Chapter Text
The first memory of his childhood is this - the woman’s mouth pressed into a thin line, the heavy hand on his head, the fingernails digging crescent furrows into his scalp as if to stop him from fleeing or to ground herself. Her face is blurred, now, and he does not wish to remember it regardless. All day, she had been quiet. The floors he normally swept had been done when he woke. And the taste of iron had, unbidden, quietly risen to roost in the depths of his throat like a stone.
A hand inspects his teeth like one inspects a beast of burden, grips his shoulder, squeezing to consider the muscle beneath the thin flesh stretched over bone. He does not look at the slaver’s face, only his hands, at the thick, cruel callus imprinted lengthwise over his palm. Later, he will learn with intimate cruelty it is from the handle of a whip.
One tael of silver.
All skin and bones, comes the disdainful reply. Five coppers.
And so, Shen Jiu is sold, for the price of three buns at a night market.
His inheritance in this world is thus - the knowledge of his value in this world, and the feeling of his insides twisting with premonition before he is cast aside. He knows abandonment the same way a street dog senses the storm an hour before the sky roils with steel-grey thunderclouds but is rained on anyways. He feels it come into him when he stares at Yue Qingyuan, when he was still his Yue Qi, clutching at the bars of his prison and sees the last starlight fade in his eyes.
And when he wakes today, five years into his tenure as the Qing Jing Peak Lord, he feels the iron settle into his mouth like the water of a river closing over his head.
He practices sword forms alone in the bamboo forest. In the flat court behind the bamboo house, when the sky is still dim with the colour of wet slate and the bamboo breathes quietly as the wind stirs. It is not out of devotion. Two years ago, on a ridge above the Xiagu mountains, he stood between a boar-shaped thing with wings and horns longer than his legs and eleven disciples who had frozen with fear. He held his ground until Liu Qingge had swept in with a fury of lightning like a vengeful god, and something in the battles had come up through his sword and nestled deep into the bones of his right arm. He has not had full use of it since. There are three movements in the second form of the Qing Jing techniques he no longer performs, because he cannot, and he has rebuilt the sequence so cleanly that only the hall masters recognize that it is not whole but think it is an intentional variant made by the Peak Lord.
He practices these forms in the dark, where this weakness cannot be whispered down the mountain to Qing Ding in the guise of concern. A swordsman with a useless right arm is a liability, and liabilities are discarded. Mu Qingfang has asked to examine him, thrice a year since the accident, with a doctor’s keen eye and patience. And every time, Shen Jiu has declined, initially courteously, then with the rancour the peak lords come to expect of him, burning off the tips of Mu Qingfang’s hideous moustache. To be examined is to be undressed in a bright room and forced still while another man’s hand roams over him, and there is no arrangement where Shen Jiu would permit such an act nor explain why. He would rather have the arm as it is. (He would rather not have the arm at all if it meant - )
When he finishes the form, his right hand shakes, the residual sensation of lightning streaking through his arm. He waits for it to stop, watching the bamboo’s grey leaves take on the first hues of green with the rising sun.
Then he goes back into the bamboo house and paints his face.
It is a mask like any other.
The jar of ground pearl sits on the shelf above the washing basin, fine as flour, the colour of a luminescent cloud glowing in the sun. He works it under his eyes with a fine brush, where his face carries the darkness of sleepless nights. A dull pain lives beneath the socket and on the days it aches, the light reflecting off the water in his basin resonates through his head like a struck bell. The red goes on his eyelids like the sharp streak of a weapon. He is once told that he is beautiful until he opens his mouth, like a rose bush with only one rose but a hundred thorns, and he finds that he does not dislike the comparison, for only the rose with thorns is not worth plucking.
The morning bell rings. Below him, he hears the sound of the disciples rousing from their sleep, and the slow trickle of feet into the lecture hall.
The morning lecture is on Wei Zhuang, and he dissects it with nothing more than a brush and the soft scratch of forty disciples copying his words onto a parchment laid on a low desk above their knees. There is a bitter satisfaction in knowing they are better at the end of the hour than they were prior because of him.
Ming Fan reads out his imitation, and it is poor in the manner of a boy who has understood the shape of emotion without having experienced it, and has therefore assimilated the shape of someone else’s. The empty carcass of a rice bag with only the scent of rice within, that a street rat would lick as if they could like the impression of rice into their belly to stop the gnawing ache.
“Again.”
Ming Fan reads it again, stumbling over the words, his ears flaring red.
“You have chewed up and regurgitated an agglomeration of poems and have gone from the water in the second line to the city in the next without anything in between.” He sets the brush down. “Take out the third line and reread the rest.”
Ming Fan does, a shininess in his eyes that they both tacitly pretend is not there. The poem, robbed of its beautiful but ill-fitting line, smooths together like the seamless blend of wind knitting long stems of grass together to hide a gorged ground. The brightness of joy flashes over his face, a small, terrible thing, and he looks up at his shizun before he can stop it, his whole idiot heart in it. It dims at the expressionless set of Shen Jiu’s mouth.
There, he thinks but does not say. That is what it should sound like. Do this again for ten more years and perhaps I will have made something out of you yet.
“Copy out the Nineteen Old Poems by the night bell,” Shen Jiu says sharply, “since you seem to lack variation in your poetic taste. Make sure you do so legibly this time - as scholars, writing resembling avian footprints is unacceptable.”
The room laughs because it is safe to. Ming Fan bows low to the floor, spine straight, scarlet rising high in his cheeks.
He dismisses them by the hour of the snake. He tells himself the unease lodged beneath his sternum is from the headache licking along the sinews of his spine and curling its tail around his brain, but he knows perfectly well that it is not.
As the sun burns high overhead, he grinds his ink and starts on the ledgers.
Qing Jing supports one hundred and twelve disciples and twenty three hallmasters. Pine soot costs have risen by a fifth. The eastern bamboo grove will be cut this year while the northern sector bides. More roof tiles will be needed after the heavy storm of the rainy months. Two hundred jin of lamp oil. The stipends. (And under stipends, the full fees, robes, and board of a disciple whose family stopped sending money when his mother died and he rejected their plea to return home to run their family farm, drawn from his own accounts, where no one will ever know nor care).
The punishment book is next. His documentation is sparse; the offence, sentence, date, and name - no reasoning or small, vindictive marginalia he has seen in other peaks’ books. Eleven are trivial. The twelfth is a disciple who was found outside the wall at night and will forfeit a month of leave. He does not write that the reason is that he goes to see his sister every fortnight at a village and sneaks her food, and if the reason goes into the book it will, one day, be read out in a hall and the whispers of the past will carry forward into the present.
He blots the gleaming ink and closes the book. He does not look at the incense slowly burning down.
What he does not let himself think about is this -
Every seventh day, Yue Qingyuan comes in the afternoon. It is not the first day of the week, which would signal eagerness, nor the last, which would be a duty cleared before the start of the next week. This has been their tradition for as long as Shen Jiu has been on Qing Jing.
Yue Qingyuan will climb up the eastern stair, although the western side is shorter, because Shen Jiu had made an offhand, sneering comment about idlers on the western steps, and the sect leader had not set foot on that stair since. He is always a quarter of an hour later, never more than half, not enough that a reasonable man should find it irritating and therefore cannot mention it without becoming the smaller party in the room. It is the one flaw Shen Jiu permits in this rite.
And when he comes, Shen Jiu does not look up. He does not rise, greet him, or turn away from whatever he is reading, even if his eyes have been staring at the same line for the past few minutes. He lets the sect leader stand in his doorway like a menial servant delivering coal. And Yue Qingyuan will come in anyway, set down a tin of plums a disciple was sent to fetch from the town, and sit on his side of the table. Or he will come bearing a trinket he found in the towns nearby - another ornate fan, a hair piece, an intricate carving. Something that the young Yue Qi and Shen Jiu would have looked at with envious eyes as they huddled in the alleyway, watching with hunger as merchants hawked their wares. Something wasteful that could have fed the two of them for weeks.
He will reach for the cold pot of tea and does not complain, only warming the pot briefly between his hands, and fills the silence with talk that drifts and idles like a wisp of smoke in bleak summer air - a bridge requiring repair in Wan Jian, the rain, a new batch of goods - until at some point after another quarter of an hour Shen Jiu will answer him tersely in scathing, clipped sentences. There is a small part of him that revels in the unconditional attention and favour that their illustrious sect leader showers upon him. Something none of the other peak lords could enjoy, no matter how famed or flawless their reputation. There is also a certain pyrrhic pleasure he feels, mixed with self-loathing, in making that smile fall from Yue Qingyuan’s face. His attempts to make up for those years of silence with a few ornaments and eager attempts to forget their shared past is not enough. He wants Yue Qingyuan to hurt just as much as he wants to protect him.
Yue Qingyuan plays chess like a man whose mind is wholly consumed by other matters. Shen Jiu beats him with a cruelty that is one of the few affections he can perform in daylight, and Yue Qingyuan withstands it the way a stone bears rain. Shen Jiu pretends he cannot feel Yue Qingyuan’s gaze fixed intently on him, tracing the darkness under his eyes, the contours of his mouth.
He stays for half a shichen, sometimes on. And when he rises to his feet, his arms braced against his thighs, he will pause at the door and say every time, “Next week, then,” as though this whole edifice were a proposal renewed by mutual consent, and not the only tenuous bridge between them in their lives.
Every seven days, like clockwork.
And yet -
Today, he does not come.
The sun arcs high in the sky and slowly stretches downwards. The board on the table is almost mocking when Shen Jiu looks at it, resisting the urge to knock it to the ground. On its surface, the pieces are halted in time from the week prior, four moves from a victory that he had held in reserve to let it last another week, which he would not admit to a torturer under interrogation. The evening sun reflects off the pool below the stairs, th bamboo rustling unhurriedly in the breeze as Shen Jiu stands with the teapot in his hand. He walks to the window and watches with a detached eye as the dark amber tea, oversteeped now, wets the leaves of the bamboo as he pours it out the window. His hand hovers over the board for a moment before letting it sit.
He feels like a dog with its ears pricked towards the door, eager for its masters return to their abode.
Ming Fan comes before the evening bell with the poems copied out and his ears hued red.
“Shizun, this disciple has - “
“Put it on the table and get out.”
Shen Jiu hears his own voice arrive a second after it leaves him, as though it had travelled through a great distance - the terse clip of consonants, the cutting tone he keeps sharpened and does not always choose when to use - and there is no way to swallow back the sounds and let the razor-sharp edges cut his own throat instead.
The boy’s face drains of colour. He puts it on the table and bows at the wrong angle, and the door shuts with a sound of finality. He looks down at the poems, which are legible. The boy had taken great pains over the calligraphy.
He does not look at the door.
When, not if, he comes, I shall not let him in, he says to himself, then immediately finds the thought reprehensible. What does it matter to him if Yue Qingyuan has caught himself another fancy? Far be it from Shen Jiu to care.
His hands are steady as he plucks aimlessly on his qin. The disciples passing by pause at the sound, which makes something in their chest quiver with an irrepressible desolation that they cannot quite explain, despite the fixed, unchanging face of their shizun behind the gauzy curtains rippling in the sighing wind.
By evening, the mountain has begun to clamour.
Cang Qiong is a rumbling beast in slumber that he has lived inside since he was in his teenaged years - the bells, the shift of disciples from hall to hall, the quiet underlay of noise from hundreds of living beings operating their daily lives. But what he hears now is a discordance. There is excited chatter rising from below, at the core entrance of the sect, which is a market day, funeral, execution, or an arrival that he has not been warned of.
He stands at the rail with his hand on the wood and listens for the length of ten breaths.
No one has come up the eastern stair.
He puts on his outer robe, folding it tightly as though wrapping himself in armour. He takes up his fan and looks into the bronze mirror at the cold, composed Qing Jing peak lord staring back at him. He goes down the stair at an unhurried pace.
Hundreds of disciples stand in the courtyard before the main hall from every peak.
That is the first thing that is wrong. Bai Zhan does not stand in courtyards unless they are breaking it. Xian Shu does not associate outside their peak. An Ding is scurrying between peaks with hardly a moment to rest. Yet all of them are here, packed to the pillars, craning their necks, jostling each other with their elbows to get a good view. It is not the noise of a crisis, but one of keen interest.
The second thing wrong is that when they see him, a ripple runs ahead like the parting of a sea, shoulders folding aside, heads dipping down, opening like water cresting off the bow of a ship. He has never stopped feeling it at the base of his skull, the small, shameful animal pleasure of a crowd yielding before him, which he despises in himself and has yet never been free from.
Then he understands the quality of it, and the pleasure goes through him like water draining from a burst dam.
They are not making way. They are watching a show. The faces follow him as he passes, heads swivelling on their necks the way they watch a man walk towards his own undoing, and the ones closest to the front have their eyes not on his feet but his mouth.
He keeps his pace exact.
At the head of the steps, in the doorway of the main hall, Yue Qingyuan is half kneeling with his hands on a stranger’s body.
His heart does something ugly behind his ribs.
He takes in the scene over the course of three breaths.
One. The stranger is wearing his face. It is not a resemblance, not cousin-shaped, not something vaguely reminiscent in the shape of the eyes or the set of the mouth. Brow to jaw, it is the borne from the exact mold, borne by a body half a hand taller and better filled out, a rosy glint of health in his cheeks. He is the crane immortal descended from the celestial mountains, never tainted by the red dust of humanity, his body carried open and easy in a manner that Shen Jiu’s has never been.
Two. One of Yue Qingyuan’s arms is supporting the man’s shoulders, the other beneath his knees, as though he had just carried him a distance and was setting him down carefully. One hand is open and splayed over a delicate looking shoulder. It is set in a position of kindness, and yet when Shen Jiu looks at it for the better part of a second, something in his chest crumbles like a wall going into water.
Three. And this is the one no one else will believe, and he will not mention it because it is not evidence, but a trade secret learned in a way he could not describe to anyone.
The stranger is reading the room.
His expression is correct. His mouth is pressed into a white line, his eyes wet at the lower lid in a way that evokes sympathy, and his hands faintly tremble as they reach up to press against Yue Qingyuan’s, just as those identical eyes meet Shen Jiu’s. And in the half second beneath one wave and the next, the gaze switches into an analytical one, over the eager disciples, the peak lords drawn by the clamour along the steps, then back to Shen Jiu, and the grief settles back as though it never left.
The fan snaps out and covers his face.
The certainty goes into and through him, as well as the faint helplessness of knowing that he would not be believed.
Yue Qingyuan sees him as the crowd finally parts fully in front of him, and his face falls. It is perhaps the worst part of the whole thing, and Shen Jiu digs one hand into his arm to prevent himself from throwing his fan and going back to his peak. The composure collapses into an expression of embarrassment and guilt, then a wince, the apology assembling itself before anything else has been said.
“Qingqiu-shidi,” Yue Qingyuan says, standing and descending the steps, the stranger reaching one hand to brace himself against the floor. Shen Jiu’s sharp, scornful eyes over the top of the fan stop him in his tracks, yet his mouth continues to move uselessly. “I meant to come by. I had gone down to the town for the plums and found -”
The anger roils in his chest and rises to his teeth.
“I see the hall is full,” Shen Jiu says. “Was there a reason my peak was not informed, or has Qing Jing been dissolved while I sat at my desk?”
Yue Qingyuan absorbs the rebuke without blinking, but the other peak lords do not. Qi Qingqi’s mouth presses together tightly. Liu Qingge looks at the sky with the resigned expression of a man watching a familiar storm come in off the sea and knows there is no way to avert the calamity. The disciples whisper and watch the Qing Jing peak lord be unpleasant on a day of such wonders, and he knows it will cost him reputation he already does not have, yet cannot bring himself to care.
“It happened quickly,” Yue Qingyuan says. “I found him hurt in an alley.” And then, lower, with that beseeching tone, as if Shen Jiu is the unreasonable one needing cajoling, “Shidi, he has nowhere else to go. He tells me that he has nothing.”
And somehow he already has more than I ever had, Shen Jiu does not say. You know exactly how it looks for someone to come with nothing, and this is not it. Not the delicately scraped knees or the soft slice of red against one brow, inflicted to invoke pity.
“You bring an unknown of suspicious appearance into the sect and call it charity,” Shen Jiu scorns.
Then the stranger speaks, and the courtyard quietens.
He speaks well. Almost too well, and it takes Shen Jiu more time than he would like to admit to put it to words. The diction is too even, the vowels belonging to no province between the sea and western wastes, the voice possessing a softness and smoothness that comes with being a thing only for talking and never for screaming across a battlefield, or pleading on its knees with its head on the ground in supplication, or held in and swallowed into the belly for the last shreds of pride, even as all else is taken from him.
“This humble one is sorry for the troubles and disturbance.” A soft breath, before the feet draw together and he pushes himself up and sways where he stands. Yue Qingyuan makes an aborted motion to steady him, before his eyes flick to Shen Jiu’s stony expression. “This one is named Shen Yuan.”
Shen.
The name ripples through the yard like a coin dropped in a well. Mu Qingfang’s eyes narrow in clinical interest. Qi Qingqi says something behind her sleeve to the girls beside her.
“Shixiong,” says Mu Qingfang. “Could there be some relation?”
Shen Jiu looks at him with a gaze that would make the Old Palace Master avert his eyes, but Mu Qingfang only gazes mildly back. “I had a brother once,” he says in a clipped tone. The swell of voices rise in excitement. “But he died in front of my eyes when I joined the sect. I buried him myself. So any claiming any blood relation to me would be a liar.”
Yue Qingyuan flinches, so subtly that none other see it.
Shen Jiu looks at his own face, for once not reflected in a mirror or water but in another living being, too rosy and carefree to be his own, supported against the doorway by the sect leader. His mouth tastes heavy of iron and he thinks he must have bitten through the side of his cheek. By tonight, the tales will be across all the peaks. A brother rising from the dead, an unknown relative, a unique quirk of fate.
The fan snaps shut in his palm. A splinter digs beneath his skin.
He turns and goes back up the stair to Qing Jing, unhurried, through a crowd that has not yet remembered to close behind him.
The note is brought by a disciple as the moon rises into the sky. It is in Yue Qingyuan’s own hand.
Shen-gongzi is lodged in the guest quarters on Qiong Ding. There will be a formal reception in three days. I should have sent for you, and this I greatly regret.
And beneath, in a hand that had grown slightly smaller, the characters curling more into themselves, in the way his does when he is setting down something he does not know how to feel about:
Shidi, do you think he truly could be your kin?
Shen Jiu reads it twice and feeds it to the candle.
Outside, the bamboo sighs in the wind. The unease that woke him before the bell has not moved and now will not, for it has come true, because he has been in this place before with a hand digging into his scalp and then a leg broken underfoot, and he already knows what will happen.
He puts out the lamps, and waits, in the dark, for it to come.
Shizun,
A man wearing my face was brought to the sect today, bearing my surname. The others think it a sign. I think it a trap.
You would have known which of us was the fool.
There is no one left to ask.