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The sea nearly claims Li Lianhua a second time.
Following a trail of rumours and unlikely sightings, Di Feisheng is almost unsurprised to meet Fang Duobing, accompanied by Li Lianhua's too-clever mutt, in a seaside village so remote the waves must have washed away its name. Willow branches still decorate some of the doorways, and white paper offerings linger upon the smattering of graves outside the village. Some would call it an ill omen, looking for a man so soon after Qingming and hoping that he still lives.
Di Feisheng believes in neither omens nor wishful thinking. Fang Duobing barely gets through his story about a beggar with a bag of familiar sweets before Di Feisheng wheels his horse towards the cove south of the village, trusting the other to follow.
The sand is a pale, dun expanse in the cloud-choked afternoon, broken only by the odd water-smoothed rock. The tide is high, painting long lines of froth upon the shore. The dog has ranged ahead, and races back to them now, rattling off her discovery in a series of barks.
There is a person slumped in the tideline. Bowed in on himself, sliding down along the side of a rock as if he'd fallen asleep there. Dismounting a step ahead, Fang Duobing rushes into the water with a shout.
They prop him up, his worn robes drenched and sticking to his skin. Di Feisheng catches his head in his palm, his forearm behind his neck, drawing together the wet strands of his hair. A deep, wary part of him is braced for the worst: a blind man, wandering the shore alone, may easily find his death.
Their searching hands encounter neither blood nor bruises, nor the black marks of bicha poison. Then, Li Lianhua sputters and blinks dark, heavy eyes up at them.
"What are you doing, you bastard?" Fang Duobing demands, half in fury, half in tears. "Walking into the sea like that! Do you know how long we searched for you?"
"Ah—Fang Xiaobao. I should've known," he says, coughs, and starts again. "I swear, you fret like an elderly auntie. When did you become such a worrywart? I was just napping in the sun."
"While the tide was coming in? The water's icy!" Worry makes Fang Duobing loud. Di Feisheng lets him continue, since it doesn't hinder him in lifting Li Lianhua from the shallow water.
For months they looked for him high and low, and the slippery bastard is ready with a smart comment first thing. Di Feisheng expected no less. Li Lianhua wields his glib tongue with the same artistry as Li Xiangyi did his blade.
Together, they get him up, only for his knees to buckle. Whatever Li Lianhua has been doing on this desolate shore, spooking fishermen and handing hawthorn sweets to the poor, he is thin as a bundle of sticks, wrapped in ragged clothes, his hair a briny tangle.
"It is spring," Li Lianhua says, as sagely as he can, given he currently has all the grace of a half-drowned foal. "It was warm in the morning."
The wind rushes in hard from the east, putting the lie to that. They're all wet now, more or less, and even Di Feisheng feels the bite of the gusts. The most efficient next step is to haul Li Lianhua over his shoulders, one leg and arm hanging down his back.
"And you, Director Di!" Li Lianhua protests. "Still in cahoots with this menace of a boy. How am I to have any peace like this?"
Hardly a boy anymore, Di Feisheng has concluded, but it's not a matter for the present. "So your eyes and ears still work, Li Xiangyi. I told you. You won't escape me in this life."
"Escape you?" Fang Duobing huffs. His hand hovers by Li Lianhua's dangling head, as if it might roll away if he doesn't watch it. "I tracked him down, and I have a warm room at the inn, where we really should be taking him."
"Do you want to carry him?"
"I'd do it more gently!"
"I don't remember asking either of you," Li Lianhua says, clotted. He's starting to shiver, rough enough that it makes his teeth chatter. His waterlogged clothes soak Di Feisheng's hair and back.
Ignoring Hulijing's wild, concerned barking and his own increasingly sodden state, Di Feisheng strides back to the waiting horses. As Fang Duobing holds out his arms, he hoists Li Lianhua into Fang Duobing's saddle in front of him, cradling his head until it settles against Fang Duobing's shoulder.
*
After the blustering wind and waves, the inn is stiflingly quiet. The hills to the southwest hold a temple, whose visitors and pilgrims must be the reason the inn is even scraping by. There are few other guests; most people that return to their ancestors' graves stay with family members in the varyingly ramshackle houses of the village. A quick circuit of the courtyard satisfies Di Feisheng that none of the people huddled in the inn pose a threat. The first gusts of chilly rain spatter him as he slips indoors through a balcony.
The best room in the village's only inn is not much to speak of, but it'll shelter them from the brewing spring storm. The paper windows thrum with the heavy droplets, and the innkeeper's daughter scrambles to pull the shutters closed. Fang Duobing made a list of requests to the keeper, backed by a handful of taels, and things are happening in rapid succession.
A bathtub is brought into the room and a wooden screen erected around it. It is filled with warm water and medicinal herbs under Fang Duobing's exacting supervision. Thankfully the ban on lighting fires is over, or the price for this service might well have been steeper. Fang Duobing's authority is somewhat undermined by his own shivering, until Di Feisheng tosses an indiscriminate set of dry robes at his head.
He gets an indignant look for his efforts. "Lao Di, this isn't the time for horseplay. What are you doing with my things?"
"Your things are all over the room." Di Feisheng waves a hand at the open camphorwood chest that barely contains the unfolded mess of Fang Duobing's travel wardrobe. "Get out of those wet clothes. I'm not interested in playing nursemaid to either you or Li Xiangyi, least of all both of you."
Li Lianhua sits bundled in a quilt next to the brazier someone lit in a corner of the room. Hulijing is curled protectively around his bare feet that are no longer quite tinted blue. He whispers to the dog now and then, but the ride sapped his energy for complaining. Di Feisheng counts this a relief. His pulse is weak, his qi at a disturbingly low ebb, but he is unquestionably alive. A mystery for later. For now, they need to keep him that way. That cause unites them as it has all through last winter.
"Worry about yourself," says Fang Duobing. "Or is the great Di Feisheng too mighty to catch a mere cold?" He ducks behind the privacy screen. Cloth rustles industriously as he begins to change.
Di Feisheng is still slowly dripping water onto the floor. He wrings out his hair and peels off his soaked outer robe, both of them stiff with salt and smelling faintly of sand and seaweed. Once Li Lianhua is up to it, he owes him—them?—the most revered ancestor of all explanations.
The room fills with the fragrant humidity of the bath and the pelting rhythm of the rain. The keeper's son and daughter leave out tea and food, light the lamps scattered on tables, then retreat prudently.
Di Feisheng is inspecting his dao for any saltwater blemishes, when Fang Duobing drops a basket of bath implements in his lap. "Please make yourself useful. I have to get a letter to my mother, and calling a messenger bird in this weather will be no joke."
"What did I say about playing nursemaid?" His question is a shell, breaking off from the kernel of a thing that is alive in his gut, warm and unspeakable. He will not think of it; it's easier to argue with Fang Duobing. He's always been a promising opponent, even when his temper makes him predictable.
"Who else is there?" Fang Duobing says, instead of rising to the bait. "He can barely hold a teacup right now. Undress him, get him in the bath, and see he doesn't drown."
"You want me to do that?" Di Feisheng would've thought Fang Duobing would prefer to carry out such an intimate task himself. He is the young master of Tianji Manor, instilled with a sense of propriety. A concept that, in most people's view, excludes such villains and outcasts as Di Feisheng.
"Better a friend than a stranger." Fang Duobing raises a brow, something hopeful in his eyes.
"You do both know I'm right here, yes?" Li Lianhua rasps. "I can hear you. Have I permitted either of you such liberties with my body?"
"The patient does not get a say in his treatment," Fang Duobing says, in tones of turning Li Lianhua's own line against him. "Drink more tea—but no wine! You need to warm slowly."
More briskly than is necessary, Di Feisheng pulls the quilt from Li Lianhua's shoulders. The undershirt he still has on, threadbare and half-sheer with damp, reveals the raised contours of his clavicles and ribs, the way flesh has dwindled off his bones. He was always wiry, but his cheeks were full and his body light and limber. Now, Di Feisheng has the inexplicable urge to handle him like something delicate.
The jut of Li Lianhua's chin is still respectably haughty. "I can get in the bath by myself."
"Good. Then walk, or I'll carry you."
"Such stern demands, Director Di!" Li Lianhua gets on teetering feet, but remains upright, his hand to his breast, obstinate mischief in his eyes. "Or was that an invitation, rather than a threat?"
Forget gentle handling; perhaps Di Feisheng will lock his acupoints and dunk him in the tub headfirst.
Li Lianhua must read, if not the exact thought, then the gist of it in his scowl, because he makes his way to the bathtub. Fang Duobing looks between the two of them, minder and minded, both equally contrary, and sighs as if he were the oldest of them by many weary years. When his eyes find Di Feisheng's, they widen with an unspoken entreaty.
To his private annoyance, Di Feisheng caves at that.
"As if I'd let him die after all this lunacy. He owes me a fight." Even to his own ears, it borders on hollow, but Fang Duobing's expression eases.
"I leave him in your care." Drawing up the hood of his cloak, Fang Duobing goes out.
*
Di Feisheng sits in a low chair with his dao laid across his knees and does not watch Li Lianhua disrobe.
He knows, with the jagged viscerality of recent memory, what it is to be stripped of your armour and your power. It makes little difference that Li Lianhua armours himself in his independence and his power now lies in his wits. He flings barbs even at Fang Duobing, who follows him with the same mindless loyalty as the dog. Hulijing is sleeping, content, next to the brazier. Her happiness, at least, seems absolute. Her master lives. What else would she ever need?
Let Li Lianhua rake at Di Feisheng with his words. The dead are silent, but the living clamour. All the noise means he is not yet a ghost. He brought Di Feisheng back from the brink of death, so by all accounts, it's only fair to return the favour.
Li Lianhua curses his damp clothes, the slippery tub, the smell of the herbs. At last, with soft swashing noises, he climbs in. When Di Feisheng glances his way, the wet ribbon of his hair hangs down the side of the tub. His face is canted to the ceiling, the rest of him folded in the lukewarm water. He is quiet but for the slight rasp of his breathing.
Di Feisheng can grant him the gift of privacy without solitude, of his presence without demand. Li Lianhua has done the same for him before, when he was adrift, his memory sundered.
He walks his fingers over the scabbard in his lap. The changeable ocean weather is making hair-fine cracks in the surface of the wood, barely felt by his fingertips, but he knows every curve and groove of the scabbard. It needs treatment.
He's not patient by nature. Still, his goal won't be furthered by disturbing Li Lianhua, even if the impulse to drag him up and press him for answers sooner rather than later is there. Li Xiangyi was always his match, a partner as much as an opponent, answering him move for move, blow for blow—and Li Lianhua has never feared him, either.
Was that an invitation, rather than a threat?
He can wait, but what is he waiting for? His fingernails rap against the scabbard.
"If I'm gone for a moment, will you stay put?" A foolish question, on its face, but a needful one.
Touching a hand to the back of his neck, Li Lianhua turns his head. Even through the warm haze of the bath, his gaze is more focused now. "Look at me. Where would I go? What's this errand, though, that's more important than staring at the wall while I thaw out?"
"I left my saddle bags on the horse. Because you were about to faint, so you owe me this."
"Oh, I'll be right here. I ran from you two to the far ends of the empire, and still you found me. I know when I'm beaten."
"I don't think you do. I'd tell you to swear on your honour as a swordsman, but—"
"I abandoned my blades." Again a flash of those dark, knowing eyes. "Wenjing is lost, Shaoshi is broken. I have no honour left as a swordsman."
His throat constricting, Di Feisheng remembers picking up Shaoshi's shattered hilt on a cliffside. If there's gravel in his voice, it's only the memory, which Li Lianhua cannot see. "Then swear on your mother—no. Swear on Fang Duobing's mother, she at least has your respect."
Li Lianhua sighs with drama fit for a stage play. "I swear on the most esteemed Master He Xiaohui, I won't escape while your raptor's eye is turned away."
"You're still a liar and a charlatan," Di Feisheng says, "but I'll believe that, Li Xiangyi."
Li Lianhua's voice recedes under a cough, then continues at a murmur, "You know I'm not him anymore, Lao Di."
"You are whatever is left of him. Stay here."
*
When Di Feisheng returns, saddle bags slung over one shoulder, Li Lianhua is still there, his wrists rested on the edge of the tub. In a corner of the room, the wind hammers at a faulty shutter.
"There you are. Pour that in, would you? It's getting cold." Li Lianhua gestures languidly at a covered bucket that's still steaming, if barely.
"You'll wrinkle like a dried fig if you sit there all day. Move your legs aside." Tossing the saddle bags onto the chair and then hefting the bucket, Di Feisheng watches the spill of hot water stir the herb-clouded bath.
His reward is the way Li Lianhua sighs, unguarded and utterly content this time, and sinks down to his chin again. The water blurs the shape of his body, curled into the confines of the not-too-generous tub. He was dressed too lightly for the capricious spring of the East Sea.
Di Feisheng offends the sleeping dog by hauling the brazier next to his own seat. In response, she clambers onto the bed and stretches out on her side. The rain darkens the afternoon, but his hands know this task, and maybe it'll still the restless feeling that flows and ebbs in him.
He unsheathes his dao, sets it aside on a table, and unrolls the leather case that holds his tools. A small block of beeswax softens in the melting ladle while he takes apart the brass mounts on the scabbard.
Then Li Lianhua says, "What was so urgent that Xiaobao went to whistle down a Tianji Manor bird in a rainstorm? Is something the matter?"
Di Feisheng frowns at the mouthpiece, wedged around the top end of the scabbard. "You, of course."
"I am... the urgency, or the disturbance?"
"Both." Traces of verdigris smear onto his fingers from the mouthpiece. He should clean the mounts while he's at it. Once upon a time, this dao was his life. It still is his closest companion. "You don't know. Tianji Manor has been researching your condition. Fang Duobing put their intelligencers to work. That flighty aunt of his is running the operation. Quite well, it seems." Di Feisheng will note competence where he finds it. He Xiaofeng is a more clever woman than her frivolous attitude suggests.
"Ah," Li Lianhua says, and no more.
"I felt the bicha still in your body when I took your pulse." The statement doesn't call for a reply, but he won't let Li Lianhua squirm away from that truth.
There is no reply, either. The brazier crackles in the silence.
Once the wax has melted, he starts rubbing it into the surface of the scabbard with a cloth, close to the brazier so it warms the wood and eases the work. He used to do this nightly, back in his wandering days, before the Jinyuan Alliance grew around him. Caring for his weapons was both a necessary task and a promise, made only to himself: never again. Never again would he be taken. Never again would he be bent to another's will. The dao was made for his hand, and it would cut down all threats.
Li Lianhua abandoned his sect, his blades, his strange little sanctuary built from the wreckage of their last battle. He even tried to leave Fang Duobing, who proved to be a more stubborn tracker than Li Lianhua was a quarry. For months, he seems to have roamed the nine provinces without so much as a hidden sword in his sleeve.
Listening, Di Feisheng hears footfalls in the stairs, the sounds of cooking and cleaning in the kitchen, the rattle of the rain. For the thing he wants to ask, Fang Duobing should be here.
Once Fang Duobing returns, the quiet will be gone. Whatever merits he does possess, the young man doesn't know the meaning of calm. It's been a long time since Di Feisheng sat this companionably with anyone. Most of those people are gone now—and the person here is one he means to keep in this world, no matter the cost.
"Tell me one thing. How are you still alive?"
"The blessings of Heaven and the mercy of strangers, what else?" Li Lianhua fires back so swiftly he must've been expecting the question. "I must be gathering the fruits of my earlier charity. They did call me Almsgiver Li, after all."
"I've heard them call you some less flattering things."
"And you pay mind to the black tongues of gossip and hearsay? I'm disappointed. I thought you more discerning in your opinions."
"As if I care what anyone says." Moving his chair farther away from the brazier, Di Feisheng keeps working the wax into the grain of the wood. This part takes patience, and so does, frequently, talking to Li Lianhua. "The whole farewell letter was a sham, then, was it? A final trick to get away?"
With a splash, Li Lianhua sinks so low in the water that Di Feisheng almost reaches in to pull him back up. A long moment passes.
"I don't wish to lie to you," Li Lianhua says, nearly muffled by the tub, "but I don't have the answer yet."
"There's no but there. Not knowing is not the same as lying."
"You want me to say something."
"I do, but what does it matter?" Di Feisheng shrugs, though Li Lianhua can't see him. "You're not ready to tell me. It isn't as though you're a pomegranate I can cut open to get at the seeds." Or an enemy he can subdue and force into a confession. He shakes off the image before it can take root in his mind.
"Is Director Di telling me that he'll wait for this humble wanderer to talk?" Li Lianhua croons. "What magnanimity! Do you not worry for your fearsome reputation?"
"Fighting alongside the Sigu Sect and Tianji Manor already ruined my reputation." The Jinyuan Alliance has fractured into Jiao Liqiao's traitors and those still loyal to Di Feisheng himself. Except for Wuyan, unflinchingly capable and devoted, Di Feisheng has largely allowed them to scatter—and Li Lianhua is the greatest reason for that.
Still low but much more sober, Li Lianhua says, "You're a legend of the jianghu. If you call your people back, they'll answer. Only be sure that you want them to."
The current leaders of the Sigu Sect would still cut their own throats at Li Xiangyi's command. Jiao Liqiao splintered Di Feisheng's forces and turned them against him. They are not the same, but he thinks he grasps Li Lianhua's meaning. There's power in names and in stories that he's only starting to appreciate, beyond the obvious uses of one's infamy to make others fall in line.
At its heart, that kind of compliance requires fear. Li Lianhua has never feared him.
"I am always where I mean to be, Li Xiangyi. Don't trouble yourself with that."
Li Lianhua laughs hoarsely. "That you are, Lao Di. That you are."
Di Feisheng raises the scabbard to the lamplight, examining the renewed gloss of the dark wood. The new wax coating is even and without flaw; it will cool and set overnight.
"That is fine work." His elbow leaned on the edge, Li Lianhua raises himself up a notch. "Not that I need to tell you so. May I borrow your hands, now that they're not busy?"
As Di Feisheng knits his brows, Li Lianhua chuckles again, as if particularly amused by his confusion. "I assume there's a comb and some hair pins in Xiaobao's basket. I rinsed the saltwater out of it, but I don't trust my hands to put my hair up. Is this enough detail that you can piece it together?"
It might prove entertaining to make him spell out his request, but something in Di Feisheng shirks at the idea: the same part that's been careful to let Li Lianhua keep face as much as possible.
His search turns up a wide-toothed comb, a bottle of something that a brief inspection confirms to be camellia oil, and a ji pin with a floral motif. Certainly one of Fang Duobing's personal effects. It will do.
In the meantime, Li Lianhua has hied himself out of the tub and washed the herb dregs from his skin at a smaller wooden basin. An untied robe—which no doubt also belongs to Fang Duobing—hanging off his shoulders, he's trying to gather his wet hair in a bundle and clearly failing.
"Sit down before you hurt yourself." Di Feisheng pokes the chair with his foot.
With an unsubtle roll of his eyes, Li Lianhua complies. "No need to be so coarse. Maybe it is your blunt manner that explains why you have no admirers. Not even handsome looks and great power can compensate for a lack of charm, I suppose."
"That's bold talk when you're half-clothed and so close to swooning you can't even tie up your own hair."
"Lucky that I have you, then, is it not?" Li Lianhua tugs the robe decorously closed and manages to knot the ties under his arm. Di Feisheng is not unaware of Li Lianhua's state of near undress, but that awareness is overtaken by his clear vulnerability. He clutches on to his gibes with all his diminished might.
Di Feisheng has barely tried his hand at caretaking. He doesn't know how desire would mingle with it. One is not like the other.
So, the simpler thing first. He slides his hand into Li Lianhua's hair and lets the weight of it lie in his palm while he draws the comb through the long, clinging strands. Salt has roughened them, but he untangles the knots with careful, efficient strokes. The camellia oil smooths the work of the comb.
In essence, it's no different from cleaning a blade or mending a slashed vambrace. Simple, gentle, repetitive work to ground himself in. When his knuckles skim Li Lianhua's neck, his skin feels warm at last, and his shoulders are lax and still, without shiver or twinging tension.
Then Li Lianhua tilts his head into his grip, his eyes mostly shut, his water-clumped lashes fluttering. Di Feisheng could—could break his neck with a single forceful twist. Li Lianhua's qi still feels sluggish, but not dangerously so: rather, it's the lassitude that comes as a body long driven forward is finally permitted rest.
"You're asleep sitting up." For want of anything else to say, Di Feisheng states the obvious.
"Not yet, Lao Di." For a breath, Di Feisheng almost misses the flippant fondness of A-Fei. "Is Xiaobao back yet?"
"If he was, you'd know."
"Mm-hm. Subtlety has never become Fang Xiaobao." Li Lianhua lifts his head at Di Feisheng's nudge, and there it is again, the wash of longing, an impulse to let Li Lianhua rest against his palm for however long he wants.
"Nothing in this village that he couldn't take in a fight," Di Feisheng says, gruff, and winds up the long coil of Li Lianhua's hair, then tucks the pin neatly into it. The loose bun won't withstand any vigorous activity, but it'll keep the damp hair away from the back of his neck. He seems too exhausted for the inevitably lengthy work of washing it, so that'll serve for now.
"You'll check on him if he doesn't get back soon, won't you?"
"Between you two, I can't tell who's the nagging wife and who the worried grandmother."
"We trade, of course." Li Lianhua smiles up at him, that slight arch of his lips that intimates he knows something Di Feisheng doesn't. It has soft edges, though. "Thank you. For the lending of your hands."
Better a friend than a stranger, Fang Duobing said before he left. Di Feisheng might understand now, an unfolding section of it, like splitting an orange to bare the gleaming slices one by one.
*
Fang Duobing rustles in not much later, tosses his cloak on top of the privacy screen, and plonks a jar of millet baijiu onto the table next to the largely untouched dishes. The rain still patters on the roof. Given that, he seems remarkably dry.
Li Lianhua dozes in the bed under every quilt Di Feisheng could find in the room, the dog sprawled over his legs. Hulijing stirs but doesn't bark, only leaps to the floor to whine a greeting at Fang Duobing, who crouches to scratch her under the chin.
"How is he?" It must be only Li Lianhua's sleeping state that keeps Fang Duobing's voice down. His eyes are keen with concern, though Di Feisheng can see the shadows etched under them even in the dim lamplight.
"He's stable. As obnoxiously talkative as ever, when he's awake. Did you find your bird?" Di Feisheng uncorks the jar and sniffs the contents. The unnamed distillery might be located in a village shed, but he could use a drink, and not only for warmth.
"I had to wait for the worst of the storm to pass, but yes." Taking the jar from Di Feisheng, Fang Duobing pours them both a cup. "I asked Mother to send her Cloud-Chasing Carriage for us, and to summon Doctor Guan and Su Xiaoyong to Tianji Manor. My aunt said in her last letter that she has a promising lead."
"I hope when you say us, you mean the three of us." Di Feisheng puts enough menace in his timbre that the I hope is made void.
Improbably, with a flash of his usual insufferable verve, Fang Duobing brightens. "Does that mean you'll finally let my mother invite you to tea? She keeps asking, and I really am running out of excuses, Lao Di. We did travel together—on and off, but still—all through last winter."
Where Fang Duobing employed his family's lavish resources in his canvassing, Di Feisheng relied on the remains of Wuyan's information network. They crossed paths several times, compared notes, shared a meal and a drink and maybe a room, until Di Feisheng would tire of the chatter and meddling and bothersome emotions that Fang Duobing inflicts on everyone around him. The whole Fang-He family seems to share this exuberance, Minister Fang perhaps excepted. Subjecting himself to several of these people at once is not high on Di Feisheng's list of priorities.
"If your family can figure out how to cure him, I'll—" Take their surname might be the only apt way to finish that. Di Feisheng scoffs, but softly. "Tell Master He that I accept her invitation."
Fang Duobing nods, the phantom of a smile creeping onto his face. As he raises his cup, Di Feisheng clinks his own against it obligingly. The baijiu is extremely middling, but after today, it goes down easily enough.
Neither is today over yet, even with dusk tinting the lingering rainclouds.
"Did he tell you anything?" Hope and fear twist together in Fang Duobing's voice. "How did he end up on the shore? Where has he been? How is he still—"
"Alive?" Di Feisheng finishes.
"I keep hearing that only the favour of gods or immortals could cure him now, that I'm on a fool's errand, but today we proved that wrong." Fang Duobing's breath shudders. His hand closes into a fist on his knee. "We found him. He knows us. He could see us. The bicha hasn't consumed him yet. How?"
"He did not say," Di Feisheng says, truthful, then wonders if he wants to share Li Lianhua's ambivalence around the subject. Fang Duobing is smart—when he isn't charging ahead like a battering ram in pursuit of justice—but however he's matured over the winter, he is still young. He still thinks the world can be grasped according to simple rules: good and evil, right and wrong.
So, Di Feisheng goes on, "Give him some time, Fang Duobing. To recover, and to understand it himself."
"You of all people, advising me to be patient." Fang Duobing pops a cold dumpling into his mouth and chews wretchedly. "Ugh. Why didn't you eat while the food was hot?"
"Aren't you shovelling money from your family's coffers to anyone that asks? You can afford another meal if it doesn't suit you." Di Feisheng did not stoop to force-feeding Li Lianhua, who only agreed to drink another cup of tea before he slumped into sleep.
As if to protest the claim of his own careless spending, Fang Duobing eats a few morsels, picking at the dishes like a dainty lady of the court. Di Feisheng fills their cups again, mulling over this problem of other people. Even with the Jinyuan Alliance gathering around him, he always knew what mattered: ascending to the top of the list of martial artists, but more so, conquering himself and perfecting the Bitterwind Poplar. He never cared much what the jianghu or the empire thought of him or his kind. Through power, he could achieve vengeance, and through that, freedom.
Li Xiangyi was always the one beautiful, entrancing distraction that threw his best laid plans into disarray. Now, there are others that divide his attention, too, Fang Duobing loudest and most vexing among them, and that is what has him on edge.
That is, probably, also what makes him open his mouth. "I have an idea, though."
"Hmm? A proper plan or a casual inkling?" Fang Duobing perks up, but he has to kick himself into it. He was just sliding down in his chair as if Li Lianhua's fatigue were contagious. "Let's hear it."
"I took his pulse again once he fell asleep." Di Feisheng slows down his words as if gauging a new opponent. "The Bitterwind Poplar seeks survival through danger. You push yourself to the edge so you can fly. His inner power may be depleted, but he is still a true master of his qi."
"Obviously—aside from the minor invasion of his privacy—but how does one lead to the other?" Fang Duobing traces a line between two points in the air with his finger.
"I taught him how to protect his vital functions with the Bitterwind Poplar."
Through their often fierce arguments and circling conversations—two thirds of which Fang Duobing might've had with his own shadow, for how much Di Feisheng actually talked—he never mentioned his rescue from Jiao Liqiao's stronghold. Not the crippling wounds that refused to close; not the way Li Lianhua carried him to safety when his own legs couldn't; not anything that happened in the wedding chamber.
It is too deep in him, and the problem with Fang Duobing, for all his youthful bluster, is that he's perceptive. More than once, Di Feisheng has seen him take the measure of a person in a fleeting exchange and be unsettlingly right.
"You taught him—yes, I remember." Fang Duobing narrows his eyes. They're hazy under the shimmer of putting the puzzle together. "That is how. Is that what you're saying? When Yangzhouman couldn't keep him alive anymore, he turned to your techniques."
"That's what I sense in him. He has one foot on the road to Yellow Springs, but the other is still firmly in this world. He hasn't given up."
"He hasn't given up." Fang Duobing inhales sharply through his nose, exhales in a smothered sound that Di Feisheng can't pin down. "Oh, damn it. Damn him. I thought—you know, in truth, sometimes I did think this was all—"
Too late. In vain. If you speak the unspeakable thing, it gains strength and substance.
"Come on. He knows if he dared to die, you'd drag him back to the land of the living by the ankles."
Fang Duobing lets out a somewhat better kind of noise, stifled, but laced with amused disbelief. "Then what would you be doing, in this fantastical scenario?"
"Defeating the guardians of Diyu, of course, to cover our escape."
His childhood was blood and shadow and constant, gnawing dread, but even in the cells of Di Fortress, stories were whispered through the bars. Orphan children carried fragments of tales from their hometowns and families; they were pieced together and mixed up further in hushed voices in the dark. Once, a boy with a moon-round face suggested that maybe, if they could find the road to the underworld, there they could hide from Master Di's wrath. They were warriors, after all, and could battle the sentinels of the dead.
A few of the older boys kicked him for that until he bruised and cried, but the story kept being told.
"A-Fei," Fang Duobing says, "has anyone ever told you that you're ridiculous? And strangely sweet?"
"No one that I've let live." Di Feisheng bristles, on a reflex of challenged pride, but there's no mockery in Fang Duobing. Only a young man who's put on a brave face for too long.
"Can you make an exception, or shall I get my sword?"
Di Feisheng flicks a dumpling at his cheek. Fang Duobing yelps satisfyingly, scrubbing at his face with his sleeve.
"I'll fight you any time you like, but let him sleep." Di Feisheng nods towards the bed and the slumbering Li Lianhua. The room is sizable enough to also hold a day bed, piled with bolsters, but it looks woefully too small. He'll find somewhere to cat-nap later. He's used his energy to stay awake for days before; one night will be nothing.
"Any time I like," Fang Duobing repeats, rolling it over on his tongue. "That's quite an offer." Collecting himself, he stands, stoppers the baijiu, and gives Di Feisheng an appraising once-over. "You've barely eaten. When did you last sleep? Or bathe?"
Di Feisheng points a stormy look back at him.
"Your hair reeks of brine halfway across the room," Fang Duobing says, reasonably. "I know you're a fastidious person, but... there were more urgent things today."
That is more grace than Di Feisheng is used to from Fang Duobing. A tug of his own collar reminds him that seawater has dried into his robes, too, leaving white tracks in the fabric. As he draws his fingers through his hair, they snag on salt-brittle tangles.
Such nuisances are of little importance, but he feels heavy with something beside exertion. The bed, easily wide enough that he could collapse in and leave room for the dog, looks more comfortable by the moment.
Behind him, he hears Fang Duobing muffle a laugh. "Oh, just wait here."
The back of his neck prickling as if he's about to walk into an ambush, Di Feisheng watches him whisk out the door again.
*
In short order, the nature of the ambush reveals itself: new buckets, one of them redolent of rice water, and Fang Duobing, who sheds his outer robe, ties back his sleeves, and in no uncertain terms tells Di Feisheng to strip to the waist. If his ears are a little red when he says that, Di Feisheng is too baffled to harass him for it.
Other people do not touch him like this. He bathes alone and sleeps alone. He has done so since the Jinyuan Alliance expanded into more than a ragged gang of young ruffians with bloody mouths and heads full of their newfound power.
His recent captivity only honed that instinct to a sharper edge. But he did let Li Lianhua lay a hand on him and shield his vital organs, while he healed himself of the unclotting wounds Jiao Liqiao had carved into him.
He could still fling Fang Duobing across the room like a straw doll. Though the youth is fast, nimble as a breeze, he's still growing into his skill and strength. Of course, that would wake Li Lianhua, and Di Feisheng would find himself explaining why he's mistreating Li Lianhua's pesky not-disciple.
Instead, he finds himself shrugging off his underlayers and freeing his hair.
Between the rain and the impending nightfall, it's dark outside. The lamps in the room are guttering one by one. Fang Duobing takes the one that burns brightest and brings it over. Then he steps back, dropping his hands to his sides.
"May I, or shall I leave you to it?"
The choice is trivial. Either of them is capable of this mundane task. Di Feisheng looks at Fang Duobing standing over him, his palms open and his face attentive and without guile, and waits for him mutate into a figure out of his memory, looming above: a man in black and silver, a woman in red and gold, both wielding and promising a different kind of pain.
Li Lianhua laid his head in his palm like he couldn't fathom Di Feisheng hurting him.
For his part, Fang Duobing smiles, slanted. "Has anyone ever washed your hair? Or did you stare them to death before they could try?"
He has no need to change into anyone. He's a right smug little bastard as he is. Di Feisheng resists the urge to shake himself, as if he could slough off the past, and bends his head enough that it is a nod. "Fine."
Fang Duobing's smile gentles. He seems to make sure to stay in Di Feisheng's periphery as he lifts his hair and twists it carefully into a single loose rope.
This can't be the first time Fang Duobing has done this: his movements are practised, as he tells Di Feisheng to lean this way or that and pours rice water over his head, barely getting a few errant drops in his eyes. Under his breaths he hums something almost familiar, simple as a work song.
Young Master Fang has never laboured a day in his life, that's for sure, but his hands bear the signs of work all the same, the calluses of a martial artist, the honed dexterity of a mechanist. Unable to quite close his eyes, Di Feisheng watches him move in and out of his sight. His fingers knead the rice water through the mass of Di Feisheng's hair, carefully wringing out the excess.
His humming stops. "Tilt your head back." Plain water this time, in a warm spout that patters into the basin on the floor. "Also, you can relax. I'm not going to stab you with a hair pin."
A flicker of irritation cinches Di Feisheng's mouth, only to smooth out with his hitched exhalation. "Why would you? You have a perfectly good sword for that."
"Mmm, that could be a reason." Di Feisheng reads the beat of hesitation in Fang Duobing before he puts a palm lightly on Di Feisheng's back. "Close your eyes. Let me finish."
Something about the bare, unsentimental way he says that makes Di Feisheng obey. He takes orders from no one, and yet Fang Duobing's tone compels him, like a lit hearth compels a traveller after a day's journey.
He lets himself blink, slow and weighed, until the candle in the lone lamp is only a deep amber afterimage on his eyelids. Water runs through his hair, followed by the soft scrape of adroit fingers.
He is still, and lets Fang Duobing work.
*
They move around each other like they used to in the cramped quarters of the Lotus Tower. The only difference is that before, Fang Duobing's mere presence could nettle Di Feisheng into seeking a bed with the horses or in a nearby tree. Now, they brush shoulders in passing and simply continue their idle tasks.
Hulijing is still trying to conquer the bed, her sturdy legs splayed in all directions as she sleeps. Li Lianhua stirs and coughs, curling around the wracking sound as Fang Duobing hurries to crouch beside him.
Di Feisheng is inspecting the narrow day bed: he might sooner stretch out on the floor than try to fit himself in it. He's broken from this thought as Fang Duobing fusses over Li Lianhua, turning his collar to check for bicha darkening his veins, testing his temples for signs of fever.
Li Lianhua cracks his eyes open. Blurry with sleep, he shoves the covers aside so he can catch Fang Duobing's questing hand by the wrist. "Xiaobao. I'm all right."
"Liar," Fang Duobing says, with choked fondness that turns the complaint on its head. "Can I get you anything?"
Di Feisheng steps closer, but tarries, an unpleasant lump in his throat. He should want Li Lianhua to rise from his sickbed so he can take his measure again at last, and know that he has but one equal between the four seas.
If Li Xiangyi truly is gone, his talent and glory shattered, then what is left for Di Feisheng to strive towards?
The pillow rustles as Li Lianhua shakes his head. "No, I think I want to go back to sleep. I'm quite warm."
"That's good." Fang Duobing squeezes his hand, then tucks it meticulously under the quilt. "Sleep. We have time tomorrow."
Li Lianhua's mouth curves, in argument or amusement; he slips back under before either can form. Getting to his feet, a little unsteady, Fang Duobing scrubs his knuckle across the corners of his eyes. Di Feisheng realises he is hovering, barely in the circle of hooded lamplight, waiting for something that never came.
"Tell me this is real," Fang Duobing says, very low, in a voice younger than his years. "Tell me I didn't dream this, A-Fei."
Tears cling to his lashes but do not fall. He wipes them away again.
"You're awake," Di Feisheng says, the words sticking oddly in his own throat. "He's here."
With a huff somewhere between frustration and relief so deep it hurts, too, Fang Duobing turns and buries his head in Di Feisheng's shoulder. His still-bound hair drapes over Di Feisheng's sleeve, his breaths muffled into his shirt.
"What do you think you're—" And then, to his consternation, he doesn't have the heart to go on. Fang Duobing has been his most constant companion on this twisting search, sometimes wanted, sometimes not, but always recurring, always reaching back towards him.
Thinking again of Li Lianhua, and the weight of him leaning into his hand, Di Feisheng sets his palm on top of Fang Duobing's head.
"We found him," he says. "You can rest now, Fang Xiaobao."
Tomorrow will tell them what comes next. That will be soon enough.