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I will arrive at Gusu in a week’s time, Nie Mingjue’s latest letter reads, in response to Lan Xichen’s offer to meet and night-hunt together sometime before the summer’s end. Perhaps we can stop by the famed Qixi festivities of Caiyi Town. The moonrise will be beautiful against the lanterns.
Although the scroll is bound shut with Nie Mingjue’s personal seal, indicating sect business, the contents of the sheet itself are signed, not stamped. An intimacy of the most intolerable kind. Lan Xichen traces a light finger over each of the characters that make up his zi—ming meaning bright, jue meaning jade, characters that Nie Mingjue has penned in his own hand, every downward line a separate prayer—and aches quietly. A sect heir’s ribbon around his forehead. A fist of dormant stone weighing down the center of him. The moon, clinging heavy and waxing to the roof below which he stands now, holding a single sheet of letter paper to the light. In the absence of anything more, bodies will find the smallest, most human ways to understand wanting.
There are eight days between this one and Qixi Festival—seven moonrises, then. Seven for the date on which it falls, and for lovers, too.
Lan Xichen sleeps dreamlessly that night. The summer air is hot and sweet, feverish with the borrowed light of the moon.
—
Excessive frivolity is against the principles of the Lan, but Qixi by its very nature lends itself well to such things even in the Cloud Recesses. As Lan Xichen prepares for his morning class of senior disciples, he hears their stifled giggles in the courtyard outside as Qin Caiyan asks Jia Baichang if he would accompany her to the festival happening in Caiyi, just five days from now. After the laughter and initial teasing has died down, Lan Yuzhen bashfully recalls how a merchant’s handsome daughter had bought her sesame-flavored qiaoguo at last year’s festivities before disappearing into the crowd. Someone else eggs her on, and the murmur of voices swells again.
Besides him, Lan Wangji tilts his head ever so slightly to the side, indicating disapproval. Lan Xichen shakes out the folds of his sleeves as he continues arranging the piles of paper on the desk. He can hear Lan Linyuan’s soft laughter as she tries to shush the others, having only just been given her assignment as Head Disciple of the cohort and taking it with all the bright-eyed gravitas of youth. “Let them be, Wangji,” he says. Qixi is about joy, after all. The people have looked a tragedy in the eye only to make a fairytale out of it, immortalizing Zhinu and Niulang in the stars and praying yearly for their union. Something inside Lan Xichen cracks open, hungry as a mouth, when he thinks too hard on it.
Lan Wangji recites the rule against excessive frivolity—three hundred and two—in a measured tone with a sidelong glance at his brother. Something in Lan Xichen’s face must stop him from taking it further, because instead of continuing on with his characteristic persistence, he merely nods and brings his hands neatly into his lap.
“Will xiongzhang be extending an invitation to night-hunt with Chifeng-zun this year?” he asks. His back is straight, eyes cast downwards in a model of respect for his elder brother. No one outside the two of them would ever see the story behind the question.
“Perhaps,” Lan Xichen allows, once the pause has grown long enough to stagnate in the air between them. The answer is yes—the answer has always been yes, for as long as Lan Wangji has asked and Lan Xichen has answered, but its certainty is something neither of them have ever discussed. Nor will they bring up the fact that the night-hunt is a pretense at best for an outing that has very little to do with sect politics at all.
“Then I wish xiongzhang all the best of luck,” Lan Wangji says, as he does every year. Lan Xichen wonders how it must look to him—his brother, Zewu-jun, acting sect leader in the absence of their father, as of yet both unmarried and heirless. Slipping into the Cloud Recesses with the dawn that breaks over Qixi night as Zhinu and Niulang, too, bid each other goodbye across the cruel silver expanse of the sky. He’d grown up alongside Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue, despite the four years that separated them from him, but then again, he’d grown up visiting a house trimmed with quiet and gentians, too.
Secondborn children tend to take away different lessons from these things than their elder brothers; are afforded the luxury of paths other than sect leader. Lan Xichen only very rarely resents this.
—
Nie Mingjue arrives alone and by saber. Baxia slides out smoothly from beneath him as he lands at the edge of the woods, the place that separates the cultivators of Cloud Recesses from the rest of the world. Where Lan Xichen is waiting, as he is every year.
His bow is low and proper. A beat, a heartbeat, and Nie Mingjue’s hands curve around the angled slants of his forearms, lifting him out of it. Lan Xichen lets his sleeves fall back towards his elbow so that skin touches skin for the briefest moment; the performance of it, the calculation of how much he can take like this, how much they can live off of. Mingjue’s thumb strokes the bare inside of his forearm, and one of them—it’s unclear which, in this dim, heady space—breathes out a measured exhale.
“Xichen,” Nie Mingjue says, letting go of him slowly, finger by finger. “I’ve missed you.”
They had seen each other at the Yunmeng cultivation conference only several weeks ago, and have been in correspondence since then. That is not what Mingjue means. Lan Xichen lacks the warmth of skin on his own, and murmurs, “I have missed you, too, Mingjue.”
—
The night-hunt is simple enough to be considered unremarkable. They fly to a small settlement in one of Gusu’s farming provinces where villagers have been complaining of a yaoguai stalking the fields. Such things are beneath the notice of even one sect leader, to say nothing of two, but they are discreet, and the people of Jiangxing seem grateful either way.
They return as the sun is burning low over the tree line, and then Lan Xichen takes them both away to Caiyi.
—
Caiyi Town is lively and crowded. The streets bristle with passerby and performers, merchants selling their wares in dizzying displays of color. Young women whirl by carrying offerings of red dates and melon seeds, and pairs of lovers out to enjoy the festivities stand with their heads bowed together, shadows stretched out long into the evening. Lan Xichen has taken off his hairpiece, as well as the jade tokens signaling his status as Sect Leader Lan; Nie Mingjue has left behind his layers of ceremonial outer robes in Qinghe. Together, they could be any one of those young lovers, sons of some rich gentry family out for a meal and a night together under the full moon that looms over this year’s Qixi.
“Are you hungry?” Lan Xichen asks, voice pitched to carry over the noise of the crowd. He loops an arm around the crook of Nie Mingjue’s elbow and tries not to think about how much he is taking by doing this, by swaying in closer under the pretense of being able to hear.
Nie Mingjue hums a neutral sound. “We could go to that dumpling stall you enjoy so much. It was on the edge of the main square last year.” His voice is close, very close to his ear. They are lined up side-by-side from shoulder to hip as the people flow around them.
“We could get qiaoguo,” Lan Xichen says, flicking his gaze over the nearest booth where an older woman is bent over a pan of hot oil. There are neat rows of fried dough displayed on a wooden board before her, shaped into flowers, fish, clouds. Charming, fanciful things.
“Qiaoguo is not a meal,” Nie Mingjue counters for the sake of argument, but his eyes flash and he lets himself be pulled in that direction. Lan Xichen laughs at his easy concession. Nie Mingjue only says, “It is Qixi,” in a quiet tone, and pulls himself a little closer.
Lan Xichen pays with enough silver to buy them a half-dozen of the most intricate ones, wrapped in wax paper that he pulls apart as they wander back the way they came.
Nie Mingjue’s arm slinks out from where it’s being held loosely in the circle of Lan Xichen’s hand, to snatch at the tail of a carp-shaped pastry as Lan Xichen tries to whip the package out of reach reflexively. Excessive frivolity, Lan Wangji had said. But Mingjue looks years younger when he grins. So Lan Xichen lets the undignified noise of annoyance fall from his mouth and retaliates with a jab to the shoulder, knowing it will pull another smile out of him, sharp and pretty. The package of qiaoguo—meant for lovers to share, really—is warm in his clutched hand. The excess grease from the dough dots the paper, and slowly seeps into his palm that is growing sticky from the heat. Sugared oil and other things, emotions that he does not linger too much on.
—
The thing between them is rarely easy. It would after all not do for two sect leaders to enter into a politically unfavorable and ultimately heirless marriage—Nie Mingjue would never agree to marry into the Lan and leave his brother the violent, unwanted burden of leading, and Lan Xichen has Wangji to think about. Secondborn children are not sect leaders. Their brothers will someday be far better men than they, given the chance.
What this means is that it would be infinitely better to prune the blossom at the root, then, before any damage is done. Lan Xichen thinks that if he could have Mingjue in his entirety, he would never let go of him. A dangerous sentiment for a boy born to a house of gentians: better to never indulge in the thought at all.
—
“What are you thinking about?” Nie Mingjue asks, brushing the back of his hand between Lan Xichen’s shoulderblades, just tentative enough to be construed as decorous rather than proprietary. The touch is anchoring and ruinous at the same time.
Lan Xichen is thinking about him; how could he not be? He is thinking about the way Nie Mingjue’s robes pull taut against his shoulders and how it would feel to drop to his knees and press his mouth to the place where they cinch in at the waist. He sometimes makes bargains with himself, about how much of his desire would lie within the bounds of acceptable. To be on his knees for Nie Mingjue would not. But a single kiss stolen over layers of fabric, a position meant for lovers made chaste and confessional—perhaps that is enough, to appease both his conscience and himself.
“The moon,” he says instead. “You were right. It is very beautiful tonight.”
—
For much of the year, they correspond only through letters. Letters for sect-related matters, mostly, with anecdotes and other things of a more personal nature slipped between the lines of business, stretched thin to last. Your insight would be appreciated. This one wishes you were here, Mingjue will write in the midst of discussing Qinghe’s latest harvest taxes, and it is as good as what Lan Xichen truly wants to hear in a message from him.
When they were younger and aching with a ferocity, before they had truly settled into the conventions of their affection, there had been a single, ill-advised letter. A slip of paper that had borne the distance from Qinghe to Gusu with all the weary, tender weight of Mingjue’s heart folded into its traveled pages; perhaps it is the unspoken reason they now write about business and politics instead.
Two weeks after that, another missive had arrived, this one with only a few lines on it. Forgive my sentimentality, my lapse of judgement. Forgive the selfishness it takes to write such a thing, Nie Mingjue had penned in a wretched, unsteady hand. Burn the letter, Xichen. There was not even a signature to trace on the paper.
Now they are older, although not by much, and Xichen feels as jaded as the name they use to call on him. He still remembers every sentence of that letter, and the note that had followed it. Mingjue had called it a lapse of judgement—Lan Xichen knows without being told, the only lapse in judgement that had occurred, in both their eyes, was the sending of the letter, the tangibility of the words rather than the words themselves. He doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.
—
The night is not all melancholy. Qixi is one night, granted, with the breaking of dawn hovering just around the edges of their vision, but it is also one they are spending together. There are moments, too, that remain warm and bright and unconditional.
They drift through the festival together. Nie Mingjue smiles more than Lan Xichen has seen him smile in a long while. He is eating tanghulu off a wooden skewer, not looking at Lan Xichen who is looking at him, and he is achingly beautiful, the sight of him against a hundred illuminated lanterns like a blunt sword through the gut. The night passes, light slips from the sky, and then Nie Mingjue does look at him. Lan Xichen’s hair has been tugged out from its half-topknot—tonight, he has forgone his hairpiece but wears it up in braids as young men do in the mountains of Qinghe—so Mingjue’s hand flies up to smooth it back into place. His touch, felt through a layer of loosened braids, sends fire down Xichen’s spine. He fusses with the stiff sleeves of his outer robes as he waits for the feeling to fade, surely crumpling the expensive material with his careless ministrations, but it never does. It just settles low and comfortable inside him, a contented animal returning home.
A constant: The moon, high above them. Round and bright like a coin. Lan Xichen is beginning to understand how such things can drive men mad.
—
A woman with bright dark eyes flirts laughingly at Nie Mingjue as they are standing by the waterfront waiting for the fireworks to begin. Lan Xichen takes his hand and clasps it in both of his as if he has a right to stake a claim, and forgets they are not the roles they are playing that night. The woman’s face changes as if she understands. She apologizes for perceived disrespect and tells them that they look very fine together as she makes to wander off into the crowd.
Lan Xichen manages to smile and thank her before she leaves, more out of residual politeness than anything else. He is still holding onto Nie Mingjue’s hand in a way that becomes more and more inexcusable with every passing moment.
—
“Hairpieces for your lovers, sirs? Pins, combs, ribbons, we’ve got them all here—do take a look, young masters, it’s Qixi—”
Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue exchange a glance. The merchant who had flagged them down scrutinizes the two of them and brandishes a hand towards the row of guan on display at the back of the booth. “For men, too, we have handcrafted hairpieces and specialty combs from Dongying—something for everyone, young masters. Take your time looking!”
Lan Xichen looks. Why not? The night is not quite young now, and many of the more elaborate pieces are wrapped up, presumably already reserved for earlier customers who will come back at the end of the night for them. The products remaining are of simpler, more affordable makes. At his side, Nie Mingjue gives him a long look, and his shoulders go up and down in a tiny, helpless movement.
“Why not?” he asks when Lan Xichen does not move to respond. “Let me buy something for you. Just—just the one.”
Why not; Lan Xichen made the same excuse of himself just moments ago. But there are seas of difference between looking and taking.
“You know why,” he reminds him, putting two fingers on Nie Mingjue’s wrist to hold back his roaming hand that is already reaching for something precious that he wants to give to Xichen tonight, and hating himself for it.
“Xichen.” Nie Mingjue says it like a surrender. Xi meaning sunlight, chen meaning subject. Their zi in each other’s mouths, a different intimacy than what anyone else in the world is allowed. Nie Mingjue does not beg for things, but he is begging for this.
Lan Xichen lets go.
Mingjue buys a hairpin of fine, dull silver for him. One end is capped with a crown of geometric swoops, to frame the knot of hair it holds in place. It is simple enough that it will raise no questions, and beautiful, too. A needle of light in the night around them. Their hands touch only very slightly when he hands it to Xichen.
“Let me put it on you, later,” he murmurs, and Lan Xichen is helpless to refuse him.
—
The truth of it is this: if Nie Mingjue asked to brush his fingers against the forehead ribbon, Lan Xichen would allow him. Would bind their hands together in whatever dark alleyway one slips into to do such things. There is a strange sort of equilibrium to be found in cradling knives against a person’s pressure points, the softest underbelly of them; the trick is to never give in to the urge to wound, even accidentally. So Nie Mingjue never asks, and Lan Xichen never offers.
—
Lan Xichen,
I am no poet, but I tell the truth when I say the Qinghe nights are lonely without you. Perhaps I have overindulged. Perhaps I am a little maudlin. I am thinking about you constantly, do you understand my meaning? We talk ourselves in circles around this—enough. Enough. When I was younger, much younger than is normally advisable, my mother taught me how to ride a sword using her Longzhan. My golden core was not quite fully developed, so I could only keep my balance for short amounts of time, and more often than not, I would try to shift my weight too soon and fall down onto the ground. It was a shock each time. It hurt, but I was stubborn. I kept trying, even when it became clear I could not possibly have improved until I gained enough core strength to work with. All this to say, I am a foolish creature of habit. This hurts, too. Every time we have to leave each other, it is like I am falling off the sword and hitting the ground with a shock again. I never learn to expect it. The last time we met, at Jilin, I spent the afternoon watching you watching me, knowing the things we both knew. You were enchanting in the sunlight, and every other kind of light. That day and every other day. I am splitting out of my very skin with it. Do you understand? I would see you in red if I could, my Xichen, but I will take anything you give me.
Yours, Mingjue
Two weeks later, after the arrival of the second scrawled note, Lan Xichen had burned the letter as requested. He could never quite refuse Mingjue anything; therein lay the conundrum.
—
The first year after the death of Nie Mingjue’s father, something had changed. They’d been circling each other in twin orbits for a long time now, gravitating ever closer, but Lan Xichen had looked over at him one day in the copper daylight and seen Sect Leader Nie, and understood that he could never have him again as Mingjue. Other things must be put first. And by the end of that summer, Nie Mingjue had come to the same conclusion himself; when they said their goodbyes under the first gold of Qinghe autumn, he bowed stiff and ceremonial while his hands shook, and Lan Xichen had rushed to hold him up by the forearms in the only way he knew how to touch now.
—
They part at the edge of the forest where they first met in the fading afternoon. It is dawn in only the vaguest sense. Lan Xichen lets Nie Mingjue stand behind him and take out his Qinghe-style braids, one by one, feeling as if this is the end of something all over again. Foolish, to believe it is not. Another pin is lifted from his head, and his hair comes all the way loose, crushed into waves by the braids that had kept it pulled neatly back.
“Ah, Mingjue,” he says, soft and wistful on the end of a sigh, not intending to go anywhere with it at all. Mingjue strokes the edge of his cheek, gentle as anything. He presses the last pin, blood-warm from where he’s clutched at it too tightly, into Lan Xichen’s palm.
“Let me put the hairpin on you,” he says again, and then Lan Xichen is being turned around so that they are facing each other. The cool darkness makes Nie Mingjue look solemn and Xichen wants to touch him so much it hurts. Instead, he reaches into his robes and takes out the fine silver hairpin, holding it out ornamentation first with his fingers at the other end so that there is no chance that their hands will catch. Nie Mingjue sees this gesture for what it is, and lets out a low, hollow laugh that cracks down the middle somewhere above their heads.
“This hurts, too,” Lan Xichen says, willing him to understand. “Every time we have to leave each other”—and it’s almost too much, and he doesn’t know which he would hate most, his voice faltering, or his voice remaining steady; which betrayal of the body would cost more, here?—“I have never learned to expect it, Mingjue.”
They have never once brought up that letter, in all the time that has passed since its burning. Lan Xichen is breaking too many taboos by doing so.
Nie Mingjue begins to part his hair into pieces, twisting the strands up and back. The position they are in right now, facing each other with their heads level, makes the task difficult. It puts his arms on either side of Lan Xichen’s head, nearly all the way around to the back in a mockery of an embrace. “I told you to burn it,” he says. His breath, when it comes out, is only a little shuttered. The expression that flickers over his face, his entire body, is heartbreaking.
Lan Xichen closes his eyes, briefly. “I did.” He is pleading for an exoneration that both of them will deny the need for; there is no way to atone for doing the right thing.
The pin slides into place, and Mingjue’s hands linger. They hesitate to leave him. In the gray light, his eyes are rendered dark, fire under an overcast sky, twin talismans wrecking themselves midair. If he let his balance tip forward the slightest bit, if he leaned in only a little more, he would be in Mingjue’s arms proper. How to tell him that the memory of the letter sears as keenly as a brand, if only because it says all the things that Xichen cannot have? I would see you in red. He does not want to make this harder than it has to be—what is worse, the truth, or the lack of one?
Mingjue’s hand is on his face now, the warmth and broadness of it swallowing Xichen’s jaw whole. A thumb touches at the small space underneath his eye. Lan Xichen covers Mingjue’s hand with one of his own, keeping it pinned against his cheek. The singular point of contact between them. Any more, and they would not be able to keep up with this charade.
I would see you in red, too, he thinks, again and again, and almost opens his mouth with the force of it. Nie Mingjue shakes his head tightly. His fingers burn on Xichen’s mouth where he presses them, preemptively, as if to stop what they both understand Xichen would have said.
“Don’t say it. I wouldn’t be able to bear it if you said it.”
Nie Mingjue, who has never been anything but forthright and righteous at the cost of convention, asking Lan Xichen to hold back. What is that, but the most weighted kind of care? There are names for such things. If only they could put a name to this. He tries to speak—the syllables of Mingjue’s name never make it past the swallow of his mouth, but his lips move with it anyway. A kiss printed onto the very tips of Mingjue’s fingers, in the shape of his zi.
Lan Xichen steps away first, because if he does not, they will stand there like statues until the first sun hits their unmoving bodies.
“Better to pretend, then,” he says at last. Nie Mingjue nods, and does not look at him, and in the end, their separation is lingering and hollow, unfinished.
—
Lan Xichen walks home through the woodland as dawn bruises the horizon. He walks because if he rides his sword, perhaps he will let the wind tug him too far to one side. Perhaps he will fall and hit the ground and have to relieve the truth of the cruel, tender ache in his body all over again. Perhaps, perhaps.
He takes the pin out of his hair before he enters the Cloud Recesses. He knows that he will not allow himself to wear it again, save in moments of certain weakness. It will be enough; it has to be.