Chapter Text
“出生三十年，In my first thirty years of life
當遊千萬里。 I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
行江青草合， Walked by rivers through deep green grass
入塞紅塵起。 Entered cities of boiling red dust.
鍊藥空求仙， Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;
讀書兼詠史。 Read books and wrote poems on history.
今日歸寒山， Today I’m back at Cold Mountain:
枕流兼洗耳。 I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.”
— Hanshan , excerpted from Cold Mountain Poems. 9th century.
When, in the future, Jiang Yanli thinks back on that first summer, it will never form clearly in her mind. She has to ask Jiang Cheng, a few times, when there is a particular detail from that time that she needs. When did they raid the first border outpost? How long was she away the first — and last — time she went to beg aid on the golden steps of Koi Tower? In which village did they find the farmer who, never meeting their eyes, never indicating that he knew who they were, offered the use of an abandoned farmhouse in the dusty hills?
The man she cannot picture, but she does remember the face of the grown daughter he sent to guide them to the place, a woman who, like the farmer, did not call any of Yanli's siblings by name or title. But she had to know who they were because she, too, deferred to Jiang Yanli first, and addressed her before either of her brothers.
The farmhouse is the first thing Jiang Yanli can recall with certainty. Her memory gains back senses that it seems to have lost for a while after Lotus Pier burned. Before the farmhouse, all memory is color and light, the surge of fear, things her mind scuttles away from like a mudcrab when a heron is near. It is like trying to recall something you witnessed while incredibly drunk. She thinks that whatever it is in her which tries to twist away from any remembering at all is, after all, not unintelligent.
At the farmhouse, the memory of smell comes back. Jiang Yanli can recall the texture of the dusty path as they left the village. She remembers following Jiang Cheng whose feet were in straw sandals. Wei Wuxian wore a Wen soldier's boots, caked with lat summer rice paddy mud, a fishy smell. Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian's swords are tucked away in the heavy carrying baskets slung on their backs; Yanli's linen veil is catching in her basket's straps. Only Jiang Cheng wears a sword, and then only carefully; his scabbard is wrapped in so many layers of gray rag that it looks thick enough to be a common soldier's saber rather than a cultivator's narrow jian blade. One of Jiang Cheng's hands is bandaged; under this lies Zidian, which was supposed to be Jiang Yanli's, but which cannot be untangled from her brother's soul, just now.
“A hermit lived up here,” their guide tells them. These are hills that are sometimes called mountains but they are nothing like the grand peaks of Gusu; they are small and rounded things, wooded, rippling hills in the landscape rather than peaks surging above it. Sometimes the path through them seems like a mere deer-track, but the farmer’s daughter does not falter.
“Is there a name for this place?” Jiang Yanli asks.
“No,” says their guide. None of them are sure, not even Jiang Yanli, whether they are on the Yunmeng or the Yiling side of the border. It is marked here by a creek, but there are many creeks, tangling through dust and rock and maple forest.
When they scramble after her through dry ravines, dust-choked, and up a hill grown over with scraggly wild ginger and thick trees, they find the house. It is obviously abandoned, as they have been warned. Jiang Yanli remembers its appearance in those days in shards of clarity. It had most of a roof and a courtyard and a millstone and a well. Yanli remembers more clearly, walking in silence through the emptied-out kitchen, hearing the hot wind in the walls. Grass grew through the reed floor. It was the start of chu shu time, the limit of the heat. It was the end of summer.
“It will do,” says Jiang Cheng, who a year ago would have complained. Wei Ying, who used to run his mouth off to say nothing, is silent and watchful.
“We humble ones offer our thanks, guniang,” says Jiang Yanli politely to the farmer’s daughter, words heavy in the dry air. In her head she marks a debt, careful and sure. Even if it is abandoned, even if it does not belong to the family, this woman and her father likely know Jiang Yanli’s name and still they have led her and her little brothers to a house, to a place where they can live, even for a little while, like people and not like hunted deer.
Jiang Yanli has a very good memory for faces; she studies the face of this woman. She remembers the name of the village from whence they have come. She looks at Jiang Cheng out of the corner of her eye, haunted but healthy, a golden core fluttering inside his chest, and feels her debts mount up like silt in a riverbed. Enough, and there will be a flood. It is not - anxiety, exactly, that she feels about this. Floods are seasonal. Debts, if they are hers, get paid in their due time.
Her anxieties live elsewhere, in things that fit on no ledger, for which there is no abacus.
Leaving them, their guide bows very low, and salutes Yanli the way a laywoman would salute a cultivator who is the Mistress of Lotus Pier. Certainly that is Jiang Yanli’s title, but she is the protector of conquered land, the brave leader of a graveyard. She has never been a great cultivator. Yet, knowing all this, the farmer’s daughter bows to her, then makes her way down the steep slope, silent as she had come. The late summer sun beats down on her glossy hair, on Yanli’s hat and veil, on the hills and heat-shimmer rice paddies in the distance and little streams running through dusty gullies. It presses, like a threat.
That was how they had come, in those nothing-days, to live in the borderland hills.
*
It is the middle watch of the night, which is Jiang Yanli’s. Jiang Yanli is cooking her grief in the oven. She is baking it with melon seeds, to the scent of melon gut and white pepper. She is in the farmhouse courtyard with the big brick-and-mud oven, a squat round thing. She is wasting firewood to toast melon seeds. Tonight they stole their dinner: fish caught in Wei Wuxian's swift hands from a rice paddy several li away, and a single late-summer melon off a vine.
It is clear out, and the stars wheel across a sky edged by the farmhouse roofs, and the swaying trees beyond. They were open orchard once, but have grown wild. Her hands softly push more wood into the little fire-gap at the bottom of the oven. Its belly glows hot. Farm cats, the only constant inhabitants of this place, are milling about. They jockey for position by the oven’s heat. Jiang Yanli and her brothers have been here a week and the nights are cool and humid now. The cats rub their cheeks on her wrists, ready to nudge at Yanli’s hands which perhaps still smell of the fish. They will, Yanli thinks, need to make some fishing supplies again. There is a thin river in a gorge to the east side of their hill, too swift for fishing by hand or with a spear.
She thinks, as she tries not to, of Lanling. There is a covey of goshawks, beautiful falcons, that were given to the Jin clan by a minor clan bordering on the steppeland. One of the many, many times Madam Jin's only daughter was forced to take a visiting Jiang Yanli on a stroll around Koi Tower, a bored Jin Zixuan had taken her to the mews and showed Jiang Yanli the goshawk that was Jin Zixuan's own, per her father's orders. This goshawk could, according to Jin Zixuan's unusually spirited explanation, hunt both hares and other birds and even fish. Maybe Jiang Yanli should just have stolen Jin Zixuan's goshawk before she left Koi Tower for the last time. Better, she thinks ruefully, than stealing melons from people of her own protectorate.
If Yanli watches for long enough, the starry sky slowly turns. It was a long time ago that she had any lessons on the stars. As a cultivator, as the first heir of the Jiangs, there were a lot of lessons and they were largely practical. She’s always thought it odd that the cultivation rituals of great families are so practical. They are learned like a martial skill; often as a martial skill. It is something so essential between a body that can form a core and the world around it that will let it, and yet it can be prescribed like an exercise regimen and taken like medicine. Jiang Yanli is an accomplished cultivator, not the best but good and capable, a late bloomer but pleased to be where she is. That power comes, apparently, from the way she and her body move through the wide and spinning universe, yet she has to think hard to dredge up the memory of the stars’ names as they slowly shift above her. The sky is divided, so she was told, into sections called xiu which are like rooms in a mansion through which the moon moves, one room for each of its twenty-eight faces. Jiang Yanli, when she was young and learning, pictured them like a series of lakes in which the stars float. She manages with difficulty to find the Cowherd Star, which is bright and near the horizon. She can, over an hour or two, track its slow journey as it skitters along her roof tiles.
It does not feel like meditating. Her core is not stronger. Perhaps the stars are just stars.
Under the sky, the scent of baking melon seeds rises. They will be crisp and savory, Yanli thinks. One by one they will be split open on teeth, in her brothers’ mouths, and her grief will spill out in a tiny burst, and her brothers will spit the shells into the dust. From that dust her grief will go into the dirt, will fall back into the river from whence it came.
She imagines it that way, across the long night’s watch. Little seeds of grief broken open, and the longing in them gone home to the water, home to the river, home to the lakes of her childhood. She smiles at herself; fanciful. The thinks of the stars circling, of a goshawk circling from Jin Zixuan's wrist, her yellow robes tumbling out around her in the wind.
A little ghost-fire flares and fades in the air in front of her. She does not sound an alarm, because the ghost-fire warning is Wei Wuxian’s invention and the intruder is Jiang Cheng. He is perfectly on time. There is a whisper of air and he hops off of Sandu.
Jiang Yanli looks up from the warm insides of the oven. Besides her on a wide flat bamboo-weave basket are piles of toasted melon seeds, still hot. “A-Cheng? How did it go?”
“Fine. Well, even,” says Jiang Cheng, face grim, knocking mud from his boots - his own boots, nearly in pieces, but he refuses to wear clothes off a Wen when he still can wear his own - and sheathing Sandu. Wei Ying emerges from the house where he should have been sleeping. He’s carrying one of his many bamboo flutes like it’s a sword. Jiang Cheng addresses both of them. “They brought the body back to the watch house. A cultivator there recognized the Sect talismans, and the bell. And...and the sword. They think it’s - the Jiang heir.” He swallows. "It worked, I guess."
"I hope it helps," says Wei Wuxian, a little bitterly.
Jiang Yanli nods. They have been planning this for a few weeks, and discussing it for longer: faking the deaths of the remaining Jiang heirs. It was Jiang Yanli who suggested it, after her failure to convince the Jin Clan to support her in fighting the Wens outright, and the condescending suggestions that the best Jiang Yanli can do for her sect now is to merge it with one of the other major clans; the Jins all but invited her. When she tried to turn them down, the Nie were suggested.
Jiang Yanli did consider it. She is better, much better, than either of her brothers at losing a battle to win a war; she could have arranged a good settlement. And she has never had any interest in being a general. But she also cannot accept an offer as ill-considered as that one. If nothing else, Jiang Yanli has learned this year that the war is coming for everyone, and if she must fight and must fight alone, she will do so most effectively on her own terms.
Everyone else's terms keep getting everyone killed. So, that's enough of that.
It was Wei Ying who gave her the idea, inadvertently. The Wens are telling everyone that he was killed when they threw him in that place, and seem to believe it themselves. But Wei Ying walks free, and a boy the Wens believe they have killed is killing them in turn, one little border outpost and soldier encampment at a time.
Not to say they've done much; Jiang Yanli is terrified that her brothers, who have each been captured this year, will be taken again. She has been like a wild thing roaming the frayed edges of Yiling and Yunmeng, trying to keep them tucked away as much as pick off the Wens who are settling into their new occupation of Yunmeng.
It has been a long, hot summer. The Wens in Yiling have been here for a long time and are complacent; the Wens in Yunmeng are unfamiliar with the area and jumping at shadows. As well they should. In front of Yanli's oven are two of her favorite shadows in the wide world.
Jiang Cheng takes a handful of melon seeds and shoves some in his mouth. It makes him look younger; it makes him look seventeen, which he is. Her willful baby brother. “That went longer than it should have. Jiejie, it’s time for Wei Ying to take over the watch.”
It probably is. Yanli has little way to track time. She used to be able to read the movements of the household around her that spoke to the hour; now she needs to relearn to read the sky.
*
Jiang Cheng lets seed-shells fall from his mouth. No one scolds him for not watching where they land. Jiejie is already in the house, and Wei Wuxian is unfolding himself from the doorway. He moves like someone with injuries, but as far as Jiang Cheng knows he doesn’t have any.
“...Was there a problem?” asks Wei Wuxian, in that voice he has now that is quieter than he has ever been. Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli have been trading glances when he uses it, but even they are starting to get used to a Wei Wuxian who can be quiet, who can spend a day in silence. “Jiang Cheng,” Wei Ying pushes, stepping close enough that his boot crunches on the fallen melon seed shells. “If there was a problem, we need to tell shijie too.”
“Not a problem,” says Jiang Cheng, even though he isn’t sure, even though this is why he came to Wei Wuxian in the first place.
“Then what happened, Jiang Cheng?” asks Wei Wuxian, implacable. Jiang Cheng has had many older brothers in his sect, but does not technically, officially, have an older brother in his family. This has been bullshit for years.
“I followed them to the watch-house in Muyu,” Jiang Cheng begins, naming a small town. The warm smell of melon seeds and white pepper wafts over him. “I had line of sight through a window, so I could see them bringing in the corpse. They did look at the talismans, and especially jiejie’s sword, and I think they were suspicious… but then.”
Wei Ying came to sit cross-legged with him on the flagstone around the oven. “One of them called out loudly to call another person over. Two Wen-dogs went out and brought back someone— not a Wen. I couldn’t see her face but she wasn’t dressed in Wen robes, and she was a woman. I couldn’t get a good look when she was brought inside, but I don’t think she was a prisoner, either. She had two servants with her and shook a hand off when a Wen touched her sleeve.”
“You saw who it was?” Wei Wuxian guesses. At the pause, he adds, "Or, you think you did?"
Jiang Cheng takes up another handful of toasted melon seeds from behind himself and holds them out to Wei Wuxian. “Stuff these in your mouth so you can shut up and let me report.”
Wei Wuxian does take a couple seeds. Good, Jiang Cheng thinks nonsensically, he’s eating.
“I snuck in closer so I could hear,” Jiang Cheng continues, “But then I couldn’t see through the window anymore, so I couldn't see the woman. The Wen-dogs thought that this woman could identify the body. First they must've brought her the sword, because one said ‘do you recognize this sword?’ and a woman's voice said that maybe it was familiar but she did not know the cultivator. And they insisted that she did know, then they brought her into another room, it sounded like, and said ‘do you not recognize her?’ Probably they were showing her the body, the fake jiejie. And the woman said no, at first, but they kept insisting.”
“Ah, just tell me who it was,” Wei Wuxian says, dangerous, cajoling. "Jiang Cheng. If it's really bad, we can fix this."
It used to be Jiang Cheng’s job to reign Wei Wuxian in when he sounded like that. Jiejie always said so. Now he doesn’t have to anymore. He doesn’t want to, either. Who is going to stop them, jiejie? No.
They might all have been raised by Jiang Fengmian, but even jiejie is their mother’s daughter.
“The woman - I'm almost certain she was Jin Zixuan,” says Jiang Cheng, finally.
Wei Ying is halfway to his feet, ready to do who knew what, when Jiang Cheng’s hand on his belt makes him pause.
“Don’t you want to know what that woman said?” asks Jiang Cheng through a clenched jaw. Slowly, carefully, Wei Ying sits. “I risked a glance through the window. They had shoved Jin Zixuan's face right up to the body. They were making her look.”
“And what did Jin Zixuan see?”
“Jiang Yanli,” says Jiang Cheng, his mouth a flat line. “She said, ‘That is Jiang Yanli’.”
Wei Ying breathes out a long, gusty breath. He stares up at the sky.
“She lied for us,” says Jiang Cheng, who is obviously furious about it. “After all she did this spring, after humiliating jiejie years ago, after the Jins told us, told jiejie to her face, that they wouldn’t stick their necks out for us….” He spits.
Wei Wuxian is silent for a beat. “Well,” he says. “I don’t like Jin Zixuan either, but we might as well use what she’s given us.”
“She and the Jins have given us nothing,” Jiang Cheng says, half-shouting. He looks back at the darkened doorways of the house immediately, but nothing stirs. Maybe Jiang Yanli is already asleep. Quieter he murmurs, “Don’t tell jiejie, alright?”
“Why not?” asks Wei Wuxian blankly.
“They have a history,” Jiang Cheng replies tightly.
“What could that possibly matter?” Wei Wuxian demands, a hint of his old lazy drawl back for a fluttering moment. “No one’s trying to force them to be friends anymore. No sworn sisters or whatever, where shijie just gets treated like some unwelcome hanger-on.”
After he says it, Wei Wuxian looks like he wants to swallow his own tongue. He does not like to mention their parents, even by mere implication.
“Trust me,” says Jiang Cheng, snorting. "I'm not even totally sure it was Jin Zixuan, alright? It doesn't matter. We got what we wanted. They think jiejie is dead."
“Alright, alright,” Wei Wuxian says. The hunted look on his face is gone like morning mist. He flaps a hand at Jiang Cheng. “Go to bed, Jiang Cheng, you’re eating all the melon seeds.”
Jiang Cheng leaves him under the big black sky, sat cross-legged by the oven, his fingers tapping the bamboo flute as clouds begin to scuttle over the stars.
*
They had been growing a little apart, she and her brothers. Not in any sad way, but in the way that fully grown people must stand a little further apart from each other. Yanli is twenty-two and well beyond childhood; her brothers are both in the last few months of seventeen. Before the massacre she travelled a lot; she is like her mother that way. She went on nighthunts, she visited her parents’ friends and smiled at all the young people who thought of her as "Wei Wuxian's shijie" and "Jiang Wanyin's sister" and as the Jiang heir. She liked it, going up and down the path of the Yangze, visiting the cultivation sects, doing official business for her father.
None of them want any extra space, anymore.
*
The false death of Jiang Yanli went like this:
The heat runs out like a hole in a bucket, two weeks after they come to the farmhouse. The gully by the farmhouse contains a thin, deep river which feeds into a larger network of rivers and canals. In it is one boat, barely big enough for three, but good on the water and designed to be steered through the steep-banked creeks.
They are growing adept at using it. When Jiang Yanli pushes off from the shore and steers them into the current, they ease their way swiftly along, down canyons so narrow that vines sometimes grow across from one side to the next above their heads.
Flying on their swords is out of the question while they are still laying low. Well, Jiang Cheng has questioned her, multiple times and at volume, but to her surprise, Wei Wuxian is in agreement: no flying. They would be as exposed as three sparrows in a wide blue sky. Jiang Yanli has compromised enough to allow that sometimes, a single person on a sword at night can be helpful.
They are all strong rowers, but for a time they merely drift with the rushing water. Jiang Cheng in the bow keeps a sharp eye out for rocks in the narrow path, Wei Wuxian in the middle, reclining, watchful. Jiang Yanli takes up the steering paddle.
She is a cultivator who cannot quite read the stars, but she can read the sun just fine. She can read the water well , even, because even if it is not something that comes up in traditional cultivation training, it is something every child of Yunmeng knows.
It helps, too, that they have been wandering these borderlands of Yiling and Yunmeng for all this long summer. She cannot read the sky well but she is learning this sky, these tangled rivers. And the town they are looking for — a place with certain Wen presence, and a relatively large and fluctuation population; a market town — they’ve seen before, camped in its outskirts as just another three Yunmeng refugees.
There are a few dead ends, but the river runs true, like they always do for Jiang Yanli. They leave the farmhouse at dawn and arrive in a bordertown called Muyu Town by midday.
They are tense and quiet as they pull the boat up and hide it, tipped on its side, in the underbrush. Autumn, even early autumn, has begun to thin the brush and the trees from the lushness Jiang Yanli vaguely recalls of this place in summer. It feels exposed.
She has travelled so much, and yet strong seasons always take her by surprise.
They do not have much to carry with them as they leave the boat. Jiang Yanli has her sword strapped to her waist, the pommel wrapped in rags to obscure its value, and carries the heaviest thing: a Wen’s brand, hot even with her hands on the handle.
The brand scar on Jiang Yanli’s chest throbs in recognition.
Jiang Cheng’s hand is tight on his own rag-wrapped pommel of Sandu, and Wei Ying’s hands are loose and deceptively casual around one of his bamboo flutes. He’s carved several by now; he’s getting a little better at it. At first they were terrible.
*
For two days they watch and wait and on the third day they go to a coffin home. It is outside the town, in the same way the blacksmith’s is outside the town: a well-founded wariness of death and iron in the common folk.
Jiang Cheng had worried that they would have to go to several, or rob a grave, but they are lucky on the first try. The ones they need are there: a boy and a girl in their late teens or perhaps early twenties. Still in the coffin-house, they have not been dead long and are mostly whole.
Wei Ying brings his flute to his lips. The tune he plays is very soft. The corpses sit up and then stand, following Wei Ying like enraptured children. Jiang Yanli helps the corpses over the tall step of the coffin house, because Jiang Cheng does not look like he wants to touch them. His nostrils flare.
Jiang Yanli helps them and does not flinch. Jiang Cheng was not there, when she went to find Wei Ying. He did not see it.
Jiang Yanli is not afraid of the dead, nor of Wei Wuxian. But everyone else should be.
*
These corpses of the coffin-house are to be Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli. There would be three, except that the world already thinks Wei Wuxian is dead in the Burial Mounds.
They return to the forest where they have made camp, where they have been a little cold and very damp. Birds call in the trees; all is gray and golden-brown, even the late-afternoon light. The corpses lay down again with a soft note from Wei Ying. She can smell them, a little, but mostly she smells over-sweet citrus and leaf matter; they struck camp in a grove of yuzu trees, which are in season and heavy with little wrinkled fruit.
“Go rest,” she says the to boys, pulling two packages out of the little damp tent. “Or go pick some yuzu.”
“We’ll stay and help, shijie,” says Wei Ying.
“Mmn,” agrees Jiang Cheng.
“Not now,” says Jiang Yanli gently, laying out the packages next to the bodies and the Wen brand.
Jiang Cheng looks like he might argue, so she adds, “My vote counts for two.”
It is an old joke, from another time. She told them all the time as children that she was the eldest, so her vote counts twice and she gets to decide the tie-breaker.
They retreat a ways. Jiang Yanli kneels by the body of the boy and pulls his head and shoulders into her lap. The body is heavy.
Jiang Yanli was thin and a little sickly as a girl. Then, it was hard for her to carry A-Cheng, who was a fat baby. She did anyway, insistently, until no one could be bothered to keep telling her to stop. Only once she’d achieved a stable golden core had her body stopped plaguing her so much. Now she can easily lift the body of this unknown boy. Now she can carry Jiang Cheng nearly full-grown. She has carried him, out of terrible things.
She takes off the boy’s outer robe, white for a burial. Then she pulls open the first package and from it takes the last of Jiang Cheng’s fine clothes, his robes in Yunmeng purple, the embroidery Jiang Yanli did herself along his belt. She puts these things on this unknown boy.
Then the woman. She has no outer robe, just the thin, cold white robe worn only by Buddhist priests at initiations and by the common dead. Carefully, Jiang Yanli bares the body’s collarbone and upper chest. The old brand scar throbs on her own chest in sympathy as she picks up the Wen brand and presses it as gently as she can onto the body. It sears. It will not look exactly like a year-old scar, but it is an identifying mark that Jiang Yanli of Yunmeng is known to have. To leave it off would be worse.
Then she covers the woman again. Like an apology, she dresses her carefully in her own clothes. If there had been another baby after Jiang Cheng, perhaps she would have done this for a sister, dressed her in her own old things. They are simpler in decoration than Jiang Cheng’s; her sash she embroidered with lotus leaves without flowers, except one. She remembers Wei Ying laughing, clumsy with the needle, adding a single embroidered pink lotus after half an afternoon of practice attempts.
In front of Jiang Yanli are two corpses, dressed in the last of the clothing which survives from Lotus Pier. These decoys do look like two wayward children of Yunmeng, rough around the edges as one would expect from six months on the run, but glittering in purple and lilac and gold. It is like birds from the south are somehow laying dead on a forest floor in Yiling.
Jiang Yanli is thinking of them as ‘the bodies’, but they are really a boy and a woman, who are dead very young and very recently. They do not really look anything like Jiang Cheng, who is so similar to their mother that it hurts like a toothache to look at him, or Jiang Yanli, who doesn’t particularly take after anyone.
This will have to do. So many people who know their faces are dead or scattered, now. They will have to bet on that, and on luck.
Wei Ying, pale and thin and distracted, returns before Jiang Cheng. “He’s gone to scout,” he says. He looks at the two bodies, then stops fidgeting and kneels beside Jiang Yanli. With gentle care, Wei Ying takes a comb from Jiang Yanli’s pack of supplies and brushes out the long hair on the bodies, and then clumsily begins to tie it up.
“Let me, A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli whispers, stilling his hands under her own. Wei Ying is hard to touch now, but he will let Jiang Yanli and no one else. Not even Jiang Cheng sometimes. His hands are cold and jump under Yanli’s. It makes her throat hurt. She smiles at him.
“Sit down and rest, A-Xian,” she murmurs, gently nudging him to one side. He lets her, and she pulls away quickly when he moves under his own power.
She brushes out long black hair on a dead girl and boy, who looked nothing like her family but were each someone else’s family. The boy’s she ties into a half-knot with barely a breath of thought, easy from a childhood of two younger brothers. The girl is harder, because she is less used to doing a woman’s hair on someone else. Her mother's maids dressed her hair. She braids it and takes pins from her own head to fix up the braids. Then she takes her bell and the wooden sigil of Yunmeng-Jiang that hangs from her belt and hangs them from the girl’s belt. They feel like grave gifts.
She only half-remembers the complex funeral recitations shut up in the old treasure rooms of Lotus Pier. She cannot think of any words in those treasure rooms to say to this boy and girl who, in their death, might keep Jiang Yanli’s family alive.
“Thank you, little one,” she says to the girl. She hears Jiang Cheng’s footsteps, finished with his side of things. Wei Ying sits still and silent in the mud to her side.
She slides a glance at Wei Ying, whose mouth is tight.
“Set their souls to rest later, shijie,” he says. “If things go wrong, their resentful energy can be summoned to protect us.”
Jiang Yanli nods, watching Jiang Cheng walk carefully towards the bodies, looking at them sideways like a discomfited cat.
She’s a little surprised when Jiang Cheng opens his mouth and mutters, “May you have better luck in the next life." It is not a spell, not a talisman: it is just words anyone might say at a funeral. The wind catches them, and carried them up to the trees. May they have a next life, Jiang Yanli things, tired. There is a reason everyone is horrified by Wei Ying, who keeps souls on earth when he uses them.
Jiang Cheng’s face is entirely closed off. Yanli has twice thought Jiang Cheng was lost to her this year. First, when they brought her word of the sack of Lotus Pier. And the second, when she met a frantic Wei Wuxian on the road home, who tried to shout but could only rasp -- “He’s gone back, he’s gone back”. When they found Jiang Cheng laying like a corpse awaiting burial, when they found him with no gold in his chest.
She is aware, in a distant way, that it is not over, that she could still lose Jiang Cheng to that closed off face, to rage deferred and impotent. She has spent the spring learning the many ways a person can be destroyed, that the mind itself can be as dangerous as the body or the soul. She used to think that she could keep going through any emotion, any silent and well-hidden longing or heartbreak, so long as her body was fine. It is not so; not for anyone.
“Help me carry them to the clearing,” Jiang Yanli says to Jiang Cheng. What else is there to do? Wei Ying stands, though, and before Jiang Cheng can approach he is shaking his head. A-Xian’s cheekbones are so sharp now.
“No,” he says in a quiet voice. “No need, shijie.”
Wei Wuxian keeps his eyes on the bodies and puts his flute to his lips. The tune is soft and the movements of the corpses are soft as they stiffly stand. Yanli scrambles to her feet and stares at her decoy, who is not quite her height. She cannot not bring herself to look at a dead Jiang Cheng, even one who looks nothing like her brother.
The corpses stumble forward through the forest and then lay down again in the designated meadow, on the soft grass wet with dew.
They have to lead the Wens to this meadow. Wei Wuxian stays hidden near the corpses. Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng hike up a slope of dewy grass. They know the patrols of Muyu Town, well-protected because it sits on the banks of one of the rivers that supports lots of trade, and is part of the supply route of the Wens’ invasion force.
The patrols are jumpy. They have never seen the eyes that have watched them for three days, but they have shot nervously at rabbits. They can be lead.
Jiang Yanli does lead them, with nothing but the soft, taunting swish of footsteps in the grass, a glimpse of her shadow between trees.
But then Jiang Cheng is gripping her wrist. They are nearly to the clearing. There is a problem.
Jiang Cheng says, face pale. “The older one, with the moustache—he knows my face, from when we were hostages last year. He ran the boys’ barracks.”
This would be why Jiang Yanli did not recognize any of the Wens they are leading on a merry chase through the woods; the girls’ and boys’ barracks at the Nightless City were separate.
But there is crashing nearby. A surprised shout. They have paused for too long. They are not shadows of suspicion in spooked soldiers, anymore. They are real. Of the Wen patrol — two cultivators and two foot soldiers — one soldier has seen them. He is shouting.
They run like rabbits, she and Jiang Cheng.
As soon as they streak through the clearing Wei Ying leaps to his feet from his hiding place. Jiang Yanli hurls herself towards him and multitasks: she explains the situation while placing a hand on top of Wei Ying’s head and shoving him back down behind wide mulberry leaves.
“They spotted us from a distance,” she says. “Four, two cultivators. The cultivator with the moustache knows Jiang Cheng’s face.”
“We need to abort,” says Jiang Cheng. “It’s not worth the risk. If they see that one of us is a fake, they’ll suspect both. We won’t get a second chance.”
“No time,” says Wei Ying, and from his place sprawled under thick mulberry leaves, puts his flute to his lips.
The cultivators burst into the clearing first, on their swords even though it is probably faster for them to run than to fly in the underbrush. They see two forms in Yunmeng purple just getting to their feet, stiff as if they have been sleeping in this little camp, on this rough ground.
Under the shouts and the trampling footsteps of the arriving soldiers, Wei Ying’s flute rises, singing like a frightened bird. The buzz in Yanli’s skin rises, but also tangles. It is complex, what Wei Wuxian is trying to do.
The plan had revolved around the Wens finding two already-dead corpses, partially looted, with just a few telltale signs that they were of the Jiang Clan. They would probably like to believe the last of the Jiangs had been killed by petty robbers who knew to steal their swords (so that they could keep them) but not their bells or talismans. It had been a passable plan.
The Wens have seen the two bodies in the clearing. They see the boy, who is supposed to be Jiang Cheng, who is dressed in purple, in fine clothes worn down, turn. He seems to hesitate; Wei Ying’s playing becomes louder, stronger, the notes more complex. Like he’s trying to play both parts in a duet, or harmonize with himself.
One of the cultivators, the woman, shouts, “State your names and business!”
Even Wei Ying cannot make the dead speak. What he does instead is still impressive, however, because Jiang Yanli has never seen him do it before. When Wei Ying controls more than one corpse, he can still only give one command. When that command is ‘attack’ they all must attack. When it is ‘shriek and ramble around the town walls’, it is what they all do. Jiang Yanli watched him use a dozen do this, once, allowing herself and Jiang Cheng to slip inside the town gates unnoticed and kill the six Wens in the overseers house.
She has never seen corpses do two different things, as if they have two different minds, but somehow Wei Ying does it: though he wavers, the decoy Jiang Cheng turns and then begins to flee. It is more of a stiff-legged jog, but he does it, while the decoy Jiang Yanli stands her ground.
They must not find the fake Jiang Cheng. The Wens will realize they are alive, nearby, and trying to play tricks. The Wens will hunt Jiang Yanli’s little brother like a dog.
The two footsoldiers are sent after the decoy Jiang Cheng by the moustached cultivator. They are not terribly fast but they will catch him if something is not done. They will search the woods. They will find the boat, find her brothers.
Jiang Yanli puts her hand on the hilt of Shuise. Her sword, named first of her generation, named for the lakes of her home.
She makes a sword sign against her chest; the light flashes from Shuise’s bright blade like it always has, like sun on water at dawn and dusk. It lunges at the footsoldiers and they dive into the leaf matter and the rotting fruit under the yuzu trees. There is more shouting; the boy decoy keeps running to Wei Ying’s incessant playing. The sword retreats back to the decoy Jiang Yanli. She has to concentrate to keep it circling around the decoy and not around the orbit of her own real body. The cultivators shout; they recognize that this is a high quality sword but none of them are familiar with Jiang Yanli of Shuise.
Jiang Yanli is worried that the cultivators will want to take the decoy ‘alive’ for questioning, as an unknown cultivator. But they get lucky. An arrow flies from one of the soldiers; it strikes the decoy through the back. The other soldier rolls to his feet and goes after the decoy Jiang Cheng again, but hopefully Wei Ying has taken advantage of the head start.
In front of them, the girl decoy staggers; Yanli forces her sword to waver, as if affected by her injury. From a distance, it really does look like watching herself die. Her own clothes, her own sword. Maybe this is what it would have looked like, should she have been at Lotus Pier that day.
Playing as quietly as he can, Wei Wuxian eases the girl decoy into a stagger, like she is caught in a wind. Another arrow pierces her shoulder, a little up from where Wei Wuxian has his own arrow scar. Birds start to cry out in the woods, warning.
It feels like an act of mercy when Wei Wuxian lets the dead girl fall. With an unsteady breath out, Yanli drops the sword signs she has been making against her chest. Her sword falls to the dirt. She does not call it. The Wens are converging on the fallen girl.
“Get her sword,” the moustached cultivator says to one soldier, and to the other, returning to the clearing: “Did you find the boy?”
“He leapt into the river gorge,” says the soldier, and spits.
Yanli raises an eyebrow at Wei Wuxian, who shrugs. “It was a big drop. Most people wouldn’t survive it unprepared,” he whispers. He holds his rough flute loosely in one hand. She catches him rubbing his joints, sometimes, like they hurt. His knuckles look a little swollen, but maybe that’s just the weight he’s lost.
“See who it is,” orders the female cultivator. “I don’t recognize her. Are those Jiang disciple robes?”
Their shadows converge around the girl’s body, sprawled in the field. The sun it setting.
“Don’t know her. A Yunmeng runaway?” a soldier says.
“Wrap up the body,” the male cultivator says.
“Huh,” the second soldier says, “That’s a nice sword.”
There’s a pause. The woman says, sharply, “What’s its name?”
“What do you mean?” asks the soldier.
“On the scabbard, you imbecile.”
“Cultivation swords all are named,” the second soldier says to his fellow.
The woman yanks the sword out of the soldier’s hands and brings it over to the moustached man. The daylight is dying; dusk is rising. There is a pause where two of the cultivators have to squint at the characters on Jiang Yanli’s scabbard, which read 水色.
They never meant to sacrifice Shuise. The male cultivator frowns and touches his moustache.
“Not one of the major swords, but the name is familiar.”
Jiang Cheng makes a little offended noise next to Jiang Yanli. As the Jiang heir, her sword is absolutely considered one of the major swords.
“ That person might still be in Muyu Town,” the female cultivator says, lip curled in distaste. “We can see if they can tell us who this is. If this is really a Yunmeng cultivator.” She nudges the body with a foot. None of them are noticing that the arrow wounds have not bled.
“Continue the patrol,” the male cultivator orders the disgruntled soldiers. “Be on the lookout for any more of them. We will take this one up to Muyu Town for identification.”
And just like that, they scatter. The clearing is empty.
Jiang Cheng looks awkward. Wei Ying looks grimly amused. “Well,” he says, “That did not go to plan, exactly.”
Jiang Cheng reddens, even though it is not his fault that they had the bad luck to lure a patrol with someone who knows his face.
“I’ll go after them,” Jiang Cheng blurts out, Sandu already half-drawn, as they clamber out from under the mulberry bush. “We should find out who it is in Muyu Town who might recognize a Yunmeng cultivator. This could be important.”
Wei Ying blinks. “It could be anyone. We’ve met lots of people.”
“A-Cheng,” says Jiang Yanli. “If they think they have my corpse and saw a youth run away, they’ll think it was you. They’ll be looking for you. I’ll go; you and A-Xian take the boat back.”
“I have to know,” Jiang Cheng responds with gritted teeth.
“Shijie, your sword,” Wei Ying says quietly, at the same time. Her sword. They’ve taken it. She cannot fly, and would not be able to keep pace with the Wen cultivators. Jiang Yanli tilts her head back and looks up at the sky. The stars are starting to peek out.
“I’ll go,” says Jiang Cheng. Jiang Yanli expects Wei Ying to try to stop him and go in his stead, but maybe Wei Ying is tired. He is silent, and then Jiang Cheng has mounted his sword. Jiang Yanli has missed her chance to insist without making it an argument.
“It’s just another raid,” Jiang Cheng says. “I’ll steal some supplies, too. Give me two days, jiejie.”
He is already hovering in the air. Wei Ying blows out a gusty sigh, and Jiang Yanli says, “Stay out of sight please, Jiang Cheng. Watching only. We can track them down again if we need to.” She puts a hand on his arm, even though she has to reach up to do it, with him hanging in the air.
Jiang Cheng nods. He squeezes her hand before she pulls away, but his face is stony.
“I’ll be back in the middle-night watch two days from now,” says Jiang Cheng.
*
And he is, right on time, while Jiang Yanli is baking melon seeds.
This begins autumn, and autumn begins everything else.