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A stranger with a magpie on his shoulder walked into Yunmeng like he owned it. Dressed in black, with a grey outer robe the color of charcoal whose wide sleeves were edged with designs in bright scarlet that somehow looked like both willow leaves and tongues of fire. Hanging from the bright red tie around his sash was a jade pendant that was shockingly pale against his dark clothes; in his hand, the way that cultivators would hold their swords, was a black dizi with a scarlet tassel.
“Jiang-zongzhu,” he said brightly when he saw Jiang Wanyin. He bowed and the magpie seemed strangely unperturbed by the motion, shifting its weight to stay on his shoulder as he moved. The motion revealed the red ribbon tying his hair back and as he moved, it shimmered with an embroidered design whose threads were only a few shades off the ribbon, making it otherwise invisible.
Not particularly in the mood to be polite, Jiang Wanyin gave him only the barest courtesy of a bow. He didn’t really need to bow to someone who had yet to introduce himself, but something about the man’s knowing look and the strange magpie on his shoulder told him that it would be best if he did.
He of course ruined the courtesy of the bow by saying gruffly, “Who are you?”
“Just a passing cultivator,” the man said, as if any cultivator would be caught without his sword. “But I have heard much of the beauty of Yunmeng, and much of its infamous sect leader that I thought that I would pay a visit. What great luck that I get to see both at once!”
The man offered a smile that bared all of his teeth—it was mischief and danger, but Jiang Wanyin’s gut said that it wasn’t a threat.
Yet.
“Your name?” Jiang Wanyin asked.
The other man, who appeared to be about his age, continued to grin that wild grin. Just as he was beginning to think of huli-jing, the man bowed again and said, “Wei Ying, courtesy Wuxian.” It seemed that the magpie was done with all of the bowing and flew off. Wei Wuxian showed no sign of noticing.
“Hopefully you enjoy your stay in Yunmeng,” Jiang Wanyin said curtly.
Wei Wuxian’s huli-jing grin widened. “I’m sure I will,” he said. “And I’d promise not to make trouble, Jiang-zongzhu, but I’m afraid that trouble has a way of following me. But don’t worry—I’ll be on my best behavior!”
He winked an eye that seemed too silver to be natural—or entirely human—and left. Despite his burning presence, like the sun in the middle of summer, he disappeared easily into the crowd as if made of the morning mist that still rose from the waters of the lake around Lotus Pier.
Jiang Wanyin paid him little mind after that. The presence of someone as dangerous as this Wei Wuxian was concerning, but for the moment he seemed harmless—and he had other concerns to pay attention to, like the small village outside of Yunmeng that had called for help with a band of fierce corpses.
The magpie landed on a bush in front of Jiang Wanyin, dropping out of the sky like a stooping hawk. Startled, Jiang Wanyin nearly killed the thing but turned his blade at the last moment.
Despite the danger of Sandu nearly cleaving it in two, the magpie didn’t seem concerned and chirped imperiously at him as if scolding him.
“A…bird?” Jiang Longxia asked, her brow furrowing.
“A very strange bird,” Jiang Wanyin growled, remembering how unbothered it had been by Wei Wuxian moving around. “What is it doing here?”
The magpie chirped like a baby chicken and then cawed like a crow and turned its beak to their right.
“Move, little bird,” Jiang Wanyin said and realized how ridiculous it was that he had resorted to talking to birds , even birds as clever as magpies were supposed to be.
The magpie cawed like a crow again and then laughed in a human’s voice—mimicking someone, Jiang Wanyin realized uneasily. It seemed too clever, but magpies were like that. That just meant that it was harder for Jiang Wanyin to tell if there was something wrong with the magpie and the man whose mischievous smile was more like a threat.
Still, the laugh seemed familiar, and Jiang Wanyin said to it, “Take us to Wei Wuxian.”
Fluttering its wings, the magpie laughed again—this time in a different voice that Jiang Wanyin didn’t recognize at all—and flew off to their right, pausing on another bush to look back at them.
“Jiang-zongzhu?” Liang Haoyu asked quietly.
Without looking at him, Jiang Wanyin knew that he was fiddling nervously with his bow. For all his apparent anxiety and tendency to fidget, Liang Haoyu had the potential to be one of the best archers that Jiang Wanyin had seen in his lifetime. His nervous demeanor and tendency to twist and wiggle and fiddle with the string of his bow or the arrow nocked there seemed to help rather than hinder, so Jiang Wanyin never called him to stand still.
“Eyes and ears sharp,” Jiang Wanyin said, looking at the magpie’s clever black eyes. “We’ll follow the damn bird.”
The magpie laughed and fluttered further into the forest before stopping again. Before long, they began to hear the sound of a flute—a dizi, Jiang Wanyin thought, remembering the startlingly black instrument with its bright red tassel cradled in the hands of Wei Wuxian.
With the magpie leading them, they came to a clearing filled with fierce corpses that moved as if bewitched by the music coming from Wei Wuxian, who played while lounging in the boughs of a tall pine tree. For a moment, Jiang Wanyin thought that he saw the symbol of a cloud in the bark of the tree, but it disappeared and he chalked it up to the strangeness of the situation.
The magpie fluttered around the fierce corpses before flying up into the tree with Wei Wuxian where it perched on the branch near him.
Zidian sparked to life in Jiang Wanyin’s hand. “What is this?” he demanded. “Demonic cultivation?”
As if surprised by the accusation, Wei Wuxian lowered the flute from his lips. “Demonic cultivation?” he echoed, still sounding far too mischievous and just a little mad. “No such thing, Jiang-zongzhu, just a form of cultivation that you’re not familiar with.” He brought the dizi back to his lips and continued to play; the fierce corpses, who had shuffled around as if confused by the lack of music, turned one by one to face him like sunflowers facing the sun.
Surprised by the thought, Jiang Wanyin paused and looked thoughtfully up at Wei Wuxian.
As if sensing his revelation, Wei Wuxian’s eyes went crescent-shaped with obvious glee. He inclined his head toward the fierce corpses in invitation.
The fierce corpses swayed in place and Jiang Wanyin couldn’t help but think of farmers in their fields, wielding sickles and scythes to cut down wheat and rice. When the last fierce corpse fell, he turned to look up at Wei Wuxian who continued to play, this time a happier and jauntier tune, his leg hanging down from the branch he lounged on. The magpie was perched on his other knee, preening a glossy blue-black wing as if unbothered by the carnage around them.
Wei Wuxian continued to play and lounge in his pine tree while they cleaned up, but even hot-tempered Xia Caishu held his tongue, seemingly knowing that there was something not quite right about the young man. When they were done, Jiang Wanyin sent his disciples away and looked up in the tree.
With a flourish, Wei Wuxian finished the song and sent the magpie away with a gesture; he leapt lightly out of the tree and landed in front of Jiang Wanyin. “Very tidy,” he said with that wide, huli-jing smile of his.
But Jiang Wanyin was fairly certain that Wei Wuxian was not a huli-jing. He said nothing.
“Stories of your martial prowess are not exaggerated,” Wei Wuxian continued, his silvery eyes mischievous. “Smooth as water with the sword Sandu, and fierce and quick as lightning with Zidian.”
“You have me at a disadvantage,” Jiang Wanyin said a little curtly. “You know so much about me.”
Wei Wuxian’s grin widened and revealed almost disappointingly human teeth. “Naturally,” he said. “Word travels fast about war heroes. And I had the advantage as well of hearing about you from…a friend of mine.”
“A friend of yours?” Jiang Wanyin asked suspiciously.
“He asked me to look in on you,” Wei Wuxian said. “But I couldn’t resist—I’m sure he intended for me not to be seen, but I wanted to know more about the one that caught the attention of the clouds.”
Jiang Wanyin looked at the red embroideries at the edges of Wei Wuxian’s outer robes. Like tongues of fire , he had thought in Yunmeng. Or like willow leaves . He swallowed hard, but the grief lodged deep in his throat.
“Don’t say that name,” Wei Wuxian said almost gently, his eyes shimmering. “Very few are privileged to know it.”
Jiang Wanyin swallowed again. “Why are you here?”
“As I said,” Wei Wuxian said as the magpie came to land on his shoulder, just as it had perched there when Jiang Wanyin had first seen them in Yunmeng. “A very dear friend of mine asked me to look in on you. But I couldn’t resist meeting you for myself. It’s not often that the clouds are so…” he spun his black dizi thoughtfully. “…unsettled. I wanted to see what foot kicked the ant’s nest—or what lightning had struck.”
Unsure why he was so drawn to it, Jiang Wanyin looked at the magpie. It laughed in that unrecognizable voice and Wei Wuxian looked at it.
When he held out a hand, the magpie hopped over and perched on his wrist. “Go on, now,” Wei Wuxian said. “You’ve caused enough trouble, you meddlesome thing.” The magpie tilted its head to the side as if to ask, who, me? But it obligingly flew away and disappeared over the trees.
“What does your… friend …want with me?” Jiang Wanyin asked.
Wei Wuxian turned back to him and grinned. “Nothing so terrible,” he said. “And nothing you should worry your pretty little head about. What’s done is done.” He twirled the flute in his fingers again and then tucked it into his sash.
“Who are you?” Jiang Wanyin asked, feeling strangely slow, as if a heavy blanket lay over his thoughts.
“No one of consequence,” Wei Wuxian replied. “And someone that’s spent long enough here. Wen Ning?”
There was movement in the pine tree and another shape slipped down. Where Wei Wuxian’s skin was as tanned as if he had spent his whole life in Yunmeng, this new person’s skin was ghastly pale, as if it had never seen the sun—as pale as death. Dressed in black and charcoal, their hair long and unbound, hanging around that too-pale face, they looked so like another fierce corpse that Jiang Wanyin’s fingers twitched on Sandu and Zidian sparked on his finger.
“Aiyo,” Wei Wuxian said playfully, picking a few pine needles from the creature’s long hair. “Look at you, you’re a mess.”
“Wei-gongzi,” the fierce corpse said in a surprisingly deep voice. Surprising because it seemed deeper than it should, but also because Jiang Wanyin had never heard of a fierce corpse speaking.
Wei Wuxian plucked a few more pine needles from the fierce corpse’s hair. “What did I tell you, A-Ning? You don’t need to call me that.”
The fierce corpse, who must have been the “Wen Ning” that Wei Wuxian had called for, blinked his black, black eyes. Jiang Wanyin would have expected that a corpse would have pale, milky eyes but his looked like polished volcanic stone.
“Wen,” he echoed, and remembered the Sunshot Campaign and the Wen dogs that had killed his family.
Wei Wuxian brushed more pine needles from the corpse’s shoulders and settled his robes back around him. “Wen,” he agreed as if blithely unaware of Jiang Wanyin’s growing horror. Wen Ning watched Jiang Wanyin with those soulless black eyes. “My dear Wen Ning. Because what is fire without shadow?” He looked over his shoulder at Jiang Wanyin, that mischievous, dangerous, huli-jing smile on his face again. “It was a pleasure meeting you at last, Jiang Cheng.”
The red of Wei Wuxian’s sleeves and sash and hair ribbon shone like embers and the black and grey of his robes and Wen Ning’s crumbled like ash; they disappeared quickly, blown apart in a wind that Jiang Wanyin couldn’t feel.
When they were both gone, Jiang Wanyin took a deep breath and felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Remembering how slow his thoughts had seemed, he scowled to himself.
Kicking an exposed root, he stalked—because he didn’t stomp like a child , like Jin Ling who was hopelessly spoiled by his peacock father—back to meet up with his disciples. He told himself that he wasn’t thinking about willow leaves and the taste of moonlight.
Jin Ling practiced sword forms under the watchful eye of several Jiang disciples while Jiang Yanli and Jiang Wanyin had tea in the shade of a nearby pavilion.
“Wei Wuxian?” Jiang Yanli echoed thoughtfully. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
Jiang Wanyin grunted. “I think he did something to me,” he muttered. “I couldn’t think of any questions to ask him. All I could do was stand there.”
“If he was divine, I imagine that he couldn’t allow you to ask too many questions,” Jiang Yanli said soothingly. “Do you think…?”
“He had someone with him too,” Jiang Wanyin said, debating how much to tell her. “He said…” he trailed off, trying to remember the exact wording. “He said, ‘what was fire without a bit of shadow?’”
Jiang Yanli frowned. “That’s very specific,” she said. “What did he wear?”
“He wasn’t a…a Lan,” Jiang Wanyin said and even after so many years, the name still hurt to say. “He wore black. And red.”
His sister sat up. “Did he have a black flute? And flames on his sleeves?”
Jiang Wanyin looked at her. “Yes,” he said slowly. “A black flute with a red tassel. And I think they were…willow leaves.”
His sister reached across the table and squeezed his wrist comfortingly. “I don’t think they were,” she said gently. “Because the person that fits that description—of fire and shadows, who wears black and red and carries a black flute—is associated with the sun , not the moon.”
“The clouds,” he remembered, Wei Wuxian saying. “He kept mentioning the clouds.”
“They say that the home of the Lan Clan is called the Cloud Recesses,” Jiang Yanli reminded him. “Some say that it is high in the mountains, so high that it touches the moon; some say that it is the realm of the moon itself.”
Jiang Wanyin swallowed the lump of grief in his throat again. The memory of the moon—and willows, and the single perfect lotus still in the lake where a god had left the mortal realm—still hurt. Sometimes he couldn’t even bear to see the reflection of the moon on the lakes because it brought back memories of jade-cool hands and gentle kisses and the smell of shimmering white robes that had been washed with soap scented with lotus blossoms.
“Oh, A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli said and squeezed his wrist. If she knew that beneath his sleeve, he had that same white ribbon, decorated with a silver cloud pendant, she gave no sign of it.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he said brusquely and blinked quickly to keep from crying like a child .
Jiang Yanli smiled, as ever seeing right through him, but said, “Yes, it’s probably for the best.” When he looked at her in surprise, she squeezed his arm gently. “To speak too much of gods and spirits would be to invite their attention.”
He wouldn’t know what to do with that attention anyway. Seeing Wei Wuxian and that dead Wen dog at his heels once was more than enough.