip on his arm spasmed so hard his bones creaked.

“I’m here now,” he replied eventually, in the same eerily fluting voice. “By all means, continue the tour.”

As they made their uneven way through the twisting garden path, a restless itch began to arc through Zhou Zishu’s bones. The more he explained, the more Wen Kexing’s keen eyes lingered on the trip wires and fallen branches, the more it burned. Had he ever looked at the manor through another man’s eyes? Chongming’s few guests were either ignorant nobles, easily herded, or exactly the type of snakes the traps were designed to catch in the first place. The only exception was Jing Beiyuan, but from the very first day he visited, Jing Beiyuan had sailed unerringly through the manor like a familiar ghost, wreathed in the same sibylline smile as ever. Given that he had survived more than a decade next door to Wu Xi’s scorpion-infested deathtrap, not to mention the imperial court, Zhou Zishu assumed Jing Beiyuan’s instinct for danger had simply transcended human perception.

Wen Kexing’s approving little nods couldn’t mask what was surely now obvious to both of them: Zhou Zishu had created a killing jar. Was it really surprising that everything in it was dying?

“Well. That’s it,” he said, tugging an unsettlingly serene Wen Kexing back towards the north wing. “Now you know.”

❃

The next morning, Zhou Zishu dumped Wen Kexing in his usual chair and turned right back around to survey the garden. He stared for a long time at a pile of smashed terracotta, which had, at some point, cracked in the cold and vomited a four chi-tall banana palm onto last autumn's dead chrysanthemums. He knew how to make a body disappear. That was simple enough. The banana palm was another matter. What was he supposed to do, sneak it out at night and throw it in the canal? Eventually, he decided to begin with the potsherds, flinging them one at a time into a pile of their own against the wall.

Wen Kexing’s silence was very loud.

“What?” Zhou Zishu barked eventually, glancing up.

This was a tactical error. As soon as he realized Zhou Zishu was watching, Wen Kexing’s expression bloomed into exaggerated concern, and his mouth started up again. “Hai, is there really nobody else to do this? What if you cut your beautiful hands? The heavens themselves would weep.”

Zhou Zishu held up his hands, palm-out, silently. Ever since he placed the first nail, his circulation had been just a little bit sluggish, as if resentful of the imposition. The cold tile had turned his fingers into bloodless beeswax tapers. Three decades-worth of blade scars stood out pinkly.

There was no use pretending his killer’s hands were beautiful, except inasmuch as the outrageousness of the second question might have covered Wen Kexing’s genuine interest in the first-- if Zhou Zishu were less accustomed to such tactics. “Nice try,” he said. “But next time you dig for answers, I’m putting you to work.”

Removing the broken pottery gave Zhou Zishu a vague sense of satisfaction right up until he stood up and was confronted once again by eight dead chrysanthemums, a palm plant as big as he was, and the newly-loosed pile of sandy mud the potsherds had been hiding. What an absolute waste of time. What a stupid, pointless--

“Are you going to put it in the compost?” Wen Kexing called, sprawled in his chair like the king of convalescents, chin in hand.

“I’ll put you in the compost, if you don’t shut up,” Zhou Zishu snapped, instead of admitting he had no idea where the compost pile was or if these things should go in it.

Wen Kexing nodded. “Bodies are good fertilizer,” he agreed. Zhou Zishu squinted at him. It seemed like the kind of thing he’d say just to be provoking, or out of a misplaced sense of poeticism, but it was also the kind of thing men said when they were trying to make light of the darkest corners of their memory. But then: “Surely Lord Zhou can think of better ways to shut me up, though. Killing me outright would be such a waste of my body, when I’m so willing to--”

He easily dodged the pebble Zhou Zishu flicked at his renying acupoint, the monster.

Zhou Zishu turned back to the mess, so he wouldn’t have to look at Wen Kexing’s stupid smug face. “What do you know about fertilizer, anyway? Are you secretly a farmer, Philanthropist Wen? It would explain your manners.”

“Keep digging,” Wen Kexing echoed, voice edged. And then, in an entirely different tone, “Life is a follower of death. Rotten things change into wonders, and wonders rot in time.”

“Try again. A scholar’s even less use to me than a farmer.”

“So picky. How about this: can’t you break it apart with your martial force?” When Zhou Zishu glanced back, Wen Kexing’s eyebrows were tilted with feigned curiosity, but he had the relaxed posture of a man who knew himself to be correct. It was, somehow, not terribly difficult to imagine him pulverizing obstacles as a matter of course.

Admitting Wen Kexing was right would be intolerable, so Zhou Zishu said nothing. If he rather enjoyed reducing the pile to scrap the following day, he made no comment either. And before Wen Kexing could work his way up to another insufferable quotation about mortality, he announced, “Today, you’re helping me shift this. It’ll build your strength. Here’s a bowl.” He’d located the compost pile earlier, in a tiny back courtyard by the store rooms and former servants’ quarters.

“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing cried, predictably. “I’m still so weak. How am I supposed to cross the courtyard? Everything I could lean on is full of knives.”

This was a suspiciously good question. Zhou Zishu frowned. “There should be walking sticks in storage. Unless they were taken to the main-- I’ll check.”

Wen Kexing plucked at his sleeve. “Who needs a stick? I’ve got your arm. Are you planning to leave me alone in this place anyway? Who knows what I might get up to.”

“I can’t carry anything with a howling monkey hanging off my arm.” Zhou Zishu slapped his hand away--lightly--Wen Kexing’s fingers weren’t even broken, his constant racket truly was insufferable--and strode off to find a crutch, leaving Wen Kexing’s protestations with the rest of the garbage.

The new year came and went without remark: the first month melted into the second, until Wen Kexing wasn’t even pretending to use the cane Zhou Zishu found for him anymore. Slowly, they made their way through the scrum of dead and broken things until all that was left was the plum tree.

Wen Kexing severed a twig with an idle flick of his stolen decorative fan and rubbed his fingers over the flaking black tumors. As the days had grown warmer, his hands had grown tense and restless, eyes flickering toward the horizon over the roof. “So, Ah Xu, what does the manual I’m not allowed to read say?”

The question had a finality Zhou Zhou didn’t like. “You never asked to read it.”

“Ah, my mistake for interpreting your hostile silences and elaborate concealing rituals as a clear boundary.” Wen Kexing twirled the twig between his long fingers, back and forth, back and forth, like a dying spider kicking its legs.

“A clear boundary? What, like the wall around my house?” Zhou Zishu snatched the twig away and tossed it over his shoulder. “There isn’t a man or god capable of building a boundary big enough to stop you, or your bullshit.”

“True enough,” Wen Kexing conceded, mouth fixed in the thin, distant smile he used when his mind had gone somewhere else. It was ranging further and longer these days, as if he were a fledgling that had learned to kill on its own; sometime soon, he would not come back. Then he seemed to snap back into himself, and his mouth curled up into a fox’s teasing smile. Zhou Zishu wanted to slap it off his face. “Then you won’t mind telling me what the book says we should do.”

The answer had lived like a knife in his gut for weeks now, so it was easy enough to pull it out and take aim at Wen Kexing’s. “The book says we need to burn it.”

❃

The book did not, in fact, just say that they should burn the plum tree. Madam Qin had written out careful instructions for excising the diseased branches--how to make a cut one knuckle’s-length from the trunk, so the tree would not bleed sap; how to treat the wound with oils to kill the spores before they could regrow.

But then, the book said— fire. Really, of all the things Zhou Zishu had done in the garden these weeks, treating the plum tree should have been the most familiar: cut down what must be cut down, cauterise what might be saved, and burn out the rot before it could spread. Court factions, families, trees--contain them or kill them, the tools were the same.

Whether the tree would survive, the book could not tell him.

Though the tree was not large, pruning the diseased branches and carrying them away took the whole morning. Zhou Zishu watched the sharp, neat movements of Wen Kexing’s long hands as he checked the remaining branches for black spots and swallowed down the hollow feeling in his gut. “Let’s stop for lunch,” he said, brushing his hands against one another to shake off the worst of the dirt and evading Wen Kexing’s sharp gaze. “We’ll burn it this evening.”

After a moment, Wen Kexing’s hand came up to brush something from Zhou Zishu’s shoulder. “Ah Xu. How could I say no?”

How indeed. “If you’re feeling so agreeable, help me warm some water for a bath.”

Wen Kexing made a face and pretended to clutch pathetically at his side, but he hauled most of the firewood and water in the end anyway. “You can have the first bath,” Zhou Zishu said. Wen Kexing stared at him for a beat too long before smiling.

“My husband is so generous today,” he murmured, watching Zhou Zishu fuss with the oils next to the tub. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

Zhou Zishu tsk ed. “Just a splinter from the firewood. It’s nothing. Take your bath before I change my mind.”

“What kind of wife would this one be, if I didn’t attend to your wounds? Surely you don’t keep me around just for my pretty face. Here, put your hand in the hot water for a moment.”

Grumbling, Zhou Zishu did, and endured Wen Kexing staring at the pale fish of his fingers in the water until at last he reached in and plucked Zhou Zishu’s hand back out.

“Closer to the window,” he said, pulling Zhou Zishu along by the hand. The early afternoon light was yellow and forgiving where it played on Zhou Zishu’s gently steaming skin. His hand looked warm and alive in Wen Kexing’s; his fingers twitched reflexively when Wen Kexing probed at the dark splinter in his first finger. Wen Kexing’s eyes flickered up, too quickly for Zhou Zishu to catch his expression, before going back to their inspection. “Not bad. Should be quick,” he concluded.

“I told you,” Zhou Zishu replied, riveted.

Wen Kexing’s finger pressed, stinging, just under the wound. “Let me?”

“Stop making such a production and get it over with.” Zhou Zishu tugged his hand back threateningly, but let Wen Kexing curl his long fingers over his palm to hold him still.

“Some things require care,” Wen Kexing chided, and then pinched Zhou Zishu’s finger hard, forcing the snag out. His mouth twitched into a smile when Zhou Zishu hissed. “See? My husband is so sensitive.”

“Let go of me, you lecher,” Zhou Zishu snapped, pulling in earnest, forcing Wen Kexing to clutch his hand in both of his to hold him still.

“I’m a lecher, am I? Is that the thanks I get?” Wen Kexing peered carefully at Zhou Zishu’s hand, and then, satisfied, swept forward to press a noisy kiss to his finger. “There! This lecher is all done,” he announced into Zhou Zishu’s outraged silence.

“Take your bath,” Zhou Zishu said, backing away from Wen Kexing’s crooked smile. He paused just before the privacy screen, and then very deliberately patted his hand, still wet and warm from the bath and Wen Kexing’s mouth, dry on Wen Kexing’s waiting bath linens. He ignored Wen Kexing’s outraged hoot and beat a dignified retreat to make tea and ignore the crawling tingle in his skin.

Predictably, the water was cool and hazy with bath oils by the time Zhou Zishu used it. He didn’t care. Wen Kexing would leave Chongming Court warm and clean, and it wasn’t often that Zhou Zishu could let someone leave better than he found them—though that was a low bar, and Zhou Zishu’s fault in the first place. So.

Zhou Zishu’s robes hung awkwardly on Wen Kexing’s lankier frame. His wrists looked almost delicate where they hung, achingly bare, from the sleeves. Zhou Zishu dragged his eyes up to Wen Kexing’s to make a joke out of it, but when he met them, they were remote and strange.

He gestured for Zhou Zishu to sit down for lunch. “Thank you for the clean robes, Lord Zhou,” he said, swinging the sleeves back ostentatiously as he sat. Zhou Zishu expected him to replace them the first chance he got.

Zhou Zishu nodded, and let the silence settle into afternoon, then night.

They set the fire in the back courtyard, away from living things.

Wen Kexing sat crouched before the blaze. In one hand, he lightly held the painted fan he’d stolen from the wall. At rest, it swayed gently in the gusts of hot air blowing off the fire, as if alive. The movement danced in Wen Kexing’s dark, watchful eyes—Wen Kexing who had uttered Zhou Zishu’s real name at the height of delirium, who knew Siji Manor, was somehow a part of its history, and had not yet been killed for it.

“I’ll make you a deal.” Zhou Zishu folded his hands behind his back, away from the beating warmth of the flames. “If you answer one question honestly, you can leave.”

Wen Kexing looked at him sharply. “Leave?” he said. “If I leave the same way your banana palm did, it’s not much of a deal for me.”

If I were going to take you out with the other trash, I would have done so the first time you opened your mouth, Zhou Zishu wanted to say, but he resisted the lure of Wen Kexing's practiced quarreling. "No tricks," he said. "You'd leave as you came in, unharmed."

Wen Kexing’s fan resumed its motion, blowing tiny sparks of flaking ash over his shoulder like unseasonable fireflies. “I’ll admit, I thought you were only nursing me back to health so you could torture me some more.”

“That’s what I planned to do, at first,” Zhou Zishu admitted, because it cost him nothing, “though I didn’t have high hopes. I don’t think you’re the type of man who can be broken by pain.”

A month ago, Zhou Zishu would have expected Wen Kexing to preen under this backward praise. He wasn’t surprised to find that, though his mouth tilted up in something like a smirk, Wen Kexing merely tipped his head to the side thoughtfully. “Ah Xu, you know me so well. Are you going to tell me what can?”

“Take the deal and find out.”

“If the punishment is more time with Ah Xu, there’s nothing for me to lose.” If that were true, things might be different, Zhou Zishu thought, and was not surprised when Wen Kexing took another smoky breath and said, “But I’ll play anyway. Go on, ask your question.”

“What’s your name?” Who are you to me? he was asking. What do I owe you? Will anyone else have to pay?

Wen Kexing’s mouth flattened into a hard slash.

Zhou Zishu watched their days together pass through his eyes, all the times that Zhou Zishu had asked what he was doing at Chongming Court, all the way back to the interrogation that first night. “What a waste of a question, Ah Xu,” he said, at last, voice light as a coiled viper. “I told you the truth already.”

“Maybe,” Zhou Zishu agreed, deliberately ambiguous. Maybe it was a waste. But he hadn’t found it wasteful to ask what Wen Kexing’s intentions were, and he’d already known Wen Kexing’s answer to that. With Wen Kexing, watching him dance across the liquid surface of the truth was more useful than trying to fish in those dark waters.

“I expected you to ask me one last time what I’m doing here,” Wen Kexing temporalized, the delicate bamboo bones of his fan creaking between his fingers. “Did you give up?”

Zhou Zishu shrugged, and flicked away a stray ember before it could land on his cheek. “No.” Although most people had forgotten, it wasn’t a particular secret that Siji Manor had relocated to the imperial city. When it had flourished, Siji Manor’s reputation had been well-known in the jianghu; it wouldn’t be surprising if a martial artist as strong as Wen Kexing had heard about it. If he’d done some digging, he might have even found out that this manor belonged to Lord Zhou Zishu, third-rate general. There was no clear reason for Wen Kexing to hide the fact he knew these things. And yet: over and over, he had. “You already told me. You came here to see if the flowers bloom in all seasons...Well, by now you’ve seen the answer for yourself.”

Wen Kexing’s face had gone very still. Eventually, he said, “My name is Wen Kexing. Let me go, Zhou Zishu.”

“A deal’s a deal.” Zhou Zishu fished a carefully-folded packet from his robes. “Take this.”

The packet’s contents susurrated softly when Wen Kexing tipped it, testing its weight. “The final antidote?” he guessed.

“The poison has already cleared your system. I lied before. Those are just some seeds I ordered. I have too many; it makes me tired just looking at them.” As expected, Han Ying could not do anything halfway, and had delivered enough seeds to cover the imperial palace several times over.

“It’s a gift from Ah Xu, so I shall keep it close to my heart.” Wen Kexing smoothed out the packet’s bent corner, turning it over in his hand as if to feel its edges before he tucked it into his robes. Zhou Zishu’s robes, rather, which he probably wasn’t getting back: a plain blue set he’d worn for evenings out drinking with Jing Beiyuan and the rest. They weren’t much good to him now, so what did it matter?

“It’s not a gift, it’s a disposal service. Use them or scatter them by the road, I don’t care.”

Wen Kexing laughed, a percussive sound pitched to bounce off the walls of the tiny courtyard, and bowed over his ill-gotten fan. Backlit by the dying fire, he was all shadow. His mind was gone already, Zhou Zishu thought, ranging ahead toward whatever blood it scented on the wind: this was just his body, moving in practiced motions. “This humble one thanks you for your hospitality, Lord Zhou. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

Zhou Zishu made himself shrug. “I’m betting that we will. You don’t have your answer yet--you’ve only been here for two seasons.”

Wen Kexing gave him a long, searching look. “When peach flowers have just unfurled and willow leaves are tender--we’ll see.” (4)

Then he pushed off into an effortless, powerful leap: and like a last breath, he was gone.

Chapter Text

The morning after Wen Kexing left, alone at last, Zhou Zishu inserted the second nail. As it unfurled under his skin, he tried not to think about the black, bare branches of the plum tree, spreading like angry roots in his chest. It burned. If his eyes burned, too, that was only because they were still aggravated from the night’s bonfire. 

Unlike the first one, the pain from the second nail only seemed to grow the more it settled in his chest, scraping and seething against his ribs, scrawling unintelligible complaints in his soft cartilage. Still, every morning he rose at dawn to practice his forms and exchange papers in the gatehouse. Every day he coordinated Tian Chuang like a paper general and ate the food his cook placed outside the door. At night, he lit a stick of Drunk like a Dream and slept as if dead, hungrily. 

When the snow melted, it revealed a wet, blackening mat of dead leaves which bore more than a passing resemblance to exposed muscle after a burn. Confusingly, Madam Qin’s book both admonished that if the leaf litter were too thick, it would smother anything under it, but that if cleared it would deprive the soil of nutriment. Zhou Zishu, who knew a thing or two about smothering, decided to strip it away after all. 

Other tasks seemed impossibly paradoxical, like pruning back the osmanthus and rose before the spring growth started. If the point was to grow plants, why not let them grow? It felt stupid to make them smaller. Flowers only bloom on new growth , the manual said, and Zhou Zishu sat on the ground and didn’t think about the Tian Chuang which Duan Pengju would inherit from the last lord of Siji Manor. Then he cut back the woody shrubs until they were as small and orderly as children lined up to learn their first forms. 

Whatever madness had possessed him to order seeds, he now had to use them. While the cook was running errands, Zhou Zishu requisitioned all but two of the teacups from Chongming’s cavernous pantry and filled them with a mixture of courtyard dirt and old compost. He ran out of cups long before he ran out of seeds, but anyway--how many did he really have time to take care of? It was for the best, probably. The cups made their way onto a cleared table, pushed under a sunny window which he could see from his desk. 

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. And then--a crack in the dirt, small and green, delicate as wet paper. Strong enough to move earth. Look! Zhou Zishu didn’t say, because he was alone, and the nails were eating away at his meridians, not his mind. 

The seedlings sprouted. Zhou Zishu set them outside in the sun for one shichen, and later, for two, and then for the day, until they were strong enough to stand up in the wind. Wen Kexing wasn’t here, but it wasn’t really all that hard to clear the herb beds himself and replant them. It was just a matter of pulling and digging and patting down, over and over. 

The nails drilled down; the seeds sprang up. Small lives. The rains arrived, and the warm winds, and the birds. The seedlings waved in the currents like tiny fans, green flickers in the wet dawn. 

Until, one morning, they weren’t. Zhou Zishu stared at the divots of each neatly-plucked sprout, the masticated remains of their wet roots, and listened to the birds chatter happily overhead. 

“Shit,” Zhou Zishu said, out loud, because why not. It almost felt good. “Bastards.” 

❃❃

The end of the second month found Zhou Zishu on a path filled with blooming peonies, each as fat as a ripe persimmon and soft as a human heart. Close by, a man in patchwork robes was loudly predicting the price of Shining Black Gold cultivars, nearly invisible in the crush of parti-colored flowers. Zhou Zishu was going to kill him. 

The funny thing was, Zhou Zishu had stolen, spied, or killed at every Peony Fair he’d ever been to--he’d thought this one might be different. Stupid. Like everywhere the rich and powerful gathered to piss away wealth and favors, it attracted maggots.  

Just as they had every year before, the wealthy, the aspirational, and the desperate had descended on the peony market to speculate fortunes on the Fair’s offerings, feverishly buying up the most popular flowers in the short window of time before they withered and fell off the branch. The smell was so thick in the air that it had a physical presence, choking the tiny spaces between the bodies heaving through the park. Someone jostled Zhou Zishu, and he let himself tip gently with the flow like a boat in a storm, arm knocking against strange arms and shoulders, hot bones under cold silk. 

He was sure Wen Kexing would have had strong opinions about the Peony Fair if he were here. Which he was not. What strong opinions, Zhou Zishu couldn’t decide. Wen Kexing said things sideways: not, I’m searching for something, yet willing to grab whatever I can get, but, Picking flowers . Not, I’m a dangerous Jianghu criminal, but, Bodies make good fertilizer. Not, I knew you once, but you’re too stupid to remember, but, Zhou Zishu, you lied. 

“It’s peony season,” he murmured. “No one wakes up from the addiction.” (1) Wen Kexing would probably be surprised he knew the poem--or any poetry at all--because Zhou Zishu had never let him see his library. The truth was that Zhou Zishu had a whole miserable collection of poetry, which he read with the same grim determination as he read the gardening manual. Helian Pei’s faction had an awful predilection for ciphers based on poems, all of it excruciatingly on-the-nose. Assholes.

The cool evening sun cast dramatic, orange-limned shadows on the thousands of peonies, red and white and purple, clogging the path. He could barely feel it through the human skin mask on his face, which gave him the sallow look of a man even older and more haggard than Zhou Zishu felt. If he felt like making excuses for himself, he could have said that was why he’d left the manor for the first time in six months. According to Wu Xi’s manual on poisons and cures, red peony roots improved blood circulation. Ever since he’d inserted the second nail, his circulation had worsened, moving sluggishly through his fingers and toes in the morning like the blood had curdled overnight. But what was the point of improving his circulation, anyway? It was absurd to mince his way toward and away from death like a rat looking for food in a trap.

He’d found a purpose at the Peony Fair, nevertheless. He wasn’t sure yet what Iron Hand Fan Huoqiang was doing here, whether that had anything to do with the imperial game; he wasn’t sure yet whether he cared. 

Fan Huoqiang’s face was more creased and battered than the last time Zhou Zishu had seen it--laughing over the gaping chest of one of Zhou Zishu’s shidi, a fourteen-year-old boy who had been out picking cherries when Fan Huoqiang challenged him. Zhou Zishu had arrived too late and done too little. Back then, he hadn’t been much better at killing than he was at running a sect, and Fan Huoqiang had got away in the end with only a deforming facial wound for his trouble. Zhou Zishu had been aiming for the neck, and hesitated just a breath too long. It wasn’t a mistake he made again.

For the next shichen, Zhou Zishu trailed Fan Huoqiang through the Fair, listening, watching his hands. While Fan Huoqiang was eating dinner below, Zhou Zishu searched his dark room for money, tokens, letters: anything that would tell a story. What he found was a change of socks, a pot of cheap baiju, and six stolen purses. That was good, he thought, settling himself against the wall to the left of the door to wait. Zhou Zishu had only been looking for a reason not to kill him. The reasons to kill Fan Huoqiang were written all over him for anyone to see. 

Twelve years ago, Fan Huoqiang, disciple of a no-name master, had devised a way to stand out from all the other jianghu rogues: he cut a trophy from the robes of every fighter he killed and sewed them to his own. The result was as striking as it was ghastly; but whatever gains he made in reputation were, in Zhou Zishu’s opinion, outweighed by the burdens of recognizability. According to his last reports, Fan Huoqiang had been chased into Ghost Valley seven years ago and hadn’t been heard from since. Certainly, his robes were very red now, the skirt a jagged patchwork the same red as the Valley Master’s hordes, as though he had waded into a river of blood, or peony blossoms.   

And sewn into the shoulder of his robes, faded but unmistakable, was a palm-sized scrap of silk Fan Huoqiang had torn away from a Siji disciple while the boy lay in the dirt, drowning in his own lungs. 

It had been a long time since Zhou Zishu had killed someone for his own reasons. He wondered if it would feel different. Below his feet, the tavern restaurant boiled over with shouts and laughter. Above his head, the roof settled quietly in the night. Eventually, he heard the steps he was waiting for, moving toward him in lazy thumps. 

Zhou Zishu waited until Fan Huoqiang closed the door behind himself to move, lunging forward to kick out his opponent’s kneecap. Fan Huoqiang jumped back just in time--to his credit, soundlessly, like someone who had long ago trained away his instinct to scream. His hands, when he struck back, were sharp and fast as steel. Twelve years ago, he had been strong—strong enough to tear a hole in a young man’s chest, and strong enough to escape a prodigy like Zhou Zishu. Whatever had happened in the meantime, it had turned him into a monster. 

That was fine. Zhou Zishu was the same. 

He rolled away from Fan Huoqiang’s chops, grabbing Fan Huoqiang’s wrist as he turned, and twisting up and around. Their combined momentum swung Fan Huoqiang face-first into the wall and tore his shoulder from its socket with a crack. Still, he did not scream. Fan Huoqiang kicked backwards, catching a stinging blow on Zhou Zishu’s shinbone, and tried to drop his weight toward the floor. Before he could try again, Zhou Zishu punched him hard in the kidney and drove the blade of his foot into Fan Huoqiang’s ankle. The tendon snapped, and Fan Huoqiang dropped to his knees, caught between the grip on his dislocated arm and the foot pressing on his crushed leg. Quick strikes to his neck and chest sealed his qi , and the fight was over.    

Zhou Zishu yanked his opponent’s head back by the hair and stared into his moonlit eyes. “Fan Huoqiang. You’re a long way away from the jianghu.” 

“So are you,” Fan Huoqiang gasped back, and spat blood on the floor. “I don’t think I’ve had the honor of making your acquaintance, venerable master. Have I done something to offend you?” 

Breathe. Eat. Shit. Live, when they didn’t. Zhou Zishu swallowed it down, along with the throbbing pain in his calf. It didn’t feel like the bone was cracked, but he could feel his blood clotting hotly under the skin. “You’ve been busy,” he said instead, scraping his foot over the patched skirt of Fan Huoqiang’s robes. “I thought there was no escaping Ghost Valley.” 

“Ghost Valley is like anywhere else. One set of rules for the weak, and another for the strong. Surely someone like you knows that the strong can get anything they want, if they’re willing to pay the price.”

“And what is it you want, Fan Huoqiang?” 

“What any of us want. To disappear. To live a peaceful life.” Fan Huoqiang laughed blood into the whitewashed wall. “A generous wife and fat sons.” 

Zhou Zishu’s hand spasmed in Fan Huoqiang’s hair, pulling his head back to an impossible angle. “It’s too late for that.”  

“Ah, it’s been too late for a long time.” Fan Huoqiang’s smile was black with blood. “What is it you want, old devil?” 

“You already know.” It was worth seeing if he could get more, though. “But if you tell me the Valley Master’s name, I’ll make your death quick.”  

“Is this a trick? A test? Is he here?” Fan Huoqiang writhed against Zhou Zishu’s hold, suddenly animated by terror. Zhou Zishu pulled his hair back until Fan Huoqiang’s neck began to creak and held him there, wheezing hysterically through his distended windpipe. Finally, breathless, Fan Huoqiang went limp. “No matter, no matter. There’s nothing you can do that would make it worth it. Will you skin me alive? Eat me? No?” He choked out a laugh at whatever he saw in Zhou Zishu’s face. “Then do your worst.” 

“For you? No,” Zhou Zishu said, and dropped Fan Huoqiang’s broken arm just long enough to draw the baiyi sword and stab it through Fan Huoqiang’s left lung, right over the patch of Siji silk. 

“Ah,” Fan Huoqiang gurgled, understanding dawning on his face, “it’s you,” and died laughing. 

❃❃

Three weeks later, Zhou Zishu woke to the sound of someone picking the lock on his bedroom door, his body already moving. Halfway into a low roll, baiyi sword in one hand and a knife in the other, his mind finally woke up enough to register who was on the other side--but he let his body complete the motions it had already begun, a wave crashing to shore.

Or in this case, a knife to Wen Kexing’s temple. It served him right for waking Zhou Zishu up this way again--maybe he needed another puncture wound for the lesson to really sink in. Another man would have learned after the first fifteen, but another man wouldn't have knocked a professional assassin’s blade away with a silk fan, laughing, “So eager with your sword this morning! I missed you too.” 

“Get out,” Zhou Zishu said, and kicked him down the hallway. Grabbing the front of Zhou Zishu’s sleeping robes, Wen Kexing fell easily with the blow, sending them both careening back into the lattice door to the courtyard. “Wen Kexing! Don’t--” he gasped, too late to stop the demon from nudging the door open with his heel, and then they were tumbling backwards once again. He felt Wen Kexing’s arms come up around him, bracing him against his chest as they fell onto the landing. 

“Ahh! My back,” Wen Kexing cried, a beat too late to be genuine, grinning up at him. “Lord Zhou’s attention is too heavy.”

“Philanthropist Wen is just too weak,” he snapped, elbowing him hard in the side. “I guess I’ll just have to put him to work to build up his strength.” 

“I’ll work hard,” Wen Kexing promised solemnly, and rolled Zhou Zishu under him. “Put me to any use you--” Zhou Zishu kicked him up and over his head, flat onto the gravel. It might have dazed a man with more brains, but Wen Kexing lunged up immediately and grabbed Zhou Zishu by the waist, fully prepared to fling them both sideways, further into the garden.  

“Wen Kexing! Not the fishpond. I just cleaned it yesterday!” 

“You just cleaned it yesterday? ” Wen Kexing dropped him, aghast. 

This, Zhou Zishu felt, was uncalled-for, coming from a man who had disappeared during all the hard work. “So what! I’ve been busy. You try to do everything by yourself, useless brat, see how you like it.” 

“Alright, alright.” Something complicated passed over Wen Kexing’s face, but he smoothed it out before Zhou Zishu could catch it. “Silly me, I just thought that Ah Xu would prioritize the rotting fish. Of course I underestimated his busy schedule and strong stomach.” 

It had smelled awful, and it had looked worse--and that was before he ground it down to mash for the roses. “Dead things are good fertilizer, you said so yourself.” He turned the knife over in his hands pointedly before stowing it in his sleeve. “And you’ll join them if you wake me up one more time like this.” 

“In my defense, I expected to find you doing your mysterious morning exercises. Or were you only getting up at dawn before to annoy me? Are you secretly very lazy, Ah Xu?” 

Now that he mentioned it, Zhou Zishu could see Wen Kexing’s annoyingly symmetrical face quite well. With a jolt, he realized that the sun was visible over the garden wall: he’d slept through the dawn. How--and then Zhou Zishu must have compounded that error by letting his surprise show on his face, because the hilarity drained out of Wen Kexing’s demeanor. 

“Have you been sick? Were you poisoned?” Wen Kexing raised a hand, as if to thumb the dark circles under Zhou Zishu’s eyes; he batted it away impatiently. Wen Kexing was right to be concerned--martial artists of their caliber rarely succumbed to the everyday complaints experienced by ordinary people--which made his concern even more annoying. “Ahh, did you poison yourself, perhaps, making more of those evil needles? Don’t be embarrassed. Ah Xu can tell me anything.” 

Not far off, really. “I’m telling you to keep your hands to yourself.” Zhou Zishu tucked his hands into his sleeves. “Come on. We need to eat breakfast now if we’re going to have time to weed the vegetable patch.” 

❃❃

Wen Kexing truly had intended to surprise Zhou Zishu during his morning exercises. When he arrived, however, he’d found a courtyard which was filled with unrecognizable greenery, but absent its watchful master. He’d actually stood up again from his crouch at the safe edge of the roof to check that he was in the right place, but no: there was the dilapidated old canal, and there was the ostentatious imperial park. It was Zhou Zishu’s manor, alive where it had been dead, and silent where it had been restless. 

Another paradox. Another puzzle--like the one Zhou Zishu had locked his room with, the ingenious bastard.  

Even with Zhou Zishu back in the garden, glowering at a rogue vine wrapped around the azaleas, it was hard to believe he was in the right courtyard. It was like walking into a daylit room he’d only ever crossed in the darkness; he knew the hard edges of it by touch and instinct, but he couldn’t connect it to this warm, green place. In Wen Kexing’s opinion, Zhou Zishu was still undeniably the most beautiful thing here, but that was no longer a default victory over overgrown wreckage. It seemed, absurdly, like he could hear the garden breathing where before there had only been silence and Zhou Zishu’s clipped commands: the wind exhaled through the leaves, and small birds whisked from the flame tree to the sedge and back again. Fat purple buds studded the azalea; the last cherry blossoms were blowing over the cleared ground. 

Near the center of it all, Wen Kexing was aghast to discover that Zhou Zishu had, in fact, planted a vegetable patch. It was aggressively rectangular. “Ah Xu. What used to be here? Before…this happened.”

Something about this question made Zhou Zishu’s jaw pucker, mulish. “A bunch of dead crap,” he said. Ah, so he didn’t know. That explained it. 

Wen Kexing stared with morbid fascination at the orderly rows of seedlings cutting harsh lines across what had clearly once been two distinct plantings: a dwarf cherry tree ringed elegantly with lilies on one side, and a mossy heap of alpine flowers on the other. A deep groove indicated that they’d formerly been separated by a scholar rock which now sprawled on its side against the eastern wall like a drunk beggar. “If you’re trying to ruin the scenery, you could just have left the dead fish lying around. There’s no need to go to these lengths, Ah Xu.” (2) 

“Why go to all that effort? If my goal were to ruin the scenery, I’d just let you talk.”  He shrugged. “I had to do something with the vegetable seeds.” 

“Is the imperial vegetable inspector going to come check? You don’t--fine, fine,” he said, when Zhou Zishu’s glare became too pointed to ignore. “But I’m serious! You moved things. Why did you move things?” 

“It’s my garden. I can do whatever I want.” Zhou Zishu’s finger sketched out hard angles from the sky to the ground. “That rock was blocking the sun. And now that statue has a much better angle on anyone coming in through the screen gate.”

“Sure,” Wen Kexing agreed, “but now it’s right in front of a door. I don’t care whether anyone uses it or not!” he added, seeing Zhou Zishu’s mouth open. “Who blocks a door ?”

“Armies, for one,” Zhou Zishu replied, mulishly. “People bothered by intruders. Households suffering from a pestilence--”

Wen Kexing did not find Zhou Zishu’s implications helpful. “Alright, alright. But Ah Xu, you’re not any of those things. You are,” he continued quickly and loudly, before Zhou Zishu could contradict him, “making yourself sick. Look at all the poison arrows you have pointed at your house. Why waste all this vitality on harming yourself?” (3)

The discussion ended the way most of Wen Kexing’ attempts to persuade Zhou Zishu to see reason did: with Zhou Zishu silently walking away mid-sentence.

A martial artist of his caliber could hear a sewing needle drop two houses over, but Zhou Zishu liked to pretend that if he couldn’t see Wen Kexing’s mouth, he couldn’t hear him. Like any maneuver, however, this one could be countered; it worked better on people who felt it was beneath them to scamper after Zhou Zishu like a lost puppy, stubbornly yapping out the rest of their account. 

Wen Kexing did not feel it was beneath him. 

Instead, when he caught up and flung an arm around Zhou Zishu’s stiff shoulders, he felt vindicated--both by the fact that Zhou Zishu did not immediately throw him into a tree, and less happily, by the bony shock of Zhou Zishu’s shoulders. Wen Kexing was right; he’d lost weight. 

“It looks good,” he concluded, placatingly. They had arrived at Zhou Zishu’s stash of gardening implements and Zhou Zishu was regarding them with the stolid gravity of a general preparing for war. “It’s lovely, just like Ah Xu. But we’ve got to fix it.”  

“Just like Ah Xu?” Zhou Zishu echoed snidely, and pinched Wen Kexing’s arm. “Get off of me.” 

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Wen Kexing sighed, clutching him harder instead, so that Zhou Zishu tipped sideways like a badly-weighted boat. “Ah Xu is peerless in all things, from his face to his martial arts. I have to assume you meant to ruin the garden’s feng shui, because you’ve done such a good job that you made yourself sick. If this was supposed to be another type of defense system, it’s not worth it. What’s the point of defending your manor and killing yourself?” 

Zhou Zishu’s fathomless eyes flickered over Wen Kexing’s face, and then, sudden as summer lightning, he was smiling. “You’re right, Lao Wen. What do you want to do about it?” 

“Well, first we’ve got to unblock that door. Then we’ll see about reshaping these straight lines,” Wen Kexing chimed, accepting this suspiciously easy victory even though it made his stomach clench with unease. With Zhou Zishu, there was every chance it was a trick--if he pushed Zhou Zishu’s easy smile off his face, it’d lead him right into a bear trap, sprung and ready on the other side. 

For now, he tried to enjoy the warm burn of Zhou Zishu all along his side, the living play of his muscles under Wen Kexing’s hand. Back in the Valley, Wen Kexing had nearly convinced himself that Zhou Zishu was a dream; Luo Fumeng, he knew, suspected that Wen Kexing had spent the winter lost in a drug den, and had made preparations in case he did not claw his way back out in time for the thaw to wake the Valley’s restless Ghosts. But here he was, playfully batting his way free of Wen Kexing’s grasp, demanding, “You move the rock, then. It’s too heavy, who can bother?” 

“Yes, yes,” he said instead, returning Zhou Zishu’s smile. “This wife is at your service. Hey. Did I mention I brought wine for later?”  

Zhou Zishu beamed at him, then twisted to swat him down the garden path. “You better get working, then, if you want to earn your drink.” 

“I’m the one who bought it! It’s already mine,” Wen Kexing protested, but he headed down the path anyway, Zhou Zishu close behind. 

❃❃

Drinking their dinner allowed them both to avoid confronting the awkward logistics of Wen Kexing’s visit. Hours after the moon rose, Zhou Zishu lurched away from the table where they’d been drinking, left the room without a word, and returned dragging a bedroll behind him. “Is that the same one as before?” Wen Kexing asked, unreasonably delighted.

Zhou Zishu replied, “Find out yourself,” and threw the whole thing at him. “Blankets are in that cabinet,” he added, watching Wen Kexing flail with catlike satisfaction. He sat down and poured himself another drink while Wen Kexing made up his bed on the floor.

“What kind of host are you?” Wen Kexing demanded, stumbling back to the table. “Only pouring yourself a drink, unbelievable.” 

“Am I your host?” Zhou Zishu asked, but thankfully poured another drink so that neither of them needed to linger on the question. In the end, they fell asleep at the table, too full of wine to return to their proper places.  

It was a novelty to wake up before Zhou Zishu; in all the weeks they’d slept across the room from one another, Wen Kexing had never seen him sleep. He looked--smaller, somehow, back curled into a soft line, tucked up into himself for warmth. The shadows under his eyes looked purple in the cool morning light; his fingers were mottled, as if just the pressure of his cheek on his arm was enough to stymie the blood flow. What an idiot, making himself sick like this. Of all the things that Wen Kexing had expected when he rode here, it wasn’t that they’d switch places. Maybe it was karma, balancing the scales, giving Wen Kexing a chance to show that he could take care of Zhou Zishu, too. The time ahead of them took on a firmer shape as the idea settled in Wen Kexing’s mind; after all, Zhou Zishu hadn’t issued an invitation for him to return, so much as a challenge. The terms of this visit weren’t clear to either of them. But if he could fix this--that would be something. 

“You’re so noisy,” Zhou Zishu complained, smearing the words across his own sleeve. “What the hell.” 

“I didn’t say anything!” Wen Kexing laughed, and took the chance to push stray hair away from Zhou Zishu’s mouth and eyes, where it had escaped from his severe bun in the night. It must hurt now, having slept in it. Typical. Zhou Zishu allowed his petting with the air of a long-suffering cat, so Wen Kexing knelt up to inspect his guan. “Is there something I should know before I take this out? Any poisoned needles hidden in it? Knives? Tiny smoke bombs?” 

“Ha ha.” Zhou Zishu rolled his forehead into his arm, jaw cracking around a yawn. “Just a garrote. No poison, you coward.” 

“Just a garrote,” Wen Kexing parroted gleefully, fingers already working. “Who were you planning to garrote, here in your big empty house, huh?”

“You, if you don’t shut your mouth and hurry up.” 

“Such a demanding husband,” Wen Kexing said approvingly, smoothing his hands through Zhou Zishu’s unbound hair, shaking out the braid at his nape. “What other tasks do you have planned for this wife today? I have some ideas, but they’d require an open mouth, so--” 

A thrill of victory went through him as Zhou Zishu tackled Wen Kexing onto the floor and rolled away, onto his feet, muttering to himself. He’d caught the smile on Zhou Zishu’s face--he looked better already. 

❃❃

“Ah Xu, what’s this called?”

Zhou Zishu, who had been poking contemplatively at the vegetable patch for five minutes with no sign of actually doing anything, glanced up at the gongshi Wen Kexing had single-handedly hauled back into place. “What do you mean, what is it called? Did you hit your head? It’s a rock.” 

Wen Kexing rolled his eyes. “Fine gardens should have fine names for their best features. And little--plaques! Haven’t you ever seen a real garden?” 

Zhou Zishu favored him with a narrow look. “Have you? One that isn’t connected to a brothel,” he added swiftly. 

“Such course language,” Wen Kexing tutted. “Courtesans keep lovely gardens. They’re very well-read.”

“I’m well-read, and I’m telling you that that’s a rock.”

“Haven’t I seen plenty of Lord Zhou’s garden this winter?” He gestured grandly at the gongshi, which may or may not have been upside-down; Zhou Zishu had repurposed its original pedestal as a step stool. “How could I know the mountains would change?” (4)

“Uh huh. Out of the two of us, only one has been to the imperial gardens, and unless you’ve been conducting midnight raids there too, it isn’t you.” 

“I could be. Or I could be an imperial cousin. You can’t know everyone and everything.”

Zhou Zishu made a tired, disgruntled sound. “Try me.”   

“Fine. What’s the name of that flower?” Wen Kexing asked, pointing randomly. Rendered temporarily deaf by irritation, Zhou Zishu wandered off in the opposite direction to do something important to the pond.   

It was nice, being the Wen Kexing whose worst quality was that he wouldn’t stop naming garden features and annoying the gardener. Every morning, he folded his blankets neatly, warmed their water for tea, tidied the bedroom, and didn’t mention the fact that Zhou Zishu had clearly barred the servant from entering while Wen Kexing was there. “Is it a secret that I’m here?” Wen Kexing asked, to be sure, the first night. 

Zhou Zishu had simply said, “Of course they’ll notice that someone’s here. They know better than to ask. Keep your face hidden, though,” and Wen Kexing kept his peace about the sort of household where any of that made sense.  

He knew a thing or two about places held together by nothing more than secrets and fear. 

There was a perverse kind of pleasure in building fantastical mountains out of Zhou Zishu’s discarded stones while the manor lord himself puttered aimlessly about, sometimes weeding, sometimes planting, sometimes drinking from a flask and staring at the wall. For two decades, Qingya Mountain’s shadow had presided over every desperate thing Wen Kexing had done, unmovable and unmoved as the heavens. Now he balanced a rock the size of a lapdog on top of another as tall as his head, stepped back, and called “Look, Ah Xu! This is clearly an old man listening to the zither.”

The rocks’ owner, who probably had no idea what the gongshi had cost or the hardships required to transport them, sighed long-sufferingly. “What’s that next to it, then?”

“That’s his wife.” Wen Kexing indicated the stone to the left, then pointed to the right. “And that’s his husband.” 

“Uh huh. And the zither is playing itself, I guess.” 

“Don’t be facetious, Ah Xu,” he sniffed, indicating the lump crouched at the back of the collection. “That’s clearly their other husband.” 

“Oh, obviously.” Zhou Zishu finally stood up from the begonias he was torturing and faced the new arrangement head-on, arms crossed and head cocked, for a long moment. At last, he declared, “It looks like four piles of hogshit.” Wen Kexing obliged him by crowing in outrage and throwing a handful of gravel at his smug face. 

Elegant as the gongshi were, they made subpar cover in a fight, Wen Kexing found. 

“Have some respect!” he called, ducking out of range when one of Zhou Zishu’s projectile pebbles careened off the delicate corner of the Second Husband rather than sailing through one of his perforations, breaking it in two. Zhou Zishu looked more irked by the failure of his aim than the destruction of his property. “Ah Xu, you nearly destroyed a masterpiece of god.” 

“That rock? It looks like meat the maggots have gotten into.” 

“I was talking about my face. ” Wen Kexing picked up the broken chunk and balanced it experimentally on top of the First Husband, like a hat. “If you find the stones so objectionable, why spend your fortune on them, Lord Zhou?”

“They were here when we moved in,” Zhou Zishu shrugged. “Of course I wouldn’t have made such a spectacle of myself. The last time the Emperor ordered gongshi from Tai Hu , it clogged the canals for forty-three days. There were riots in the fish market and the textile district.” 

Casting one last suspicious glare at the chipped gongshi, as though it might incite civil unrest at any moment, Zhou Zishu turned back to his weeding. Wen Kexing watched him fling the heads of dead flowers into a bowl and tried to reconcile it with Zhou Zishu’s casual familiarity with imperial politics. With the empty manor. With the piles of correspondence Zhou Zishu picked up every morning and sent away every night. 

Before he returned, Wen Kexing’s spies and informants had sketched out the outlines of Zhou Zishu’s life since childhood, the things that had happened between the smiling boy and the scowling man, but the overall picture still made little sense. For those from the jianghu, the story ended twelve years ago, when Zhou Zishu and what remained of his sect abandoned Siji Manor and, as far as they were concerned, ceased to exist. Picking through the bones of fickle patrician memories in the smoky parlors of expensive courtesan houses, Wen Kexing had learned that the Crown Prince’s cousin and his entourage of jianghu transplants became a minor source of fascination after their arrival in the capital. What had seemed to them at first like a daring attempt to shore up the Crown Prince’s corner--gathering jianghu thugs, lobbying for a backwater cousin to be appointed as a general--turned out to be nothing more than a houseful of rustics who thought they were too good for intrigue, and an unambitious squatter happy to languish in a meritless generalship. As far as anyone knew, the disciples gradually returned to the jianghu, all except a loyal few and Zhou Zishu, who had taken quite well to the life of a third-rate general of an icebound northern distict no one lived in, let alone invaded. In the past, he was often seen carousing with the Crown Prince and his cousin, Qiye, but after Qiye’s death he had become more aloof than ever.  

It was hard to connect the words people used to describe him with the man Wen Kexing saw. Courteous enough , said one, of the man currently throwing rocks at a red-necked swallow. Cultured , he recalled, watching Zhou Zishu kick fish bones from their breakfast into a hole. Reserved , another had said. “Bastard rabbits,” Zhou Zishu announced, pointing at his vegetable patch. “They’re eating the eggplant shoots, see? The birds have already been at it, too. I don’t know why I bother.” Unremarkable , he heard, again and again; Forgettable , of the man standing under a shaft of sunlight, smiling like a huli jing. “What are you doing over there, you lazy brat? Come pick up this bucket, it’s heavy.” 

Only one informant had stared at him for a very long time, and simply said, “Stay out of his way.”

In the garden, Wen Kexing smiled back. “Only because you called for me so sweetly. Ah Xu, all you think I’m good for is picking things up and putting them down again, but I’ve been working so hard composing names for your garden.” Wen Kexing made a sweeping gesture behind himself, already picking his way toward Zhou Zishu’s abandoned bucket. “I call that: ‘Autumn Moon Hung Above Pale Beauty.’” (5)

Zhou Zishu didn’t quite stifle his smile quickly enough. “Wen Kexing. That’s the roof.” 

A dead leaf was caught in the folds of Zhou Zishu’s collar; Wen Kexing plucked it free and let the wind take it, running his knuckles down the collar to smooth it. “ The roof. You make it sound so boring. That’s where we met, you know. Why can’t it be both?”

“What can I say,” Zhou Zishu replied, voice dry, belatedly batting his hand away. “I’m a very boring man.”  

Willing to risk a worse reprisal, Wen Kexing caught Zhou Zishu’s hand and pressed it down over his own on Zhou Zishu’s chest, above his steady heart. “I disagree. My dreams are never boring.”

Instead of rolling his eyes or slapping him, as Wen Kexing expected, Zhou Zishu leaned in closer, eyes very black under his long lashes, fingers curling just slightly between Wen Kexing’s hands. He wet his lips, then said, “Too bad. Mine are.” Laughing at whatever stupefied expression he saw on Wen Kexing’s face, Zhou Zishu flung his hands off and wandered off in no particular direction, easy and purposeful. 

Of all the lies Zhou Zishu was telling, of all the easy confessions he doled out in between, Wen Kexing hoped most fervently that that wasn’t true. If Zhou Zishu dreamed ordinary dreams--there really was no hope. Since they parted in winter, Wen Kexing had dreamt again and again of the feeling of Zhou Zishu’s knuckles pressing into his palm; but the memory had mutated in the harsh wasteland of Wen Kexing’s mind. Now it went like this: Zhou Zishu melting Wen Kexing’s hard bones like wax, like lard. Folding Zhou Zishu’s hands into him like pastry, sucking the secrets from his bones. He dreamt of Zhou Zishu’s skin sinking into him, mud into mud, bones into bones, guts into guts, a single tangled tree, shared rot, shared fire. A nightmare sweet enough to live in. 

The next morning, while Zhou Zishu was off on his mysterious errands in the front courtyard, Wen Kexing took a smooth, palm-sized stone from the garden and a cruel little blade from his sleeve. He spent the morning etching words onto its surface, trying not to imagine it was Zhou Zishu’s heart. He left the finished product in front of the chairs where they’d spent so many winter mornings, framed by a spray of slowly-recovering, brownish sedge.  

Zhou Zishu being Zhou Zishu, Wen Kexing didn’t have to wait long for him to notice the addition. “‘Flower-Weaving Butterfly beholds Water-Dabbing Dragonfly’?” he read, voice climbing. “Give me a break. What kind of long-winded nonsense is that?” (6)

“I know that you think rolling your eyes is an effective form of communication, Ah Xu, but in order to convey an idea effectively, sometimes you need to use your words.” 

Leaning down, Zhou Zishu swiped the stone, tossing it from hand to hand. “Your words, or Du Fu’s words?” 

“...What would you call it instead?”

“Two chairs.” Zhou Zishu slipped the rock into his sleeve, and clapped the hand he’d freed on Wen Kexing’s shoulder. “And an idiot.” 

❃❃

The day before Wen Kexing planned to leave, it rained hard--the kind of late-spring downpour that felt like the world was ending. Rain heaved against the roof and walls, audibly slapping the new leaves outside. A bedraggled Zhou Zishu returned from the front courtyard soaked from the shoulders down, having clearly used his wax umbrella to protect the scrolls in his arms rather than himself. He dropped his burdens on the desk and stood there, dripping, oblivious to Wen Kexing’s noisy fussing up until the point when Wen Kexing started pulling at his robes. Even after Zhou Zishu changed—by himself, behind the screen, more’s the pity—, he sat quietly behind the desk, rolling an empty teacup between his palms. Unmoored, somehow. 

This had happened before. But what a delirious Wen Kexing had mistaken for refined detachment he now recognized as a kind of--absence. Some days, Zhou Zishu’s stare was vacant, as if his soul wasn’t quite tethered to his body in the usual ways. Like it was a kite in the wind: even his shoulders seemed braced against the force of its flight. It made Wen Kexing feel desperate. When he was small, his mother had treated a girl who’d broken both her hands flying a kite. The girl had wrapped the strings around her palms trying to pull it down, and a strong wind nearly split her hands two. That’s how Zhou Zishu looked, sometimes--grimly clinging to his soul until the bone showed through. 

Like today. Zhou Zishu sat, shoulders squared against some intangible wind, while outside gales rattled the roof tiles and yawned through the trees. 

Inside the cavern of Zhou Zishu’s room, the silence felt too big to fill; not that Wen Kexing didn’t try. He let his own mouth lead him where it wanted, occasionally surprised by his own discoveries.

“You know, I’ve just realized,” he mused, somewhere around mid afternoon, “you huff, and puff, and play the simple general convincingly enough, but you’re pretty quick to recognize lines of poetry. I think you secretly love it. Am I right? Do you have a stash of poetry hidden under your bed? It’s awfully greedy of you to keep it to yourself, while this hard-working wife’s heart starves. All alone, what am I going to do before it gets dark? (7) Ah Xu, take some responsibility.” 

All through this, Zhou Zishu had not moved. He stared tensely at the wall, as if he could see through it and past the corridor to the garden. “I probably put the new sprouts out too soon,” he said, as if Wen Kexing hadn’t spoken. “Their roots aren’t strong enough for this kind of weather. And the drainage...” 

“Don’t worry so much, Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing said, pitching his voice to something gentler, something like the voice courtesans had used to cajole him out of a black mood. He thought he hit the right notes, although it wasn’t a familiar song; he’d never indulged any weakness in Gu Xiang. If she could see him now, shuffling forward to sit by Zhou Zishu’s side, too afraid to touch his shoulder, she’d scream. “It will be fine.” 

“Oh, are you an expert now?” Zhou Zishu crossed his arms, shifting unhappily. 

“If outdoor plants can’t survive being outdoors, they weren’t meant to survive at all.” 

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. And where.” Wen Kexing had the uncomfortable feeling that Zhou Zishu wasn’t quite in the room with him--was somewhere off to the side of himself, alone in the corridor, only catching snatches of what Wen Kexing said. “I should have realized that Siji Manor was hundreds of li southwest of here. Up north--things are different in the north. If I didn’t prepare them properly, it’s no wonder that they died.” 

His use of the past tense made Wen Kexing’s skin crawl, like they’d fallen outside of time itself. “Ah Xu,” he ventured, reaching for him at last, “are we still talking about the cabbages? I—“ 

The table clattered as Zhou Zishu shot to his feet. “I do,” he announced. “Do you want to see?” 

“Always,” Wen Kexing agreed, before his mind caught up to the question. “Wait. See what? ‘You do,’ what?” 

“I do have books. Of poetry.” He held out a cold-mottled hand to pull Wen Kexing up, and repeated, “Do you want to see? Hurry up, before I change my mind.” Wen Kexing took it. 

It was his first time walking the manor’s long empty corridors, which seemed to twist and dead-end in unnatural ways, like a snake writhing in its death-throes. Even Wen Kexing’s light footsteps creaked and echoed; beside him, Zhou Zishu’s susurrated through the dust. None of the lanterns were lit, and the light that would otherwise have come in from the latticed windows to the courtyard was wet and grey, edged in black shadows. They passed one closed door after another. It was not quite tomblike; a tomb, at least, had a sense of presence, of meaning. The manor, as it unfolded before them, was more like an unworn set of robes--something that might have held the shape of a person, but empty, was only an uncanny reminder of where a person was not.

After a short eternity, Zhou Zishu stopped and, shoulders set resolutely, flung open one of the identical doors. Wen Kexing scrambled to catch his curious smile before it slid off his face; sure enough, Zhou Zishu’s eyes cut over a second later to gauge his reaction, strangely intent. “Ah Xu,” he made himself say, snapping his fan open, “how could you have hidden such treasures from me for so long? Ah, what a cruel husband.” As expected, Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes and retreated to the window. 

Hidden behind broad sweeps of his fan, Wen Kexing took a deep, dusty breath, and slowly blew it out.  

The room was perfectly unremarkable: small and cold, lined with latticed windows on the garden-facing wall and wide shelves on the others. The scrolls’ casings and books’ bindings were workmanlike and practical; the few decorative outliers were set apart in a way that suggested they were gifts Zhou Zishu felt obliged to display rather than treasures he had indulged in. 

Snapping the fan shut and tucking his hands behind his back, Wen Kexing made an ostentatious tour of the nearest shelf. It was weighed down with a mixture of obvious classics and bizarrely specific references--Zhuangzi next to instructions for making fireworks, the Book of Rites next to a scroll on underground sewer design. There was an entire scroll dedicated to identifying the minting year and provenance of copper coins, which looked like a promising remedy for sleepless nights. Glancing up, Wen Kexing found Zhou Zishu hovering restlessly by the window, watching the rain crush his garden. 

It was odd. Wen Kexing didn’t believe for a second that there was anything truly revealing here; any scroll with Siji Manor’s secret techniques would be hidden away somewhere no thief could find them, and all those papers Zhou Zishu signed every day had to go somewhere. But there was something here that made Zhou Zishu oddly vulnerable--something that mattered.

Wen Kexing let his eyes rove over the shelves, bewildered. He’d seen the gardening manual before. What else was there in this odd little collection that could possibly matter so much to a man like Zhou Zishu? What was he trying to share? It wasn’t the library of a man who loved words, not like Wen Kexing; not the library Wen Kexing would assemble, if he could claw his way free. If he was at liberty to read anything he liked for the pure pleasure of it, rather than anything he could get his hands on for a temporary escape... 

--maybe it only mattered to Zhou Zishu because he thought it mattered to Wen Kexing. 

“Ah Xu,” he breathed, and jolted when Zhou Zishu immediately spun around, wide-eyed and blinking as if startled out of a dream. Shit. Casting around for something--anything--to say to meet that singular attention, Wen Kexing turned towards the furthest shelf, where the books were worn but spaced neatly apart. “Ah! The forbidden gardening manual.” Wen Kexing started towards it with unfeigned eagerness. “Can I really read anything here?”  

Zhou Zishu followed in his wake, a patient shadow. Perversely, the more agitated Wen Kexing became, the more Zhou Zishu seemed to settle. He reminded Wen Kexing of a sailor who no longer knew how to walk on land--lurching furiously across steady roads, striding confidently on stormy waters. He stopped so close that their arms touched, dark eyes scanning Wen Kexing’s for--something. Either he found it or he didn’t, because in the next moment his hand came up to tug playfully at Wen Kexing’s sleeve. “Sure. Or, if you don’t have time before you leave…” Zhou Zishu tilted his head toward the shelf, smiling faintly. “Take whatever you like. Just treat it carefully.” He didn’t seem to notice that his fingers were still knotted in Wen Kexing’s robes, burning warmth into the silk. 

Slowly, gently, Wen Kexing pressed his other hand over Zhou Zishu’s. “I’ll treat it like it’s my own heart,” he lied. He wouldn’t, he thought, folding their hands together, thumb tracing the soft, secret inside of Zhou Zishu’s palm. 

He’d treat the scrolls far better. He wasn’t being at all careful with his heart. 

❃❃

The next morning, Wen Kexing arranged for Zhou Zishu to find him sitting next to his new rockery, surrounded by pebbles and an air of victory. The birds had vanished from the trees, because Wen Kexing had spent the past quarter shichen flicking rocks at them. 

Zhou Zishu looked rightfully suspicious. “What are you doing down there?”

In answer, Wen Kexing pointed at the clear sky, grinning, then at his side. “I’m sitting with the mountain.” (8)

Zhou Zishu blinked, then rolled his eyes as Wen Kexing’s meaning sunk in. “Get out of my house.”

“That’s the plan!” We sit together, the mountain and me, he thought, until only the mountain remains. 

Something flickered across Zhou Zishu’s face, and Wen Kexing knew that Zhou Zishu had recognized the real plan: to ensure that Zhou Zishu could never look at the rockery again without registering Wen Kexing’s absence. He visibly considered taking it apart, eyes shifting from the rocks to the wall and back again, and then--

“You shit.” Zhou Zishu held out a hand for Wen Kexing, and even though they both knew he didn’t need it, Wen Kexing grasped it back and let Zhou Zishu haul him to his feet. He didn’t let go immediately, as though Wen Kexing might really disappear, fishing through his robes with his other hand. “Give me a moment, I have something for you.”

“More seeds?” A funny little laugh bubbled up from under his lungs. “How can I accept such bounty, when Lord Zhou has already been so generous? I already have your copies of the Shijing and a Guide to Regional Glassblowing Techniques--what will my husband give me next?” 

Rolling his eyes, Zhou Zishu raised a palm to smear the lascivious smile off Wen Kexing’s face, unsuccessfully. “Absolutely nothing. You’re welcome, you ungrateful pest.”

“I’ll just have to come back for the fruit harvest, I suppose. I’m owed at least one peach, I think.”

“Get out of here,” Zhou Zishu scolded, and then, when Wen Kexing was nearly over the wall, added: “We’ll see.”  

❃❃

It would have been too easy, if Wen Kexing had simply left. If Zhou Zishu could have quietly drowned Wen Kexing’s voice in the mud with the other things he didn’t let himself hear. Instead, the gangly shithead had left pieces of himself everywhere, like invisible tripwires strung throughout the manor at the level of Zhou Zishu’s graceless heart. 

Ordinarily, he found weeding relaxing, inasmuch as he found any of this insanity relaxing. But there was undeniable appeal in the instant, unmistakable change it made. A problem existed: he pulled up the problem, threw it in a basket, dumped it in a pile, and the problem went away. Then he could stand over the freshly-tidied garden bed, soaking in the empty spaces and breathing. Just breathing. 

Zhou Zishu had just hit a nice stride--yank, toss, throw out, breathe--when he spotted a tangle of brown on top of his southern screen wall and jumped up to clear it. It was immediately clear to him that this was no natural overgrowth. For one thing, he recognized the pile of dried star-thistle from his own herb stores. For another, someone had carved must not be swept away on the wall next to it. 

“Ugh,” he said. And then jumped back down, thistle unswept. 

That night, eyes itchy with candlelight and lack of sleep, he found the reference buried in a disorganized collection of songs someone had copied out as practice. A note informed him that it was originally from the Shijing, which that asshole Wen had taken with him. “Nice try,” Zhou Zishu muttered, knocking back a cold cup of tea. 

He began by reading silently--On the wall there is a star-thistle; it must not be swept away--but found it impossible to hear in any voice but Wen Kexing’s. Lilting; jaunty; unbearable. What is said within the fence may not be disclosed. Out loud, to drown it out, he read, “...But what could not be disclosed was lewd as a tale can be.” (9)

Subtle. 

The next morning, Zhou Zishu included a request for more dried star-thistle with his reports. All those nights outside probably ruined this batch, and it was useful in poisons. 

Not all of the garden’s needs were relaxing. As a rule, Zhou Zishu avoided looking at the mangled plum tree too closely. He found a way of standing back and unfocusing his gaze, so that he only had to take the tree in one branch at a time when he inspected it for more black growths (none) and new green shoots (some). 

So he refused to be embarrassed that it took him two whole weeks to register the unnatural collection at its roots. At a distance, he thought it might be a small animal’s nut horde; upon closer inspection, he realized that they were round rocks, closer to the size of plums than walnuts. Seven of them in a row, arranged in a deliberate swoop. “What the hell,” he muttered, and craned around to see the other side, where a neat triangle of three round rocks was waiting. They looked somehow smug. “What the hell ,” he said, and toed through the daylilies clustered at its back until his boot unearthed his third-favorite basket, now damp and limp from weeks spent in the rain. It was long and shallow and good for gathering herbs--or it had been--and now it was full of more round rocks. “What now?” Zhou Zishu asked the rocks, and headed straight for the library. 

At least this time he knew that the poem was probably from the missing Shijing--that asshole--and started with the more idiosyncratic collections. He missed dinner, but found the song: “Plop fall the plums, but there are still seven. Let--.” Zhou Zishu massaged his jaw, pressing down both the hours of tension and a new, rogue smile. “Let those gentlemen that would court me come while it is lucky.” While there are still three, the next verse said. In shallow baskets we lay them. Any gentleman who would court me had better speak while there is time. (10) 

“That was a good basket,” he admonished the blameless poetry collection, and lost his battle with the smile. “I liked it. Damn it.”

❃❃

While there is time, he woke up hearing. 

While there was still time. 

Han Ying didn’t look as alarmed as he should have when Zhou Zishu asked for more seeds. He must truly have had no idea how many were necessary--which made sense, maybe. He’d been raised in Tian Chuang. 

Maybe he thought it was a sign that Zhou Zishu wanted to live. That, Zhou Zishu couldn’t hold himself responsible for; if the boy had developed some kind of poetic fancy, it was his own fault. Zhou Zishu wasn’t planning to grow ginseng and galingal for their symbolic qualities. He was growing them because Wen Kexing’s sucking gut wound had consumed his stores. 

After Zhou Zishu was gone, somebody else could use the herbs, or they could throw them in the streets for dogs. It wouldn’t be any of his business. 

“Leave the packets with the morning delivery,” Zhou Zishu said, just in case Han Ying thought this was a prelude to some sort of special connection, and left without another word. 

❃❃

Chapter Text

Inserting the third nail hurt like nothing Zhou Zishu had ever felt before. It wasn’t the worst pain of his life, probably--it was so hard for the mind to hold onto pain, so hard to measure it by anything but the scale of the indignities it left in its wake. But surely, somewhere between the dozens of ways his flesh had been cut or burned or crushed or poisoned--he’d felt worse.  

This was a deeper kind of agony. He couldn’t describe how it did feel, except--as if he were forcing a river to run backwards.  As if he had laid his face down in sand and held himself there, and stayed, and stayed, and stayed, gasping and swallowing grit, packing his stomach and lungs until they were tight and hard as porcelain pillows. Like a child calling his name before he split her throat. 

And then a numb darkness fell over his hands, his feet, his trunk, his face--and for a long time he felt and heard and saw nothing at all except a scream of fire in his mind. 

He breathed through it, even though he couldn’t feel his lungs, couldn’t tell if they were full or empty except by the buzzing feeling in his head. He breathed, and he thought about the fire growing small, about gathering up the ash and carrying it away. He thought about clean dirt, forced qi through his limbs like he was turning over sod, roots and all. He remembered what having hands was like, how skin warmed against skin. What his finger felt like, pressed against the delicate skin of Wen Kexing’s mouth. Imagined pressing his finger inside, where Wen Kexing was wet and soft, and running his finger along his teeth. Wen Kexing staring up at him with those fathomless eyes, his voice saying, For every second that remains, I want to see your beautiful face.

He couldn’t have that, he realized--eyes clearing, ears popping, skin burning with sudden sensation. If Wen Kexing saw him, truly saw him, he’d see the Nails. If Wen Kexing saw the Nails, he’d--what, try to stop him? Leave? He’d be furious; he’d feel that he was owed this truth. 

You want me to pay with my life? Zhou Zishu had asked Qin Jiuxiao. No!, he’d said, but Zhou Zishu had heard the grinding echo of a gear slipping out of joint in his voice--the last-second decision to embrace hypocrisy. Another thing Zhou Zishu had sullied, had smothered, had ruined. 

The fact that he had lied--to Zhou Zishu, to himself--was almost worse than the fact that in his heart, Qin Jiuxiao believed Zhou Zishu deserved to die. 

❃❃❃

Wen Kexing was erratic, unstable, and untrustworthy, but in some ways he was comfortingly predictable. If Zhou Zishu had been asked to guess when and how Wen Kexing would appear this time, “sitting under the cherry tree next to an ostentatious pile of knotted stems” would have only ranked below “in the library, pretending to discover a book of pornographic art.” Apparently, showing off had temporarily won out over testing the new boundaries of Zhou Zishu’s welcome. That would come later, he supposed. 

As soon as Wen Kexing spotted him, he grinned, the tip of another cherry stem pinched between his teeth. 

“What are you trying to prove by showing me that your mouth is big enough for a cherry stem? Insulting,” Zhou Zishu said, by way of greeting. It probably said something about him, that his heart felt lighter than it had in weeks, watching Wen Kexing nearly choke to death.

“Choking on just that?” he observed. “Tch.” 

Wen Kexing coughed out something that might have been his name, or might have been the cherry stem finally dislodging itself from his windpipe. 

Zhou Zishu went back inside to make some tea. 

Wen Kexing clattered enthusiastically after him, skidding to a stop just short of Zhou Zishu’s shoulder. “Ah Xu! Are you making this humble wife a drink for his sore throat?”

Zhou Zishu flicked some leaves into the pot. “What does it look like?”

“It looks like…” Wen Kexing began, then paused and sighed. “It looks like you’re doing this badly on purpose so that I’ll step in and do it for you. Scoot, Ah Xu, you’re going to ruin it. Aiya, you heathen, this pot is completely cold. I know you know how to do this properly; I’m onto you.”

He really was. “You wish,” Zhou Zishu replied, swallowing down the tight thing in his throat, and sat down in his chair to wait for Wen Kexing’s clever hands to finish the tea. 

When he was done, Wen Kexing led the way back into the garden, eyes never quite leaving Zhou Zishu, even as he stepped deftly around tree roots and rocks. Being truly known, he had always thought, was like asking to be set on fire. Zhou Zishu’s life had been spent in the shadows. Yet here he was, standing by as Wen Kexing ran his hands over the garden chairs, both of which he had, humiliatingly, kept clean and ready for Wen Kexing’s return. The sun scoured the vulnerable back of his neck and drove needles of pain behind his eyes, but he made himself stand still and wait for Wen Kexing’s knowing smile. To stand there, dizzy with the heat and something like fear, and recognize the light in Wen Kexing’s eyes for what it was. 

“Show me what’s changed in the garden,” Wen Kexing demanded.

Ever since he drove in the third nail, Zhou Zishu had felt a little like he was on a badly-weighted boat, blood shifting like loose sandbags in his veins, crashing heavily from one side of his head to the other, settling thickly in his feet. If he paused officiously to lean against a table and “read” something while he got his bearings, Han Ying and Duan Pengju never questioned it. Wen Kexing was another matter. After the third time Zhou Zishu stopped their tour of the garden to blink dark spots out of his vision, Wen Kexing’s suspicious look narrowed down into something dangerous. 

“Ah Xu...The cherries are so bountiful! I’m impressed.” He pressed a hand to Zhou Zishu’s shoulder, as if to congratulate him, and subtly pushed. Insulting, honestly. As though something as small as this would destabilize his footing. Wen Kexing frowned anyway, fingers tightening on the knobby corners of Zhou Zishu’s shoulder. “You look tired, though. I hope you didn’t give all your vitality away to the trees.” 

“You’ve caught me.” Swatting the back of Wen Kexing’s hand with a twig, Zhou Zishu proceeded on toward the garden chairs, where they’d left their tea. “This is all the result of a dark ritual. I fed my soul to a hungry ghost in exchange for a few cherries. He offered me immortal life and the Dragon Throne, but I said no: just the cherries, thanks. Make sure they’re sour on one side and tasteless on the other.” 

“I cannot believe,” Wen Kexing cried, sounding genuinely outraged, shaking out his hand, “that you have been entertaining other men while I was away. What a disloyal husband I have, aiya.” 

Zhou Zishu swatted at him again, less successfully, with the stick. “If you keep spouting nonsense, I’m going to think you aren’t paying any attention.” 

“I’m paying plenty of attention! No one has ever paid you more attention than I will--put that thing down--”

“Not to me,” Zhou Zishu corrected, letting Wen Kexing snatch away the stick in his hand. It was about to break anyway. “To the garden. Pay attention to the garden, Lao Wen.” 

The problem was, Wen Kexing wasn’t lying; Zhou Zishu’s survival up to this point had hinged on making himself forgettable, on fading into the walls like old dust. Nobody had ever paid Zhou Zishu as much attention as Wen Kexing did, not even when he was the last thing they’d ever see on this earth. With Wen Kexing, it didn’t matter whether Zhou Zishu was withholding a life-saving antidote or kicking manure onto a shrub, he looked at him the exact same way--like he was memorizing every movement of Zhou Zishu’s face, burning it into his mind to take with him to the Naihe Bridge. 

You could get drunk on that kind of attention. You could come to depend on it. 

“I think peonies would grow here,” Wen Kexing was saying, dutifully performing the role of someone who was paying attention to the garden, even as his hand came up to brace Zhou Zishu’s elbow. “We’d make a fortune next year at the Fair, and you could buy your wife all the wine in the world.” 

Zhou Zishu snorted and shook his arm free. “Buy your own wine, you leech.” 

“Leeches are good for the blood,” Wen Kexing retorted, piously. “My parents were doctors, you know. I have some small skill at healing. If you’d just let this humble leech examine your pulse--”

“No, thank you.” Zhou Zishu knocked Wen Kexing’s questing hands away once, then harder when he tried again. “It’s nothing. Just an old internal injury.” 

“I can help!” Wen Kexing’s fingers skated across the inside of his wrist, a burning line of warmth. When was the last time someone had touched his skin? It must have been Wen Kexing--who else could it be, since Qin Jiuxiao--? 

“I said no --Wen Kexing!” Zhou Zishu snarled. He tried to jump back, left foot landing in the first of the Swift Moving Steps, but the movement sent a wave of black spots and green sparks crashing across his vision. The hesitation was just long enough for Wen Kexing to grab the front of his robes, two-handed, and reel him back in. “Let me go, or else, so help me—“

Wen Kexing’s laugh was high and strange. “Or else what? You’ll kill me? You already tried that. Try another one.” 

“Or else,” Zhou Zishu said, slow and deliberate as footsteps in deep snow, “I’ll ask you to leave, and you’ll do it on your own two feet. Because you’re not my wife, and this is not your house. You’re just a guest, and you know it.”

Wen Kexing’s eyes were huge in his face, and then they were gone, and all Zhou Zishu could see was the bent top of Wen Kexing’s scalp, the flexing line of his jaw. His fingers unclenched from Zhou Zishu’s robes, one by one. “Ah Xu,” he breathed, apparently studying the teacup on the little table. “Your tea’s gone cold. Allow this humble guest to make you some more.” 

❃❃❃

It was difficult to stay angry with Wen Kexing, even though he had mud for brains and cocklespurs for a heart. After making Zhou Zishu more tea, he retreated to the library and stayed there in self-imposed exile until Zhou Zishu finished up the day’s reports and went looking for him. He wondered, as he wove through the halls, if Wen Kexing had already left; Zhou Zishu would have. But when he turned into the last corridor, he could see a distinctive shadow slouched against the screen door, so still and silent he might have been one of his stupid rock mountains. Zhou Zishu stepped deliberately onto an old floorboard and the shadow startled off the floor and away from the screen. 

By the time he arrived at the library, Wen Kexing had ensconced himself at the table, an open scroll half-unravelled in front of him, chin tipped indolently in his palm. It almost looked believable, except for the way that Wen Kexing’s robes were badly creased at the elbows and knees, his knuckles so tight the bone pressed yellow crescents and trembling shadows on the back of his hands. 

“Ah Xu!” he cried, mouth splitting into the most enthusiastic, least convincing smile Zhou Zishu had ever received in his life. “Done with work?”

“Mm.” Zhou Zishu leaned over the desk, past Wen Kexing’s evasive elbow. “Ah,The Complete Survey of Equine Hoof Diseases . A true classic of literature. Can you bear to tear yourself away from it for dinner?” 

Wen Kexing’s face relaxed from its rictus smile. Without it, he looked a little lost; the genuine relief that creased his eyes wasn’t dramatic enough to entirely mask the uncertainty beneath it. “For you, Ah Xu, I could tear myself away from anything. My own skin is not too much—“ 

“Who’s asking for that?!”

“Well,” Wen Kexing began, contemplative, “actually—”

He really was going to answer, the crazy bastard. There was such a thing as too much penance. “Do not put me off my dinner, Lao Wen, or I’m not sharing any of my wine tonight.” 

“Your threats have truly grown more cunning,” Wen Kexing said, approving. 

Threats are strongest when you truly know your target, Zhou Zishu thought. He held out his hand to pull Wen Kexing up. 

❃❃❃

Wen Kexing sat awake that night, watching Zhou Zishu sleep trustingly on the other side of the room, one arm flung out to the side. Like a dare. The moon cast soft light on the deceptively delicate lines of his wrist. It was in moments like these, when everything was still, and the only sound was the soft, tidal whisper of their breath, that Wen Kexing knew he was no longer human. A man would feel content, here in the warm darkness with his beloved. Would look at the exposed underside of his wrist, blue with veins, and think only of protecting him. Wen Kexing watched the twitch of Zhou Zishu’s tendons under his skin, hands moving through some unknowable dream, and thought about sinking his teeth in, down to the bone. In his imaginings, the skin and muscle would give, the veins popping like unskinned grapes; but the tendon and bone would hold, comfortingly secure under his teeth. 

He imagined Zhou Zishu waking up and seeing him like that, in him down to the bone, and not pulling away. He imagined Zhou Zishu watching, black eyes endless as the night, and not saying anything at all, because nothing needed to be said that Wen Kexing hadn’t already drunk down with his blood. 

He imagined Zhou Zishu waking up and seeing him, down to his bones. Finding black tar and tumored branches where a man should be. Seeing the inside of his stomach, as heavy with blood as a tick’s. 

He wants to touch. He wants--

Earlier that day, Wen Kexing had stopped by a stream outside the city walls to rinse the blood from his nail beds and the bamboo ridges of his fan. He couldn’t afford to carry evidence of his sins over the invisible line that separated Wen Kexing’s life from Zhou Zishu’s garden. The irony wasn’t lost on him; he’d lost every robe he’d ever worn to Chongming Court to some combination of wine, blood, and dirt. And yet--Zhou Zishu would want answers Wen Kexing couldn’t bear to give, if he noticed, and he would. Zhou Zishu was the kind of person who would notice a drop of week-old ink on an apron you’d just worn to slaughter a pig, and ask who you’d been writing letters to. He’d ask in the exact same tone of voice, too: eyebrows raised, eyes flickering down the damning spots like he was reading a mildly interesting map, saying, Who’d you kill this time, Lao Wen? 

He’d understand. That was the worst part, that he’d understand--up to a point. 

This journey had been bloodier than the others. The Ghosts who’d followed him out of the Valley hadn’t been particularly challenging to kill, but they’d been unexpectedly numerous. Someone had evidently amassed quite a following, though what good they thought it’d do to challenge him with lackeys, he didn’t know. The fools weren’t capable of following him quietly, much less assassinating him. Even the more patient ones were weak idiots; according to his spies in the capital, Fan Huoqiang had tracked him all the way to the capital before getting killed in a tavern by a petty thief. Embarrassing. The previous Ghost Valley Master was lucky; at least Wen Kexing hadn’t pestered him with incompetant assassins before skinning him alive.

The real problem was what came later--the plain-clothed men who ambushed him on the road the day before. If someone in the Valley was making alliances with outsiders--then his enemies were getting bolder. That was a pain; for every Ghost he had to kill today, he’d have fewer to unleash on the jianghu tomorrow. 

It didn’t take long before he’d scrubbed away everything that separated him from a scholarly gentleman. But something always remained-- some deeper stain that ate away at his mind like quicklime, deeper and deeper every year. Soon there would be nothing left. Only an empty space where his soul had been, and endless hunger.

The things Wen Kexing was hiding would not survive the light of day. If Zhou Zishu wanted to hide too—Wen Kexing was many monstrous things, but he tried not to be a hypocrite. But he was so hungry, and Zhou Zishu’s skin was right there, white as mushrooms in loam. Why was Zhou Zishu hiding something so simple? It would be so easy to check his pulse—was that it? Was this a test? Had it always been a test? Was Wen Kexing passing? 

Or--a message? This is me trusting you, Wen Kexing imagined him saying. If you betray that trust, I’ll turn you into soup. 

Contrary, impossible man. 

Wen Kexing tucked his arms around his knees, breathed in until he could feel his ribs press against the solid barrier of his legs. Tucked his fingers into the sweaty recesses behind his knees, so they could not betray him and reach across the room. He could wait. He could wait.

❃❃❃

Long days, warm nights: everything grew. Wen Kexing followed Zhou Zishu out into the courtyard on the first morning, stretching lazily, and called, “Lord Zhou, may this humble one join you? Or are you afraid I’ll learn your sect’s secret technique for push-ups?” 

“If all you practice at home is push-ups, it explains a lot about your form,” Zhou Zishu said, and spun close, feinting a chop at Wen Kexing’s neck with one hand and grabbing for the pressure point under his bicep with the other. His thumb skimmed down Wen Kexing’s sleeve as he danced back--then gripped Wen Kexing’s arm for balance when he lunged unexpectedly forward, bearing Zhou Zishu back toward the garden. “Not the pond!” he shouted. “Wen Kexing, don’t you dare,” and twisted out of his hold like a fish. 

So the next morning, and the next. 

Zhou Zishu’s manual seemed to assume that, under a generous sun, the majority of the planting done and the bulk of the harvest yet to come, the garden’s maintenance became routine and obvious. Glowering at a daylily which was somehow both sun-burned and drowning in mud, Zhou Zishu was living proof that it was not. 

“Ah Xu, does your book say anything about drainage?” He was carrying around a new one, something his mysterious south wing friend had left the day before. 

“Read it yourself and find out,” Zhou Zishu said, and threw it at Wen Kexing’s head. 

Planting things had never interested Wen Kexing before, except inasmuch as it was a comparatively painless chore, and therefore one the Ghost Valley Master assigned him rarely. His enthusiasm for harvesting existed in inverse proportion to his hunger. It had been more than eight years since he was last driven to it. But Wen Kexing’s had a survivalist’s instincts for what would grow, and how, and where, and whether it was edible. The Ghost Valley could make a farmer out of anyone, even Luo Fumeng, who was stingy with sharing her martial arts but took a reptilian pleasure in making other people dig for their dinner. The greatest secret of the Ghost Valley was this: only about two thirds of the 3,000 ghosts were any good as an army. Only a few of Luoyi’s girls were wulin. Some of them were pregnant when they arrived; no matter how viciously Luoyi protected them, some became pregnant after. Wen Kexing and Gu Xiang had never been the only children in the valley. And, of course, even the most hardened murderers grew old. 

What the righteous sects did not suspect and could never know was this: that not all of the valley’s vulnerable died, ground to marrow and blood meal, a feast for the Valley’s weeds. Some Ghosts planted for themselves; some were little more than slaves. All of them eventually learned how to drain rainwater away from the cabbage and toward the rice, which was more than Lord Zhou could say for himself. 

“Wipe that look off your face and do something useful,” Zhou Zishu grumbled. Wen Kexing wasn’t sure which objectionable thing his face was doing, but he tamped it down into something more subdued before he trotted into pinching distance. “Where’d you learn all this, anyway, Philanthropist Wen?”

“A bit from my parents. And from my--aunt,” Wen Kexing found himself saying. It hardly hurt at all, like an air bubble popping in his throat. “I passed the seeds you gave me on to her.” 

“Oh? For your aunt’s sake, I hope she’s a better gardener than you.”

“She hasn’t done nearly as much for the local bird and rabbit population as Philanthropist Zhou, I have to admit. Mostly she’s quite greedy and insists on growing entire vegetables that people can eat.” 

“She sounds as terrible as you,” Zhou Zishu concluded, and then blinked rapidly. “Ah. I mean. Not to insult your aunt.”

Wen Kexing waved that away magnanimously. “No, no, she is.” He paused, searching for a way to describe Luo-yi that didn’t include the phrase mass murderer. “But she’s practical. I owe her a great debt for that. Growing things allows her to take care of those who depend on her. ” She seemed most surprised and pleased by the flowers, though, which struck Wen Kexing as absurd. Except as a weapon, beauty was worthless in the Valley. “She believes that beauty elevates even the worst of circumstances,” he added lightly. 

Zhou Zishu stared contemplatively into the garden, then sighed, slanting a wry smile at Wen Kexing. “In my experience, one doesn’t have much to do with the other.” Wen Kexing felt himself smile back. “Still, I’d like to see more beautiful things in this world before I die. Wouldn’t you?”

“Well…” Wen Kexing let his eyes trace the graceful line of Zhou Zishu’s nose, his peach-petal lips, neat shoulders, down the severe lines of his robes. “If you’re offering.” 

Zhou Zhou rolled his eyes and struck off for their discarded pile of trowels, but paused halfway, so close to Wen Kexing’s side that the heat prickling off of him felt wet with humidity. “Keep digging,” he advised, and stomped off. 

❃❃❃

Zhou Zishu had thought many dangerous things in his life: things that were disloyal, unfilial, treasonous, cruel. Things that were wrong. But the questions now pressing against the back of his teeth felt like the most dangerous of all. He knew, intellectually, that Wen Kexing must be a killer too. There was no other way to cultivate martial arts as ruthless and direct as his. But in this space together, they were ordinary. Was it okay to want to keep something? Something sweet? Even if it was just for a little while? 

He knew what the answer would be--it never was. 

Luckily, Wen Kexing was adept at reminding Zhou Zishu of all the reasons he shouldn’t, and couldn’t, be kept. 

“You don’t want to kill a rabbit, ” Wen Kexing repeated back at him. “ You. Don’t want to kill a rabbit. You don’t want --”

“Do you have a point, or has your brain finally broken?” 

“Ah Xu, I am merely concerned. Is that cold of yours catching? Are my ears blocked? I could have sworn you said that you , Zhou Zishu,--”

“Yes, yes, I’m a ruthless killer and you’re a philanthropist. Since you’re such a good person, I guess you can advise me.”

Wen Kexing blinked. “A philanthropist would make his beloved rabbit stew.” 

This was why it was infuriating to argue with Wen Kexing: he was often correct. Zhou Zishu regarded his only options in these cases--agree with him, or to take an absurd position--as no kind of choice at all. “Who wants rabbit stew?” he snapped anyway, and immediately regretted it.

“My beloved can have any dinner he desires; just tell this humble wife. Even my own body is not too far--”

Zhou Zishu considered that chasing the rabbit with his bare hands would involve less loss of dignity than this conversation, and charged. 

Ten minutes later, defeated, Zhou Zishu admitted, “I wasn’t a good student for my shiniang. I only…” He sighed, watching the rabbit cheerfully ravage chrysanthemum greens. “I respected her erudition and work ethic. I did everything she told me to do. But I didn’t learn them, not in the ways that matter. I didn’t see how it would serve my ambitions.” 

Zhou Zishu stared bitterly at his knuckles, twisting them together into knotted baskets, until at last Wen Kexing ventured, “And...the rabbits?” 

That, at least, made him laugh. “Oh. Right. She wouldn’t let us kill the rabbits at Siji Manor. Even joking about it made her furious. This isn’t Siji, but…” 

“Ah.” 

Wen Kexing stared, for a long time, at the plum tree: the lopsided, unhappy leaves growing out of the southern side, the thin, wild shoots growing on the stumps to the north. “Ah Xu…” he said. “I think we’ve both been cursed to live our lives out of time. When I was a child, my parents wanted me to practice my martial arts, but I only wanted to play. When I wanted to practice martial arts, my parents were no longer there. Isn’t it funny?” His gaze dropped, heavily and all at once-- to the gravel yard where they’d fought that morning, to the garden Zhou Zishu had no reason to grow. His smile shook at the edges. “And yet...maybe I’m in time, for once. Maybe we both are.” 

How could it hurt so much, to meet somebody’s eyes? Nearly as much as the Nails scraping on his bones--nearly. But no matter how it felt, this feeling wouldn’t kill him.

Zhou Zishu had questioned so many things that shouldn’t be questioned. But he’d always had a knack for finding answers; it was what made him what he was. He’d known the answer to the ones inside his heart before he even asked them. 

After all: what right did he have have to ask Wen Kexing to stay, if Zhou Zishu had no intention of living? 

“I’m done for the day,” he announced. Picking up his tools let him look somewhere other than Wen Kexing’s eyes; although when he looked up again, Wen Kexing was there, still as a heron on the water, looking back. “Lao Wen, let’s drink.” 

Wen Kexing smiled back, radiant. “Ah Xu. Always.”

❃❃❃

Wen Kexing couldn’t stay any longer. He knew that. Zhou Zishu did too, in the same mysterious way he always did, like Wen Kexing was a book he’d read a hundred times before. All Wen Kexing had done was pour their morning tea a little too slowly, and Zhou Zishu’s face had twisted into a tiny, knowing smile. “Leaving tomorrow?” he said, more an observation than a question. “I suppose it was inevitable once we finished all the good wine.” 

“I have standards, Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing replied. “It’s no use pretending you don’t, too.” 

“Do I?” Zhou Zishu mused lightly. “I keep you around, after all.” 

“Exactly! My face is a gift from the Heavens; many men have tried to keep me, but none were as gracious as Ah Xu…”

Zhou Zishu snorted inelegantly, turning his face to look out across the garden, so that all Wen Kexing could see was the smooth curve of his neck. “‘Gracious.’ Right. Well, Mister High Standards, maybe you should bring more wine with you next time.” 

Next time. After their morning in the garden, the afternoon was a barren wasteland of Zhou Zishu’s determination to work through his correspondence and Wen Kexing’s echoing mind. Next time. Next time. When staring at Zhou Zishu as he worked became too painful, Wen Kexing loudly renounced the bedroom for the library, and then stood there, unsure what to do next, unable to ignore the certainty that had been growing under his skin like mushrooms ever since he left for the capital. His enemies in the Valley were getting bolder; he couldn't afford more of these trips until he regained absolute control over the Valley and had everything in place for his revenge.

Perhaps--could he send for Zhou Zishu once everything was ready? Or maybe he could leave a sign, a way to find him, for when Zhou Zishu himself was ready? For all that he seemed determined to do--whatever it was Zhou Zishu was doing here--Wen Kexing was certain that his roots here were shallow. If Wen Kexing could only find the right way to pull--would Zhou Zishu go with him to the jianghu? Outside the latticed window, the bamboo screen bowed and whispered in the hot air. It cast shadows the same color as the bruises under Zhou Zishu’s eyes. No. It was better for Zhou Zishu to stay here, safe: safe from further injury, from jianghu monsters, from the knowledge of what Wen Kexing was truly like.

Wen Kexing had never thought of life after his revenge. He had assumed that he would die; he had nothing else to live for, and the rot in him was too deep to dig out. If he did, though--hope was a painful thing. If he didn’t, there was tonight. 

Ah Xu had asked for more wine. 

Well--the city was full of it. 

They had tonight. 

❃❃❃

As though he knew Zhou Zishu was impatient to finish, Duan Pengju had sent a runner with an exceptionally tall and tedious pile of scrolls. Helian Pei’s stewart had purchased a suspicious number of spoons. During training, one new Tian Chuang recruit “accidentally” pushed another into the canal, only to discover that she couldn’t swim. Perhaps they should consider swimming lessons as part of the training curriculum? Tian Chuang was running low on crossbow bolts, which they weren’t supposed to have in the first place. The city guard had found the badly-mutilated bodies of six beggars piled in an alley, which might be a cover-up for one of Helian Zhou’s ill-fated spying schemes, or might just be garden variety murder.

This was stupid.

Tomorrow, Wen Kexing would be gone, and Zhou Zishu would still be trying to unpick the threads of Helian Pei’s obvious money-laundering scheme. Why bother? 

Who was he trying to fool? Certainly not himself. 

Maybe I’m in time, Wen Kexing had said. Zhou Zishu stood up.  

Wen Kexing was not in the library, although it looked like he had been. The garden, then; Wen Kexing liked to spend his afternoons reading in the sun.

The last time Zhou Zishu had bothered to open the sliding doors which separated the library from the courtyard, the frames had hissed and scraped across their dusty runners. Now they moved soundlessly, and uncomplainingly took his weight when he leaned against them to shout out the door. “Lao Wen!” He squinted at the bamboo screen; between the swaying trees, he could make out the shape of two empty chairs. “Lao Wen?” 

Nothing. The lazy idiot was probably asleep. “You better not make me look for you,” he called, already starting down the garden path. “Lao Wen! I’ll put worms in your blankets if you don’t get over here right now. I’ll drink the last of the wine and make you watch. Lao Wen!” 

He wasn’t in the garden. 

Eventually, he found him. Wen Kexing wasn’t exactly hiding; once Zhou Zishu found the right corridor, it was easy enough to guess the room from the creak and thump of closets disgorging their contents. When Zhou Zishu opened the guest room’s door, he found Wen Kexing elbow-deep in old blue robes, sorting them into piles on the bed according to some idiosyncratic standard. He’d no doubt share his opinions at length if Zhou Zishu were stupid enough to ask. He didn’t. He met Wen Kexing’s startled expression, and watched it melt to nervous excitement. 

“Ah Xu!” he called, as if they had arranged to meet here, in a room that smelled like the stale pillows of a dead boy. 

“Wen Kexing…what are you doing here?” 

“Looking for something for you to wear! Your closet is full of nothing but the same sad black robes. Let’s go out, Ah Xu, into the city. Think of all the rare wines we can drink.” 

“There’s plenty here to drink. Anything you’re lacking, I can order.”

“Don’t you ever want to hear elegant music? Eat fine food? I’ve been to the capital three times now, and all I’ve done is sleep and haul sticks.”

“I’m fairly sure that’s not all you’ve done,” Zhou Zishu snapped. He found his gaze had drifted, somehow, to the bed, and forced it back to Wen Kexing’s face. “Based on how you smelled the first night I met you.” 

Wen Kexing smiled crookedly and tipped his head down to slant an inviting look up through his lashes. “See? Here you are, drinking old vinegar. I can promise you a far better vintage than that. Ah Xu, you haven’t yet shown me any of the unique and beautiful sights the city has to offer. What kind of host are you?” 

“Wen Kexing.” It felt hard to talk through his lips, which had gone strangely numb. The Nails had never done that before. “I told you the rules. Don’t touch anything unless I give it to you, or tell you that you can touch it. Don’t leave my bedroom without me. No talking to—“ 

Wen Kexing blinked once, twice, face blanking. His eyes gleamed with the green light of a coming storm. “Ah. This humble one apologizes, Lord Zhou. I thought those rules only applied to prisoners, not guests . Clearly there’s been a misunderstanding, one way or another.” 

“Don’t.” Zhou Zishu found that his voice was hard, but it was cracking at the edges. “Don’t do that. You know I consider you my friend.” 

“Friend!” Wen Kexing laughed bitterly, a garbled sound like rocks over water. “Wen Kexing, Wen Kexing. Seems like you need to work harder...Don’t you want to know how I consider you?” 

“Lao Wen--” 

“I consider you my zhiji in this life.” 

Zhou Zishu flinched. He watched Wen Kexing register the movement and absorb it, like a shock passed from one hand to the other, shoulders tightening, mouth spasming into a thin, flat line. 

“Lao Wen,” he tried again. “I can go with you when I’m done--done planting. Four more seasons. Then we can go anywhere--drink all the wine in the world, if that’s what you want.” 

“Planting?” Wen Kexing sputtered. “What kind of excuse is that? What kind of planting requires you to stay here, day in and day out, for so long? If we don’t go out and drink, we’ll stay in and drink. It doesn’t make any difference to the plants.” 

Zhou Zishu’s jaw flexed. “It’s not an excuse. If you want to leave, leave.”

“I don’t want to leave. I want to know why you can’t. ” Wen Kexing threw up his arms. “Even your lies don’t make any sense. In four seasons we’ll be right back where we started. You’d have the same problem. Can you not leave this place? Is it your sickness? Are you a prisoner?”

“I’m not a prisoner,” Zhou Zishu scoffed, and realized too late that he wasn’t able to make it sound true. “...Or perhaps I am. Have it your way.” 

“This isn’t my way. I just want the truth.” He seemed to have forgotten that he was standing right next to the piles of robes, painful evidence of all the other things he wanted that Zhou Zishu could not give, until Zhou Zishu’s eyes settled on them. Wen Kexing swallowed, then darted forward to put himself between Zhou Zishu and the bed. “I mean it. Please. Are you hiding from your enemies? I’ll kill them.”

“Don’t be insulting,” Zhou Zishu’s mouth said. “Who could you defeat that I could not?” He plowed on before Wen Kexing could offer an equally pointless answer. “Lao Wen, enough. My debts are too great. I’m staying here.” 

As if Wen Kexing would ever settle for enough when he could take more. “No! Let me help pay your debts, then. I’m not leaving without you, Zhou Zishu.” 

“Of course you will,” Zhou Zishu snapped, then closed his eyes against the resentful scorn he felt burning behind them. When he opened them, his expression was pleading. “You can’t pay my debts for me, Lao Wen. Please. I owe you as much as I owe anyone alive.” 

Wen Kexing recoiled, eyes huge. “Is that all this is to you? Payment ?” His voice cracked, and a tide of cold rushed down from Zhou Zishu’s stiff cheeks to the ends of his fingers and the bottom of his stomach. 

“No!” Were Wen Kexing’s hands as cold as his own? There was only one way to find out. Zhou Zishu gathered their hands together, blinking back an emotion he refused to name. “No, of course not. That doesn’t change the facts. Lao Wen, I nearly killed you.”

For a moment, it looked like Wen Kexing couldn’t understand him; then the terrified slant of Wen Kexing’s brow melted back into exasperation. “Oh, that . Well, I broke into your house. Twice. If I’d used the front door like a normal person, none of that would have happened.” 

Zhou Zishu’s thumbs pressed into Wen Kexing’s palms, urgent, a strange smile twisting his mouth. “If you were a normal person, would you be my zhiji?” 

Wen Kexing clutched his hands back, too hard. “If you were the kind of man to wait complacently, would you be mine?” 

“Waiting and using crafty tricks to shoot someone are two different things.” 

“Are they? Ask me if I care! It was worth it. Getting shot was worth it, if you let me stay!”

That, finally, gave Zhou Zishu pause. “...You meant to get shot?”

“Only by the one bolt! How was I supposed to know you had a second barrage hidden in the begonias?” 

“You nearly died. I would have killed you.” Zhou Zishu tried to pull his hands away, but Wen Kexing’s ridiculous giant hands clenched down even tighter. He could feel his knuckles grind together.  

“I didn’t know you yet. I know better now, because of that.” 

“Unbelievable. You--. You’re actually crazy. Let go of me, Wen Kexing.” 

He did. Zhou Zishu regretted it immediately. He tucked his freezing hands into his sleeves and backed up, towards the door. It was still, he remembered absurdly, afternoon. Somewhere out there, the sun was out, warm and heavy. 

“Zhou Zishu.” Wen Kexing squared his jaw, like a man about to throw himself in front of a bolt. “Who lived here? Why are these rooms empty?”

“You know the answer to that.” Zhou Zishu’s voice was the sound of the cave collapsing. “I know you know that answer to that.” 

Wen Kexing was silent for a long time, watching him. Finally, he said, “If they’re all gone, then there’s no reason for you to stay. Come with me.” 

“Fuck you.” To his horror, Zhou Zishu realized he was about to cry. His heart hammered against his teeth. “How could someone like you understand?” 

Wen Kexing lurched forward, and didn’t stop when Zhou Zishu backed up. “Someone like me? Someone like me? We’re just like each other! If you want freedom, take it! If someone needs to die first, we’ll do it together. I’d burn this whole city to the ground, just to keep you warm.”  

“Fine. Great.” Something vital was draining out between them; he could feel it slipping between his fingers, hot as fresh blood. “Wen Kexing, ask yourself. What kind of cheap zhiji is a copy of the worst parts of yourself?” 

“What would you call us then?”

Finally, Zhou Zishu found the strength to leave the room. “A joke.” 

❃❃❃

At dawn, Wen Kexing found Zhou Zishu sitting on the floor of a nearly-bare pantry, rolling an empty jar of wine between his palms. 

“Have you slept?” Wen Kexing asked, softly, and Zhou Zishu shook his head. When he looked up, his eyes were bloodshot but steady. 

“I’ve barely slept either of the past two times you’ve been here. I normally use a drug to sleep, an incense. But I didn’t want you to know I’d used it on you while you were recovering here, so I stopped.” 

“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing breathed, too overwhelmed and exhausted to parse this sudden confession. Finally, he simply said, “Do you think my dreams are any better than yours? I understand.” 

If anything, Zhou Zishu looked even more chagrined. “It isn’t that. I know that it helped you too. It was just an advantage I couldn’t bring myself to give up.” He sighed, and dropped the jar, letting it roll away, under a shelf. “I’m sorry.” 

“I’m sorry, too. Ah Xu, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—I just wanted to help.” 

Zhou Zishu nodded, and then seemed to brace himself. “Lao Wen. There are a lot of things I can’t tell you. Not now. If you can’t accept that, I understand. But if you can’t, that’s the end of things between us.” He took a long breath, loud in the empty pantry. “If you stay, though—I’m done lying when I don’t have to. If I can tell you the truth, I swear, I will.” 

“Okay.” Wen Kexing crouched down, painted his thumb across the blue circles under Zhou Zishu’s eye. “Tell me then. What are--things between us? What am I doing here, Zhou Zishu?”

“Don’t waste your breath on questions you already know the answer to,” Zhou Zishu admonished, wetly, and dipped his chin to press a kiss to Wen Kexing’s palm. 

“Ah Xu.” Wen Kexing tipped forward, pressed his forehead to Zhou Zishu’s--breathed in the hot wet air between his own palm and Zhou Zishu’s mouth. “Ah Xu, I wouldn’t ask if I were sure. Please. I need to hear it from you.” 

“Learn to listen better,” Zhou Zishu said, and sank his teeth into Wen Kexing’s palm. When he gasped, Zhou Zishu smeared his way across Wen Kexing’s fingers and chin, up to Wen Kexing’s open mouth. “Lao Wen,” he whispered with the last of Wen Kexing’s air, “Lao Wen,” and kissed him.  

It was like--he hadn’t been alive before this, and all his nerves were waking up at once. It hurt. It was the best thing he’d ever felt. It wasn’t that the kiss itself was perfect; Zhou Zishu was assured and clever, his tongue tracing confident shapes in Wen Kexing’s mouth. But his lips were chapped and his mouth was strangely, almost unpleasantly, cold, like he’d been sucking on ice. It wasn’t the kiss itself; it was Zhou Zishu. It was the fact one of Zhou Zishu’s hands was at the nape of his neck, half-tangled in his hair, half-clenched on the delicate pressure points under his skull. A killer’s hands, with a killer’s instincts. The other was clutched around Wen Kexing’s wrist, as if Wen Kexing might otherwise let his hand fall from Zhou Zishu’s face. His thumb swept fitfully over Wen Kexing’s pulse point. Like this, it was impossible to tell sword callouses from the chapped skin of a gardener.   

Wen Kexing slung his free arm around Zhou Zishu’s back, so that when he swung his leg over Zhou Zishu’s lap and pressed him up against the shelf, the board pinched his hand, not Zhou Zishu’s spine. That pain felt good, too, almost as good as it felt to spare Zhou Zishu from that same hurt: it reminded him where their bodies ended, kept him from melting into the sticky summer air. It made everything feel more real--like Zhou Zishu really was tracing his fingers down the line of his inner arm, pushing the sleeves back past his elbow. Secret skin. Like Zhou Zishu really was hitching his knees up against Wen Kexing’s back, tipping the last of Wen Kexing’s body weight forward, hip to hip. Like he was hard against Wen Kexing, hot and solid in all the same places, because of Wen Kexing. Like Wen Kexing was real.  

He ground down experimentally, and determined that he wasn’t imagining this, at least: Zhou Zishu’s erection was definitely real. Wen Kexing whimpered against Zhou Zishu’s mouth and did it again. Real.

Wen Kexing felt Zhou Zishu smile against his mouth just before he pulled Wen Kexing back from the kiss by the hair. “If you make a single comment about one of us growing or-- picking lotus, or sweet rosebuds or any other nonsense, we’re done.” 

“I--what?” Wen Kexing blinked at him, unsuccessfully trying to clear the stunned mist from his eyes. “Ah Xu?” 

For no reason Wen Kexing could see, Zhou Zishu’s smile softened into something barely there at all. Something almost helpless. “Lao Wen,” he echoed, softly. His face was so beautiful. Wen Kexing wanted to cry. 

“Oh, Ah Xu—let me fuck you,” he said instead, grinding down demonstratively. 

Zhou Zishu’s face went slack with surprise for all of a moment before he braced his feet on the floor and pushed up harder. “Ridiculous.”  

“Ah! I—“ Wen Kexing curled forward, burying his face in Zhou Zishu’s neck, trying to think around the hot ball of unreality spreading from his cock to his hips, his thighs, his stomach. 

“You are not fucking me on the pantry floor,” Zhou Zishu said, pushing up into the cradle of Wen Kexing’s hips like that was any different. Maybe it was. He couldn’t think. He mouthed up Zhou Zishu’s neck, testing the feel of it under his teeth. Thin skin, strong tendon, and the hammering beat of Zhou Zishu’s pulse. It felt good under his tongue, the fast, steady evidence that Zhou Zishu was just as affected as he was, underneath his face. That he was alive. 

Wen Kexing bit down hard--if he bit down any harder, Zhou Zishu wouldn’t be alive anymore, but Wen Kexing didn’t, and Zhou Zishu was--and sucked, and finally--finally earned a groan. It felt like he had been making enough noise on his own for five men, but Zhou Zishu was human, after all. He was alive, after all. He tasted like salt and dust and small hairs.    

Zhou Zishu’s hand tightened painfully in his hair; he allowed the sucking for an endless moment before dragging Wen Kexing’s mouth back to his. That was good too. Zhou Zishu’s knees pressed into his back, and his hands were clenched against Wen Kexing’s skin, and Wen Kexing had nowhere to go, nothing to do but sit in the fire and feel it. The restless pressure in his cock was going to make him insane, and pressing against Zhou Zishu only made it worse. More skin would make it unbearable. Suddenly frantic, Wen Kexing ran his free hand down from Zhou Zishu’s face and neck to the collar of his robes, pushing them aside just enough to skate the tips of his fingers along Zhou Zishu’s sweaty collarbone. It felt-- 

Zhou Zishu yanked him back by the hair, far enough that Wen Kexing could meet his eyes, blown black and bright. He smiled, bright and crooked, and it felt like getting stabbed. Wen Kexing smiled back, probably stupidly, and Zhou Zishu laughed and pinched him. 

“Hey, did all those courtesans you saw teach you anything useful, Philanthropist Wen? Or only how to let other people do all the work?” 

This, Wen Kexing could do. He smiled, tracing his hand back up Zhou Zishu’s neck to trace his lips. They felt hot, like a bruise. “Who needs teachers when you have a mouth as talented as mine? There’s only one way to find out if it’s big enough, though.”

 “You shit,” Zhou Zishu said, laughing, his knees relaxing behind Wen Kexing, letting him tip back. “Prove it, then.” 

Somehow, making Zhou Zishu laugh felt as good as the rest of it. Wen Kexing beamed back at him, smirking, and let Zhou Zishu pull him down. 

❃❃❃

By the time they made it back to Zhou Zishu’s actual bed, the sun was fully up. “We should just start the day. Why bother?” Zhou Zishu complained, but let Wen Kexing heard him under the quilt all the same.

“Do you really want to start today that badly?” Wen Kexing asked, a little meanly, and for a suffocating moment they both had nothing to breathe in but the knowledge that Wen Kexing was leaving. Zhou Zishu’s hand returned to its new favorite place in Wen Kexing’s hair and tugged his face down, into Zhou Zishu’s shoulder. 

“Just for a little, you spoiled brat,” he conceded, and gently pushed the small hairs away from Wen Kexing’s sweaty temple. With the sun up, it really was too hot for this. With his stomach this cold, he couldn’t bear to do anything else. 

The sunlight crawled across the floor--closer. Closer. Wen Kexing tucked his hands under Zhou Zishu, as if his weight might hold him there. The bruised back of his hand--the one he’d used to protect Zhou Zishu from the shelf edge--throbbed under the pressure. It was good. “Ah Xu,” he said, just to say it. “I sleep so much better with you nearby. Isn’t that funny? I’ve never liked it before. But now...” He yawned, jaw cracking uncomfortably. “See? Ridiculous.” 

“Mm.” Zhou Zishu settled into a thinking silence, and Wen Kexing waited, breathing in the humid corner of Zhou Zishu’s neck. They had at least enough time for this; the sun hadn’t found them just yet. And hot as it was, Zhou Zishu’s fingers were five points of freezing cold on Wen Kexing’s scalp, his forehead, behind his ear. 

“Lao Wen. Let’s do it,” Zhou Zishu murmured, into the secret darkness of Wen Kexing’s hair. “Let’s roam the jianghu together. There will still be peaches at Siji if we leave now. Wild plums. Cherries, ones that taste like something.”

“You do owe me a peach. I said I’d come back for the peach harvest, and you don’t even have a peach tree,” Wen Kexing agreed sleepily, and then registered the rest of what Zhou Zishu had said in one sudden, cold rush of awareness. His heart hammered. He wanted Zhou Zishu to leave, but Wen Kexing couldn’t--not yet. Unbearable to imagine taking Zhou Zishu to the Valley. Unbearable to imagine Zhou Zishu seeing what Wen Kexing had planned after, but perhaps he could hide it better, out in the jianghu. He could. For this, he could. Just not yet. He swallowed, and knew Zhou Zishu felt it. “I need to do something first.”

“...Alright.” Zhou Zishu resettled his hand. He didn’t sound surprised. He sounded like he expected that answer. Like he’d only been able to ask, because he knew the answer would be no; but he had to ask all the same. 

Wen Kexing ran some rapid calculations in his mind. “Mid-Autumn. I’ll come back for Mid-Autumn.”

“For a visit,” Zhou Zishu surmised, correctly. 

“Yes, but--give me a few more months. After the New Year.” Wen Kexing bit down on the question he wanted to ask-- will you still want to go with me then --and asked the closest thing he could: “Can you leave in the spring?”

Zhou Zishu breathed out something like a laugh, and then was silent for so long that Wen Kexing thought he might have fallen asleep. “I’ll be done here in the spring,” he said at last. His voice was strangely empty, like the wind in a tunnel; but then he pinched Wen Kexing’s side and added, “So you better turn up before I pawn all my spring robes on wine.”  

“Ah Xu!” Wen Kexing exclaimed, delighted, pressing his smile under Zhou Zishu’s jaw. “And you pretend to be so annoyed by my poetry. I knew you had hidden depths.” 

“Don’t get started with this again,” Zhou Zishu warned. “You aren’t going anywhere near my hidden depths.” 

“What? I didn’t--! ” Wen Kexing sputtered, then sighed. “Ah Xu. Nobody would believe me that you’re worse than I am.” 

“Who’s there to tell?” Zhou Zishu murmured back. And, well. Fair. 

“Those birds have been stalking us all summer. They’ll back me up,” he said anyway, to be contrary, too tired to care if he was making any sense. 

Zhou Zishu grunted. “The birds are assholes. You’re an asshole. I’m tired.” 

Wen Kexing wanted to argue with that, but he was already falling asleep. 

❃❃❃

The sunlight had slanted its way halfway across the room by the time rapid footsteps woke them up. Both of them shot out of bed at the same time, landing neatly as cats in a crouch on the floor, as if they’d practiced this before. A thrill went through Wen Kexing, heart to hands, at the thought of fighting at Zhou Zishu’s side for the first time. And then, next to him, Zhou Zishu cocked his head to the side, eyes narrowed in concentration--and sighed, eyes pressing closed for just one moment. When he opened them again, the blank, distant thing was back in his eyes. He rolled easily to his feet, calling “Han Ying?” and then strode forward to intercept their intruder before he could enter the room. He glanced once over his shoulder just once before he eeled out the door, meeting Wen Kexing’s eyes too quickly for Wen Kexing to make out his expression. 

Well, if he’d been trying to say, Stay there and don’t listen, it hadn’t worked. 

“Lord Zhou!” A young man’s voice, entirely too relieved and desperate for Wen Kexing’s liking. Wen Kexing drifted closer and settled himself against the wall. “You’re here!” 

“Of course I am. Where else would I be?” Zhou Zishu’s peevish retorts were so familiar to Wen Kexing by now that he’d forgotten how they used to sound--like they were packed in a layer of snow. Like he was saying lines in a play, and wasn’t very good at it. 

“I--.” This seemed to stump the boy. “I had a report for you, so I waited for you in the gatehouse. You’ve never been late before, and I thought--after a whole shichen passed--” 

“I have a cold,” Zhou Zishu said, “and you have entirely too much imagination.” Before the boy could recover from that blow, he added, “And I could hear you coming from three corridors away. Practice your steps more, or I’ll cut your feet off myself.” 

“My lord,” Han Ying said, sounding miserable. “This lowly one apologizes. I let my frame of mind influence me. Duan Pengju has been worried that you might collapse in this house alone, and who would know? He said...apologies, my lord,” he concluded abruptly, no doubt in response to whatever Zhou Zishu’s face was doing. Wen Kexing tried to imagine it, and snickered. 

“Han Ying.” Zhou Zishu’d voice was tired. “If whatever you were going to tell me can wait, then this little visit is over. You’re dismissed.” 

“Ah--yes, my lord. Of course.” There was no sound of footsteps, though; Wen Kexing rolled his eyes. “I just wanted to say--the garden looks better. I’m glad,” he said, all in a rush, and then his footsteps retreated in something just short of a run. Zhou Zishu waited until they heard the distant sound of the exterior door closing before he slipped back inside, looking ten years older than he had before he left. 

“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing drawled. “Your little disciple can’t tell a toad from a turd. He went running off into your house without any thought about what that ‘Duan Pengju’ is up to.” 

“He’s not my disciple, and you didn’t hear any of that,” Zhou Zishu replied, flatly. “I’ll cut your tongue out.”

“What a waste that would be,” Wen Kexing lamented, smiling broadly. His mouth still felt bruised. Well. It had only been a couple shichen since he found Zhou Zishu in the pantry, after all. It felt like a lifetime ago. 

Zhou Zishu made a sound of disgust and turned to rifle through the tea things, back turned to Wen Kexing. “Who needs it. Aren’t you leaving anyway? Get your clothes on.” 

Wen Kexing studied the tense line of his shoulders, the way they curved slightly inward, and knelt to pick his robes off of the floor and slide them on. “Ah, my husband will miss me, I’m sure of it--if only because I am so good at carrying pails of dirt. Hey, there’s an idea. You should make your little disciple carry them for you next time. He seemed interested in the garden.” And you , he didn’t add, just in case Zhou Zishu was blind, deaf, and daft and somehow hadn’t noticed yet. “None of my other duties, though,” he warned, just in case he had. “Some chores are only for a wife to enjoy.”  

Zhou Zishu threw an exasperated look over his shoulder, posture relaxing. “I’m not showing Han Ying the garden, or anything else, you colossal vinegar jar.” 

“It’s just an idea.” Wen Kexing flicked the last knot in his robes into place. With that done, it was no longer clear what he should do; he wanted to tuck himself up against Zhou Zishu’s back, bury his face in his hair, and dissolve into him like snow on wool. He rifled through the small collection of things he would be taking with him instead: two more books, dried meat and fruit. Another decorative fan, one he’d idly pulled off a corridor wall on their way back from the pantry. This one had idiotic little mountains and some badly-drawn trees, and it was really no wonder that it’d been stuffed into a back hallway. Zhou Zishu hadn’t said anything about it, though, so it was Wen Kexing’s now. “Are you giving me more seeds?” he asked when that was done, voice light as he could make it. 

At this, Zhou Zishu finally turned, smiling crookedly. His fingers trailed over Wen Kexing’s when he handed him his teacup. “You aren’t drowning in them already?” he asked, already heading for the closet.

“No,” he said, honestly. “My--people appreciated them.” More than he could have anticipated, to be honest. If he’d known a few bags of seeds could win him as much loyalty as ten homicides, he’d have saved himself a lot of trouble over the years. “I told you my aunt has been planting a garden of her own. She’s suborned half the household. At this point, I have more gardeners than guards.”  Even his silly little girl was learning something; it was good to see her happy, however pointless and short-lived it would be. The thought of Gu Xiang made something tighten in his chest, an unidentifiable pressure that no amount of tea could seem to shift.  

“Good.” Wen Kexing looked up from his tea and found Zhou Zishu watching him, arms full of little paper bags. “Good.” 

“I really do have to go,” Wen Kexing sighed, as much to himself as to Zhou Zishu, who was now methodically placing the packets in his bag. “I made a promise...” to my maid sounded feeble at best and suspicious at worst. Calling Gu Xiang something else wasn’t a lie, he decided, if it better conveyed a fundamental truth outside the bounds of language. “A promise to my sister,” he concluded. “It’s dangerous to leave her alone for so long...Not for her. For everyone else.”

If this information surprised or intrigued Zhou Zishu, he didn’t let his face show it. “Sounds like someone else,” he simply said. “Try not to go too crazy on the road. Here, I’ve given you all my extra vegetable seeds, since you hate my vegetable plot so much. And this…” Zhou Zishu held up a thick paper packet as long as an incense-stick. “Earlier, you said you had trouble sleeping, when you’re away. This is what I use. Don’t burn too much, or you won’t wake up.” 

“Ah Xu…” Wen Kexing’s breath felt foggy in his chest, heavy with an emotion he couldn’t recognize. Zhou Zishu was holding the bag out, face open and expectant; when Wen Kexing took it, their fingers overlapped, nearly enough for Zhou Zishu to wrap his hand around Wen Kexing’s and pull. He could see the intention building in Zhou Zishu’s shoulders, the cant of his hips, saw it in the same way that he would anticipate an opponent’s next strike. Instead of a particular whip strike, though, he could see the way that Zhou Zishu would reel him forward. The slight incline of his chin; the way that Zhou Zishu would kiss him, hard and deep. The terrible warmth and hunger of his eyes in daylight. Wen Kexing clutched the bag, and stepped back. 

“Ah Xu, thank you,” he said, smiling widely, choking around his own heartbeat. “I’ll see you soon.” He tucked the bag in his sleeve, and left.

Chapter Text

For someone who had been put to work digging drainage, Han Ying looked positively beatific. Next to him, Bi Xingming and Cheng Zichen watched on as earnestly as though Zhou Zishu were imparting an arcane, advanced technique, rather than some bullshit he’d cobbled together from illustrations and Wen Kexing’s vague instructions. “Look, just dig a line that way,” he said, pointing toward the rockery with an apparently-convincing air of conviction. Truthfully, he had no real idea where the water should drain to , just that it needed to drain away from the plum tree. At least if it puddled on the rocks it wouldn’t kill anything. Probably. Whatever. 

Of course, the entire point of the endeavor was learning how to kill--if you believed Zhou Zishu, which the boys evidently did. He’d asked Han Ying if he and any of the others would be interested in learning how to cultivate poisons. If they’d noticed that they’d spent nearly all their time weeding and carrying potted plants inside, they knew better than to say anything about it. Or maybe they thought there was a secret, murderous use for purple orchids that he had yet to reveal. There was not, except inasmuch as Wen Kexing would make a huge racket if Zhou Zishu forgot to bring them inside, and Wen Kexing’s nagging was murder for his peace and quiet.

Assuming he came back. 

“Aghh,” Zhou Zishu groaned, and Han Ying shot up in alarm, Bi Xingming and Cheng Zichen right behind him.  

“My lord! Are you hurt? What is it?” 

“Ah, well.” Absent Wen Kexing, Zhou Zishu was forced to cast about for the next most annoying thing in his immediate vicinity. “...that vine is back. Around the azalea. Which is one of the most important plants in the garden.”

Bi Xingming’s earnest inspection of the lone vine limply encroaching on the azalea was almost too much to bear. “Why is that, Lord Zhou? Please instruct us.”

“Well.” Something itchy had found its way into his sleeves, he was sure; Zhou Zishu shook them out while he visualized Wu Xi’s herbal manual and dutifully recited, “Azalea is useful for both poisons and cures. The leaves and nectar are toxic. The flowers can be made into either an anaesthetic or sedative. And the roots can be used to treat injuries and kill maggots.” In theory. In practice, he rarely ventured outside the formulas he’d developed with Wu Xi all those years ago. 

“I never knew that!” Cheng Zichen raised a reverent hand to touch a leaf, and then hesitated, as if the shrub might bite him. 

Damn it.

In his head, Azalea is useful had sounded better than They remind me of home, and didn’t require him to pull nearly as much skin off his heart . Zhou Zishu sighed. “Azalea is one of the four flowers that bloom year-round at Siji Manor. In spring, azalea. In summer, flame tree. In autumn, orange osmanthus. And in winter, plum.”

Bi Xingming nodded solemnly, so Bi Chengfeng must have told him this before. The other two cast glimmering, hopeful looks at the azalea, visibly multiplying it in their minds’ eyes. Imagining what it might look like, outside this little garden. Away from the city, away from the north. Away from the need to sedate imperial guards or treat maggot-infested wounds. 

“Hey. Did I tell you it’s time for a break? Get back to digging, all of you,” Zhou Zishu said, to stop himself from imagining with them. 

By the end of the seventh month, the boys had already exceeded what Zhou Zishu could imagine doing in the garden. “Do the trees in the front courtyard need to be taken care of, too?” Han Ying asked, a weirdly hopeful look on his face.

So Zhou Zishu said, “Yes,” rather than, I haven’t looked at anything past the front gate in a year. “Of course. Did you think this was all? Lazy brats,” he added, swallowing back the things he might have called them if they were his disciples. If they stayed. If they all left together. If. The nails in Zhou Zishu’s chest scraped against his bones, too deep for any sedative to reach. 

Han Ying beamed. 

❃❃❃

During festivals, more than any other time, the city was a study in paradox. Zhou Zishu had forgotten, in the past year, just how bright they could be, and how lonely. From his vantage point on his roof, he could see crowds moving through the night markets like goldfish, cold flickers of yellow and red in the blue of the night. Sound carried in the cold wind, carrying the sounds of iron pans clattering over a hundred fires, of drums, of bells, of laughter.

It would be easy enough to slip into the crowd and join them. Easy enough to find his favorite fried lotus root and osmanthus wine before he lost his sense of taste entirely. He hadn’t expected to have all his senses intact by this point, had drunk his eight jars of osmanthus wine last year with the expectation that his perception would begin to rust and flake away along with the fourth nail. But there had been no way to hide inserting the nails while Wen Kexing was with him, and--well.

Wen Kexing wasn’t here, though. So there really wasn’t an excuse not to do it now.

Best to wait until morning, just in case. 

The sounds of moon-viewing parties continued through the night, though the voices dwindled to a few blurred points of laughter by dawn. Beneath Zhou Zishu, the courtyard glowed like an old hearthfire: above the sprawling orange of the osmanthus, the flame tree and red maple shed embers into the autumn wind. Zhou Zishu slipped silently down into its warmth, before the early-rising servants in the neighboring manors crept outside to begin the day. 

Wen Kexing was not here, but his traces still moved through the garden--a sweeter type of ghost, but no less noisy. The potted chrysanthemums he’d insisted on replacing were blooming loudly along the gravel path; the vegetable plot he’d objected to was faring less well, peppers drooping on woody stalks. Wen Kexing would have something to say about that, no doubt. Ungrateful asshole. He had to know that Zhou Zishu had only planted the vegetables in the first place so he could give Wen Kexing the “extra” seeds. 

Zhou Zishu brought in the chrysanthemums, and set them on the dusty tables and chairs, one by one. Yellow as heaven’s lanterns, but heavier. Still and cool, points of contact he could feel down to the earth. 

As he had last year, Duan Pengju arrived the next day. This time, he was alone. Zhou Zishu led him to his office; he didn’t like the way Duan Pengju’s eyes roved over the front courtyard, registering the neat shape of the trees, the scrubbed stone lanterns. 

“You’ve taught Han Ying and the others a lot,” he observed. It didn’t sound like a compliment.

Zhou Zishu smiled. “I can’t take all the credit. They’re smart and capable. I was worried about what would happen if I succumbed to my injuries, but they’re more than able to pick up the slack.” From glory hounds like you, he didn’t say, very loudly. 

Duan Pengju’s hand paused halfway into his sleeve, the muscle in his jaw jumping. When he looked up and offered Zhou Zishu the scroll that had been hidden inside, however, his eyes were colder and more self-satisfied than ever. “Thank the Heavens that you haven’t. Jin Wang needs you to deal with this matter personally.” 

With a sinking feeling, Zhou Zishu read both the affixed note, informing him that the letter had been intercepted en route to General Li, and the letter itself, which described several of Tian Chuang’s more treasonous actions. General Li was an honorable man; once he had this information, he’d share it, even at the cost of his own life. Shit. If General Li’s life were forfeit, Princess Jing’an wouldn’t live to see the next dawn, no matter what services she’d rendered transporting Qin Jiuxiao’s body. Zhou Zishu passed the paper through a candle flame and watched it turn to ash in his hand. 

“This information is too detailed to come from the outside. We find the mole first, then deal with General Li and his household. If we destroy them first, the mole will simply find someone else to share this with.” 

Something bright flickered across Duan Pengju’s flat eyes. “Would someone within Tian Chuang be that foolish? Knowing the consequences? Begging Lord Zhou’s pardon, if a spy had access to Tian Chuang’s records…”

“Duan Pengju.” The sound of Zhou Zishu’s back teeth grinding against one another felt very loud. “If this is you telling me that there’s been an intruder at headquarters that I wasn’t informed about, you’ll be the first to feel those consequences.” 

“No, no--not at headquarters, my lord.” Abruptly, Duan Pengju threw himself to the ground. “Please have mercy on me, my lord! In the first month, one of your guards believed he saw a man leave Chongming Court over the roof, but knowing Chongming Court’s defenses, and that Lord Zhou did not report anything that day, this unworthy one did not believe it…”

With effort, Zhou Zishu did not kick Duan Pengju in his stupid, blackmailing neck. Duan Pengju never acted alone; killing him now would only set off whatever back-up plan he’d put in place. Guards. Zhou Zishu had known there were bound to be people watching Chongming Court, but it was insulting both of them to pretend it was for Zhou Zishu’s protection. He was almost curious to know how far Duan Pengju would carry this stupid farce out before he got to the point.

“Do I need to report to someone like you?” he said, letting his contempt show. “There haven’t been any intruders--just informants who know things above your station.” 

“Begging Lord Zhou’s pardon--this lowly one does not need to know your contacts' identities and information. But Lord Zhou’s safety is very important and Tian Chuang’s agents are always watching Chongming Court. If Leader Zhou doesn’t communicate clearly about when he will have guests, what if those agents mistake an informant for an intruder and detain them? Or kill them?” 

Zhou Zishu did not have to fake a sound of impatient disgust. “If you're all really that stupid, then until my injuries heal and I can return, Tian Chuang agents are ordered to only capture people leaving Chongming Court if they can do so without killing them.” 

“...yes, my lord,” Duan Pengju assented, smiling like a lizard.

Zhou Zishu could probably expect an assassin any week now. At least try to be subtle about it, he thought, scornful. “We’re done here. I’ll send for you when I have orders regarding General Li.” 

Alone again, Zhou Zishu stared at the scrolls Duan Pengju had left behind: copies of General Li’s household expenses, diagrams of his house. 

Jin Wang and Duan Pengju would not wait long to hear his plan. But a few hours would hardly make a difference, and that was all the time he needed. 

❃❃❃❃

Zhou Zishu’s eyes clenched shut against the pain of the fourth nail. When he opened them, Wen Kexing was crouched in front of him, smiling faintly. 

“What a mess, Ah Xu,” he sighed, hand coming up to skim his collarbone, fingers slipping in his blood until they came to rest above his heart. Four warm, firm anchor points in the storm raging through Zhou Zishu’s meridians: and then he pushed, and his fingers slid as easily into Zhou Zishu’s chest as though it were dirt, like he was preparing Zhou Zishu’s skin and muscles for seeds. Down, down, until his hand clenched warmly around the pulsing, rattling thing in Zhou Zishu’s chest and pulled it free, veins snapping, little roots. Wen Kexing held it up in front of his face: black, flaking, tumorous, slimed with rotting blossoms. 

“We have to burn it,” Wen Kexing said.

And then he was gone, and there was only Zhou Zishu, sitting like a fool in an empty room, bleeding sluggishly onto his desk. The sound of his breath was very loud.

❃❃❃❃

As slowly as it had arrived, the eighth month passed.

❃❃❃❃

In the ninth month, Zhou Zishu remembered, fingers cramping in the cold, we gather bitter herbs. (1) Few of the herbs were big enough to harvest this year, but it was a start. A start his bloodied, bloodless hands wouldn’t be able to see through, he thought, fumbling his knife. He put it down on the rocks beside the herb garden, flexing his hands to work the feeling back into them. 

Zhou Zishu’s eyes were pulled to Wen Kexing’s ghastly “mountain,” gangly and treacherous as its creator. Only the mountain remains.

Perhaps Wen Kexing was being as facetious as ever, when he named his rockery. But words were a thing Wen Kexing wrapped himself in to keep his fears at bay. Rocks didn’t die, but people did. Zhou Zishu would. Wen Kexing would--eventually--if not already--

In the ninth month are shrewd frosts. 

Zhou Zishu picked up his knife. 

❃❃❃❃

Still, still as the stones, another possibility settled in his heart. The mountain remains. It wasn’t a joke, or a farewell.

Zhou Zishu himself was the mountain: inflexible, unmoving. Inanimate. Wen Kexing came and went, but Zhou Zishu remained. Even in his escape from Tian Chuang, he’d remain, grafted by the nails of torment to a dead dream. 

Maybe it was a dare. Maybe it was a plea. The tenth month. My harvesting is over. I stop up every hole to smoke out the rats.

Chapter Text

At first, he thought that the black rot had returned. The plum tree presided over his morning exercises, its silhouette burned into the back of his eyes  by the rising sun morning after morning. So when lumps appeared on the branches he thought: well, I expected that. 

He hadn’t. They were buds.

There weren’t many of them. They were most plentiful on the small offshoots which had grown on the amputated branches, as if the tree were desperately pouring life into its broken places. And succeeding.  

Han Ying and the others found him like that, standing silently under the plum tree. The brats had become truly impudent; they came and went as they liked, just like Qin Jiuxiao had. 

“What are you all looking at?” Zhou Zishu barked. “Hey, Bi Xingming, didn’t someone promise he’d sweep up the snow? And Cheng Zichen, you’re supposed to be watering the plants indoors, not gawping out here like a fish. I’m not teaching you anything else until you’re done.”

As threats went, this one lacked bite. After the first heavy snow in the eleventh month, with nothing else to do, Zhou Zishu had ordered them to help him grind dried bai ji and san qi for wound powder. After drying enough ginseng and galangal to treat a sick army, they had started on the poisons: aconite, pi shuang, ma qian zi. This week he was teaching them how to make the paralytic arrow poison by grinding down sprigs Wu Xi had sold him many years ago, even though so far, the little idiots had only succeeded in tearing the leaves to pulpy shreds. 

Zhou Zishu had waved the boys’ sincere dismay away like a gnat, explaining, “Ingredients this potent are always good for something. If we boil this and mix it with he tun liver, it produces a draught that mimics death so convincingly an imperial physician won’t know the difference… tch , I’ll show you tomorrow.” He’d pushed the mash into a bottle to prepare it. And so it went, day by day, until it came to this: daily lessons, neat paths, and potted plants that were only a little withered. 

And a blooming plum tree, apparently. 

“You never did tell me,” Han Ying ventured. As usual, he’d hung back to say something. He really was incorrigible. “Whether plum trees need to be pruned before spring.”

“That’s because I didn’t know the answer either,” Zhou Zishu admitted easily, already looking forward to Han Ying’s expression of dismayed confusion. The result was, unfortunately, less dramatic than he’d hoped; Han Ying’s eyes flickered incredulously from the tree to Zhou Zishu and back again, but he kept his peace. “We’ll see what Madam Qin’s book has to say.”

Han Ying nodded acknowledgement, but his eyes didn’t leave the tree again, “I’m glad it pulled through,” he said, stoutly. “It’s good that it lived.”

Very subtle. Zhou Zishu sighed and resolved not to engage with that pointed metaphor. “It’s better not to get your hopes up. None of us know enough about plum trees to say what this means,” he said, honestly. Han Ying’s jaw flexed, like he was prepared to refute that--or refute whatever it was he thought Zhou Zishu was really saying--so Zhou Zishu barreled on. “That bamboo, on the other hand, is starting to get on my nerves. I tried to cut it back and it returned the next day. Forget cutting it down, pulling the roots up barely phases it. Even fire won’t kill it,” Zhou Zishu explained, waving in disgust at the verdant screen.  

Han Ying shook his head, still serious, relentless. “Why would you, my lord? They say that a true gentleman is like bamboo. He bends, but does not break.” 

Would Han Ying get along with Wen Kexing? The thought was too terrible--for a number of reasons. “You need to drop this double-sided conversation,” Zhou Zishu warned. He was annoyed to find that he merely sounded tetchy, not dangerous. “I’m not talking to you about this any more until you say something that’s actually about the garden, or you spit out whatever it is you’re thinking.” 

Han Ying nodded. “Begging your pardon, my lord.” He had stopped looking at the plum tree, and was now watching Cheng Zichen and Bi Xingming, who were neither sweeping the paths nor watering the plants, but were instead trying to hit one another with their brooms. Idiots. “You two!” he called, before Zhou Zishu had to. “Back to work.” 

They watched the boys scramble to return to their chores together, and then Han Ying turned to fully face him. “My lord, we three are loyal to you above all. I’m concerned about this plan for General Li’s household, and the fact that you are going yourself, despite your injuries.” He’d nearly managed to quash the desperation and fear in his eyes, and he’d certainly grown bolder. It was an improvement. “I think you intend to atone for your brothers’ lives. There are many ways to do that.”  

Zhou Zishu sighed. “Han Ying. What I do, or do not, intend is none of your concern. If you’re so loyal, the best thing you can do for me is live.”  

“I think it is our concern,” Han Ying argued, surprisingly sharp. He nodded to the other boys, now dutifully brushing the heavier snow drifts off the flame tree’s branches. “If Duan Pengju were lord of this manor...I don’t know if the garden would survive.” Back to this again. Well, Zhou Zishu  supposed it was  better than open treason, even if it wasn’t exactly subtle.  

“I already destroyed most of the garden once. The flowers may not survive me.” 

“Not all things can survive on their own. Maybe gentlemen are like bamboo.” Han Ying swallowed; then he turned fierce eyes on Zhou Zishu. “The rest of us aren’t so lucky. The best thing you can do for us, my lord, is live.”

And then, finally, he walked away, already admonishing his brothers to be less rough with the branches.

The plum tree swayed judgmentally in the wind. 

“Damn it,” Zhou Zishu said. 

❃❃❃❃

Zhou Zishu slept shallowly, and woke to the sound of arrows hitting meat. 

Lao Wen, you idiot —, his mind screamed. He was on his feet before his eyes had even opened, moving swiftly toward the garden. Toward whatever he would find there. Across the hall and through the lattice door, into the freezing night. There was no moon, and nothing to see the garden by--just darkness, and even darker shadows, and a high, faint sound, like a loose thread being pulled in one long pull. 

Zhou Zishu ducked and rolled down the stairs, just in time to avoid losing his head. 

Another hissing flash sent him rolling forward again, into the shade of the garden perimeter. His feet skidded on the wet snow, and he came to a sliding stop with one hand braced in a thicket of bare sticks. Except they weren’t bare--they were fletched, and they squelched and sank to the side under his weight, rooted only in soft viscera. The man the arrows were attached to didn’t even flinch; he was already dead. 

Beyond the trees, someone was laughing, a high-pitched, ugly sound. Another silver bolt of thread shot past; Zhou Zishu threw himself flat on the ground and crawled forward on his chest, to the dead man’s face.  

It was a Tian Chuang guard. 

Very calmly, he wiped his bloody hand clean on the dead man’s sleeve, scanning the darkness. The laughter bounced strangely off the courtyard walls, an animal sound; it seemed to be coming from the northeast corner, but its owner could be anywhere.

The laughing man with the silver thread wasn’t alone. Like sensing lightning before it struck, Zhou Zishu could feel at least five others in the courtyard, invisible in the darkness. He closed his eyes, and shot to the left, pulling the Baiyi sword free in the same motion. Two zhang from where he started, he turned out of the Swift Moving Steps, slashing the throat of a masked figure in ragged red robes. He kicked backwards before the body even had a chance to crumple; it was still swaying in place, death sinking from its brain to its knees, when his boot connected with another man’s sternum. He knew it was a man, despite the mask, because just before his ribs went through his lungs he made a sound like a dying goat. Noisy. Both corpses hit the ground at the same time. Zhou Zishu cut the second man’s neck, just to be sure, and rolled behind the gongshi before another volley of silver wire swept across the place where he’d been standing. 

From the direction of the azalea, under the snap and swish of the wire shearing through the garden, came the familiar crack and skid of a foot catching on something hidden in the snow. Goddamn vine. Zhou Zishu grabbed a handful of rocks from the ground and flicked them through a perforation in the Second Husband, one after the other until he heard the wet crack of the third rock crushing someone’s temple. He sent the last two flying at the south and west roofs, ducking low behind the Old Man and his zither before the resulting volleys of arrows could ricochet off the walls or rocks. None did, but three wet cries echoed after them. No way to know yet if those three were dying or just wounded; easier to be sure about the two men in red who, having followed the rocks’ trajectory, charged toward the gongshi and fell through the rockery’s false floor to the spiked pit below.

The silver wire followed after them, decapitating the First Husband before it arced suddenly down. Zhou Zishu blocked it with his sword--which saved his face but sent ripples heaving down the wire before he could move again. One edged wave caught him on the back of the shoulder, cutting fast and deep before the shockwave pulled it free again with a slurping twang. 

Shit. Time to move. “Sorry,” he told the First Husband, and kicked the gongshi over into the pit, on top of whoever was still groaning in there.

Zhou Zishu sprinted toward the wire’s source in the northeast corner, steps quick and light even as the back of his robes filled up with blood. His eyes had adjusted enough by now to make out the laughing man’s shape: short and stout, with a warped hat like an old root on his head. The man kept laughing as he swung his wire, keeping Zhou Zishu at a distance despite his speed, sticks and snow and crushed plum blossoms raining down beside them. Rolling for the shelter of the porch, Zhou Zishu ducked behind a pillar and stayed there for the one long breath it took for the laughing man to see him and strike. The wire hit the pillar at waist-height, and Zhou Zishu dashed away just as the mechanism inside clicked under pressure and released a spray of needles. 

Thuds, and a shriek and thump, and then it was just Zhou Zishu and the high, whistling wheeze of the laughing man. 

Zhou Zishu tore a strip off his sleeping robe and lashed it around his shoulder as he followed the limp line of the wire across the gravel, back to the silver case that had fallen from the laughing man’s bloody, spasming hand. Zhou Zishu knelt in the snow, and said, “The needles are poisoned. Without the antidote, you have about an incense stick’s time until it stops your lungs and heart. Time to talk. What’s your name?”

“Hanging Ghost,” the man wheezed, staring up at Zhou Zishu with avid, corvine eyes. Stupid name, and not one he knew. 

“What are you doing here?” 

“Finding the thing the Master treasures more than power.” When he smiled, his mouth was  a foaming mess of pink teeth, sharpened to a point. “We thought it was drugs--a secret armory--a palace full of whores. A luxury good enough to die for. Who knew it was a monster like you? Giving him all those seeds, it’s too funny.” The Hanging Ghost’s laughter had started to sound wet and airless. “Killing eight men in the time it takes to pour tea. What a prize.” 

“You traced the seeds,” Zhou Zishu guessed, pulling out the only useful piece of information in that drivel. “Large, unusual orders. Found the source, waited for the buyer, and followed them back here.” 

Hanging Ghost’s chest heaved with convulsive laughter. “True! You’re just the same--it’s too good--nobody would believe--that arrogant bastard neglected the Valley for a copy of himself.”

Clever enough to trace the seeds. Still too stupid to live. Zhou Zishu pressed his thumb into the nearest wound until the Hanging Ghost screamed. “Waste your breath and die, or focus. Is the Valley Master still alive?” 

“Ahhh,” the Hanging Ghost giggled. “Ahhhhh. So it’s like that. Who knows? He was alive the last any of us saw him, before he and Xi Sang Gui blocked themselves in her mountain hall like cowards.” He laughed again. “But who can say now? That was months ago. They’re completely cut off. Lunatic Wen and his harem won’t survive the winter.” 

Zhou Zishu’s mind raced, stomach burning with impossible hope. A courtyard garden wouldn’t feed a household for the winter—he had no idea how many mouths there were to feed. But maybe it could sustain them long enough for help to arrive.

“What are you doing with them?” Zhou Zishu indicated the dead Tian Chuang guards.

“Ask him,” Hanging Ghost laughed, and a man stepped out from under the eaves of the western wing. He struck a flint, and a torch gasped to life, illuminating Duan Pengju’s face. Well. Zhou Zishu had already guessed he was here--if the intruders hadn’t come over the roof or died in the halls, then someone had led them through. It wasn’t Han Ying. 

“You’re going to Ghost Valley with us,” Duan Pengju said, cool as a lizard. “Give him the antidote.”

“I’m going to Ghost Valley,” Zhou Zishu agreed. “But not with deadweight like you.” He flicked Baiyi across the Ghosts’s throat, and his laughter stopped.  

Duan Pengju’s face blanked, but only for a moment. Then he darted forward--not toward Zhou Zishu, but toward the garden perimeter, toward the plum tree, where he held the torch so close it nearly nearly licked the flowers. Zhou Zishu was sure he didn’t flinch, but Duan Pengju smirked as though he had. “Your body is strong and your mind is quick. But your heart has always been weak,” he sneered. “Jin Wang is starting to suspect it too, you know. I doubt he’ll even be surprised to hear you were carried off by some outlaw ghosts, useless as you’ve turned out to be.” 

It was easy enough to ignore Duan Pengju’s grandstanding; the torch in his hand was another matter. Zhou Zishu made himself look only at his face. “If I were a hot shit in the desert, I’d still be more useful than trash like you,” he replied easily, and enjoyed the look of lax shock freezing Duan Pengju’s face. “I’m sure they didn’t have to even come up with a very creative lie to buy your help. What was it? A hidden palace made of gold? The key to an ancient treasure? A magic pearl that confers brains?” 

He’d actually flinched for the second one, so Zhou Zishu was probably close. Embarrassing. 

“That’s rich,” Duan Pengju sneered, “coming from a man who’s spent the past year crying over some flowers.” Duan Pengju swept his arm to indicate the handful of blossoms still clinging to the plum tree--the one still holding the torch. The branch caught, and Duan Pengju stumbled back, frantically trying to keep his sleeve clear of the fire. Zhou Zishu grabbed Hanging Ghost’s silver box from the ground and flicked out the wire, catching Duan Pengju in the side of his face. Blinded by blood, Duan Pengju dropped the torch and staggered away from the fire, further into the garden. Another flick of the wire caught him across the chest, spraying blood across what was left of the snow. He staggered back, until the weak ice of the pond screamed and collapsed, taking him with it. 

Zhou Zishu believed that Duan Pengju was capable of drowning in a fishpond; but just to be sure, he heaved himself to his feet and past the smoking winter roughage to its edge and stared at the foaming, heaving water where he’d gone under. Then he gripped the Baiyi’s sword’s handle like an icepick and drove it down into the water, into the man under it. 

The thrashing stopped. The wet ground and dripping trees were already putting out the fire. Clutching the fabric to his shoulder, Zhou Zishu headed inside to retrieve the things he’d need to finish the night. 

❃❃❃❃

Zhou Zishu didn’t even bother to attach a message to the mechanical sparrow before he sent it off. Why should he? As expected, Han Ying responded to this small provocation by marshaling every resource he could. In this case, that appeared to be not just Bi Xingming and Cheng Zichen, but fifteen other boys, a suspicious number of crossbow arrows, and Bi Chengfeng, his brow low as summer thunder. 

Bi Chengfeng took in the wreckage, and then the pots and bags Zhou Zishu had dragged out onto the stairs. “You’re leaving, then.” Zhou Zishu nodded. 

“We’re coming with you!” Han Ying insisted, hands balled at his side.

“If that’s what you want,” Zhou Zishu agreed. Having braced himself for a fight but not for this, Han Ying reeled back like he’d been struck. 

“I--really?"

Zhou Zishu looked at the charred plum tree, the outflung arms and blank faces of dead Ghosts and guards scattered throughout the ground cover. He crossed his arms. “You all deserve to know the truth before you make your decision. I abandoned Siji Manor. I led 80 martial siblings to their deaths. I can’t even keep a tree alive.” He looked back, steadily, first at Han Ying, and then at each of the others. “I killed Duan Pengju, and I’m headed into the middle of a siege, in one of the most dangerous places in the Central Plains. If you leave now, I swear I will not seek to harm or silence you. It’s your choice.” 

Han Ying dropped to his knees, and slowly, the others followed. He bowed three times, and came up with his forehead wet with icy mud. “Shifu. Please instruct us.” 

Zhou Zishu met Bi Chengfeng’s stormy eyes, and smiled. “If we make it look like the result of a failed coup, we have enough corpses here to stage six deaths. The rest of you will have to wait until the next Tian Chuang mission. Cheng Zichen: there are robes in the south wing. Han Ying: the materials for making human skin masks are under my desk. The rest of you, start stripping the Ghosts’ corpses. Put everything in the back courtyard to burn. Bi-shu and I will show you what to do from there.” 

❃❃❃❃

The sun was not yet up; the garden was still caught in the long blue predawn of early spring, an in-between time that could fool you into thinking it was earlier than it really was. They needed to leave. The boys were still inside, either finishing up the last of the human skin masks, packing up Siji’s books, or enthusiastically staging a more widespread fight. There was a rattling crash and a yelp from the eastern wing that sounded suspiciously like Cheng Zichen landing on the antique armor displayed in Zhou Zishu’s rooms. Well, it was good that Bi Xingming’s throws were improving. 

With the three highest-ranked Tian Chuang agents apparently dead, there wasn’t really anyone to question the staging of this scene. Whatever Bi Chengfeng reported would almost certainly be the final word on things. 

But--it would be good to check. Just in case. One last time. 

This wasn’t the garden’s best time of year. The ground was muddy but freezing; the groundcover was cut back or reduced to sticks and thorns. Even the evergreen bamboo and the decorative pine looked ragged, as though the burden of being the only green things for so many moons was starting to wear on them. But underneath the smell of blood and char there was something dark and warm--the smell of deep earth thawing, of bulbs cracking open under the earth like eggs. The compost they’d heaped over Zhou Zishu’s ill-situated vegetable garden in the fall was sweetly rotting.

The night’s fighting had reduced the gongshi to a tumbled graveyard. The Old Man was headless; one of his husbands lay shattered on the Ghosts’ corpses. The Wife had escaped relatively unscathed, which felt, paradoxically, wrong. The stone looked exposed and lonely, stranded slightly off to the side, surrounded by a skirt of smaller rocks and alpine flowers Wen Kexing had insisted on planting, the last time he was here. He’d been extremely particular about their placement. After Wen Kexing rejected five different locations for a single chuan bei bulb, Zhou Zishu had thrown up his hands in disgust. “I think it’s fair to say we’ve moved past fixing the feng shui here,” he said, “and onto torture for its own sake.” 

Wen Kexing had tsk ed; he looked supremely unbothered by the accusation. “I’m merely showing you how one ought to treat a good wife.” He raised both of his eyebrows. “All day she cooks and sews and sings for her husbands; the least they can do is adorn her with care.” 

“It doesn’t cook anything,” Zhou Zishu had objected, gathering up his things to go back inside. If Wen Kexing wanted to fuss over the exact placement of a plant Zhou Zishu planned to harvest in two months anyway, he could do it while Zhou Zishu finished up his reports. “It’s a rock.”  

Even Zhou Zishu had to admit, when he emerged from his piles of nothing later that evening, that Wen Kexing had made something beautiful. He’d expected Wen Kexing to look smug about that; said, “Not bad—I suppose it wasn’t a total waste of time,” fully expecting Wen Kexing to preen, the way he did when he was trying to cover how truly pleased he was. He didn’t. Instead, Zhou Zishu felt like he’d found a pot of water about to boil dry, and only just arrived in time to save it from scorching. “Lao Wen,” he’d said, more tentatively. “What is it?” 

“Chuan bei mu can treat intractable coughs,” Wen Kexing had replied, slowly, like he was trying to remember a dream. Raw, it could be combined with aconite to form a deadly poison, but Zhou Zishu didn’t mention that. He was too distracted by the overwhelming urge to rub away the crease between Wen Kexing’s brows. “If I can’t come back...If this malaise of yours develops into a cough, promise me you’ll treat it properly. Promise you won’t use this all up on poisoned teapots.” 

They really were too alike, in some ways. It was as gratifying as it was unnerving. “What do you mean, if you can’t come back? I can hardly get you to leave,” Zhou Zishu teased. It fell flat. 

“Everyone leaves eventually, whether they want to or not.” Wen Kexing ran his fingers once over the rocks anchoring down the thin-rooted flowers, then let his hand drop back into his own lap, palm-up. He normally kept them tucked close, folded elegantly around a fan or a teacup or even a trowel. At rest, in the clear afternoon light, it had been easier to see the white lines of the scars no expensive oils could rub out. There was a deep indentation at the base of his left thumb and beneath the first knuckle of each finger, like he’d grabbed a knife bare-handed. Another line at the base of his fingers, although that one looked like it’d been made by a whip. Defensive wounds, the scars so old and settled that they must have been etched in childhood. “All traces of our coming and going gone. (1) If I couldn’t come back, you’d learn to stop waiting. But my spirit couldn’t rest without knowing you’d be well-cared for. So you have to promise.”

“Lao Wen.” Despite the heat of the day, Wen Kexing’s palms were clammy when Zhou Zishu pressed his fingers. His own hands were cold as ever, so he didn’t think it did much good; but Wen Kexing’s twitched, once, and then slowly folded closed around him anyway. “What’s all this talk? Do you think I’m any different?” 

Wen Kexing shook his head dreamily, like he was moving it in water. “Without you,” he said, “I will be nothing but cut hay. I will drift where the wind takes me, until I am dry enough for the fire.” 

“Lao Wen,” Zhou Zishu said, alarmed. “Hey, where’s your head right now? Come back.”

“Promise me you’ll take your medicine,” Wen Kexing demanded, still not looking at him. 

“I promise,” Zhou Zishu said, helplessly, and Wen Kexing had finally looked up, and smiled. 

How stupid, to remember that this time last year, he’d been paralyzed with fear for a sick tree. Last winter, Zhou Zishu had imagined that the plum tree looked like it had burned. Now that it really had, he could see the difference: it was worse. There was a certain clarity to a thing that had been damaged beyond saving; the plum tree would not survive this. The only question was whether Zhou Zishu would. If he wanted to die, he might as well throw himself on the same pyre. Or he could save what he could and dedicate himself to cultivating it.

If he died with it, it died with him. 

Perhaps grief wasn’t a thing you felt, a thing that happened to you; it was a thing you were. A thing you became, more and more, with every year. Even after you broke it down; burned it; buried it deep; fed it to the earth; it was in the soil, in the roots, in the water, in the air, in your blood and qi and skin. How could you survive without it? You ate grief and it became you.

If he lived--what then? 

He couldn’t pretend to be surprised that Lao Wen was the Ghost Valley Master; there were only so many people powerful enough to match Wen Kexing’s strength, and only one was nameless. It only made sense that his zhiji was a monster like himself. But here he’d returned, again and again, to build mountains, to plant roots. To try, in his own flawed and stunted way, to make room for a future together in the wasteland of their mistakes.  

How stupid it was, to make promises to a hungry ghost. 

How laughable it would be, to break them. 

Pulling out the Baiyi sword, he cut matching notches in the nearest healthy branch, above and below, 45 degrees apart; then he sliced through them cleanly. There weren’t many healthy branches left, and it didn’t take long to gather them up. He went inside and wrapped the cut edge in wet scraps of fabric and carried them to Bi Chengfeng, to Han Ying, to Cheng Zichen. He brought two to Bi Xingming, and said, “Remember to administer the antidote for he tun draught within eight hours, or else a feigned death will be permanent. It’s best if you keep them somewhere dark and quiet until then, if you can manage it… And when Princess Jing’an wakes up, give her a cutting, if she’ll take it. Please.” 

"Five weeks in the sand," Zhou Zi Shu said. "Then check for roots."

He kept one plum branch. As the sun came up, he set Chongming Court on fire and followed the others out. 

❃❃❃❃

Gu Xiang looked worried. Gu Xiang always looked worried, these days--at least he thought so. It was hard to tell; her face was doing a funny thing where it slid back and forth in time. Scowling young woman one minute, crying toddler the next. Then one on top of the other, like wet rice paper on a mask. Over her shoulder, Luo-ayi’s peach tree was blooming and unblooming, dropping leaves, dropping peaches, soft and heavy as a baby’s head. Bare again. Wen Kexing blinked, and realized: no. It was bare, but there were funny little protrusions studding the branches now--buds. Spring was here. So was Wen Kexing--still---still. 

Zhou Zishu was not. Zhou Zishu was far away--waiting. Wen Kexing knew what it did to a heart, to be abandoned and forgotten. Soon, he would be nothing but a burn on Zhou Zishu’s heart--raw--then scarring over--all the feeling gone, except for an itch that never went away. Soon that would be Wen Kexing, and then Wen Kexing would die, probably, here in this fucking pit, and go to whatever hell unfilial failures went to.

Where was his mother? He could have sworn...

He took a long drink. Gu Xiang scowled and tried to swipe it away. “Zhuren! You shouldn’t be drinking like this! You’re already crazy. What am I supposed to do if you can’t even sit up straight, huh?” 

“Are you saying you can’t kill everyone in the Valley by yourself?” he drawled, and felt a laugh bubble up like hiccups. “Stinky girl. What’s the point of keeping you alive for all these years, if you can’t even do that for me.” 

Gu Xiang’s toddler face blinked furiously, eyes bright. Gu Xiang’s teenaged hand swiped up to pinch him, and he caught it. He was still sharp enough to keep this little bully in line, at least. At least… “I’m not kidding! I’m really worried. Xi Sang Gui already won’t wake up; what if you become like her? Zhuren, we need--” 

Wen Kexing pressed his palm over her mouth, stifling her howl of outrage. “Ssshhhh. Do you hear that?” 

The moon throbbed in the clouds, distantly. It was like being in a pit: sheer cliffs above and behind the manor’s walls, the sky very small and far away. There had once been a gap in front, before Gu Xiang and Liu Qianqiao sealed it with a rockfall all those months ago. Now the mountain enclosed them on all sides, like a mouth. Piles of boulders, falling and unfailing, dark and bare; except at the bottom, where they were splattered with blood and crushed bones from the Ghosts who had been caught in the fall. Little scraps of red fabric, caught between rocks, flapped in the night wind like flags, slapping on the stone. And then the smallest clink of tile, as two figures stood up on the roof. 

Ah Xiang hissed against his hand, knocked it away as she jumped to her feet. “Shameless! Are they begging to die?” 

Something was burning in the back of Wen Kexing’s head; the ghost of incense smoke was filling up his skull and pressing on the backs of his eyes. He could barely breathe, let alone stand--but that was okay. Gu Xiang could kill them for him; she was good that way. A good girl. “Go on, then. Make yourself useful and find out.” 

By the time the words left his mouth, Gu Xiang was halfway across the courtyard, whip unfurling as she leapt into the air. 

The two figures on the roof rolled away, out of range; at a gesture, one retreated back to the far end of the roof beam, but the other stood back up, hands empty on either side of his face. A relaxed, placating posture. “Kind lady,” he called. “Do I look like one of your enemies? Shouldn’t you ask questions before trying to kill me?” 

Gu Xiang scoffed, a throaty sound Luo-ayi had unsuccessfully tried to pinch out of her. “How should I know what all you bastards look like? You all look the same when you’re dead.” The whip in her hand cracked, and the man ducked and spun easily out of the way. But instead of moving closer, under her guard where she’d be more vulnerable, he turned his back to her and jumped down into the courtyard, light as a maple leaf. 

As he descended, the moonlight caught on the intruder’s face, and from his place behind the peach tree, Wen Kexing watched the man’s eyes run over the rows and rows of freshly-turned loam, the long beds that Luo-ayi’s girls and their children had cleared waking up with the spring, the little divots where the seeds had gone into the soil. They followed the black earth up the courtyard until they reached Wen Kexing, and something like the sun came up on the intruder’s face. His black hair drifted down behind him in waves, still caught halfway in the motion of his jump, softening the sharp pale lines of his face. He was--so beautiful--

Gu Xiang’s whip cracked over the beauty’s neck, and he spun low,  corkscrewing into a neat crouch, and then he was up again. “Lao Wen!” the beauty called, launching himself down the garden path, out of the way of one of Gu Xiang’s knives. “What the hell! Call off your guard dog!” He came sliding to a stop just an arms-length away from Wen Kexing, wincing at Gu Xiang’s outraged squawk. “Ugh! Did she learn that from you, you oversized goose?”

“You!!” 

The stranger knocked the next knife away almost absently, his eyes fixed on Wen Kexing’s. “...Lao Wen, what’s the matter?” His mouth was so familiar; it moved in shapes he knew before he saw them. Wen Kexing’s skin felt very small, like a child’s skin. The mountains were so tall. 

“Do you know my father?” Wen Kexing guessed, and watched the way his words moved the air, watched them hit the beauty hard enough to make him flinch. “Do you know where he is? He was just--” 

“Hey!” Gu Xiang’s whip cracked though the hair between them, followed quickly by Gu Xiang herself, barrelling forward with a knife clutched in her free hand, freshly-turned dirt spraying up behind her. “Don’t touch him! I’ll cut your eyes out and make you eat them!” Her whip snapped toward the beauty’s feet, and then suddenly he was--gone, on the other side of the courtyard with the peach tree between them. But the afterimages of his steps were burned into the back of Wen Kexing’s brain, and they repeated, back and forth, in and out, like the memory was breathing. Without making any conscious choice to do so, Wen Kexing followed it, and then he was at the beauty’s side, clutching the tail end of Gu Xiang’s whip in his bare hand. 

“Ah Xiang. That’s enough.” 

“But--!” 

“Ah Xiang!” Now that he was standing, the whole world was heaving and flashing around him, his little girl and the little boy and the little moon were smearing in and out of focus. His shixiong. Of course his shixiong was here. He’d know...he’d know. Wen Kexing felt himself tipping, anchored himself with the whip’s end, felt the sturdy weight of Ah Xiang at the other end. Funny. She was so small, but so strong. “You’re so small,” his mouth said, just in case she didn’t know already. “Little rascal, isn’t it your bedtime?” 

The beauty’s eyes flickered from one to the other, before he bowed crisply over his sword at Gu Xiang. “I’ve been discourteous. You’re his sister, aren’t you? Please accept my apologies, guniang. ” 

“I--what? His what?” 

“Shixiong, please excuse her,” Wen Kexing cajoled, plucking at the boy’s sleeve. His arm was warm underneath; Wen Kexing put his hand around it, fascinated by the way it soaked through the chill in his fingers. When he looked up, his shixiong was staring at him like he found the idea of excusing Ah Xiang unbelievable, but was valiantly trying to rearrange his entire worldview. “...She’s just a baby,” he explained, although this failed to wipe the thunderstruck expression off the boy’s face. Maybe he didn’t know what a baby was. “Shixiong,” he giggled, conspiratorial, pulling at his sleeve harder, “a baby is when--” 

“You!” Gu Xiang screeched. Rude. “Seed Guy! It’s because of you that we all got stuck here! You and your...wiles!” She paused, and added doubtfully, “...You don’t look like a courtesan.” 

“I...” The man laughed incredulously. “I’m not. What do you mean, it’s because of me?” 

She stomped. “First you kept Zhuren away, then you gave him incense that made him and Luo-ayi crazy! He keeps trying to force his memories, and now he’s like this all the time. Do you want him dead, or what? Why? He’s so obsessed with you!” 

The beauty looked like he might have something to say about that, as well, but two sharp whistles cut across the air from the direction of the roof. His eyes cut up to the shadow on the roof, then swept across the distant rockfall. In the distance, there was a fainter sound, like boots scraping on stone. “Ah--Ah Xiang, is it? We’re out of time. I can help him, but I need you to stop throwing things at me while I do it. If you really want to save this idiot, go hold the front gate as long as you can.” 

“You’re the one who broke him in the first place!” Gu Xiang hollered, finger two cun from his shixiong’s eye. His shoulders twitched with the force of a suppressed reflex as he visibly decided not to break it. “Why should I trust you? You sneak in here, in the middle of the night...”

“How else was I supposed to get in, by knocking politely with your enemies’ siege hammer?” He rolled his eyes. He seemed to have recovered from his shock, and also aged at least twenty years. Or…? In the distance, Wen Kexing thought he could hear his mother laughing. “I came as soon as I could. Please believe me. I would never hurt your brother.”

“He’s not my brother,” Gu Xiang objected, but she didn’t sound sure about it. 

“I only know what he told me.” The beauty’s voice was gentle and steady. “He said he made you a promise to come back. It’s my fault he left at all, you’re right. Let me fix it.” 

Ah Xiang stared back at him, suddenly so still and serious that she didn’t even jump when a young man appeared at the beauty’s side, only cut him a hard, suspicious look. “Shifu…” the boy whispered, urgently, eyeing Wen Kexing like he was watching the lit end of a firecracker burn down. “Several Ghosts have breached the front gate. Do you want to dig in here, or intercept them?” 

Wen Kexing’s tall, wan little shixiong kept his eyes on Ah Xiang when he said, “Intercept them if you can. Slow them down if you can’t. The most important thing is protecting Wen-gongzi and his sister.” 

“You don’t know anything,” Ah Xiang huffed and, with a contemptuous twirl, waded straight into the neat garden beds to retrieve her knives. “Seed Guy, you’d better be able to fix Zhuren. Come on, little idiot, this way. Keep up!” She charged off toward a door in the east wing, and after a beat, the little idiot followed, silent as a sigh in the wind. 

Wen Kexing tugged at his shixiong’s arm. “Alone at last,” he murmured, barely audible over the sound of a distant, wet scream. It made him cross. “What was that?” 

“Someone found the wire we left,” his shixiong said, with a look of cool satisfaction that sat eerily on his child’s face. His old face. His…? “Lao Wen, focus. Lecturing me nonstop about poison arrows, and then you drug yourself into a qi deviation. Hey! Drink this first.” 

A little green bottle wavered in front of his eyes; he’d seen something like it before. His mother stored pills in it. Or his Ah Xu stored antidote. Or his uncle carried…“Is it sweet?” His shixiong nodded encouragingly. Wen Kexing swiped it, drank it down, and didn’t realize his mistake until it was too late. By then, a warm hand was tamped down on his mouth, a thumb gently pinioning the pressure point under his jaw, forcing it closed. Wen Kexing swallowed, and the hand moved enough to let him shout, “Zhou Zishu! You lied!” 

“I do that.” Zhou Zishu shrugged, unrepentant, and stroked his thumb along Wen Kexing’s jaw. “If you think you’re mad now, just wait and see how embarrassed you are later. Lao Wen… will you let me do a qi transfer?” 

In the distance, several smoke bombs erupted, a loud gunpowder cough that echoed off the courtyard walls like an old ghost. Wen Kexing ignored it. “Why wouldn’t I?” 

“Any number of reasons.” Zhou Zishu smiled crookedly, his thumb sweeping up to burn a tender line across Wen Kexing’s cheekbone. It felt real. Almost like Zhou Zishu was really here. “For one thing, you have to want it. The qi. To live.” 

“You feel so real,” Wen Kexing sighed, and felt his own breath turn back on him in the shell of Zhou Zishu’s palm. “You’ve never felt this real before. Ah Xu ah--I wish you were here.”

“You won’t like what you find,” Zhou Zishu warned. It sounded like Ah Xu, but the apparition’s voice cracked in a way Ah Xu’s never had. 

Wen Kexing squared his jaw, felt Zhou Zishu’s fingers move with it. “I like everything about Ah Xu.” 

“I’ll hold you to that,” Zhou Zishu laughed, oddly damp, and then moved behind Wen Kexing, warm hand trailing from his face to his shoulder blades, pressing him down to the dirt. Zhou Zishu followed. “This will be easier if you sit. Okay. Okay.” His other hand came up to join the first, one on either side of Wen Kexing’s back, and then the world went white. 

Or--not white. Gold. Like water, maybe; like sunlight. Like a full moon in the seventh month, fat with harvests. The honey and the bees, all at once. He let it push his mind through his own blood and bones, from one warm hand and down and up and back again to the other, before finally, finally coming home. Sinking into the hot river of Zhou Zishu’s qi; letting it bear him up, cradling him as he germinated, keeping the wind and the rain from tearing at the delicate folds of his new heart. And then--slamming against four columns of cold darkness, coiled death--

“Zhou Zishu, you absolute bastard,” Wen Kexing gasped, and opened his eyes. One courtyard over, something was burning. From the sound of things, it was Gu Xiang’s fault. Good. He turned in the dirt, knees knocking against Zhou Zishu’s, and pressed a shaking hand to his chest. He was real. As real as the four freezing points of iron he could now feel unfurling in Zhou Zishu’s qi, their traces whispering malice through Wen Kexing’s bones. “This entire time…? I could kill you. I’d kill you myself if you weren’t doing such a good job.” 

“Not any more. If you want me dead, you’ll have to do it yourself,” Zhou Zishu choked out, and Wen Kexing pressed an animal sound into his mouth, biting. Zhou Zishu climbed into his lap like he was trying to climb into his skin, kissing back, wet and alive. Still alive. 

One of the courtyard walls shattered, a smoking corpse skidding to a stop just three zhang away. Zhou Zishu pulled back with a gasp, dark eyes following the corpse’s progress dispassionately. “Did you raise a sister or a demon?” 

“I wonder sometimes.” Wen Kexing carded Zhou Zishu’s hair back from his face and gently nudged him off his lap. “I missed you. We’ll deal with the rest later. For now, we should help Ah Xiang and your disciple before they destroy the entire Valley.”  

Zhou Zishu rolled to his feet as nimbly as a man who had not just been rolling around in an empty turnip patch. “Psht, would that be so bad?” he said, but paused at whatever he saw on Wen Kexing’s face. It felt tight as old boots; it couldn’t look good. “Hey. Whatever it is you’re thinking, stop it.” 

“I…” Wen Kexing shook his head, staring up at Zhou Zishu from his seat in the dirt. “Are you really okay--helping the Master of Ghost Valley?” 

Zhou Zishu tangled his fingers in Wen Kexing’s hair and shook. Strong roots. He pulled Wen Kexing to his feet that way, ungently, sweetly. “Who’s helping the Ghost Valley Master? I’m here to retrieve my stupid wife. Let’s go, Lao Wen.” 

They went. 

❃❃❃❃

There was a peach tree in Luo Fumeng’s courtyard.

It was an absurd thing to notice, in the middle of a siege laid by his monstrous lover’s own pack of killers. Skull still buzzing with relief, lips still aching with giddy pleasure, he elbowed Wen Kexing in the side and nodded toward the corpse that had come to a limp stop against the tree’s trunk. “Don’t plant trees in the garden,” he said. “Trees are four seasons of sorrow.” (2)

Wen Kexing barked out a rare, genuine laugh. “You! Unbelievable.” His grin settled into a viper’s stare as soon as he turned back towards the fight, but that was fine. They had time for games later. For now, Zhou Zishu leapt over the courtyard with Wen Kexing, muscles lit up with the raw joy of moving, of being.

Wen Kexing probably liked peaches. Disgusting.

Once they arrived, subduing the Ghosts who had broken through the gate was simply a matter of endurance--which Zhou Zishu excelled at. By dawn the intruders were dead, or wished they were. The manor’s defenders had suffered no injuries worth talking about, even the other women who had entered the fray at some point. One of them, a woman who looked like a porcelain doll with the eyes of a depthless canyon, stared at Wen Kexing for a long moment before saying, “My lord. You’re back. And this is…?”   

“My husband,” Wen Kexing offered, to the tune of his sister’s howl of disgust, several gasps, and at least one person tripping and landing against a door. 

The woman just blinked, once, and said, “I see. And does your husband require…?”

“A hot bath,” Wen Kexing agreed, grandly. He was enjoying this, the idiot. But his face softened when he added, “After we’ve rested, we’ll go to your master and see if the treatment he used for me will help with her condition.”

“My lord,” the woman assented, and swept away without another word, gracious in her victory. Zhou Zishu liked her. 

He liked Wen Kexing’s sister, too, who paused in her progress across the carnage of the front courtyard to point her first two fingers from her eyes to Zhou Zishu and back again. “Seed Dude!” she called. “So we’re clear. I’m Gu Xiang. And you’re not off the hook yet! You two better explain everything. But take a bath first, eughh. Come on, idiot disciple, I guess we’ll find you a room, too.”

“Don’t worry about them, Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing said, nudging him toward the wing furthest from the gate. “Ah Xiang will take good care of him. There’s plenty of space.”  

“There better be.” Zhou Zishu focused very hard on not stumbling on the three endless stairs that led to the door. “More of my disciples are following behind. The cart slowed them down, and I didn’t want to wait.”

“The cart.”

“I heard there was a siege. So I took all the traps I could from Chongming Court. And all the crossbows. I thought that might be useful. Crossbows,” he yawned.

Wen Kexing blinked and gestured him through one last door. “You’ve certainly been busy.”

“Someone left me alone for five months. I hear it’s dangerous to do that for people like us.” He squinted at Wen Kexing, who had taken them to a windowless area at the very rear of the manor, backed up against a stone cliff. Although Wen Kexing had clearly been living here, it felt wrong to say that it was his room; there was nothing of Wen Kexing here except his body and the clothes he stood in. It was defensible, barren of anything that could be used against him; it was too dark and cold to tell the time of day, let alone the time of year. Zhou Zishu would have chosen the same room, in these circumstances. He hated it. “I’ve certainly found that to be true.” 

He liked the hot bath they took. He’d expected to be covered in blood within an hour of finding Wen Kexing, but he hadn’t dared hope for a bath afterward. There were other things he’d expected, too--things he thought they’d do right up until he shrugged off his inner shirt, and instead of groping him, Wen Kexing sighed and thumbed some mud from Zhou Zishu’s collarbone, just above the second nail. “Zhou Zishu, Zhou Zishu,” he breathed, and pulled them both into the bath. But it was still a good bath, even if he started to fall asleep halfway through washing Wen Kexing’s shoulders. “Come on, up, up,” Wen Kexing chided, gently bundling him out of the bath and into a warm linen. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Sounds like you’ve been getting plenty,” Zhou Zishu retorted, irritably batting away the offer of a clean sleeping robe. “I didn’t give you that incense so you could kill yourself with it.” 

“You’d know all about that, I guess,” Wen Kexing shot back, voice light, hands tight on Zhou Zishu’s shoulders as he steered him toward a hideous red-draped bed. “No--we’ll talk about this later. You can explain yourself when you have enough energy to grovel properly.” 

“You too,” Zhou Zishu said, but crawled under the blankets meekly enough. “No incense tonight, though,” he added, just to be sure. “Not until we figure out why it affected you like that. I can’t believe you kept using it.” 

“I have some theories about why it did.” Wen Kexing pulled him close and tucked him under his chin. “Ah Xu, I needed to keep using it. I’ll explain later. But you understand, don’t you? About needing something, even if it destroys you.” 

Zhou Zishu tipped his head back to meet Wen Kexing’s eyes in the dim light. He ran his fingers along Wen Kexing’s shadowed brow, skirting around a cut where someone had landed a lucky hit, just shy of his temple, and said, “I understand.” 

“Ah Xu. I didn’t mean…” Wen Kexing gave him a shaky, sideways smile. “I don’t think I appreciate the comparison.” 

Zhou Zishu shrugged. “Tough.” But he relented enough to smooth to thumb over the crease between Wen Kexing’s brows, to trace his frown lines until they melted away. “It’s not because of who or what you are-- although that certainly doesn’t help. It’s just that you...are.” And someday, sooner or later--possibly sooner, if he kept poisoning himself and neglecting his hive of murderers, though not if Zhou Zishu had anything to say about it--he wouldn’t be. If Zhou Zishu lived past that day, it would be a worse pain than a thousand nails of torment. For every shichen they spent together, it would be worse. 

But that shichen would be better. And that was something. 

“Ah,” Wen Kexing breathed, reading something in Zhou Zishu’s eyes that he hadn’t meant to say. “I understand. Alright.” He nosed along the line of Zhou Zishu’s temple, his breath shuddering across his skin. “I understand. Ah Xu.” His mouth found Zhou Zishu’s, and Zhou Zishu’s heart burned, and burned, and burned. He was aware, suddenly, of all the space where his body wasn’t: that there was so much of the world, and he could only blame himself for being here, tucked up against Wen Kexing’s skin, in the small space filled with the sound their mouths made and the smell of their sweat. Staying there, letting Wen Kexing breathe harshly into his ear and lick the secret place behind his jaw, feeling his cock grow hard against Wen Kexing’s: it was a little like holding himself too long underwater, like breathing in sand. It’s okay, he thought, and pressed his leg between Wen Kexing’s legs. I’m okay. He breathed in Wen Kexing’s ragged gasp and rolled Wen Kexing over him, so it felt more like there was nowhere else to go. There was nowhere else to go--not if he wanted to be a living thing.

But that was a choice, too, he knew, and ran his nails down Wen Kexing’s back just to hear him hiss and feel him arch away, then closer.   

“Ah Xu.” Wen Kexing pressed his forehead to Zhou Zishu’s brow, pushed out another long, harsh breath like he could only afford a few and was saving them up. “Ah Xu,” he said on the inhale, long and whistling. 

“Okay,” Zhou Zishu said. “You pest. But only if you have oil.” 

Wen Kexing reared back, comically offended. “ If I have oil. Ah Xu, what kind of scoundrel do you take me for?” 

“Oh, I’m taking you, then?” Zhou Zishu echoed, grinning. “I thought--” The pinch Wen Kexing gave him tickled, which was such an astonishing novelty that he stayed there, laughing, the entire time Wen Kexing fumbled at the bedside. By the time he realized how much open air was on his skin, it was gone again, and Wen Kexing was back, shins tangling with Zhou Zishu’s, hands running down his sides, then up again. Searching for the spot that made him laugh. “Do not ,” Zhou Zishu warned, pressing his heel to Wen Kexing’s back, right over his kidney. “I will end you. Hands on my shoulders. Give me that oil first. Idiot.”  

Opening himself up while Wen Kexing watched had its advantages. For one thing, it seemed to cause Wen Kexing real agony, both physical and emotional. His eyes, wide and wild, flickered constantly between Zhou Zishu’s face and his ass, fingers clenching hard enough on Zhou Zishu’s shoulders to bruise. For another, it felt less --enough to focus on the practicalities and get his breath back, enough to dampen the fire screaming in his veins and give him space to breath and think again. No--on second thought, he didn’t like that very much. “Inside,” he demanded, kicking Wen Kexing in the back after all as he pulled his fingers out. “Come on. Lazy asshole, don’t you have something better to do with your hands?” 

Wen Kexing’s guttural sound of frustration was nearly as good as the feeling of his cock pressing inside. It was--it was--”Fucking fuck,” Zhou Zishu gasped, and pulled one of Wen Kexing’s big hands down over his own mouth. “Like this,” he said, licking the taste from Wen Kexing’s fingers, breathing in the close, salty air under his palm. “Shit.” He closed his eyes, and the world made itself small, so small, but endless: just the two of them, and the feeling of Wen Kexing’s thumb pressing a bruise inside his thigh, and the bright, sparking pleasure deep in his gut, and the warm pressure of Wen Kexing’s palm over Zhou Zishu’s mouth, and the air in his lungs, hotter and tighter and harder to hold inside with every passing moment. 

“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing bit into his neck, down into the corner of his shoulder. “Ah Xu, I--” 

Something was growing deep inside him; twisting up, climbing his spine and throat like a vine, pressing up into his skull. It was so hard to breathe around it. It felt like a knife against his belly, like death was just on the other side of his skin; but it wasn’t, he remembered, it was Wen Kexing. He pressed his fingers into Wen Kexing’s neck and back, locked his heels around his spine, as if to keep him there. As if Wen Kexing, keening into Zhou Zishu’s collarbone, would go anywhere else. Maybe so he’d keep Wen Kexing there; so he wouldn’t throw him off. 

“Let me kiss you,” Wen Kexing begged, mouthing his way back up Zhou Zishu’s neck. “Please. Ah Xu, I need--” 

Zhou Zishu sucked Wen Kexing’s first fingers into his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut tighter, licked between Wen Kexing’s fingers, and for a moment, with Wen Kexing pressed as deep as he could go, existed just there: just there. And then he bit down, hard enough to sting, nearly hard enough to break the skin. As soon as Wen Kexing whipped his fingers free, yelping, Zhou Zishu ordered, “Then kiss me.” 

For all the things he’d taken, there was so little that Zhou Zishu had wanted for himself. He took Wen Kexing’s warmth inside himself, and he held on, and on, and on. 

❃❃❃❃

Waking up was as much of a surprise as it ever was. Here he was, again, in his body. But there were arms around him, which was new, glued to his ribs with sweat. He needed another bath. He’d need a lot of baths, he suspected, if he kept Wen Kexing around. 

“Ah Xu, your feet are so cold,” Wen Kexing whined into the side of Zhou Zishu’s face. “How is it possible for feet to be so cold?”

“Well, your breath is awful,” he grumbled back. “So I guess we’re even.” 

“What a terrible thing to say to your beloved. To your devoted wife, who takes such good care of you. After I attended to—ow! And such sharp elbows, aiya. Good morning to you, too.” 

The urge to knock the prim self-satisfaction out of Wen Kexing was strong, but the lassitude in his bones was stronger. “I think it’s probably evening,” he corrected, mashing his face back into the pillow. “Or the middle of the night. We should sleep some more, to be sure.” 

“Ah, but you’re forgetting I’m a ghost.” Wen Kexing paused, suddenly pensive, his fingers tracing absent shapes on Zhou Zishu’s chest. “Ah Xu…” 

“Don’t start.” Zhou Zishu pinched the back of his hand. “I already told you I know what you are. Don’t make me repeat myself.” 

Wen Kexing huffed out a wry laugh. “I wouldn’t dare,” he said, and caught Zhou Zishu’s hand before it could escape, tangling their fingers together. Zhou Zishu allowed it. “Clearly you know about the Valley. But Ah Xu… there are still things I need to do. Things you might not like.” 

“If it involves killing whoever put you here, I’ll like it more than you think.” The reflexive spasm of tension that went through Wen Kexing’s hands told Zhou Zishu more than anything Wen Kexing was actually about to say. Useful; he should just hold Wen Kexing’s hand all the time, if it provided this much insight into his crooked mind. He squeezed Wen Kexing’s hand back. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of what I will and will not like.” 

“But if you don’t…”

“You won’t get rid of me that easily, Lao Wen. Don’t be insulting. I burned down the manor; you’re stuck with me now.” 

“You what, ” Wen Kexing howled, flipping Zhou Zishu over to face him. “Zhou Zishu! You set it on fire?” 

“It was the fastest way to destroy evidence and muddy the scene. No one who’s left is good enough to distinguish a burnt corpse in a skin mask from the real thing.” 

“A corpse in a skin mask is still a real corpse,” Wen Kexing retorted, automatic. “Is it supposed to be your burnt corpse?”

“Mine. Han Ying’s. Four other boys.”

“The boys with the cart full of crossbows.”

“Mm.” Zhou Zishu laid his head down on Wen Kexing’s shoulder, pointedly relaxed. “I’ll explain after you tell me why you nearly drugged yourself to death. Ah, remind me, though; I need to send a letter to Nanjiang after this.” 

“ What --but--the garden?” 

 Zhou Zishu made a passably casual sound. “I can grow another one. I--actually, wait here.” 

“What?” Wen Kexing sat up, gaping, to watch Zhou Zishu hunt down and replace all his robes. “Why are you getting dressed?” 

“Get us breakfast. Dinner. Whichever it turns out to be,” Zhou Zishu ordered, already on his way out the door. 

It turned out to be something like midnight, which figured. When Zhou Zishu returned from his mission outdoors, Wen Kexing was already leaning against one of the manor’s pillars, bundled in his own robes. “I wasn’t going to lose my way,” Zhou Zishu said, exasperated, and Wen Kexing smiled crookedly. 

“I know. The moon is beautiful tonight; I thought we could watch it while we drink.” 

It was hard to find fault with a plan like that. The moon was the warm yellow of chrysanthemum. It was the kind of stupid thing he’d never have admitted to back in the capital, but Zhou Zishu had always loved the stars; not like a poet loves them, but like a child does, simply happy that they exist. They made him feel small. His schemes, his needs, his loves--even his failures were dwarfed by an ordinary night sky. Under a sky like this, even Wen Kexing, bright and volcanic as he was, felt small enough to hold, felt like something he could keep. “The moon is beautiful tonight,” Zhou Zishu agreed, not looking at the moon. “Okay, Lao Wen. Lead the way.” 

Zhou Zishu followed Wen Kexing onto the roof, and they settled against its eaves together. Wen Kexing set a warmed jar of baijiu between them and unloaded a surprising number of baozi from his sleeve; when he was done, Zhou Zishu handed him the bundle of fabric in his own hands. “Open it,” he said. 

Zhou Zishu had watched Wen Kexing unwrap his own gaping wounds with less care than he showed now, long fingers gently unravelling the strips of fabric Zhou Zishu had torn from his own sheets before leaving Chongming Court. When a twig sprang free, he froze as if startled, but swallowed and went on until he’d exposed the entire plum branch to the moonlight. Its flowers had been crushed, had dried out and crumbled on the journey west; Wen Kexing made a small sound as the wind took them. 

“It bloomed after all,” Zhou Zishu said, pointlessly, when Wen Kexing continued to simply stare. “I don’t know if this cutting will survive or not; according to the book, it should have been planted a few days ago. But, well.” He shrugged. “Better than leaving it behind.” 

“I...but where…? Not here .” 

“Why not here? Add it to your aunt’s orchard, if it survives. Or anywhere else we go.” He took it gently from Wen Kexing’s trembling hands, and laid it carefully to the side. Wen Kexing’s gaze followed it, like there was a string between his brow and the plum branch, like he was a marionette pulled by fate.

“I can’t believe you rode all this way with that,” he choked out finally, on something like a laugh. “Why not let the boys with the cart take it?” 

The very thought was repellent, like swallowing a live beetle. “I wasn’t going to trust some idiot children with this. It was safer with me. I hid it in the eaves when we got here,” he added, raising his voice to be heard over the hiccuping sound of Wen Kexing’s laughter. 

“Anyway,” he reflected when Wen Kexing had finally quieted down, “there are more at Siji Manor. Some things are irreplaceable, but not this. Lao Wen, we’ll go when you’re ready, and then you can really see if the flowers bloom in all seasons.” He bumped Wen Kexing’s shoulder with his own, his smile self-deprecating. “My garden wasn’t a very good representative of the real thing.”  

“I liked your garden.” 

“I liked our garden, too,” Zhou Zishu admitted, and settled his head on Wen Kexing’s shoulder. 

“I dreamed of Siji Manor, back then,” Wen Kexing confessed, voice hushed. “The flowers that bloomed in all seasons. You swore it was real, but it seemed too good to be true. Like a Peach Blossom Spring beyond this world.” (3) 

Zhou Zishu thought of the boy Fan Huoqiang killed, bleeding out in a bed of fallen plums. Of Qin Jiuxiao, climbing the peach trees, smiling--just for a moment--like he’d never known pain. “It was, and it wasn’t. Wen Kexing, what happened to you? You don’t have to tell me everything now. But--tell me what you can.” 

What he could tell wasn’t much. But it was enough to paint a picture; enough to build a plan. Zhou Zhishu absently pulled Wen Kexing’s hand into his sleeves to warm his own around--his circulation really was too bad to sit outside for this long, but he wasn’t about to admit that and risk having to move. The moon had meandered halfway across their window to the sky; the sun wouldn’t come up for a while yet, but the horizon had blued enough to make out the tall, ragged shapes of the mountain around them. He let their shape settle into his eyes while his mind turned over what he knew now.   

“Mirror Lake sect is the weak link,” he observed finally. “We need to find out why they’re estranged from the others. That’s where we should go first.” 

With his head still on Wen Kexing’s shoulder, he could feel Wen Kexing’s jaw clench with a suppressed yawn. “There’s an idea. We’ll just head over, two strangers, and demand they tell us the secrets they’ve kept for twenty years.” 

“ Tch. Don't you know what Mirror Lake Sect is famous for? If we’re going to reestablish Siji Manor, no one will find it strange that we want advice about restoring the orchards. If Manor Lord Zhou and his shidi go to humbly learn from our qianbei, who could blame us?” 

“And what will I do in the meantime?” Wen Kexing griped. “Sit in Yue and drink tea while you and that Han Ying run off together? Think again.” 

Zhou Zishu peeled his face from Wen Kexing’s shoulder, the better to squint at him incredulously. “What does Han Ying have to do with anything? It’s your revenge, lazy imp, I expect you to be there working for it. You’re part of Siji Manor, too, or don’t you remember bowing to our master?” 

Wen Kexing didn’t return the smile. “Zhou Zishu... it’s my revenge, but I’m not that boy.”  

Zhou Zishu searched his eyes in the darkness, and then laid his head back down so that they could both turn back to the moon. “Okay, Lao Wen,” he said, and turned Wen Kexing’s hand in his own, rubbing out the rictus tension in his knuckles. “Okay. You don’t need to be my shidi to travel with me, anyway. Han Ying and Bi-shu can keep an eye on my disciples in the meantime. They’ll be plenty busy just cleaning the manor. As soon as we settle this mess in the Valley, let's go. I’ll follow your lead.” 

“A righteous sect leader like yourself, following the Valley Master’s lead?” Wen Kexing teased, hand clenching back around Zhou Zishu’s. The man was like a room full of mouse traps. “What will people say?” 

Sighing, Zhou Zishu worked one hand free and reached around to tangle it in the hair at Wen Kexing’s nape. “Who cares? Anyway, I’d like to see them try and spread a rumor I can’t control. Lao Wen, you must have realized by now that I’m not just some paper general.” 

At last, Wen Kexing relaxed under his hands, head settling warmly on Zhou Zishu’s own, tucked together like the pages of a book. “You know, after I was shot by a mechanism hidden in the begonias, I started to suspect that.” 

“... wasn’t just a paper general,” Zhou Zishu amended, belatedly. 

Wen Kexing fell silent while he digested this. “And what are you now?” 

Zhou Zishu snorted, and held his hand tighter. “Somebody said I’m his husband. Other than that--we’ll see.” 

“We’ll see,” Wen Kexing echoed. 

It was cold, but not too cold to stay; a spring wind was blowing in from the south, and the sun was coming up. They stayed to watch it rise, limning the peach tree in something like gold. Something almost sweet enough to eat. 

❀