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Chan is in a beautiful room, and he doesn’t know how he got here.
He’s cleaner than he’s been in months, sunk into the muck on the eastern front. His hands are soft, his nails trim and clean instead of split raw to the quick. His clothes are white, softly cut trousers and tunic of the same weave. This troubles him most of all, his molars clenching reflexively. He never wears white. Not with all the blood.
He rises from the bed where he woke and examines his surroundings. The latticework doors over bark paper screens, the wooden lintels carved and painted to resemble delicate green vines and summer blossoms. This looks like the palace, but the capital is ten days away at a march, lugging all their supplies behind them.
The supplies. They’re running out of fresh water, and the river is so near and so far. The scouts didn’t make it back.
Chan is warm, he realizes. So warm in his light, useless clothes. The sun shines golden through the paper screens, through the narrow slits in the gently sloping ceiling. He hasn’t felt this warm since before the first freeze of autumn, or maybe far longer.
His palm itches for a weapon, but there’s nothing, just the wooden bed better than any he’s ever called his own, a painted chest too broad to throw. If he were captured there would be guards outside, and he would see their shadows.
As he starts for the door, it opens. A tall man, holding a tray from below, blinks owlishly at him and steps over the threshold. He closes the door before Chan can see outside, blocking the view with his shoulders.
No shadow, Chan thinks uneasily. No shadow. But he looks human, in baggy trousers like an old man. His long, sleeveless vest would fit an officer, but lacks any ornamentation or sign of rank. No shadow, he reminds himself, testing the purchase of his bare feet on the floor. This is new. He prefers his monsters with bleeding red eyes or tusks as long as his arm.
“You can sit,” the man says, and does so. He folds his long legs like a grasshopper and begins to pour the tea.
“No,” Chan says slowly, and the man glances up. “I don’t think I will.”
The door doesn’t budge, heavy as carved stone under his hand. Furious, Chan tries to punch through the paper between the finger thin wooden slats, only to hiss when his knuckles tear.
The man on the floor blows on his tea. “The only person who can open that door is me.”
“So who are you?” Chan snaps.
“Jeon Wonwoo,” he offers, as if that explains anything, and gestures for Chan to join him.
A second cup waits. Chan doesn’t touch it. He watches Wonwoo watch him. He’s young, or he’s made himself look young. His skin is unlined, his eyes alert but shadowed as if with lack of sleep. He might have a few years on Chan, if that. And Chan’s youth is so often remarked upon it’s like the buzzing of bees.
“Can you tell me your name?” he asks.
Chan stares.
“I need you to tell me your name,” Wonwoo presses. “So we both know you can remember it.”
A steadying breath. Chan feels his nostrils flare.
For the first time, Wonwoo appears discomfited. “Not that I don’t believe you can kill me with your bare hands. But you’re never getting out of here if you do.”
“And where is here?” Chan asks thinly, lip curling the way Soonyoung always warned him to avoid. Makes you look like a cat, and people around here hate cats, he’d tease, and laugh harder when Chan punched him in the side. Chan’s always liked cats, anyway.
Wonwoo shakes his head. “Your name.”
“My name is Lee Chan and I serve at the pleasure of the queen,” he enunciates, one shade shy of murderous. “You already know that. Why am I here?”
“Because I need to know if your mind is intact.” A small dish faces downward on the tray and when Wonwoo overturns it the confines have all changed, now deeper and wider and brimming with beef stew, which steams invitingly. “Eat, if you want. You must be hungry.”
Jeonghan stirs potions for the queen and Jihoon can read the stars like a poem, but this. Chan has never seen magic like this. When Wonwoo passes his hand over the bowl again there’s another dish in his grasp, smaller, and another. Pickled cabbage, sliced water chestnuts whiter than bone. As if he plucked them from the air.
“My mind was intact enough yesterday to kill a bear with needles for fur and claws longer than your hand. Have you ever seen a thing that eats iron?” The scent of the food wakens a gnawing hunger in his belly. It’s been nothing but rice for days. Some part of him, guilty, counts the rations of meat fed to soldiers who died the next morning anyway. He’s always so hungry, even when Soonyoung claims to be full and scrapes what remains into Chan’s bowl. He shouldn’t, he’s lean as a snake already, but Chan never refuses.
“Do you think I need poison?” Wonwoo enfolds a pair of silver chopsticks in one hand. Beautifully made, the flat ends engraved with herons. He stirs the stew and plucks out a morsel of beef, which he chews slowly. Chan stares, waits, but the silver remains bright and pure. Jeonghan taught him that, in his study crammed with scrolls and mysterious clay pots sealed in wax, how poison would discolor precious metal.
Who would poison me? Chan had snorted, talking around a mouthful of food.
Jeonghan had given him a mysterious look, but then he was always prone to theatrics. Jihoon says there’s destiny in the tangle of your stars.
The silence stretches between them. Wonwoo sits back and laces his hands across his lap. Chan swears once, with great feeling, as crudely inventive as only soldiers can teach, and pettishly enjoys Wonwoo’s startled blink before he tucks into the bowl. The beef is tender and hot, the broth rich, and for a moment he forgets himself and moans at the taste.
He doesn’t mean to eat it all, but the bowl is emptied before he can check himself. Flushing, he wipes his lips and sticky chin on his sleeve. The stain blooms dark.
“Thanks,” Chan manages with great difficulty. It’s bad luck not to say so, and he ought not test his now. “Fine. You must be new. If the queen’s potion master and her astronomer and her favorite commander can’t vouch for the state of my mind, what do you need to hear?”
"Would you like to begin with your childhood?" Wonwoo asks politely.
Chan sets his teeth. "I don't have time for this."
With a twist of his hand, Wonwoo clears the tray. The bowls are gone, the tea. From the glazed bottle that has manifested he pours two bowls of milky rice wine. He serves Chan first, deferential, and he can’t understand it. A soldier is expendable, no matter how he avails himself in the field. When he returns to the capital he’s just another cretin dusty from the road, preferring loud suppers with the troops to celebrating in the royal hall. But a sorcerer like Wonwoo is worth his weight in silver.
“You think you’re needed on the battlefield,” Wonwoo murmurs, opaque, and sips his wine.
“There are two thousand troops between us and the river,” Chan snaps, frustration bubbling over. “And monsters from the mountains cutting off our retreat. If you brought me here then you can put me back. I’m not bragging,” he pleads, “when I say that they need me. These things, they’re six-headed snakes as long as a horse, goats with claws and faces like children who beg you not to hurt them. If I’m not there to stop them they take twenty, thirty of my soldiers. Some of them are fifteen years old, you know that? Girls and boys who can barely hold their spears.” His eyes are hot. He refuses to cry.
“Chan.” Something pained hitches in Wonwoo’s voice. It’s a shock, somehow. Everyone has called him captain for so long. He only hears his own name in private. Drinking with Jihoon and pestering him into telling the stories of the stars again, or brushing down Soonyoung’s horses together. Sometimes sighed against his skin in the dark, breathless, but that was before the war.
Wonwoo covers his mouth, a furrow cut between his brows. Then breathes in sharply, his spine gone straight as a flagstaff.
“That was ten years ago,” he says.
“Oh.” Chan hears himself as if underwater. He waits for rage. For righteousness, to tell this cheap hack that he won’t be fooled. He waits for pain. The unending ache in his arms from carrying his sword, the bruises over his kidneys that had him pissing blood for days, the crush of exhaustion like an iron band around his skull as he sleeps two, three hours a night. But there’s nothing. Just like his clean, soft hands.
Chan blinks his eyes clear and downs the contents of his bowl without stopping for air. “Alright. Let’s go.”
After a heartbeat of silence, Wonwoo seems to recover himself. “I’m sorry?”
“So I’m dead,” Chan nods, lifting the cup for emphasis before returning it to the tray. Funny that his hands should still shake like this. Maybe the spirit can’t forget the ways of the body. “I drank. I accept. Take me wherever I belong, reaper. I tried my best.”
“You’re alive,” Wonwoo says thickly, and he pours more wine into Chan’s bowl. “Please. I’m trying to help you. Tell me where you were born.” Somehow, stupid as it may be, Chan doesn’t doubt his sincerity. He lacks the polished face Jeonghan turns to the court when he dazzles them with his mysteries. His voice is low and rough and soft as dusk.
Eventually, Chan swallows past the lump in his throat. A voice tells him, you can’t fight your way out of everything, and it sounds suspiciously like Jihoon.
“You’ll tell me why I’m here?” he asks, and hates how his voice wavers.
“I promise,” Wonwoo says. He has eyes like a horse, Chan thinks in frustration, deep and guileless and open. Or so he makes himself appear.
“I grew up on a farm.” Chan steadies himself with another sip of wine. It’s both creamy and light on his tongue, with a fragrance like pear blossoms. This isn’t wine meant for serving at the queen’s table, this is for the sort of people Chan knew as a kid. With callused hands and too many children, chickens in the yard, who would bed down with the cows for warmth in winter.
“My dad was strict. He wouldn’t even let me outside the house after dark, so winters were hard. After he died, the Kwon family took me on. Cleaning out the stables, feeding the dogs, that sort of thing.”
“And your mother?”
Something dark must pass over his face, because Wonwoo holds up his open hands to placate him. They’re a scholar’s hands. Long fingers, the knuckles not swollen with labor, no calluses, smudges of ink instead of blood.
“She left me with my father. I never knew her, but I’m grateful she did that much for me.”
“What did your father say about her?”
Chan scowls. “Why does it matter? I told you I never knew her.”
“It’s necessary or I wouldn’t ask,” Wonwoo says firmly. He’s not a soldier, but he’s accustomed to being heard. Men like that never have to raise their voices. Jihoon might even approve of him, Chan thinks. He hates blowhards. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask after his friends, but he swallows it down again. Wonwoo won’t offer him any answers until he’s ready.
Another swallow of wine, and Chan touches the tip of his tongue to his lip in consideration. It doesn’t hurt to remember — he never knew her to lose her — but it’s a sore subject anyway. The kitchen boys had unkind things to say about orphans whose mothers never wanted them, or at least they did until Soonyoung, all of eleven and chattier than a pigeon, decided Chan was his new best friend.
“He said she was beautiful,” Chan shrugs. “That she came from the mountains. That she had hair down to her ankles and it was softer than silk, not that he’d know anything about silk. My father drank,” he adds defensively. “So I let him talk. He was sad. Some drunks are like that.”
“So the Kwon house took you on as a servant,” Wonwoo nods, and there’s nothing in his tone to suggest he thinks less of Chan for it. Once he’d get so angry he cried when they called him pig and said he was too dirty to let into the house, but that was a lifetime ago, before Soonyoung, before the war. “How did a stable boy end up training with the guards?”
“That was all Soonyoung,” Chan grins despite himself. It’s a good memory. Now Wonwoo is staring oddly, and he can’t think why— oh. “Commander Kwon,” he corrects himself stiffly. “His sister was always shut up in her lessons, so she could inherit the family office. He was bored, and if he wanted someone to play at wooden swords with nobody was going to stop him.”
“So you advanced through no special talent of your own,” Wonwoo muses, brows lifting. The bait is obvious, he’s searching for a reaction. Chan glares back with narrowed eyes and drains the wine from his bowl.
“Soonyoung bet the captain of the guard.” There, now he’s smiling serenely again. That was the best summer of his life. “I was twelve then, and he was fourteen. He said if I were allowed to train for the season and they didn’t want to keep me on at the end, he’d polish every inch of plate and chain mail in the armory.” This doesn’t seem to register for Wonwoo, and Chan sighs. “The Kwon family kept something like five hundred trained soldiers then. Do you understand? It was a lot. It was crazy of him.”
“Clearly he won that bet.”
“They had all summer to decide.” An old familiar pride wells up, the remembered scent of dust and crushed grass and his own sweat. “But it only took three weeks for the captain to tell Soonyoung’s mother he wouldn’t let the stables have me. I didn’t know that then, obviously. They didn’t want it going to my head.”
Funny how Wonwoo goes soft when he listens, only to school his face into a sterner expression when it’s his turn to speak. “But even then, you knew you were better than the others.”
Maybe it’s a test. Wonwoo wants to know if his mind is intact. Ten years, Chan thinks queasily, and shoves the thought down. Jeonghan would say he ought to play at humility until the precise moment that pride serves him better, but Chan could never make his lessons stick. This is why he stays away from courtiers.
“I knew that I was faster,” he admits, unapologetic. He holds Wonwoo’s gaze like a challenge. “A lot faster. In a month they had me training with boys who were sixteen, older even. The sword took some time, but no one could hit me anyway. Then it was autumn, and they told me I was worth training,” he swallows tightly, “Soonyoung said I would live in the main house with his family. Since I didn’t have any of my own.”
“And you came with him to court when he was of age,” Wonwoo supplies, as if reading Chan’s life from a script. Part of Chan, stubborn, wants to disrupt the narrative. Maybe the sorcerer knows the outside edges of things, but not the colors that give the picture meaning.
“Soonyoung was supposed to oversee his family’s soldiers in the capital. Everyone thought there might be trouble in the east again, but back then we hoped not.”
Here’s where I took a man to bed for the first time, Chan doesn’t say. No one was afraid of me then. Here I tripped into the astronomer’s tower on the pond and here he called me his friend. Here I guarded Jeonghan picking his herbs by moonlight so no one could spy and steal his secrets. Here I learned how to dance, because Soonyoung wanted me to learn with him. Here I was happy.
As if he can hear, Wonwoo waits in silence until Chan leans forward and pours more wine for both of them. The bottle is small, but heavy, and feels impossibly far from empty. Wonwoo smells clean, earthy like new green leaves, maybe a touch of fragrant oil for his hair like Jeonghan wears.
“When did they begin calling you the Wraith?” Wonwoo sounds almost apologetic. Why should he, Chan wonders. It would’ve been before the sorcerer came to court, whenever that was.
“Later,” he says thinly. “What more do you need to hear? I know who I am. I know my own mind.”
A sigh, a sip of wine. Wonwoo hesitates as if he’d rather not continue. A terrible interrogator, Chan thinks. One of their spies was caught, once, and when her body floated down the river every last finger was broken. They’d pushed needles through her eyelids, Chan remembers, but they had pulled those out and kept them. In war everything is rationed.
“Three years at the eastern front,” Wonwoo recites. “Twelve hundred soldiers from the capital, four hundred from the Kwon clan, three hundred from Kim Minseok in the east, and so many conscripted farmers you couldn’t see the end of them when they marched on the Queen’s Road.”
“You talk like you were there,” Chan huffs, stung. Four hundred men. Conscripts. How neat he is, summing up the graves Chan helped dig. Later, when the creatures came at night, they learned to burn the bodies.
Conspicuously, Wonwoo is silent.
“Oh,” Chan says distantly. The bottom of his stomach falls away. “You were there.”
“One of those boys who could barely hold a spear.” The sorcerer won’t raise his eyes, downcast as if in prayer. Chan studies his unlined face anew and his chest aches like he was kicked by a horse. He would have been so young. Most boys don’t know death. They don’t know what it’s like to find your father cold in his bed in the morning and wash his body, to dress him in his cleanest clothes and comb out his hair before telling the neighbors he’s dead.
He tries to imagine Wonwoo, how he must have been. Softer with youth, his cheeks rounder, small and nervous in his skin. So many boys Chan buried never grew to their full height.
Then he stops thinking of the battlefield, and thinks of the palace.
“I know you,” he breathes in sharply, and Wonwoo’s eyes snap up to meet his, shocked wide and alarmed. “The Kim boy, the loud one, you were his tutor. I remember you.”
Wonwoo is very still. He was always quiet, then. Chan only has to picture him at a distance, shading the sun from his eyes. It wasn’t uncommon for the courtiers and scholars to linger in the shade porches of the palace, peering around the red beams as the soldiers sparred on the beaten earth, though more often they hustled on their way without a second glance.
The Kim boy always wanted to watch. It must have been dull, a kid of twelve bundled off to the capital to learn all the courtly graces and curry meaingless favors. But just behind him there was always the tutor, thin as a green twig. Hazy, Chan recalls Soonyoung’s offhand observation that he’d excelled in the civil service examination but was denied an official post due to his age.
“Were you even going to tell me?” Chan flushes hotly. “Ten years I can’t remember and you couldn’t be bothered to let me know it wasn’t some stranger deciding if I can leave this fucking room?”
A sound catches in Wonwoo’s throat. “This isn’t about me,” he says weakly.
“That’s horseshit,” Chan hisses. “You wanted me scared.”
This stings him. The sorcerer has no trouble holding his eyes now. “I was seventeen by the time we went to war. Older than some of your soldiers, Captain. You shouldn’t ask someone to die for you and then call them a child in the same breath, should you?”
“I just want to know what I can’t remember,” Chan accuses, but it comes out a plea, his voice cracking. “There’s nothing, it’s all missing.” A sudden thought seizes his lungs. “Give me a mirror.”
The sorcerer hesitates, mouth twisting like he might refuse.
“Wonwoo, please,” he begs.
With an unsteady breath Wonwoo draws a coin from inside his sash. He rubs it between his thumb and forefinger and it goes thin, thinner still, until it’s wider than his palm and clear as the surface of a lake. He hands it over without fanfare and watches in silence as Chan flinches at what he finds.
“I look the same,” Chan mutters. His lips feel heavy and numb as if with cold. “Why do I look the same? I should be older.”
“Chan,” he begins, only to falter. There’s an awful, naked compassion in his look and it fills Chan with more dread than he can put into words.
“Tell me the truth,” he says. Without thought, he reaches across the tray and covers Wonwoo’s hands with his own. They’re so warm, humid with nervous sweat where Chan’s fingertips graze his palm, and so much bigger than his own. Chan trained with a woman’s sword when he was smaller, and some laughed until Soonyoung paid to have one forged just for him, with a narrow grip and a blade nearly as tall as Chan himself when stood on end. He always was stronger than his build would suggest, but just now his limbs have turned to water.
A shudder takes the sorcerer from the crown of his head down his arms.
“You died.” His lips scarcely move.
Ice trickles down his spine and Chan closes his eyes. “Yeah. Of course. Why did you bring me back?”
Wonwoo’s hands spasm in his grasp. Slowly, so slowly, he turns his wrists and curls his fingers over Chan’s in return. The world narrows to this. The rasp of their breath in the air. The heat of his skin.
“Most people would ask how I brought you back,” Wonwoo says unevenly.
Chan shakes his head, and somehow this renders the darkness overwhelming, like it could pour down his throat and swallow him up from the inside. When he opens his eyes he stares into the painted screen past Wonwoo’s shoulder. The mountains girded in mist, lissome spotted deer among the trees.
“Doesn’t matter how. You said ten years. Now tell me why.”
“No one kills monsters like you.”
“You must’ve stopped them before. We won the war, didn’t we?”
“You stopped them,” Wonwoo sighs and it catches in his throat. “You stopped her. I’m sorry we have to ask you for more, but they came back. The princess had twins,” he supplies into Chan’s silence, and it hooks his stomach with horror at what more he could say. “A snake with teeth like a shark and legs like a spider made it into their room.”
“Are they alive?” A knot tightens his throat. Wonwoo nods, shallow, but there’s no relief in his rigid shoulders.
“Oh,” Chan breathes out. The sorcerer has yet to unclasp his hands. As if he’s drowning here the same as Chan. “I’m not the first person you brought back.”
A twist of the mouth, miserable. Surely Jeonghan’s been looking out for this one, he would know what to do with him. Wonwoo, he wears all this power so uneasily.
“No one knows about the twins but me, the royal family, and three guards who have been well paid to retire to the countryside. No one knows about you, either,” he struggles. “General Kwon will be angry he wasn’t told.”
So Soonyoung is alive. And a general, of course he is. The vise in Chan’s chest eases minutely.
“Why did you think I would come back wrong?” Chan asks, squeezing Wonwoo’s hands in his own to console him. It’s an unnatural thing that he’s done, without the solace of confidants. Wonwoo would have been the one to wash Chan’s body, he realizes. To brush his hair and ease him into clean clothes. “I know I have a temper but I never hurt anybody over it.”
Stiffly, Wonwoo distangles their hands. Chan realizes how close he’s been leaning over the tray and eases back to sit on his knees. His palms still hum with warmth, not like the trembling that comes with holding a sword and absorbing the impact of a blow. The feeling is mellow, like cupping sunlight.
“My mother was a witch. So was my grandfather.” Wonwoo rises for the first time and paces back to the painted screen. He brushes his knuckles over the dappled green of the trees and comes away with a golden pear in each hand. The wine has gone to Chan’s head at last, his fabled tolerance deserting him, and coupled with the shock it leaves him dizzy. He accepts with a murmured word of gratitude when Wonwoo passes one to him and resumes his seat.
“No one worries much if you’re making ointments, or telling them when to expect rain,” he continues, skimming his thumbnail over the circumference of his pear as the skin falls away in one unbroken spiral. “But my father dealt in cloth then, from far away, and he was always bringing me books when he traveled. Languages I’d never heard of, the names of spirits and how to appease them, anatomy and surgery. My mother told me it would be trouble, if people knew what I was teaching myself. They only want magic in small doses, in colors they can understand.”
So tangled up in himself, Chan had never considered it. How someone so young could have been tutor to a duke’s nephew, then a conscript with no land or title to keep him home safe, and yet still blossom into the most powerful sorcerer Chan could ever have imagined. The only stories of raising the dead are a thousand years old, and the conjurers who could do all that were descended from the gods with lineage like fine golden thread.
“When I saw you at court,” Wonwoo says, and Chan jolts in surprise, “I thought you seemed lonely. That sounds naive, I know. The truth is I was lonely, and I was different, and the way you looked sometimes when nobody was paying attention — I thought you might be different, too.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” Chan says, and means it. He always counted his true friends like pearls, few and greedily his own. He could've made room for another, and told him how tomorrow can be kinder than the rain on your neck or the stares of others would have you think.
Perplexed, Wonwoo blinks, then bites deeply into his pear. “I didn’t want you to know,” he mumbles.
“I should congratulate you,” Chan offers wanly. “They must call you a miracle worker. But you didn’t wait all these years to show them what you could do,” he adds, thoughtful.
“What makes you say that?”
“There’s no way you could have stopped yourself from helping people,” Chan says, amazed by his own conviction. What does he know about Jeon Wonwoo. Nothing but his gentle, troubled eyes, and the way his hands pass delicately through the air as if not to bruise it. “So what made you show yourself?”
Wonwoo grimaces, thumbnail prising a seed from the core of his pear. Belatedly Chan bites into his own, and it’s like nothing he’s ever plucked from the bough, sweet as honey and light as spring water on his tongue.
“Nothing I’d do again,” Wonwoo answers. He hesitates, biting the inside of his cheek. “You danced with me once. At the equinox, after the songs and supper. I was taller than you already and you thought that was funny. You led well, but I stepped on your toes anyway.”
Chan doesn’t recall this in the slightest, but he isn’t surprised. He used to drink too much at banquets, always winning coin off some thickheaded new recruit from the countryside who thought they could match Chan cup for cup. Still he sees what Wonwoo doesn’t think to name. How Chan made courtiers uncomfortable, over time. When he arrived with Soonyoung, they said he had a handsome little face and they were entertained by him, how he was so much stronger than he looked. Later, they might say he fought like a savage, impressed, or whisper how he shattered another soldier’s arm in a spar gone too far. Fewer of them wanted to dance with him, after that. Fewer still dared to stroke his hair and ask him to bed liked they did before. No wonder he spun up to a shy boy for a few minutes company.
“I’m sure you danced just fine,” is what Chan says.
“No, I didn’t.” Something small and fond tugs at the corner of Wonwoo’s mouth. “No one had ever asked me before. But it’s kind of you to think so.”
Without thinking, Chan drops the remains of his pear and squeezes Wonwoo’s wrist, his fingers sticky with juice.
“We’re stalling,” Chan says, and tries to smile back. “Whatever it is you’re afraid to tell me. We can’t wait forever.”
“Has anyone ever told you that your nobility is exhausting?” Wonwoo asks, his voice gone dark and unreadable again. Chan doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing.
From his sash Wonwoo draws out a sachet of embroidered silk. He rubs his thumb over the needlework for a long while, frowning.
“Some people make an art out of loving everyone else when they can’t love themselves,” he says. “So I want you to think of the general— of Soonyoung, and Jeonghan, and Jihoon. I want you to think about the soldiers you trained and the ones you saved. Think of me,” he adds, looking away. “When I went to find you, and bring you back. Your soul was like a star in the darkness, even after all this time. That’s who you are.”
Chan laughs wetly and scrubs at his eyes. “You’re sweet, you know that? I hope the world never hammers it out of you.”
Another unhappy twist of the mouth, but Wonwoo doesn’t argue. “This is you,” he says, loosening a cord, and upends the pouch over the suddenly empty tray. Dust spills out, slate blue, and rises in smoky plumes.
“Breathe in,” Wonwoo says, and Chan, trusting, does. The dust ceases hangs in the air, taking on a shape. The spine of a mountain, pricked with trees, one Chan knows well from ever searching over his shoulder for some unholy thing to come crashing down upon them.
“They started taking our guards,” Chan says, slowly. His absent memories unfurl like a ribbon before him. “At night. Not the enemy, the creatures. We doubled the guard, we’d stand awake until dawn but they still vanished. So quick we never heard them scream.”
“You couldn’t take it anymore.” Wonwoo appears resigned. “You fought with the commander, and he wouldn’t allow you to go after them alone. But you did.”
Chan swallows, nodding. “I went up the mountain.” He thinks he sees himself, a smudge of blue, a speck where the shape of the mountain is strung between them. “Some of them were still alive. She was changing them. That’s why you're not the one hunting them now,” he realizes, faint. “They’re unnatural. Every one of them must be a different knot of magic.”
“What did she say to you?”
“When I was trying to gut her?” Chan responds numbly. Sees the long tangle of her black hair, her broken teeth in a young face. “She laughed. Said she knew what I was.” Laughing with blood down her chin. Laughing when she stabbed the tusk through his heart.
“She knew what your mother was,” Wonwoo tries to correct him.
Chan nods once, his eyes swimming. The dust has taken on the shape of them, following the chain of his memory. Faceless, him with his sword. He watches the minute figure reel, dropping the blade to clutch at his chest. Watches it bend in on itself, spine contorting until it should snap. He doesn’t need to see the claws, or the mouth full of fangs. It rips the second figure in half like paper.
“When I was fighting her, I told them to run,” Chan gulps. There are no thoughts to remember now, no words. Only the burning of his eyes, the howling hunger in his belly. The way he followed the reek of sweat and fear and unwashed human on the wind. How slow they were, and how easy to catch. How their livers steamed in the air.
Chan watches the figure, bloodless and silent, leave a carcass behind and reach the base of the mountain. His gorge heaves.
“How many?” he chokes.
“Seventy-one.” Wonwoo clenches and unclenches his hands, knuckles cracking like dry twigs. “It would have been more, no one understood what was happening, you still looked so much like yourself and you didn’t have your sword. But you kept stopping to drag their guts out,” he forces past his teeth. “So that slowed you down. You took General Kwon’s eye. Lucky he was used to the way you moved.”
A field of milling figures, dissolving back into the dust as they fall, and Chan at the center of them. Hunched like an animal, cutting through them like weeds.
“The Queen wanted to know if you could be leashed,” Wonwoo continues. “But I told her you weren’t yourself then. If you’d been only human, you would have died. The tusk missed your heart but it pierced your lung. The witch on the mountain meant to kill you, but she woke up the only part of you that could survive instead.”
In the shifting figures, some fleeing and other mustering shields for the archers, one crouches low and darts through the throng. Abruptly, Wonwoo throws out a hand and disperses the dust. It falls to the floor inert. The sorcerer’s face is mottled with color, his eyes red.
“Thank you,” Chan says hoarsely.
Wonwoo stares down at his hands. “You don’t need to see the rest.”
“No,” Chan shakes his head. “Thank you for ending it. How did you kill me, Wonwoo?”
All that hectic color drains away. Even his lips turn pale. But Wonwoo raises his head, meeting Chan’s watery gaze steadfastly. “The surest way to kill a fox is to burn its heart. I drew sigils up my arms in my friend’s blood so you wouldn’t be able to see me. I hoped,” his voice breaks and his shoulders jerk helplessly with it. “Part of me hoped the tusk was cursed. But when I pulled it out you didn’t come back. You cut my arm open to the bone,” he says, and here Chan flinches. “Still I got my good hand inside your wound. I held your heart in my hand, and I kept on holding it until it burned.”
“My mind is whole, I think,” Chan studies his hands. Prods at his fingertips and finds no hidden claw. He places his palm under his shirt and feels only warm, unbroken skin with his pounding heart below. “But it could happen again, couldn’t it? What then?” He watches Wonwoo’s face crumple. “So they’re counting on you to kill me again, if it comes to that.”
“I know more now,” Wonwoo says thickly. “I could stop you. Make you sleep. I wish I’d known how back then.”
Chan stares. “Why? I killed your friends. I killed my soldiers. I’m the same monster I always was but now we all know.”
“You are who you’ve always been,” Wonwoo snaps, too loud. “Now you remember. Now it’s all out in the open. And you’re the same soldier who fed the cats outside the kitchens and bought kites for children. You’ve carried the wounded on your back when they couldn’t stand. I’m the one who drew your memories out when you were dead, and I know that wasn’t you at the end.”
“They’re idiots to do this,” Chan rubs his hand over his mouth unhappily. “Of course I’ll fight. But you have to promise you’ll be there to stop me. I don’t want to hurt anyone again.” It’s a stupid thing to say, the words crooked and wrong in his mouth. Chan has always excelled in hurting people, in slipping through their defenses. But only ever his enemies, face to face. He never cut down a soldier who knelt in the mud and surrendered.
“Why should you fight?” Wonwoo’s voice goes foggy and strange. There’s a burning, hungry look to him, one Chan thinks he was never meant to see. “You know yourself, you’re not any danger. If I open that door, you could go anywhere. Leave. Find somewhere they don’t know your name, where no one will ever ask you to bleed for them. You don’t owe them your life just because you were holding a sword the first time anyone ever bothered to tell you that you were worth something.”
“Oh,” Chan inhales sharply. Like the painted screen, the whole of his knowledge takes shape before him. His father, who only ever struck him once, when Chan stayed out in the fields past sunset. Soonyoung telling him, worried and fond, that he needn’t prove himself every hour of the day. That he could rest. Jihoon says there’s destiny in the tangle of your stars. And Wonwoo.
“You were in love with me,” he says sadly, and it’s not a question.
Only now does Wonwoo break. He folds over his knees and sobs without sound. When he was a child, in his first life, Chan thought it impossible that beautiful people could ever feel pain. But Wonwoo cries like his chest could cave in.
Kindness is a luminous thing after war, so bright it feels like a new kind of pain. No one ever warned Chan of that. He thought it would deaden him, in time, that joy would dim. Instead it made him hungry for life. In the first haze of dawn, the camp wakening, he would stand outside the tent before Soonyoung and watch enthralled as starlings swooped above with their impossible wings outstretched, each pinion translucent in the early light. He thought his heart would break then with hope and longing for every perfect fragile thing in the world.
The silk of Wonwoo’s vest is glossy beneath Chan’s palms, stroking his spine. He gathers him up and holds his face, thumbs soothing his wet cheeks. There’s magic in monsters, and potions, and the tangle of the stars. But there’s a magic in this, too, nameless and wild. The warm clamoring in his chest that surpasses all gratitude and grief.
Chan kisses him then, shifting up onto his knees to meet the sorcerer’s trembling mouth. He kisses him for a very long time.
The sun is sinking, light dimming against the screens. Soon night will fall, and there will be no shadows.
“You have to open the door now,” he tells Wonwoo gently. “I’ll hold your hand. We can walk out of here together.”