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“Zewu-jun,” cries the sentry on watch at the camp, when Lan Xichen returns from his latest journey to Langya. “Thank heaven you are here! Nie-zongzhu—”
Lan Xichen’s blood turns to ice in his veins. “Has he been wounded?”
He received word of another battle at the Hejian front that morning. Jin Zixuan brought him the news while he was working in the healing tents, wrist-deep in the belly of a cultivator with metal embedded in his gut-wounds: and as soon as Lan Xichen was certain that the wound was clean, and that the man would recover, he set off from Langya on horseback before taking the rest of the northward journey on Shuoyue.
“There will be wounded there, too,” he said grimly, when Jin Zixuan protested his departure. “No more of your men will die today, Jin-gongzi—but I cannot say the same for Mingjue-xiong and his people. Farewell!”
It was past sundown when he arrived at Mingjue’s camp: and from the pall that lay over the place, it was clear that the battle had not gone well. No one had troubled to raise the standard that signaled a victory in battle—and what was worse, a full half of Mingjue-xiong’s men seemed to be missing.
“We beat back the Wen by a shichen after midday—they were forced to retreat, and at least sixty of them were killed,” the sentry says dutifully, after explaining that Mingjue-xiong had suffered no hurts other than a blow to his shoulder from a spiritual chui. “Most of our shixiongdi who were unhurt have gone ahead to the old Wen camp to plant the standard there.”
“And Mingjue?”
“He is still here, Zewu-jun. He will not go until the wounded are well enough to travel; and he is waiting for you, besides.”
“Thank you,” Lan Xichen replies: and with that, he makes his way to the tent bearing Nie Mingjue’s sigil.
Within, he finds Nie Mingjue seated on the floor, his braids hanging lank and stiff about his face: and he does not look up when Lan Xichen enters, as if he were beyond either knowing or caring that his solitude had been disturbed.
“Mingjue-xiong,” Lan Xichen ventures in a hushed voice, laying a hand on his friend’s uninjured shoulder. “Mingjue—?”
At that, the familiar beloved face turns up to meet his, and Lan Xichen recoils at the devastation within it.
Dread pools in the pit of his stomach. “Mingjue-xiong, who…?”
Silence.
“Kuanye-tangxiong is dead,” Nie Mingjue rasps. “He went three ke after the battle. The medics—they could not save him.”
Unbidden, Lan Xichen’s fists curl about the nearest tent-pole for support. He was no more than four when he first met Nie Kuanye—the eldest son of the late Nie-zongzhu’s tangmei, and as much a brother to Mingjue as his cousin Nie Zonghui. After the first Nie-furen’s passing, Mingjue spent most of his childhood trailing at Nie Kuanye’s heels, learning the way of the latter’s saber with his quick little eyes long before he was old enough to touch a dao himself: and when Mingjue-xiong came of age—years after his father’s death and his own instatement as Nie-zongzhu—it was Nie Kuanye who stood in Nie Huangyin’s place during Mingjue’s capping ceremony.
“What was it?” Lan Xichen asks, in a whisper.
“The mace that struck me—here,” Mingjue says dully, gesturing to his left shoulder. “The Wen-dog who carried it broke Kuanye-ge’s neck, first.”
And then: “Don’t look like that, Lan Huan. He knew there would be no saving him from the moment the blow fell. If you had been here—well. It wouldn’t have made any difference, unless you were willing to leave the rest of the wounded to their fates and devote all your strength to him.”
He gazes blearily at the bearskin spread on the floor of the tent. “And Kuanlai is not here,” he murmurs: and at the mention of Nie Kuanye’s brother, Lan Xichen’s fists tighten upon the tent-pole so fiercely that it creaks beneath his hands. “Kuanlai rode back to the Bujingshi with a message for Huaisang the day before yesterday. When he returns, I will have to tell him—”
Lan Xichen’s throat burns. “Must he be summoned back?”
“Yes. To escort his xiongzhang’s coffin back to Qinghe, at the very least. If the choice were left to me, Zonghui would have carried that duty out himself; but I know Nie Kuanlai, and he would not heed me. So I will not ask.”
Nie Mingjue falls silent once again: and for a long while afterward, neither he nor Lan Xichen utter a single word. Lan Xichen’s lungs are burning from within, so that he scarcely feels capable of drawing breath, let alone speech; but at length, he makes his way to Mingjue’s side and touches the bandage wrapped about his left shoulder.
“Come,” he says softly. “Let me heal this, at least.”
Mingjue shakes his head.
“Nay. I—I cannot, Xichen. Not tonight.”
I cannot bear to have such a little wound taken from me—not now, he does not say. How could I shirk a pain as small as this, when Kuanye has lost his life?
A lump rises in Lan Xichen’s throat. “You will have to travel tomorrow, Mingjue-xiong. And whether you go by sword or on horseback, the journey will be made no easier by an injured shoulder.”
The look Nie Mingjue gives him in return makes it plain what he thinks of how easy tomorrow’s journey might be: but Lan Xichen says, “Suppose you are ambushed before it heals? That shoulder might mean the difference between life and death during battle, for you—”
He bites his tongue before the rest of the plea can take shape. He had meant to say “for you, or for one of your men,” but it would be cruelty to voice such a thing so soon after Nie Kuanye’s passing: so he says no more until Mingjue unwraps the bandage and comes to sit by him of his own accord.
“Are you well enough to heal it?” he asks, as Lan Xichen presses his cool fingers to the bruise. “You flew over three hundred li this afternoon, and you must have spent the morning with Jin Zixuan’s wounded in Langya.”
Lan Xichen nods and closes his eyes: and less than a third of a ke later, the skin of Nie Mingjue’s shoulder is as good as new.
“There,” he says, “it is done. Lift your arm and tell me if the wound still pains you.”
Nie Mingjue stands and lifts both his hands above his head. Much to Lan Xichen’s relief, the motion does not seem to hurt him; and after Mingjue’s left arm is ensconced in its sleeve once again, Lan Xichen proposes that they break their fast with whatever rations the disciples on kitchen-duty have prepared in the camp kitchen.
“A-Huan,” Nie Mingjue sighs. “I am not—”
“Only broth, then, if you have no stomach for proper food,” Lan Xichen entreats. “There must be some set aside for the patients’ use; and I will only take a little. Please, Mingjue-xiong.”
Nie Mingjue looks up at him without speaking, wan and heavy-eyed: but at long last, he permits Lan Xichen to go in search of rice and soup for them both. Lan Xichen’s bowls are wiped clean in less than a quarter-shichen, despite his best efforts to match Mingjue’s slower pace; and after they finish eating, he bids Mingjue-xiong farewell and goes off to attend the cultivators in the healing tents.
There is not nearly as much work for him in the tents as he expected. The patients who sustained mortal wounds breathed their last hours before he arrived at the Nie camp; and those that still live no longer require the aid of a surgeon. Lan Xichen’s spiritual energy speeds the healing of a broken bone or two here and a bruise there, and routs the infection from a few shallow wounds that would likely have healed on their own either way; and then, with naught else left for him to do, he makes his way back to Mingjue’s tent to find his friend preparing for bed.
“You ought to sleep, too,” Nie Mingjue says: and the frown in his voice brooks no argument, though Lan Xichen was the one trying to reason with him only an hour ago. “What was it you said to me, when you healed my shoulder? A night’s rest might well mean the difference between life and death; and heaven knows you are weary enough. Lie down.”
They retire together upon the same folding-cot, for Nie Mingjue will not hear of Lan Xichen sleeping on the floor. Mingjue begins to snore as soon as he touches his pillow, exhausted as he is; but Lan Xichen lies awake for an hour or more, his mind rife with visions of the Bujingshi as it was in his youth.
How distant those days seem to him now! He thinks of Nie Huaisang’s mother: dead these last nine years, and now present nowhere in the mortal world save in the paintings of her son—of the late Nie-zongzhu, Nie Huangyin, who gifted Nie Mingjue a wild Balikun for his seventeenth birthday and then would not rest until Mingjue invited Lan Xichen to Qinghe to see it—of poor brave-hearted Nie Kuanye, who braided Lan Xichen’s hair and pretended not to notice when the eight-year-old Mingjue stole peaches from his plate and fed them to a toddling Nie Huaisang—
Quietly, he emerges from his quilt and slips out of the tent. The moon is waning, yet bright as an advancing dawn as it rises ever higher over the trees: and the stars are almost harsh in their loveliness, neither knowing nor caring that twelve of the men Mingjue had grown up with—trained with, hunted with, mourned with—are lying dead in a row of makeshift coffins laid out on the west side of camp, ready to be transported back to Qinghe.
To the Sun and the Moon all lives are the same: and all deaths, a voice seems to whisper, in the corner of Lan Xichen’s mind devoted to remembrances of his mother. And the world goes on, because it must.
But it is not fair! a smaller voice cries in return—the voice of the five-year-old Lan Huan, who had only lately learned death after the passing of his grandmother.
I know, dear heart, Chen Mingyan told him then, as the infant Wangji took note of his brother’s tears and began to howl at the top of his lungs. I know.
The Lan Xichen of the present stands gazing out into the night: a night that had swallowed all traces of bloodshed and grief, leaving no sign that either Nie or Wen ever did battle or perished here—and turns his face up to the heavens, which are as enchanting to look upon now as they were on that evening at his mother’s house long ago.
“Mother,” he says aloud, for all the world as if she might hear him and answer from the other side of the Yellow Springs. “Whatever I must lose in this war, I will bear it; but spare me only Wangji and Mingjue. My own death frightens me not at all—for my life was bought with the blood of many of my kinsfolk, back at the Cloud Recesses, and it would be fitting for me to depart in the same way—but theirs—!”
He swallows.
“Only Wangji and Mingjue,” he chokes. “I will find some way forth, if they only endure—but without them—”
Suddenly, the ache in Lan Xichen’s chest seems to lessen. He gulps down a mouthful of air, and another: and then, without a doubt, he knows that both halves of his heart will be beating still when the war ends.
“Thank you, Muqin,” he whispers, his eyes damp. “I could ask for no more, given that.”
He kisses his hand and sets it to the damp earth beneath his feet, though the ground where his mother was buried is more than four hundred li away.
And then—without another word—he returns to Nie Mingjue’s tent, and follows him into slumber.