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He looks the same. He’s twenty, twenty-five at the most, and he looks the same. Ye Baiyi’s lost the knack of reading age from a face, but he can read naivete, and Zhao Jing’s pet poisoner is so guileless it hurts. Green as grass – well, green as oleander.
He looks the same, and Ye Baiyi can’t look away.
There was a moment when he was sure he was hallucinating or haunted or both, when he first saw the man – the kid. He’s a boy. A child. All the faces blur in Ye Baiyi’s mind’s eye, even the most beloved, softened by long years staring at the snow. The resemblance was remarkable but, he thought, no more than wishful thinking. A lonely old man coveting what he couldn’t have.
Then he saw the hands. Ye Baiyi remembers how they felt when he held them, the first time and the last. He remembers how they touched him. How they looked when they held a pen, a knife, a hammer. The nails are the same, fussily well-cared-for despite the way soot tries to cling to them – soot from his nasty little alchemies, no doubt, not from a forge. Pale as the inside of a crab shell with the meat sucked out. The clever fingers, too thick through the knuckles to call them elegant. The pattern of scars is different, but those knobbly knuckles are the same.
Ye Baiyi has to tear himself away. Has to turn his whole body before his eyes stop tracking back over to the boy like iron chasing after a lodestone.
It’s only later, sitting at Zhao Jing’s left hand and pretending at dignity, that Ye Baiyi can look his fill. He tries not to be too obvious. It’s wasted effort; the boy is alone, sunk in his own head, ignoring his food in favour of wine. Zhao Jing, who ought to notice if some old man starts ogling his son, isn’t paying attention to anything that doesn’t flatter his ego. He barely wants to pay attention to Ye Baiyi. Still angry that Ye Baiyi stole his thunder, at a guess.
He tries to be a good guest, although not particularly hard. He drinks his wine and doesn’t flinch when Zhao Jing calls him Ye-shangxian. As though being immortal has ever done him any good. And when Zhao Jing has the fucking brass balls to toast Ye Baiyi, as if Ye Baiyi did anything other than – well. Best not to correct him on that point.
So Ye Baiyi turns to look at the boy, instead. Calls him Zhao Jing’s son, for fear that if he reaches for a name, the wrong one will come out of his mouth. How galling, for this moustachioed cretin to have found him first.
It’s useless to look for recognition. Ye Baiyi knows it. No one remembers their past lives, or if they do, they tend to become mad old monks in crumbling temples. Ask him how he knows.
He looks anyway.
This face – he’s seen it in childhood, in middle age, no older than that. He’s seen it laugh and weep and shout and sing, seen it beatific, seen it in the tranquillity of death. There was a time it almost seemed like he could pluck the thoughts right out of it, and those eyes could pluck his right back: the next move in a fight, the next beat in a story, the next tavern they’d stop in for a drink.
This boy – this sullen, murderous, beautiful boy – doesn’t know him.
One second of eye contact, held above their raised cups; that’s all Ye Baiyi needs to know. It doesn’t matter what the boy looks like. Ye Baiyi can still read him – he’s confused now, a little flustered by such a public address, and behind that a gleam of calculation, how can I leverage this – but he isn’t read in return.
How selfish of him, to be hurt by that.
He can’t stay here. Can’t look at this stranger, staring out at him through Rong Changqing’s eyes.
The hall goes still and silent as he takes his leave, the whole pack of sleeve dogs and shoe shiners and thigh huggers staring after him in shock or dismay or to see if he really does float above the ground. He’s never been more grateful that he doesn’t. Each strike of his boots against the floor shocks a little more feeling back into his deadened nerves.
It’s fine. He’s fine.
He’s going to drink himself into a stupor, and then he’s going to stay the hell away from the boy. No sense ruining Rong Changqing’s life twice.