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Chapter Text

The soft neigh of a strange horse interrupts Li Lianhua's leavetaking.

His own horses are unhitched and grazing by the road. Hulijing is fed, but milling around his ankles as if she sensed his plans. Fang Duobing is safely away, rushing to find Guan Hemeng for a last-moment remedy that doesn't exist.

If there were a cure, Li Lianhua would know. He had a decade to unearth it. What he needs now is to use this spell of relative clarity and vitality, and go.

But yes. Someone is outside. Hulijing seems too preoccupied to even bark at the newcomer. Drawing himself up under a hasty facade of nonchalance, he opens the door.

Qiao Wanmian is standing beside the porch, holding the reins of a white riding horse. The animal is saddled and kitted as if for a longer journey. The hibiscus-flower pins in her hair reflect the crisp sunlight; her face reflects nothing.

She was present at Yun Biqiu's trial, but she stood back, quiet and watchful, as the others carried out the prosecution. He caught only a glimpse of her as he broke his last ties to the Sigu Sect. He should've thought about it earlier.

Here he is, his few supplies wrapped in a cloth bag, about to slip away while his legs still carry him.

"A-Mian," he says. "Or is it Sect Leader Qiao now?"

"Xiangyi." She bypasses his question. "I brought you something for the road."

"You—" he tries to swerve, though he is unsure where. "That's very thoughtful, but you didn't have to. I'm just waiting for—"

"Fang Duobing went down the mountain an hour ago, bought the fastest horse at the courier station outside town, and rode south like the imperial guard was on his heels. I know what goes on around my sect headquarters."

"I'd expect no less."

Calmly, she loops the horse's reins on the porch railing. "Shall I ask you what that means? That your closest friend left you when you're barely on your feet."

"I'm fine." He can even see her face clearly for the time being. "You have larger concerns, surely."

"You were my concern for ten years. You can give me another moment." Her jaw hitches so slightly that only someone that knows her well would catch it. Li Lianhua still does.

"What can I do for you, a-Mian?"

She pats the horse's neck. "This is Bailong. He will take care of you."

"I have horses," he says, inane. The robust team of four are for pulling the Lotus Tower. If he were to take one of them, the house would be stuck where it is. It is—no longer his concern, but he dislikes the thought.

"Fang Duobing will need those horses, when he returns. I asked the kitchen staff to make some of your favourite things. Those that will keep, anyway."

It only strikes him then. Qiao Wanmian, his first love, his one-time betrothed, his successor as head of the sect... has brought him a horse. And snacks for the road, like he's a boy being sent on an errand to town.

It is somewhere between absurd and humiliating. He wants to gather the last remains of his inner power and vault off the ridgeside road.

She's still looking at him, unflinching. When did she become so steadfast? He remembers her as vibrant and sweet, more demure than bold. He was gone for ten years. A third of their lives by now.

"You know that I'm going." His hands drop slack to his sides.

"After the whole grand farewell in front of everyone?" She hums. "You haven't changed that much."

The wind moves through the grass hemming the clearing where he camped. It shifts the gauzy silk of her sleeves, trails invisible fingers across his chilled cheeks. He can barely recall what it feels like to be warm.

"Where are the others?" he says. "Waiting up the slope to stop me?"

Her eyebrows crease in displeasure. "Is that how little you think of me, Xiangyi? That I'd break faith with you after all this time?"

She may be the only person in the world—or perhaps one of two—that he can still bear to use that name. His own accusation reminds him that every moment he lingers, someone may yet appear to hinder him. There is no one to hand now with the power to stop him. Qiao Wanmian, it seems, does not even wish to try.

If Fang Duobing hadn't been so focused on saving him, he would've realised he was planning to go. If Di Feisheng hadn't left to prepare for a duel he'll never get, he—

"No." Li Lianhua forcibly snaps his own thought in the middle. "That was unbecoming of me." Li Xiangyi would never have admitted the offence, but the phrasing echoes of him. For his part, Li Lianhua would rather not admit anything so up front.

When he is far enough away, he'll get a message to Fang Duobing. Tell him... what he needs to hear. Tell him to take the house, the dog, the swordplay manual still tucked under his mattress.

The rest of what he leaves behind will, in fact, now be tended by Qiao Wanmian. The sect, in the throes of its rebirth. The hope for righteous minds to prevail in the jianghu. Li Xiangyi's dream, if not his memory. He did not plan it so, but she's taken up his old burdens, and her shoulders are strong enough for them.

When Li Lianhua holds out his hand, the white gelding puts his long, smooth cheek against his palm. "Bailong, you said. Like the mount of General Zhao?"

"It might be. The hands at my family's stables named him." Qiao Wanmian smiles faintly. "He's swift and surefooted, and won't balk at anything. You should be well matched."

"I can't—" He shakes his head. Of course he can. If he intends to disappear into the towns of the river delta, slink under the notice of both the imperial court and the wulin, a head start can only help. A horse will carry him farther and faster than his own faltering legs.

"Thank you," he says, then. "I have no way to repay you."

Her mouth twists; she is holding back her first thought. "This is a kindness to a friend. It needs no repayment."

She will make a fine head of the sect. In another life, she'd have made a fine companion for a man he never became. It is past time that he step back and withdraw his persisting shadow, so it no longer obscures her.

Shine, a-Mian. Shine in your own right, now.

"Then—" He cups his fist in his palm and bows over it: a civilian's salute, not a swordsman's. "I take my leave of you, Sect Leader Qiao. Farewell."

She nods. If there are tears in her eyes, or in his own, they do not fall. "Farewell, Li Lianhua. Go, before anyone comes."

She is right, and everything is ready. He has no more reason to linger.

*

The children by the well of the riverside village are in possession of his horse.

Well, Qiao Wanmian's horse. Once Li Lianhua is far enough to the north, he'll send him back. There's always someone that owes a favour to the marvellous Physician Li in his moving house, or at least someone that knows the Sigu Sect and will take a message for enough taels.

Next to the shape of the small wellhouse, Bailong's pale silhouette blurs in his vision. So does the fisherman onto whose boat he landed, as the man lets him out onto the dock.

Li Lianhua bows his apologies for said surprise landing, as well as the trouble of conveying him to shore. He leaped from the height of Wangjiang Pavilion to escape Xiao Zijin, and the endeavour burned through the paltry reserves of his qi. He can feel a fit of chills starting in his extremities. His feet feel out the warped planks of the dock.

"Excuse me, little gentlemen!" he calls out. The planks turn to packed earth as he hurries towards the well. Do not stumble. "You've found my runaway mount. What can I do to thank you?"

Six heads of varying heights turn towards him. A girl's soft voice says, "Are your eyes all right, mister?"

"Oh, he's blind, like Granny Shen! How can you ride if you can't see?"

"Well, you see—" Li Lianhua ducks gently around the inquisitive boy, whose voice is just starting to crack with adolescence. "My horse is very clever. I tell him where I wish to go, and he reads the signposts for me."

"Really? Can you show us, please?" A third child joins in, tremulous, as if he'd screwed his courage to the sticking point for the request.

"It's a horse," says the older boy. "You can't read, Rui-er, so how would a horse—"

The more attention he draws, the easier someone will remember he passed through here. Li Lianhua weaves through the young, jostling bodies, until they're no longer between him and the horse, who is chafing at the ground with a hoof. "Bailong, come!"

The animals of Qiao Manor are well trained. His kit rattling, Bailong walks up to him. The nearest stirrup is a dark blotch against the saddle blanket.

"How do we even know that's his horse?" whispers another of the older children. "Where did he come from? He looks sort of ragged, and it's a really nice horse. What if he stole it?"

"Little madam," Li Lianhua says, breezily. "Since I'm blind, how would I go around stealing from the hardworking citizens of the empire?"

A rustle of awe and horror passes through the children. "He heard you, you ninny!"

"She didn't mean it, mister!" Rui-er chimes in. "Ling-jiejie has a big mouth, everyone knows that."

A shudder seizes his hand as he grabs for the saddlebow and misses. "No offence taken. Young Miss Ling, would you kindly tell my horse which way it is to Xuelin Bridge?"

The girl Ling, surely close to her adult height but narrow as a river reed, fires off a series of landmarks that may avail Li Lianhua if his sight deigns to sharpen again. So far, the blurry spells have always lifted eventually.

He can't count on that in the future. He's already passed every time limit that Guan Hemeng ever laid down for him. He fought the forces of both Jiao Liqiao and the Wansheng Clan. He fought and killed his shixiong. When Di Feisheng's life hung in the balance, he poured his inner power into him without reservation. Each effort ate deeper into his genuine qi, depleted him, weakened him further.

"If he's a thief, he's a pretty terrible one," opines the older boy. "He can't even mount up right."

Swallowing a retort, Li Lianhua slides his hand up along the saddle until he finds a grip, and forces his aching body up without a single tremor.

As far as he can gauge its size, the village seems too meagre for an inn. If he can ride to the market at Xuelin Bridge, he'll find someone to sell him hot wine and soup, something to fill him other than the nascent cold creeping through his meridians.

He has to clench his body into place to stay upright. Startled by his tension, Bailong sidesteps. Li Lianhua strokes the arch of his neck. "No need for nerves. I'm fine."

The crowd of youngsters seem to realise he's about to make his exit. "Hey! You were supposed to show us how your horse reads!"

"A thousand pardons!" Li Lianhua clicks his tongue, and Bailong moves. "He can only see the letters by the light of the moon!"

The betrayed shouts of the children ring out behind him as he lets the horse carry him up the road. It snakes northward as a grey ribbon through the green of forest and meadow.

In a matter of days, Di Feisheng will expect him for a duel by the East Sea. When Fang Duobing finds the Lotus Tower deserted, that's where he will head, too. Li Lianhua should still be able to find a courier that will carry a letter fast enough.

His hands shake on the reins. He blinks against the veil that will not lift from his vision.

*

The travelling scribe at the bridge market is casting increasingly sidelong looks at him.

Li Lianhua ruined the first sheet of mulberry paper with a jagged spasm of ink right down the middle. The second lies wadded up on the writing tray across his knees. He's halfway through the third, and so far both his hand and his mind have obeyed him.

The right words still come with agonising slowness. This is the one cut he must make, clean and final.

Do not come after me. Do not hope for me. My work is done, and I choose this end for myself.

He may have shaken the members of the Sigu Sect. The casual acquaintances he has across the jianghu ultimately care little if he lives or dies. The only ones left are those that he suffered for too long, those that he allowed under his roof and—more the fool him—into his heart.

All they will find is an empty house. An empty shore. The person they sought gone like sea foam breaking back into water, lost in the endless swell.

People leave without a shadow. Do not let mine hang over you.

No, no. No sentiment. Fang Duobing is the sort to chase the merest thread of hope to the ends of this earth. And Di Feisheng—well. He cannot be stopped, but perhaps he can be made to pivot himself to something, or someone, else.

Li Lianhua must finish the letter while he has both eyesight and daylight. The patience of the scribe whose inkstone and brush he's using is another limitation. The market bustles on around him: people and animals, wheelbarrows and carts. A troupe of puppeteers starting their show makes the crowd press closer with appreciative gasps and hollers. The smells of cooking from the food stalls still beckon him—a rare thing, now, with his sense of taste coming and going.

Here, says Fang Duobing in his memory, setting a bowl of pork and millet porridge in front of him. Soldier fare, I'm afraid. I found us some wine, though.

They were camped somewhere between Jiao Liqiao's mountain stronghold and the capital, in their desperate dash to stop Shan Gudao. Their forces were hastily gathered, between Tianji Manor, the Sigu Sect, and any allies they could call upon. Still, the night was temperate, and Fang Duobing sat shoulder to shoulder with him, warm against his side.

Li Lianhua ate without tasting the food. Drank the wine for its vanishing warmth. Filled both their cups again and again, to stave off retiring for the night. Of course, the bicha kept him from getting more than mildly tipsy; Fang Duobing had no such impediment.

And him! Do you know the most off—offens—the rudest thing about him? Fang Duobing brandished his cup towards Di Feisheng, who had chosen to perch in a tree outside their circle of tents.

I'm sure I don't, Li Lianhua said. What has Lao Di done now?

He was nowhere near drunk enough for this topic. Nor for the fondness that rose in him whenever he looked at either of them—one rosy-cheeked and swaying, the other on silent lookout. It was still better to hear Fang Duobing's inebriated rumination than think about tomorrow and what misery and danger awaited them in the capital. Better to take their rest while they could.

Explain to me, Fang Duobing went on, how he is so beautiful. The way he suddenly gets that wounded-deer look in his eyes. You know the one. And his hair. My aunt would be in paro—paroxysms of envy! It's so—Don't you ever want to just—put your hands in it and—

All right, Fang Xiaobao. Even smiling indulgently at him, Li Lianhua grasped his own wrist. It was not trembling; he only needed the pressure of the grip to ground himself. Why don't you go and contemplate a-Fei's charms under your blankets? There's still hours until morning.

Without great protest, Fang Duobing went. Li Lianhua sat by the guttering fire and did not think about the dark fall of Di Feisheng's hair, or the sharp gaze of his eyes that swept over him now and then, out of the crisp autumn night.

His throat is thick. Bent over his writing, he crumples his face against the sudden wetness in his eyes.

While there is strength in him, he must move. He can't let this single message delay him. But there might be something there, in the stirrings of Fang Duobing's interest, in the spare but obvious respect Di Feisheng has for the young man's martial prowess.

All Li Lianhua has to do, really, is withdraw himself from the pattern. Remove the point that connects them and... hope that they fold towards each other, not away.

He fills the ink dish again, then takes the brush and dashes broad, wasteful strokes across his half-finished letter.

A cough scratches up from his throat, bringing the tang of iron with it. The fourth attempt will be right. There is something darkly appropriate in that.

*

As the days turn, one after the other, north becomes his only goal.

Li Lianhua rides when he can, walks when the horse tires, catches passage in the carts of farmers and itinerant craftsmen when one is headed the right way. The taste of blood insinuates itself onto his tongue, between his teeth, into the tiny gashes in his lips as they parch and split from the constant coughing.

The rush of his inner power has receded to a wayward trickle, barely enough to keep him moving. Day by day, waking is harder, and still sleep is scarce to come by. He can see the bones of his hands protruding ever more sharply under his sallow skin. Yangzhouman, which he commanded fully at eighteen, flows gingerly through his meridians. When opening them, he feels like a person tangled in a thorny thicket, wincing every time the barbs catch on flesh or fabric.

The winter winds on, but he shakes more often from the cold of the poison than that of the elements. Without the horse, he would already have tipped into a river and drowned, or tumbled in the mud of the road and failed to rise.

As Qiao Wanmian promised, Bailong is a long-suffering creature. He adjusts to Li Lianhua's poor form when he grows sore and slumps in the saddle, and allows him to cling to his side even when they walk together. The horse chews patiently on his hair when he burrows into his bedroll on especially wretched mornings and thinks, What if I simply lie here until this ends?

When will it end? The symptoms multiply, but no conclusion comes. His sense of taste is almost gone, and his speech stammers. His sight runs into a slurry of colours; he can make out the shapes of things, but people and places blend together, without face or feature. He lets them stream past him like water, tries to be no more remarkable to them than a drop of rain, a gust of wind.

He doesn't know if he should be covering his trail. He takes what precautions he can, anyway.

He sleeps in cheap inn rooms or pavilions scattered along the roads, on the sides of bridges or in the lee of trees. Some days pass in a haze as his mind whips itself into a froth of past and present; his dreams are now more vivid than the world to which his senses barely cling. Only there, other people come to him clear and whole, their faces carved with love and anger and accusation. He'd rather that they melt away with the rest.

Sooner or later, hunger and thirst still drive him onto his feet. Day after day, he drags himself up, cycles his qi to soothe his unwilling body and his cramping hands, and breaks camp. The road is always there.

And always, he goes north.

Two days past a water town nestled in a broad bend of the Yangtze itself, he's brought awake by the snap of a branch in the undergrowth. It's very early, the sky barely tinted with lighter blue. The stretch of woods seemed peaceful as he lay down, with little sign of human passage. He still sleeps with his dwindling money tucked under his clothes, of course.

Bailong huffs on his tether, his head up, his ears flicking.

There are only two or three men, Li Lianhua thinks later. Haggard, reckless men, without true skill with the weapons that they clutch as they converge on him. As gaunt and thin as he is himself, the horse is a tempting target. So are his saddle bags, even if they hang near empty.

Li Lianhua rolls away from the first staff blow that sweeps through his blankets, and the man ends up entangling himself in them. Up on his feet, he feels grasping hands at his back a heartbeat too late. The second attacker bends his wrist to force him onto his knees. With his free hand, he drags the man forward over his shoulder and slams him into the layer of dead leaves, where his head cracks on a fortuitously located rock.

He does not stand up again. Li Lianhua, however, doubles over into a coughing fit at the effort of throwing him. Through the spasming pain in his lungs, it takes Li Lianhua a moment to understand that the blood on his clothes is welling from lower than his mouth.

The blade stuck in his ribs is stemming most of the dark red stream. Bailong whinnies, high and alarmed, as he dances away from the man that stabbed Li Lianhua. Darkness creeps around the edges of his vision—not a blurry spell, but a fainting one.

All he'd need to do would be to pull out the knife. Let the wound do the work his body refuses to finish.

Is this how you go, Li Xiangyi? The severe voice is not his own. It is one that harrows him in the sleepless hours of the night. You, an immortal among swordsmen? Struck down by a nameless robber, bleeding out in the woods?

Bile and blood fill his mouth even as something else wafts through the shrivelled channels of his body. Something crisp and clear and potent, pushing merciless strength into his limbs.

A shape moves in front of him. One of the men, trying to grab Bailong's halter as he rears in aggravation. Struggling to his feet, Li Lianhua calls for the horse.

Away. He has to get away. Bailong is not saddled, but Li Xiangyi learned to ride on Yunyin Mountain, on steep, wooded slopes and the hairpin twists of gorge paths. Foregoing saddle and reins was a dare between brothers, or a secret test for himself.

A fistful of the horse's mane in his fingers. He shoves at the nearest attacker, and in that fracturing instant as the man reels back, he drags himself astride.

Pain bursts in his ribs like a bolt of lightning. The blade grates against bone. He teeters, the agony eating through his consciousness. If he faints, he'll fall. If he falls, he'll die.

"No," he gasps, "no, no—"

It is the horror that comes to his aid, cuts through the haze, makes his body obey for a moment longer. His knees clench into Bailong's flanks.

As if compelled by the same mortal fear, the horse bolts, leaf and loam flying from his hooves. They gallop away through the dusky underwood, and Li Lianhua grips onto one serrated, searing thought: Not like this. Not like this.

*

The horse is still moving under him. Behind his leaden eyelids, twilight softens into dawn.

His left hand clutches on to Bailong's mane. His right is pressed weakly to the wound between his ribs, the bleeding staunched by the harsh surge of inner power that he called forth, half on instinct.

Another morning interlaces with the one breaking around him.

He woke alone in the crimson-draped bed, the lavish decorations of the wedding chamber fluttering in an errant draught. The shadows still lay thick in the corners of the chamber, but soon it would be light. They couldn't risk staying put for much longer.

Di Feisheng was sat on the floor with his back to the bed frame. He turned his head up at Li Lianhua's movement. You're awake. Good. Give me your wrist.

With a grumble for the sake of form, Li Lianhua yielded his hand. Di Feisheng cupped a palm under his, more delicately than the pulse-taking warranted. The years had worn away Li Lianhua's sword calluses, but their siblings still roughened Di Feisheng's palm.

How is it, Lao Di? he quipped, swallowing against the feeling of Di Feisheng cradling his hand. In your astute opinion, am I fit to make our escape?

I will find Jiao Liqiao before we go. I'm not leaving her alive. Di Feisheng's eyes were fixed on the pallid inside of Li Lianhua's wrist. I'm not letting you die, either.

Li Lianhua made a face. Di Feisheng would insist on that—on getting a rematch, or on saving his life, he was no longer quite sure—until one of them breathed his last. Like the rising of the sun, that seemed a fact of the world. Something of last night pierced into the moment, like a needle through fabric, a stitch the colour of his own yearning.

Unwittingly, Di Feisheng saved Li Lianhua from the trap of that thought. You're doing acceptably. Before we go, I'll show you something to improve your chances.

Not another pit of snakes, I hope? His levity failed to hide the tremor in his voice.

No, you fool. Di Feisheng scoffed, but kept his face canted down. The Bitterwind Poplar. If we have to fight, it'll protect you.

Now, months later, it protected him again.

It was not his own Yangzhouman that rose to his frantic command, but the raw resilience of Di Feisheng's gift. It stopped the bleeding and blocked the pain for long enough for Li Lianhua to pull out the blade and toss it into the roadside weeds.

Through the wet chill of the dawn comes a billow of woodsmoke pungent enough to stir even his blunted sense of smell. There must be habitation close by, or at least people. The sun is on his right: he's still going north. The road goes down to Yangzhou, but how far away is he, exactly?

On his journey, he has entertained the thought of blending into the masses of people that flock to the city. Along its canals and bridges, back alleys and waterfronts, he'd be nameless and rootless. One more stranger among the throng. Then, someday soon, a corpse for another, unfortunate stranger to find, while his souls slipped free at last.

The trees fall away as Bailong canters on. Li Lianhua can mostly tell this change by the gusting wind that tugs at his blood-spattered robes. His blankets, his heavy fur cloak—most of what he had is gone now. There's only him and the horse.

And he is starting to burn up like the last coil of a candle wick once the tallow is gone. The flicker of his life is filmy and erratic, fuelled only by the borrowed strength of the Bitterwind Poplar.

Splashes of colour rise up against the dun shade of the road. Tents, he gauges, to go with the scent of a cookfire. Bailong slows towards a walk, blowing roughly with exertion, as the first human voices reach Li Lianhua's ears.

An encampment. Too small and disorganised to be military. Company to the men he fled from? The sound of children scuffling and shouting at a game speaks against that. Whoever these travellers are, they've brought their families with them.

The road will carry him straight to the tents. They're set up openly, with carts surrounding them. Under the smoke, he can smell hay and manure—beasts of burden, then, somewhere close. If he were still travelling with the Lotus Tower, he might stop for a group like this, to ply his trade and exchange news.

And if you do not stop, says the voice that sounds too much like Di Feisheng, they'll collect your cooling corpse from the next ditch between here and the city when they pass. If their hearts are that soft.

I don't think I have a choice, Lao Di. Even thinking that is a tremendous effort. Not if I want to—

To live? Another voice, younger and higher, but spun from the same memories, hitching with determination and heartbreak. As long as you're alive, there's something you can do. Only the dead have no choices left.

Straining for any dreg of control, he pushes his inner power into motion. It swirls through him like a molten stream of iron, shredding as much as it bolsters. The fog recedes from his eyes and his mind, and his trembling muscles ease for another precious moment.

"Hey!" someone calls out. He spots the woman, a basket at her round hip, waving her free arm industriously. "You all right?"

Go to them. Is that his own thought, or a voice he has tried to bury, rising again as his own resolve splinters? Go. Choose, while you can. Please.

With a stifled rasp of pain, Li Lianhua draws himself upright. He steers the foaming horse towards the tents.

Chapter Text

Li Lianhua dreams his way into Yangzhou.

The covered cart where he lies rumbles along the imperial road. Sacks of vegetables and empty wine jars in their crates keep him company. The members of the caravan move around him: names and faces that don't stick to his rambling mind, even when his senses briefly return. Hands to offer him tea and soup, to tear his flatbread into chunks and mix it in the broth so his recalcitrant jaws can chew through it. Arms to brace him so he can huddle close to the fire with the dogs and children. He tells no one that the cold never leaves him anymore.

When he toppled from Bailong's back in the middle of the encampment, someone caught him. One of the women—a travelling midwife, he's since gathered—sewed up the wound in his side and made a compress of herbs for it. The blade missed his lung, she told him, almost cheerful.

In reply, he gasped that he'd make offerings on her behalf to Guanyin, or whichever god or bodhisattva she best liked, at the next temple they passed. Then, thankfully, he fainted dead away.

He woke up on a grass-woven mat under mismatched blankets. A boy brought him a bowl of buckwheat porridge that he ate like a starveling. A mercy from Heaven, it seems, fell into his path. The improbable solace of people that still have enough to share.

The caravan is going to Yangzhou. When their nominal leader—a man with a steady voice and a permanent cinch of worry between his brows—asked for his destination, he mumbled something about distant kin in the city. He wouldn't trouble them past the gates.

He has few things of value left. Shockingly enough, no one seems to have touched the pouches where he stowed his money, but his strings of cash are light. The only other recompense he might offer is Bailong, now plodding behind the cart like a common pack donkey. As the ox walks, they're still days from the city.

In the creaking cart, Li Lianhua sleeps through those winter days. His dreams unfold like the myriad petals of a chrysanthemum flower.

Sometimes, he's back at the Sigu Sect in its days of glory. The people in the ornate halls bow as he passes, and their faces scatter into dust before he recognises them. As he moves through the linked courtyards, each opens onto a fierce fight, a grand gathering, a negotiation whose outcome he never sees.

Other nights—or days, as his body barely discerns between them—he wanders the roads of the jianghu or the sweeping ridges of Yunyin Mountain. Here glitters the lake where he used to train with his master; there blow the cherry trees under which he first kissed Qiao Wanmian. A thousand places, strange and familiar. The length of his life, back and forth.

And sometimes, when the poison curls an icy fist in his belly and he shivers under the covers, he dreams of summer.

He walks through a whispering woodland. Across his path, Hulijing darts in and out of sight. The ground bursts with flowers in her wake: palm-sized, twin-stemmed, white veined with red. His feet crush the flowers, but they cling to his soles, the ragged petals unfurling into new, unmarred blossoms until they rush forth like a river in flood.

Borne on that strange current, he comes to a glade where the branches hang in dense curtains. Under them, he glimpses a blue sleeve spread in the grass, a silent silhouette leaned against a tree. Sleep has smoothed out Fang Duobing's brow, his head laid in Di Feisheng's lap. Di Feisheng has his hand on Fang Duobing's shoulder, still and almost gentle, but his face is turned away. Li Lianhua can't tell if he's awake.

In their repose, they're tranquil and beautiful, swathed in the impossible blossoms that might've saved Li Lianhua's life. Instead, the wangchuan flower saved the life of Fang Xiaobao. His friend, his protector, his confidant. His hope for a future he'll never see.

His throat fills with bitter warmth. It stifles any words he might speak. The flowers twine around his ankles. If he could only call out—surely Di Feisheng heard his approach. Surely, any moment now, he'll stir.

Turn around, Li Lianhua tries to say, but it comes out as a laboured gasp. Flower stems run up his legs, wrapping his wrists in supple green shackles.

He can't get his breath back. Di Feisheng raises his head, but slowly, too slowly.

Li Lianhua knows what he'd see in that face. He could bear the anger and scorn, but that might not be all. Di Feisheng once looked at him with trust and friendship, with a pensive tenderness that set his heart to racing.

Before Di Feisheng can turn his way—if he was ever going to—a flower opens against Li Lianhua's cheek, soft as a caress. A cloying, medicinal smell rushes into his lungs.

*

Li Lianhua heaves awake. Blood and saliva fill his mouth. Folded in his sleeve is a stained piece of cloth; he spits into it, then wipes his face. The fluid he coughed up is red.

There's movement across the low-burning campfire. Someone presses a cup of water into his hand, and he drinks shakily.

The woman reclaims the cup. In the fire's glow, he can just make out an old burn scar across her palm, the flesh faintly pitted and ruddy. Deeper under her skin, a murmur of power.

Before his sense of decorum can cut in, Li Lianhua grabs her wrist. A liminal thread of his own Yangzhouman is mixed into her dull, unremarkable qi. He's touched her before. "Wait. Wait." The strain of recalling is immense now, but it pushes through the mist of his dream. "Don't—don't I know you? Your hand."

She doesn't flinch at the contact. "You dressed my hand when we first met, Physician Li. You said I'd carve printing blocks again yet."

Li Lianhua hikes himself up to sit. The woman kneeling next to him is about his age, middling tall and angular in feature. Her mouth is tight against a smile, a mischievous spark that feels familiar. It's her hands that clinch the puzzle into place: long fingers, knobby knuckles, narrow nails that she'd pick at when bored or nervous.

"You said you burned it on a pot."

The pieces fall in. It was early autumn six years ago, or maybe seven. He was sat outside a teahouse, the last customer of the evening, when someone threw themself into a chair at the next table over, huffing in the way one does when tears are coming and it's just intolerable to cry.

"I did burn it on a pot," she says. "You didn't give Elder Ji your name, so I thought I'd keep it to myself for now."

He muttered an old alias to the caravan leader. He can't be Li Lianhua here, where he still runs the risk of someone in unwise pursuit. But this woman knows him, well enough to pick up on his ruse. "Clever," he manages. "I'm much obliged, Madam Song."

"Just Kang Xihui, now. Master Song is five years dead."

"My condolences," he says, because it's what you say, and reads from her curt nod that the matter of her erstwhile husband is outside this conversation. "I take it you're taking your trade to the villages."

"I have a shop in Yangzhou now, but yes. My neighbour and I travel together, for safety. She stitched your wound."

"My debt to you is mounting fast, I see." He feels askew, like a wheel about to spring from its axle. He spent ten years on the roads of Jiangnan; the people he met run into the hundreds. Most of them were brief encounters, soon forgotten, and that was how he preferred it.

He does remember Kang Xihui, though. She left an impression strong enough that his faltering mind has preserved it. Her blistered hand, her barely contained fury. The way she thought, swift and nimble, leaping like a carp between ideas. The other ways they matched each other.

"We can discuss what's owed when you're not on the brink of the netherworld." Her smile widens.

I already had one foot on Naihe Bridge, even before I was stabbed, he doesn't say. The injury suffices to explain his sorry state. "I just need to get to Yangzhou."

So he can... vanish, no? The wilderness along the road didn't take him. Perhaps the city will be kinder.

"Of course. So you can find your family."

Li Lianhua averts his eyes, as if merely looking at her would bore him deeper into her memory. He could've let his wound be fatal. It would've been quick, as those things go, a final slide into oblivion.

"Thank you for the water," he says. "It's late; we should both sleep now."

Her smile tilts, and he can't decide if it is towards suspicion or lenience. She pours him another cup and leaves it by his bed before she goes.

*

That, more or less, is how he ends up sheltering in a woodcarver's shop in Yangzhou.

Kang Xihui, known on her street as Widow Song, carves woodblocks for a local printer, and other tools and knickknacks besides. Her burned right hand is indeed still deft on the chisel and knife. She sends Bailong to be stabled with a neighbour, and puts Li Lianhua up in a little room that smells of wood dust and mulberry paper. The brazier doesn't smoke, and the quilts are so warm that he sinks between them and sleeps from the evening watch to the next afternoon.

When he wakes, sore, but with the soothed, soft clarity that comes from genuine rest, he bites into his palm so he wouldn't scream.

His injury stings, but the hurt is clean, rather than the swollen ache of inflammation. The room is quiet, the sunlight muted by the blinds. The city sounds seem far away. If he closed his eyes, he could almost be back in the Lotus Tower: the sun sails snapping in the wind, Hulijing barking her studied opinion as Fang Duobing idly practised his flute, Di Feisheng joining the dog in complaining about the noise. Music, Fang Duobing would retort, music, you absolute churl, not that you would know—

Li Lianhua cannot. He must not. That comfort is lost to him. He walked away from it while he still could, so it'd stay like that: sweet and without blemish, untouchable as a dream.

Still lying down, he makes himself circulate his inner power. When his meridians open without resistance, his dwindling qi rising to his will more smoothly than in a long time, even that feels like a blow.

He did not die. The wound is mending, quickened by the Bitterwind Poplar still in his body, and he's letting it happen.

What stopped him, when he was already facing his end? Fear, perhaps, an elemental terror of the unknown? Or his stupid, unbending pride—Li Xiangyi's pride, which Li Lianhua had already forsworn?

A swordsman would've stood firm. Li Lianhua shed the final dregs of that self when Shaoshi shattered in his hands. Once again, the only thing left is him. Worn thin and endlessly tangled, so even he can no longer unravel his own strands.

Cursing every movement that pulls on his stitches, he gets to his feet, once again.

*

Step by step, he learns the boundaries of the unassuming house. The workshop fills the front, the living quarters the back. Kang Xihui tells her neighbours that Li Lianhua was a sworn brother to her own elder brother, who joined the imperial army and was lost on a far border years ago. She's honour-bound, then, to give him succour.

She spins this poignant fiction with such pragmatism that Li Lianhua decides not to question it. The brother is real, he learns, inspecting the spirit tablets in her household shrine. There are just three more: mother, father, husband.

In this, too, they're almost the same. He had his shifu and shiniang, as well as a promise of marriage, even if it never came to fruition. An elder brother that vanished for a decade.

"I'm the last of my line," Kang Xihui says, noting his curiosity. She's going through a basket of old garments to find him a change of clothes. "Between you and me, Li Lianhua, it isn't so bad. What about the family you were looking for?"

Mobile enough today to sit in her kitchen, he set his fingertips against his steaming tea cup until it sears. "There... was a brother. I found him in the end."

"Here in Yangzhou? When did you get out of the house?"

Li Lianhua blinks. His thoughts shift and sway these days, like a stack of books piled too high. He told her he was looking for his kin in the city. Just now, her question gouged deeper, all the way into the well of emotions he'd rather fill with rubble.

"No," he says softly. "Before. He's gone now."

It's a miracle of some sort she hasn't yet brought up another, painfully obvious topic: I heard a curious rumour. It said that Li Xiangyi, hero of the Sigu Sect, was living as a travelling doctor, and he came out of hiding to foil a coup in the capital. It was all instigated by his martial brother.

If she does, he'll navigate that shambles somehow. The gossip must've run the length of the coast by now.

To his relief, Kang Xihui shrugs, letting the matter drop. "You remember that it's New Year soon, yes?"

Even in his convalescence, he's noticed. The artisan quarter around the shop hums with both business and the rush of the residents to clean and fix and decorate. People flow into the city through the nearby gates and the riverside piers.

Kang Xihui's plans for the holiday involve neighbours and friends. Li Lianhua waves away any suggestion that she excuse herself from the festivities for his sake: he is moody, absent-minded company even in his most charming moments, and she's already bent her routines to accommodate him.

He does his best to be unobtrusive. It may not come naturally, but the way he still tires at the slightest effort certainly helps. While his injury mends, the bicha is still undoing him, in its gradual, unforgiving spiral.

Between his stints of sleep, staring as the shadows move across the ceiling, he tells himself: When I'm healed, when I can walk, I'll leave. I won't make her tend to my corpse, either.

The thought is a morbid solace in its familiarity. It's the same tactic he's relied on time and again: with his shiniang, with Qiao Wanmian and the Sigu Sect, with... with Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng. The idea used to be a keen blade, the incision neat and swift. When the time came, he'd cut himself from the few ties that still bound him, and they'd all go free.

It seems he can no longer whet it to that old sharpness.

*

Outside, lanterns are hung along the street and red paper charms frame the doorways and windows. New Year arrives, flooding the city with people and music and light. Through the noise of the celebrations, Li Lianhua tosses and turns in his bed.

This time, Yunyin Mountain rises through the mists. Memory slides into dream slides into memory.

His new boots—his shixiong's boots, dug out of storage and re-soled for his growing feet—crunch through the snow in the yard. Steam wafts from the kitchen as he inches inside, slopping water from the bucket he's carrying.

His shiniang makes a tch of disapproval. "Careful with that! Someone's going to slip and crack their head, and then where will we be?"

With all the care of a ten-year-old excited for something else entirely, he hastily mops up the spill and then goes to the table. His mother is flattening tangyuan dough into circles, round as the full moon. She scoops up spoonfuls of filling, each a different colour: lotus seed, black sesame, the red bean that he'd often eat straight from the bowl, only to be rapped with her wooden spoon for his mischief.

Daringly, he dips a finger in a dollop of filling. She pinches his offending hand in her larger one, dusted with rice flour.

"You rascal!" Her ire has fondness in it. "You really are trying to spend the Lantern Festival doing penance, aren't you? If this hand comes anywhere near my tangyuan again, I'll tie it behind your back and make you do a thousand forms in the snow."

He abates at once—not because he thinks she'd carry out her threat, even, but because nothing can thwart tonight. He's been waiting for days, sneaking glances at the downward path. His shixiong went down the mountain in the summer, and only last week, a letter came, saying Shan Gudao would return for the new year. Li Xiangyi has carried the letter tucked in his robes like a treasure ever since.

After tonight, New Year will be over. Only the servants, on errands to and from the village, have come up the path. All his watching and waiting has failed to guide his brother home. It's been seven months, and he's counted every day.

Licking the filling he managed to swipe from his finger, he sinks down to sit against a table leg. "Shiniang?" he says. "What if shixiong won't come?"

"He wrote that he would, right?" A tinge of doubt in her words. Sometimes Li Xiangyi has a feeling he cannot really put into words but that lives deep inside him. He knows his parents care for him and his brother both, but something is different about the way they treat Shan Gudao. He's older, and bears responsibilities Li Xiangyi won't yet be given.

That being said, he should've kept his fear to himself. It's out now, though, and the kitchen is warm and fragrant around him. "He did. But the jianghu is so big, and he has no one with him."

His shiniang shakes her head. "I wonder who could truly watch over your brother."

"I could!" He raises his fist. "If you'd just let me go with him!"

"Oh, child." Wisps of hair have escaped from her kerchief. They fall in streaks of grey, rather than their usual thick black. "That heart of yours. That love will bring you to grief one day yet."

She looks older, suddenly, in the light leaking from the stove hatch. The shadows paint grooves around her eyes, and her shoulders stoop, her body hunching over her work.

What does she mean? He's already a better fighter than his shixiong, though sometimes that truth is like gripping a thorn bush barehanded. If he only could ride down the mountain, he could fight together with Shan Gudao, and meet the many people of the jianghu, sword-saints and evildoers alike.

That is what brothers do. Stay true to each other, guard each other's backs.

There's a gap between the floorboards. Idly he wiggles his fingers into it, to see how deep they can go, but then his mother continues.

"The heart is not a mirror, Xiangyi." Her voice warbles oddly. "It won't simply reflect back what you show to it, however you try."

He flinches as a splinter burrows into the tender inside of his finger. Blood beads around the puncture.

Above him, his shiniang speaks on. "The heart is not a mirror. It's a still pool through which a current runs unseen. You can never know how the hearts of other people move."

Around him, the floorboards shudder. Great angry slashes appear in them, gouged in fury by an invisible tool.

Li Xiangyi, they spell out, in rough, jagged strokes. Li Xiangyi, Li Xiangyi, Li Xiangyi, and each time, a final cut strikes out his name, rends it into splinters.

"Go now," says his shiniang. "Go and see where your brother is."

Li Xiangyi shrinks back against the table, frantically looking up towards her.

She's gone. The fire sputters out, plunging the kitchen in darkness. He gropes for his footings. After a few clumsy steps, he shoves the door open to the glassy winter light.

Instead of the familiar yard, a path begins right outside the door. Narrow and seldom trod, it curves through sparse trees. He knows what lies at the other end: a clearing at the foot of Yunyin Mountain, with an austere headstone and a table for offerings.

It should not. Not yet. Not on that festival night he waited for his brother to come home.

It does now. Years later, when he crept around his old home like a thief in the night, to sit a useless vigil at his shifu's grave.

Li Lianhua sets his feet—his aching, poison-eaten feet—onto the path. As he walks, his name is slashed into the dirt and struck out, again and again. Li Xiangyi, Li Xiangyi. The horror in his heart urges him to run; his traitorous body makes him hobble. He catches himself on tree trunks, leaving stains from his bleeding hand.

He knows what he'll find. He cannot stop it; he never saw it happen. Still he staggers forward in a vain attempt to change the outcome.

No headstone greets him on the shallow rise in the forest floor. The ground is torn open by three gaping graves, the earth still black and damp around them.

Not black, but red. The rich red of the great veins that will, when ruptured, bring death in a matter of moments. A crimson pool in the dirt seeps into the gouges of his name that fill the path, drips down into the grave in the middle.

His own voice speaks like the sound of a wind he can't feel: We'll lie beside you, one on your left, the other on your right. We'll keep you company, like when we were young.

It'd take a step, maybe two, for him to see to the bottom of the graves. He never saw the body of his master. He was not there to give it proper burial rites, like a son should. He only found the headstone, years old by the time he first came to visit.

Someone seizes the back of his neck, cutting off his air. He's shoved forward a step before he can brace, even as fingers press into his windpipe. Impotent rage flashes in him, but the grip is too strong for him to fight.

"Shall I show you, Xiangyi?" Shan Gudao says. "The thing you never saw, for all your insight and intelligence. I was right under your nose and you never even suspected."

His vision smears. His knees buckle. The darkness will be a mercy, when it comes, but the grip bears him down towards the mouth of the grave. His eyes will not close.

"Look," says his shixiong, and it's almost warm, almost loving. "Look, little brother, at what you wrought."

He lands on his hands and knees in the blood-soaked dirt, and the grave opens to swallow him.

*

Li Lianhua kicks away the entangling blankets. The room is too close, too dark: he needs to breathe. Yanking a borrowed surcoat around his shoulders, he stumbles into the yard shared between the nearest houses. His pulse beats a frenetic tattoo, even as he gulps in his fill of the night air.

A dream, he tells himself. A dream. Nothing more. You're awake now.

His sight is blurry, as it mostly is these days. The lanterns sprinkled around give enough light that he can make out the shapes of things: the wellhouse, the chicken coop, the corner of the stable. It still feels strange that he can barely smell the animals.

No one is about. Everyone is either out on the streets, enjoying the lack of a curfew and the plenty of the market stalls, or gathered around family tables laid with delicacies of the Lantern Festival. It's a time for renewals and reunions, but his mind is wound up in the past, in things he can't undo.

Somewhere nearby, people are releasing floating lanterns. Their shining motes cross the slice of night sky between the buildings. As a child, he used to send up lanterns fairly laden with wishes: Let me make shifu and shiniang proud. Let my arm heal soon, so I can spar again. Let me go out into the wide world with shixiong this year.

What hopes would he hang on one now? There will be no new year for him. His hands shake on the stable door.

A grey phantom in the gloom, Bailong stirs as Li Lianhua stops by the stall. Turning his head into his trembling grasp, the horse blows warm air through his nostrils. His mane is neat and brushed, his coat smooth. Li Lianhua notes those things as he would've with Hulijing, to be sure that she was healthy and well.

It was with her that he'd sit when something weighed on him. Even after Fang Duobing inserted himself into his life, sticking like an overexuberant burr, he was hesitant to open any part of himself. Too used to his solitude. Too aware of the secrets covered by a paper-thin veneer, kept intact only by his mounting lies.

The dog couldn't betray what Li Lianhua whispered to her. She didn't tattle if he confessed his ambivalence, his puzzlement, his barbed longing.

The heart is not a mirror. If he'd known Shan Gudao's heart, could things have been different? Could he have mended the distance between them before it tore into an uncrossable rift? Saved their master's life?

And the most self-involved, most damning question: how did he not see? His shixiong caught him unawares, wide open. For ten years, he prided himself on being the sly schemer, the canny observer, and still Shan Gudao had him fooled until it was almost too late.

For ten years, he lived as a travelling doctor, often humble in circumstance. In the meantime, Shan Gudao became the head of the Wansheng Clan, commanding both talented warriors and great influence in the wulin. All that Li Xiangyi once had, Shan Gudao achieved.

All except a forgotten lineage that Li Lianhua didn't even know he carried, that doesn't feel real even now. His blood family is long dead. Gone without a shadow. What did his shixiong truly hunger for: the glory of royal blood or the surety that he belonged to something, to someone?

What's done is done. Everyone Li Lianhua could ask is beyond his reach: the dead owe no answers, and the living he left behind.

Expectantly, Bailong tugs at his sleeve. "I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I have nothing for you."

Oh, he is pathetic. The blow of it is blunted, lacking the force it might once have had. He fled a nightmare to the only creature he could find that's fully benevolent to him. The only thing the horse wants from him is a wedge of apple or a gentle touch. If only it were so straightforward with people.

He can't recall the last time someone held him. A memory should be there—the smell of curing firewood, the aroma of too-expensive wine, the weight of hands on his shoulders—but it unravels. He was cold, and then he was not.

He puts his cheek against Bailong's neck. Tears prick his eyes; he has little reason to keep them back. The horse stands still, breathing steadily, until a clatter from outside startles them both.

Composing himself, wiping his cheeks on his sleeve, Li Lianhua goes to look.

It's only Kang Xihui, carrying a basket and a lit lantern. She's wearing bright clothes, clearly finer than her everyday attire. "There you are. Couldn't sleep with all the ruckus?"

"I wanted some air." Li Lianhua is glad of the darkness. It may mask how rattled he must look. Not that Kang Xihui, in particular, hasn't seen him worse than this. Injury and sickness spare no one's dignity. "Shouldn't you be out in all the ruckus, for that matter?"

"I'm going. I brought you—" She tarries. "Here. It's the Lantern Festival. You should have a piece of it too."

She puts down the lantern, then lifts the basket lid. It contains a bowl of delicate rice balls, floating in broth. Fresh tangyuan, made for the festival night, to be eaten in hope of reunion and family unity.

For a blink, he's torn between smashing the bowl on the ground and weeping with sudden, horrible gratitude.

"I remembered you liked red bean," she says. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," he lies, folding into a too-formal bow to conceal his face. "I dare not accept this. It's too much."

They are different women at different times, but he's abruptly buffeted by memory: Qiao Wanmian, the last kindly, familiar face he saw before coming across Kang Xihui. As the last thing she did for him, a-Mian, too, held out a gift he at first wanted to refuse. It was not pity but compassion that moved her.

"You have an interesting idea of what's too much, Li Lianhua." Kang Xihui covers the bowl again. "I'll be back by morning. Rest well tonight."

Her hand hovers above his bowed shoulder. They speak as friends, but she's a commoner, not a woman of the jianghu. Her sense of propriety is wound tighter than it was when they were younger. She seldom touches him casually, and he sees the wisdom in her restraint.

If she lays a hand on him in sympathy now, he might break. So he rights himself and turns his mouth into the smallest of smiles. After a shivering moment, it holds. "Be safe and be joyful. If you'll do that, I'll dare this much."

With perilous flair, he raises the basket. The earthenware bowl clinks, but he doesn't think it spills.

She nods, apparently satisfied. "Eat them while they're hot. I'll hang the lantern by your window."

After she is gone, as the lantern spreads dim golden light in his room, he picks up the bowl of tangyuan. The little rice balls swirl around his stirring spoon.

When he finally lifts the spoon, they've cooled most of the way. The red bean filling is still rich and lovely, even to his blunted senses. He eats the tangyuan one by one, chewing and swallowing more than only their sweetness, with reluctant but stubborn will.

The year has turned. He is still here.

Chapter Text

Near the end of winter, the day comes when Kang Xihui's neighbour, Madam Wen the midwife, picks the stitches from Li Lianhua's side and declares him hale in that regard. He is dreadfully skinny, though, and it's a wonder his coughing doesn't keep a-Hui up at night.

Bringing his wits to bear, Li Lianhua leaps every tripwire she sets in her bustling concern. Truly her herbal salves and healing soups are to thank for his swift recovery. His lungs are weak from old illness and the dry season, but spring is right around the corner. The lilting falsehoods finally turn her aside.

Later, sitting on his bed with only a light bandage to cover the wound, he studies himself. It's a harsh accounting: his wugong is gone, his dantian scoured of essence. His joints creak as he moves and hurt as he lies still. Yet the slimmest threads of willful power hold him together. The life-giving calm of Yangzhouman is twined with the resilience of the Bitterwind Poplar.

He could, perhaps, expel the intruding qi with the Body-Cleansing Mantra. His techniques are largely still with him, drilled so deep in his youth that the memories persist.

"What would you say, Lao Di?" Li Lianhua cranes his head; the ceiling is a haze. "If I spurned your gift in the end?"

He's tried to excise them both from his thoughts: Di Feisheng's stolid resolve and Fang Duobing's wayward hope. It's a quietly desperate effort, since neither of them will stay gone.

At the barest excuse, the questions flow: Did they get his letter? Did it convince them? Did they go to Tianji Manor, or to some Jinyuan Alliance safehouse remaining to Di Feisheng? Has the imperial court left them in peace?

Are they together in the first place? Maybe they've tired of each other, Di Feisheng scorning Fang Duobing's naivete and impetuous passion, Fang Duobing fed up with his rigidity and aloofness in turn. Li Lianhua can see the places where they'd clash, as well as the ones where they'd fit together.

He has no idea what's befallen them, and no real way to find out. He might be fit to leave the house now, but asking around would draw attention to himself that he'd rather avoid.

Sighing, he stretches out on his back. His meridians thrum so slightly he might as well be an ordinary person, one that never cultivated their qi.

"I know what you'd say, of course," he tells his imagined company. Picturing Di Feisheng's scowl remains easy, at least. "That I broke my promise—the one I never said yes to, if you look closely. That I'm your—That you have no other equal, which Fang Xiaobao will prove wrong if you only give him a few years. You never were a patient man, were you?"

Was he not, indeed? Di Feisheng sought Li Lianhua out after a decade, as if the intervening years meant nothing. As if they could pick up where they'd left off, after their disastrous battle, after one sect broke up and the other went to ground to bide its time.

That sounds like patience. Li Lianhua might have to give Di Feisheng that.

Now he is definitely not excising Lao Di, though. Another remedy is needed. Madam Wen left him a sleeping draught he could take if the wound still troubled him.

He makes the draught on his tea brazier—no need to bother Kang Xihui, who just opened her shop again after the festival period. He's slept so much he's damned near sick of it, but it'll muffle his mind.

So he hopes, in any case.

*

Again, the summertime woods enfold him.

Lush ferns trail the damp of recent rain against his ankles. The air feels verdant and easy to breathe. From farther away comes the sound of a flute, played with more enthusiasm than finesse.

He's heard this tune before, in this same frustrating, endearing rendition. It used to echo in the Lotus Tower, sometimes accompanied by a-Fei's put-upon cursing. The problem, Li Lianhua would opine sagely, was not so much the instrument—a fetching flute of green jade he'd found at a market—as it was the player, but he, too, had some promise.

The snapped halves of that flute should still be stashed in a drawer in his old house. No sound should come from it, inexpert or otherwise.

His heart leaping, Li Lianhua breaks into a run. Willow leaves whisk over his shoulders. He baulks at a glade of red blossoms, then realises they're only common woodland flowers, canting towards an unseen sun.

A path unwinds under his feet, as if called up by his need. If he weren't suddenly in a rush, driven by a wrenching urgency, he'd wonder at the lightness of his own stride. Just as he ducks under a low-hanging branch, the music ceases.

Something like fear rakes through him. A fleeting terror, drowned out as he hears voices speaking.

"Still atrocious," Di Feisheng says, but his tone is mellow. "Much like your swordplay, at that."

"Today it's my music, tomorrow it'll be my sense of dress that fails to meet your impossible demands." Fang Duobing laughs merrily. "I think what you really enjoy is criticising me."

Barely hidden, Li Lianhua holds his breath. Misty light lances down into the clearing. They're seated on a mossy log, half sunken into the grass. Di Feisheng's shoulder is propped against the roots of the fallen tree. Fang Duobing sits at a right angle to him, his ankles crossed. The flute, undamaged, is tucked into his sash.

"Only one without flaws can call himself a master." Di Feisheng shrugs, and Li Lianhua realises what's nagging his eye about his figure: his dao is nowhere to be seen. He seems at his ease, turned towards Fang Duobing.

"What do you even know about music?" Fang Duobing says. "How to strangle someone with a pipa string, I suppose."

"If need arises." Li Lianhua could swear Di Feisheng chuckles. "It's a simple thing. The same with music, or wine, or men. When something is pleasing, I know that."

There, the moment changes.

Fang Duobing slides his hand into Di Feisheng's hair, cradling his head. His eyes go soft and studying, like he hasn't done this before but has contemplated it, maybe at great length. Li Lianhua has a poor view of Di Feisheng's face, but he sees the way his lips part and he tilts into Fang Duobing's touch.

Li Lianhua watches, choked and spellbound, as Fang Duobing leans in—and that seems right, too, his brave Xiaobao reaching out first, and a-Fei letting desire and curiosity crack his facade.

None of this is for him. The knowledge is ice in his veins. Those two are alone in the sheltering woods, enthralled by one another, and he should go before they become wise to his trespass.

This was what he wanted, was it not? For the two people he most cared for to find each other, to stand together, to—

A voice rings out through his dream. An insistent, living sound, wresting him out of slumber.

*

Barely on this side of consciousness, Li Lianhua freezes.

"Please. Look again," says the voice, beyond familiar, carrying across the little hallway that separates the shop from the back of the house. "I was told there was someone staying nearby that matches this portrait. He—he might be very sick, though."

That brings him instantly, brutally awake. His gasp is barely smothered into the palm he clamps on his mouth, nails scoring his cheek. The door to his room is ajar, and so must the shop door be: enough for sound to travel.

"I'm very sorry, young master." A wire of tension coils through Kang Xihui's tone. "I don't know this man."

"I also heard you had someone staying with you, Madam Song. Someone that's barely been seen outside your house. A friend of your family?"

It's curious—or it would be, if it weren't so awful—to hear the shift in Fang Duobing. He goes from entreaty to sharp appraisal in the space of a sentence, and Li Lianhua knows where he learned that swift pivot.

"A comrade to my deceased brother. Surely you, as a man of the jianghu, know the importance of such bonds." Even as dread suffuses him, Li Lianhua has to applaud Kang Xihui's temerity. There's an armed man of noble birth in her shop, and she's doing her best to run interference.

Fang Duobing is in her shop. If Di Feisheng is anywhere near, this will be over in moments. His cultivation still rather fledgling, Fang Duobing may yet miss the sense of Li Lianhua's weakened neili, but Di Feisheng will not.

Curse them both. Curse Fang Duobing above all, and his evident fool's quest to find Li Lianhua. How did he even come to Yangzhou? How far has he ridden in his search?

As furtively as he can, Li Lianhua rises from the bed. Right now he should worry about himself. There is nothing of him in the room, if he just leaves it vacant. He came here with the clothes on his back and little else. He grabs his zhongyi top, tying the laces with unsteady fingers.

Get dressed. Go. If you're not here, maybe she can—

"—If you know that, then you know why I'm looking for him," Fang Duobing is saying. "This is my friend. He disappeared in midwinter."

"I don't want to offend, but if he is as ill as you say, young master, have you..." Kang Xihui trails off.

"Yes, I've been to the morgues. The temples, the clinics, the slums, everywhere." Something creaks as Fang Duobing apparently leans into a counter or column. There's a brief, caught silence. Li Lianhua uses it to wrestle his feet into his boots. It feels like his body is a broken bellows, air rasping into and out of him in a meagre trickle.

His Xiaobao. Clearly alone, then, without even Di Feisheng at his back. There, two doors away, imploring a stranger for any scrap of information she may have, his desolation barely concealed.

"I'm sorry." She sounds quite contrite. "I can't help you. This is someone else."

This is also sometimes Fang Duobing's weakness when it comes to getting information from people. He has honour and a deep sense of justice; it's not in him to press or intimidate a lone woman for what she may not even know.

Very likely, his integrity is what saves Li Lianhua from discovery.

Paper rustles. "Keep it," Fang Duobing says, hushed and tight. "If you see him, or—or anyone that resembles him, send word to the Tianji Manor outpost at the western market. They'll reward you generously. I should go."

Kang Xihui mutters some parting courtesy, but his footfalls already retreat across the floor. They strike off voiceless echoes in Li Lianhua. He knows those steps: loud on the stairs of the Lotus Tower, sure beside him in alleys and corridors, taverns and courtyards, treading in time with his own.

Drawing away. Twice before, Fang Duobing walked away from him, blazing with anger, heartsick and betrayed. Every other time, it was Li Lianhua that left first. He thinks he did, anyway. Treacherous little gaps grow in his memory.

This time, Fang Duobing does not even know he's leaving. Does not know how close he came.

The shop door swings shut. Li Lianhua hears Kang Xihui slump onto her stool, gasping audibly.

In the back room, he stands, blinking hard, lungs labouring. Fang Duobing missed him by the smallest of margins. He didn't have to slink out through the yard with only half his clothes on.

His relief lasts for only a moment. Then, without warning, his knees simply give way.

He slides to the floor with a ragged sob, hunching into himself. He's wept out of self-pity and utter weariness, but these tears well from a deeper place. The loneliness he imposed on himself. The fear of his looming death that he thought he was hardened against. The terrible, fractured love whose edges cut even as he understands he never managed to shatter it.

Fang Duobing picked up its shards and put them back together. He brought it with him on his search for his lost friend, and held it out to people as proof that Li Lianhua existed, that in spite of all his efforts to break away, he was known and remembered.

He doesn't know how long he sits there, shaking silently, until the tears wear away the keenest edge of his grief.

"Oh, Xiaobao, Xiaobao," he whispers into the twilight of the room. "What shall I do with you?"

It's not the real question, and he knows that as he speaks.

*

The next morning, Li Lianhua climbs the rickety ladder in the yard, almost slipping more than once, and huddles on the shingle roof as the sun crests the horizon.

The wind is from the river delta, carrying with it the smells of kitchen fires and tanners' shops. Distant fishing boats dot the rippling surface of the river, silvered by the brilliant dawn. He hasn't seen the sunrise in weeks.

He lay awake for most of the night, waiting for the darkness to thin. For once, his thoughts came cautiously, like travellers tapping at new ice with a staff, measuring every step of the crossing. Vexing, that—usually such ruminations would drive him to seek distraction, rather than linger over them.

But somewhere in the stirring city, among the priests and merchants, servants and sailors, guardsmen and craftswomen, Fang Duobing is still looking for him. He came close enough yesterday that one word from Li Lianhua would've beckoned him. Li Lianhua could've stood and—and what? Shouted at him for wasting his time on a pointless mission. Woven a subterfuge to explain away months of absence. Thrown himself into his arms and begged for forgiveness.

He still hasn't settled on an answer. The thought won't leave him.

What shall he do about Fang Xiaobao? By inextricable extension, what shall he do with Li Lianhua?

His body clings to life because he wills it to. The intermingled strength of himself and his greatest rival—his oldest friend—has seamed his wound and shielded him from the advancing poison. That wheel can't go on turning forever, but neither can he bear to stop it.

On the street below, a passing city guard calls out the hour. The last watch of the night is ending.

With some difficulty, he hies himself down the ladder again. He's largely kept away from Kang Xihui's pantry, but he finds a jar of millet and a few eggs and coaxes the covered embers in the stove with fresh kindling. Even as his hand trembles and chopping up the chives becomes a minor exercise in frustration, it's good to be doing something.

He has the porridge simmering and hot tea in the pot by the time his hostess shuffles into the kitchen, a folded sheet of paper in her hand. She puts it aside as he pours her a cup. For a moment, they sit unspeaking.

"What do you think?" she asks. "How much would you fetch if I turned you in? It's a good likeness, that poster. That young man went to some trouble."

"He did." Li Lianhua tried to thwart Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng both from that trouble, to slip out of their lives and erase all signs of his passing. When you pull a blade fragment from a wound, the body heals, but it doesn't forget. Sometimes the sense of the lodged object remains for years, after the scars have long since dulled.

Who is the metal shard and who the wounded soldier, then, him or them?

"You could, of course." He blows on his tea. "Turn me in. I've cost you enough in food and charcoal."

"How would I be weighed in the court of King Yama if I betrayed a friend?" Kang Xihui tiptoes to get clean bowls from a shelf. "I've hardly spent my life doing good deeds."

"A few long-ago nights hardly make us friends, either."

She makes a face at him. Few people would count her beautiful: she isn't delicate like Qiao Wanmian or fresh-faced like Su Xiaoyong, but she's grounded in herself in a way that shines out as a bright, pragmatic confidence. That is still her most attractive quality. "You saved my life back then. If not with your medicine, then with your company. I've perhaps paid you back."

You saved a dying man. "That debt was paid long ago. I took your five taels of silver."

"I don't count my own life that cheap, Li Lianhua. Neither should you. Especially when you have someone that devoted to finding—" She dips a spoon in the porridge, then rolls the dollop on her tongue. "Oh. That's unusual."

"I like to experiment," he says, startled into the truth by her last-moment swerve from a much graver subject. "What do you think it needs?"

His evasion is obvious and largely in vain. As she goes to get her spices, Li Lianhua has a vivid flash of memory: Fang Xiaobao getting under foot in the kitchen in the Lotus Tower, spouting unsolicited opinions on his dishes.

Yangzhou is big and populous; Fang Duobing might still be going door to door, trawling the river for a single fish that swallowed a pearl. If the Tianji Manor trading post is involved, he might not be canvassing alone.

If one were to leave a trail, someone would follow it.

If one wished to be found, even as he is now: wan and always tired, without certainty as to how long he can hold on. A man without purpose in the world.

The search for Shan Gudao always ran as a central thread through Li Lianhua's rootless existence. Of course, there were people to help—or swindle, problems to solve, places to see. Seasons of leisure and scrambles for survival, sometimes. Still, he always remembered: before he left this life, he'd do right by his shifu and shixiong. Reunite them all on that grave mound at Yunyin Mountain.

That plan came to nothing. At least he took vengeance for Qi Mushan; he can step in front of King Yama with a clean heart on that account.

He took vengeance as was his filial duty. He smothered his love for his shixiong and did what had to be done. He put matters to rights at the Sigu Sect and watched Qiao Wanmian step into his stead, capable and courageous.

That should've been it. The ending, neatly tied off. The last flourish of a storyteller to signal the tale is over.

In his rumination Li Lianhua has let Kang Xihui season the porridge to her liking and serve it. He eats his fill slowly, as he does most things.

Soon she'll rise and open up the shop, hang the bell over the door and throw the shutters wide. He might busy himself with a chore or two, or read something from her small trove of books by the eastern window. Later, Madam Wen might come by with a piece of gossip or with her salves and remedies, and ask if he's been treating his scar.

It's a good little life that Kang Xihui has made for herself. If he had any part in it, he should be well pleased.

Listen now, Xiangyi, his master used to say. Drink with a man before you test his blade. Converse with a woman before admiring her beauty. Don't forget to live well.

The lesson took years to sink in, but he certainly tried. He tried for as long as he could. By some measure, he's still trying.

Are you? Or are you blindfolding yourself so you don't have to see what's right there?

Leave it be, Lao Di. Li Lianhua swats at nothing, very close to being fondly exasperated. Chase one away and the other appears. What would I even tell Fang Xiaobao, after leaving like I did?

Kang Xihui rises, picking up his empty bowl without asking, leaving him to ponder. He sinks into his own head often enough that she's used to it.

Even here, even now, he's leaving marks, becoming known. He's been in this house for scant weeks, and fine threads of connection already radiate from him. Fingers smudge the edges of a book; mud yields to footprints and hardens to their shape.

He can't scrub himself so raw that the imprints Fang Duobing left on him would be erased. Even if he wore down into a ghost, became the wandering spirit he so often claimed to be, some part of him would still know. That Fang Xiaobao was his friend, and that Li Lianhua thought the world of him.

That seems like a thing worth saying to him, says the part of him that sounds too much like Lao Di, if you have the spine for it.

Li Lianhua finds he has no response. The morning light falls in through the open window, silent and patient.

*

It is a wretched thing, to have no refuge from oneself.

For a while Li Lianhua tries to pretend the day is like any other. He washes the dishes with great caution; it takes him twice the time it would anyone else, but right now, idleness is poison. He teeters on a threshold and the way ahead is shrouded, even as the path he already walked is crumbling away.

He tidies up as much as he dares, still being a guest in another's house. Needlessly, he puts his quilt and pillow out to air and then, rather needfully, waters the vegetable patch, going row by row with his bucket and dipper.

Resting from that effort on the bench in the yard, he tries to focus on his reading: an indifferent tale of intrigue set during a long-ago revolution. He's fairly sure the author has made free with both events and historical figures.

That was supposed to be his due, too, right? Li Xiangyi was always fated to go down in the legends of the jianghu. A hundred years hence, historians and storytellers will argue what role the miracle-working doctor who shared his surname played in the story of the master swordsman. Were they the same man, or hero and impostor? Which of them was the real person, and which the mask and the mantle?

It was Fang Duobing that boldly claimed to know him, and then, over all his attempts to mislead and befuddle, got to know him. It was Di Feisheng that slowly turned from seeing Li Lianhua as a disgraced remnant of his old rival to looking to him as a friend. Li Lianhua, Li Xiangyi—whatever name he wore, it didn't matter. But he mattered.

If only you'd done what I told you, both of you, Li Lianhua thinks, and doesn't know if he's bitter or heartwrenchingly glad. If only you had let me go.

His eyes are heavy; he barely slept last night. The book tips from his hand and into the grass. The breeze flicks through its pages, rustling the cheap paper. 

Between one blink and the next, he slips away.

This time, he is not in the woods.

The sea surges around his ankles. Above him the evening sky is thinly overcast, the clouds spun in long trails of grey. His feet are half buried in the sand, neither warm nor cold. The shore arcs away from him to the left and right, studded with rocks like ancient teeth. A bird plunges into the water and emerges in a flash of narrow wings, a wriggling fish glinting in its beak.

He doesn't know this place. There are a thousand like it, surely, along the eastern coast.

"This is where I told you to meet me," Di Feisheng says, close by. "You never came."

Li Lianhua's gaze swings to his left. Di Feisheng is stood on the shoreline rocks, his hands clasped behind him. He faces the sea, the dimming light hiding his expression.

"I never promised I would. You only assumed."

"If you hadn't cared, you wouldn't have sent that letter." Di Feisheng's voice is flat and colourless. "You could've just gone."

"I did!" Something about that voice, its lack of blame or wrath, snaps his own strung temper. "I did just go! It was you that insisted—you two, bull-headed fools that you are! I was trying to—You were supposed to move on, not go on some mad search for me."

The waves roll in steeper swells against his shins. The wind that spurs them also whips Di Feisheng's half-loose hair back. In his stillness, he could be the carved statue of a god of war, standing sentinel over the empty shore. "Do you think a person can change their nature?"

"I didn't think you were one for philosophy, Commander Di." Something in him flares, a heat so long gone he thought it snuffed for good.

"You told me you were someone else, and no longer Li Xiangyi. Still I knew you: from the way you thought, the way you moved. If the heart of you didn't change that much in a decade, how much could Fang Duobing's change in three months? Could he give up his love for you, his faith in you, and simply stop?"

"Oh, and what do you want me to do about it?" Li Lianhua clambers onto the nearest rock, out of the swell.

"He's your disciple. He declared you his greatest confidant, his dearest friend. Why do you ask me?"

The wind is suddenly chilly, the hem of his robe dragging sodden. "Because you can bear it. Because you've gone through things that break most people, and come out unbroken."

Di Feisheng is quiet. Even the sound of the sea fades until the silence resounds in its own perfection.

I ask you because your strength keeps me alive. I ask you because you won't leave me in peace. I ask you because I need your resolve now—your spine, as you say, for what I have to do.

"Not unbroken," Di Feisheng says, soft and measured—a gentleness and a truth in one. "But alive. Only the living have choices, Li Xiangyi. Do you know yours?"

"Yes." He might only know that as he says it, but the decision has been firming under his waking mind, in the dark space where his desires simmer. "Yes, and—it's selfish. I tried to keep away from it."

"Survival is selfish." Di Feisheng crouches, his eyes fixed on the sea. "Like love is selfish. Like freedom is selfish. You have to want it to fight for it."

Di Feisheng's face is still in shadow, but Li Lianhua follows the line of his gaze: a waxing crescent moon floats among the gossamer clouds, its light glowing through them.

"All right." He sighs deeply. The air is bracing in his lungs. "If you say so, Lao Di."

Di Feisheng holds out a hand. His sword hand, shaped and honed by a lifetime of fighting. Next to it, Li Lianhua's own is strangely delicate, wasted by long ailment.

He lays his hand in Di Feisheng's palm, and an answering grip closes around it.

*

It takes Li Lianhua the rest of the day to put a plan together. His heart feels like a millstone, turning and turning, pushed by a tireless water wheel. 

That night he sleeps out of sheer exhaustion, dark and dreamless, but wakes up well before sunrise. He checks his boots and finds them still intact; he bundles up his few clothes and puts his hair up in his only guan. It's been easier to just tie it back loosely, but today is different.

In the kitchen, after they've eaten, he lays out his plan to Kang Xihui.

"I want you to wait one day," he says, "and then send someone to the Tianji Manor trading post with a tip. I'll be outside the gates by then. With any luck, I can hitch a ride with a merchant or farmer going north."

To her credit, she listens with a calm mien. "You won't take the horse?"

"I... would like for you to keep Bailong. He was a good companion to me, and he could be that to you, when you go to sell your wares in the villages." Such sentiment over an animal. Li Lianhua thinks of Hulijing and has to swallow. "If he won't be of use to you, please sell him to someone that'll treat him well."

"He's too fine a horse for an artisan, but Madam Wen is not so spry as she used to be on the road."

"Don't let the good madam hear you." He finds a smile in himself. "Speaking of whom, she told me there was a temple to Guanyin on the coast, where she used to pray as a girl? She might not hold me to that promise, but I should make offerings. Heaven has keen ears sometimes."

"It's close to a fishing village. I'll draw you a map." Kang Xihui's lips twist in unhappy contrast to his expression. "It's getting warmer, and I didn't think I'd house you forever, but..."

"I'm not getting better," he says, so she doesn't have to. "You helped me when I needed it. I have to make my own way again."

"That young man." She blinks, pensive. "I won't ask who he is to you. Will he be kind to you?"

Beyond his better judgement. He'll be furious, but he won't turn from me. He thinks. He hopes. In any case, he is set on his course, as an arrow drawn and trembling on the bowstring.

"Yes." He inhales sharply, as if stung by the truth of that. "Don't worry about me."

"Like I told you not to worry about me, when I almost lost the use of my hand?" She flexes her fingers. Today, he can smell the faint scent of the ointment she uses to keep the burn scar supple. "I did not lose my craft, but my husband certainly wanted me to. If you're going to someone, I want you to be safe."

"That's all Young Hero Fang has ever done." Li Lianhua glances away. "Keep me safe. Sometimes at great cost to himself."

From everything but the bicha. His death has not stopped hanging over him, but he's staved it off for months. He is still lucid and present, even when it strains him. While his heart and mind remain, he can't be other than who he is. He can't unmake the love that's grown from him like a field of impossible flowers, luminous and unwithering.

While his life still lasts, he wants to see Fang Duobing again. The both of them, if he only can. If Fang Duobing will lead him to Di Feisheng, as he wants to believe.

Faith seems to be all he has right now.

"Today we can still keep a fire in the stove," Kang Xihui says into his pause. With a start, Li Lianhua realises it'll be Qingming soon, and the three days of cold hearths. Winter is all but over. "I'll make you something for the road."

"Ah, but these hands can still work." He braces them on the table. "Let me help you."

She laughs. "The foodstuffs will come from my pantry. You had better."

Almost in spite of himself, he joins in her laughter.

The next day breaks cool but clear, shining blue between the rooftops as Li Lianhua climbs into the cart of a wheelwright headed to his ancestral village along the delta. His farewells are brief, but he makes them: to Madam Wen and her husband, and to Kang Xihui, last of all. She stands with her hand raised until the cart turns a corner and she vanishes from his sight.

The hood of his cloak dropped back, he watches the city creep by. The gates have just opened, and traffic thickens accordingly. Somewhere in that plenty of people, someone may see his face and remember it. The hope in that thought catches in his breast, unfamiliar but not unwelcome.

He can't be other than who he is. The knowledge aches, but he could not go straight to the Tianji Manor outpost, could not make this entirely easy for Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng. It feels inevitable, on this crisp morning, in a way that goes beyond reason, that those two are as bound together as Li Lianhua is to them.

So he did his best. He laid the trail and trusted them to follow.

Find me, he breathes out, and his air escapes, shimmering, towards the northern sky. Find me. I'm still here.

*