Chapter 8 — Sword-Flight
His flying sword was called 青冥 / Qīngmíng — Sky-Cleave — and she did not know it had a name until they were six cùn off the ridge-top and climbing.
It was a thinner sword than the dull black one across her hip. Pale jade-green, the blade ribbed twice along the spine for spirit-conduction, the hilt wrapped in a dark green silk so worn the warp showed through; the warp was the colour of dried pine. It was not a sect sword. It was — by the small flat Wanshou-Mén lily-of-the-valley chased into the heel of the hilt under the wrap — a Wanshou-Mén sword, modified, the lily half-cut and re-cut as a closed bud, the way a mother had altered a stolen wedding pin to disguise a clan it was illegal for her son to carry.
He had taken it out of the bottom of the canvas pack at dawn. He had not, at any prior point on the road from Drifting Cloud, mentioned that he owned a flying sword.
She had looked at him for a count of three breaths and had not asked the obvious question.
He had said, conversationally to the sword: "Lin Yao. I was — strictly — going to walk us south. The walking is the slow plan. The walking would take eleven days. We do not — by the courier-bird Aunt Three Pots' second daughter brought up the kitchen stair an hour ago — have eleven days. We have three. The third Frost Sect tracker has crossed the liúyún 流云 ridge at dusk yesterday. He is one day behind us. He is not the first. He is not the second. He is a jindan-cusp outer-disciple instructor named Pei Hongtao, who is — strictly — a cousin of your shī-xiōng, and who does not hold his hand."
She had said: "Pei Hongtao."
"Lin Yao. You know him."
"He once broke a child's left index finger for shrugging at him at a roll-call. The child was eleven. The roll-call was held in the rain. The child was me."
A small silence.
He had said, very quietly, to the Wanshou-Mén lily-of-the-valley on the hilt of the green sword: "Mei-mei. We will fly. I am — for the record, I am happy to be flying. I have been waiting to fly. This is a good day."
She had looked at him.
He had looked at the sword.
He had been, she understood, lying about half of it and telling the truth about the other half, and she had not — because the truth-and-lie of Yan Jiuhe was, by the third morning, beginning to be a music she could read in the way she had once read the silence of a sect head's tea-cup at the third sip — required him to specify which half was which.
She had said: "Then we fly."
So they flew.
He stood her in front of him on the broad of the 青冥 hilt, both her feet planted, her right hand wrapped around the second of the two silk loops he had clipped to the spine for passenger-grip, her left at her side. He stood behind her with his right hand at the small of her back and his left hand on the silk loop above hers, his thumb a cùn from her thumb, his sword-side leg behind her sword-side leg in the steady wedge-stance of a man who had carried a passenger before and had been told, very seriously, once at fifteen by a Wanshou-Mén uncle, if she falls, boy, you fall first, and you fall faster.
He said, against the back of her head, low: "Lin Yao. Three things. One: the wind on the cusp will try to lay you back into me. Do not fight it. Lay back. I will be there. Two: if I bank, I will bank to the left without warning. I will not bank to the right unless I tell you. The right is your sword-arm. I will not interfere with your sword-arm. Three: if at any point you have to throw, throw to the left. I am the rear-load. I will counterweight."
"Throw what."
"Anything. A talisman. A peach pit. A small curse."
"A small curse."
"Lin Yao. Some curses are very small."
She did not — strictly — laugh.
She did, however, breathe out around the corner of her mouth, and the breath was — by the way it moved the loose strand of hair against her temple — not a laugh but the breath that lived in the same compound as a laugh, and Yan Jiuhe, behind her, made the small soft pleased hh that lived in the same compound as a man who had been working on a joke for three days and had just heard the door of the laugh open by a cùn.
The 青冥 lifted.
It lifted the way the kind of sword her mother had once described to her at six lifted: not the way a hawk lifts, daughter, but the way a leaf lifts when the man under the leaf has remembered the wind. The ridge dropped away under the toes of her thin shoes. The black pines became the dark green shoulders of a sleeping animal. The stone fox at the shrine door became a small white speck and was gone. The cart-line — three li west, still rolling south on the road they had left two nights ago — became a thin line of dust the colour of cinnamon.
She closed her eyes.
The wind on the cusp was — exactly — what he had said. It tried to lay her back into him. She did not fight it. She laid back. The wedge of his chest behind her shoulder blades was a warm wall and the wedge of his thigh behind her thigh was a steadier wall, and his right hand at the small of her back was not — strictly — holding her up; it was, she discovered after the second breath, holding her down, very lightly, the way a man held the lid on a kettle that he had decided was his kettle and was not going to permit to fly off the stove on his watch.
She did not — strictly — open her eyes for the first quarter of an hour.
When she opened them, the ground below was no longer the millet plain.
It was the Wild Burial Hills.
She had read about the 乱葬岗 once as a child in a sect geography scroll she had not been permitted to take to her room. The scroll had said: a stretch of low hills some hundred li in length, named for the eight hundred years of unclaimed dead the hills had held, and for the small forgotten battles of the warring-states era that had been fought across the saddles, and for the way the hills did not — strictly — show on certain qi-survey maps because the death-qi in the soil was so old it had become its own register and the surveyors had quietly stopped trying. She had memorized the scroll the way she memorized everything in those years. The scroll had not mentioned that the hills, seen from a cùn's breadth above a flying sword in late morning, were beautiful.
The death-qi in the soil made the hills the colour of old ink. The grass was green at the top of the saddles and grey-purple in the hollows. The few trees were black-trunked and small-leaved and the leaves were turning, three weeks early, the colour of dried plum. Smoke rose from one ridge — a hermit's fire — and another. No road. No villages. No carts.
She breathed out.
She said, into the wind: "Yan Jiuhe."
He bent his head one degree to hear her over the rush.
"You are good at this."
"...Mei-mei."
"You are very, very good at this. The stance. The bank. The wind. The thumb-distance on the loop. You did not learn this in seven years of being a sword-thief."
A pause.
He said, against the back of her head: "Mei-mei. I was a Wanshou-Mén outer-disciple from the age of seven to the age of eleven. My uncle was the swordsman. He died when I was eleven. The Wanshou-Mén dao-lineage died with him, in a teahouse, with three blades in his back. I did not — strictly — leave the sect. The sect left me. I have not flown a 青冥 with a passenger in eleven years. I have flown alone three times. The thumb-distance was him. The bank was him. The if she falls, boy was him. The wedge-leg was him. I am, currently, using him."
She breathed in.
She said: "Thank him."
A longer pause.
He said, very softly: "Mei-mei. He is currently a small ghost in my sword-arm. I would like to keep him for myself, if that is — strictly — acceptable to you."
"It is."
"...Good."
"Yan Jiuhe."
"Lin Yao."
"Tell him the passenger is not afraid."
"...Mei-mei."
"Tell him."
"He hears."
She closed her eyes again.
The 青冥 banked left for the first time. He had not warned her. The bank was very gentle. She did not fall. She laid further back into the wedge of his chest and her braid lifted in the wind and fell across his shoulder and she did not move it.
He did not move it either.
They flew for two hours.
The market town was called Yānsuǒ 烟琐 — Smoke-Lock, a name the locals had once given themselves to ward off tax-inspectors and had never officially registered, and which therefore did not appear in the 仙盟 gazetteer, and which made it — by the deliberate accident of three generations of clerks — invisible to certain courier-talisman networks.
It was the kind of invisibility Yan Jiuhe approved of.
They landed in a beech grove three cùn east of the town. He compacted 青冥 with a thumb-twist at the pommel. The sword shrank to the size of a paring knife. He slipped it into a hidden seam at the inside of his right boot. He shook out his shoulders. He helped her down off — she was, by the third breath after landing, not on the sword and not on her feet either; he had taken her at the waist with both hands and set her on the ground the way a man set down a small lacquered chest he had been told not to bump, and his hands had — for a count too long, for a count she had not been keeping but the Tianmo Ti under her ribs had been keeping, in a small bright cold register of its own — been on her waist, palm-flat to the meat under her ribs through three layers of cloth, his thumbs against the long flat muscle at the inside of her hipbone, and the heat of his palms had been so steady through the cloth that the cloth had no longer felt like cloth, and the third face had been very close to the back of her head, and the third face had been holding very still.
He stepped back.
He stepped back the correct distance — the wedge-leg distance, the if she falls, boy distance — and his hands were gone, and the heat of the palms was gone, and the cloth was cloth again, and the Tianmo Ti under her ribs noted with a hungry-child's curiosity that the warmth had withdrawn at exactly the moment it had been about to ask a question, and the Tianmo Ti did not — by the grace of nine days' patient training — reach.
It only watched.
She breathed out.
She said, conversationally to the beech grove: "Yan Jiuhe."
"Lin Yao."
"Forged travel-permit."
"Twenty minutes. I will return with two. Mei-mei. Stay here. There is a girl at the east edge of the grove with three ducks. She is the biāoshī's niece. She has been told. She will come find you if a guardpatrol crosses the grove. Stay."
"Stay."
"And drink the water. I left the jar by your foot."
He bowed. The biāoshī bow. Hands at the side, head dipped one cùn, right knee braced.
He went into Smoke-Lock.
She sat down on a beech root.
The fox came out of the canvas pack he had set down beside her, climbed into her lap without asking, and laid her snout very precisely on the small bright cold register inside Lin Yao's ribs that had been busy keeping a count of palm-prints through cloth.
The fox's snout, on that register, was warm.
The fox said nothing.
Lin Yao breathed in four count, out six count, and did not — strictly — file the warmth of the palm through three layers, and did not — strictly — file the thumb at the inside of her hipbone, and did not — strictly — file the count too long, and she stayed all three of them, and the stayed register inside her sternum was, by the time the fox closed her eyes, on its tenth entry, and the spine of the register was — she discovered with the small dry sardonic precision that was becoming the only register she had — creaking.
The injured man came out of the trees half an hour later.
She heard him before she saw him.
She had been listening — without intending to, the listening was the same listening her father had taught her at six, daughter, the ear is the only organ that does not betray you — to the small soft pattern of the grove. The wind in the upper beeches. The three ducks at the east edge, sluggish in the noon. The slow steady drum of a single ox on the road two cùn west. A blackbird at the south edge, alarm-calling for one half-beat — the half-beat-too-long that meant not a hawk, not a fox, a man, a man who is wrong — and then the alarm cut off, and the blackbird returned to her song.
The man had silenced the blackbird with — she would later understand — a single small soft kindness, two seeds of bitter melon from his sleeve.
He stepped through the trees. He walked very quietly. He was — by the noon light along the line of his shoulders — tall. He was not a sect cultivator; he wore no sword. He wore a travel-robe of clean undyed hemp, the kind a yaōguāizi 药挂子 — a medicine-bearer, a sect-healer travelling alone — wore on the long roads. A pack on his back, square and flat and heavy. A bamboo staff in his right hand, not for walking; the staff was hollow and the top was capped with a small wooden lid sealed with red wax. A medicine-staff. Pills inside.
He was holding his left arm against his ribs.
The left arm was bleeding.
The blood had soaked through the hemp at the shoulder and was running, very slowly, toward the inside of his elbow.
He saw her on the beech root.
He stopped.
He stood very still for one breath.
He was — she registered with the small detached attention of a woman who had been raised not to look at men's faces — unfairly beautiful. The face was the face of a man who had been ill for a long time as a child and had healed in a way that had left the bones too fine. Long mouth. Long eyelashes. A small precise mole at the inside corner of the left brow. The hair was tied back in a low knot with a wooden pin. The eyes — when he raised them, slowly, politely, the way a sect-healer raised eyes to a woman — were the clean dark of a man who had spent twelve years in a valley above a flowing river, and who could read the line of an old grief in the way a stranger held her right ankle, the way another man could read a printed page.
He bowed.
It was the bow of a senior junior-disciple to a stranger of unknown rank — formal, palms at the sides, head dipped two cùn not one — and it cost him, by the wince at the corner of his mouth, the meat of his left shoulder.
"Apologies," he said. His voice was soft. Liúzhōu accent, but the cleaner register, the eastern slope, the 药王谷 slope. "Apologies — sister — I did not — I did not intend to — startle —"
The hemp at his shoulder soaked another cùn.
He swayed.
He did not fall, because he had the staff. He used the staff. He set the cap of it against the root of the beech beside her and he leaned, very lightly, and he held the staff.
She stood up. She did it slowly. Her right ankle protested. The fox dropped out of her lap to the moss without complaint and tucked herself behind Lin Yao's heels.
"Sit," said Lin Yao.
"Sister — please — I do not wish to — I am only — passing —"
"You are bleeding on my beech root. Sit."
He sat. He sat the way a man sat who had been about to fall: the controlled crumple of a body that had been disciplined for ten years to not crumple in front of strangers. His left arm came away from his ribs and the blood was — by the saturation pattern on the hemp — not arterial, and not venous; it was the slow steady welling of a deep clean puncture that had been done by a sect-grade blade in the meat of the shoulder, six hours ago, and had been bandaged once already and had bled through, and the bandage was tied with the kind of single-twist no 药王谷 disciple would have made on himself unless he had — by the angle of the puncture, by the under-the-clavicle approach — been bandaging himself one-handed in a hurry while moving.
She knelt in front of him.
She did not ask his name.
He had not asked hers.
She said: "Take the outer robe down. I will not look at your face. Only the shoulder."
He, after one breath, took the outer robe down off the left shoulder.
The wound was — she had been right — a sword-puncture, the size of a small thumb, six hours old, the edges already trying to clot but reopened in the walk. The skin around the wound was a faint pale jade-green colour that was not normal bruising. Poison, she registered. Sect-grade, but slow. A blade fouled with — by the colour — 寒岩苔 / cold-stone moss. A southern poison. Not Frost Sect. Not Pei. Someone else.
She said: "Who did this."
He said, very softly: "I do not know. Three men. They wore no sect-sigils. They wanted — the staff."
"You did not give it."
"I did not give it. The staff is — not mine. The staff is a 药王谷 courier-staff. The pills in the staff are for a sect-elder in Jinhua, eight days east. The staff is —" he closed his eyes, "— more important than the bearer."
She said: "You are 药王谷."
He opened his eyes.
He looked at her, properly, for the first time.
The dark 药王谷 eyes were — she registered, in a small bright cold place she had not been counting — aware of her, with the same quiet attention with which Yan Jiuhe had been aware of her on the eighth day of Drifting Cloud, but the quality of the awareness was different. Yan Jiuhe's awareness was the awareness of a man who had been waiting nine years to be asked. This man's awareness was the awareness of a man who had not been waiting at all and had, by the small bright clean accident of a beech root in a market grove, just recognized something he could not yet name.
He said, very softly: "Yes. Sister. I am — 药王谷. Su."
He did not give his full name.
The single syllable hung in the air between them.
She did not, yet, give hers.
She said: "I can stop the bleed. I cannot remove the poison. The poison is 寒岩苔 and I do not have the antidote at hand. I have — strictly — one vial of restoration powder in my sleeve and it will not work on this. But I can stop the bleed and I can — I think — bind the poison so it does not reach the lung for one further day. You will need a 药王谷 hall by tomorrow night. Are you able to walk."
"With the staff."
"Then I will stop the bleed. Lift the arm — no, not that high — yes."
He lifted the arm to the angle she had asked for. The angle was the angle her father had taught her at five for setting a shoulder. She had not — strictly — set a shoulder in nine years. The body remembered.
She took the small vial of restoration powder out of her sleeve. She tipped one third of it into her right palm. She wet it with two drops of water from the clay jar at her foot. She stirred it once with her left index finger.
She put her right hand on the wound.
The skin was hot. The skin under her palm was very hot — 药王谷 cultivators ran a half-degree warmer than orthodox sect-cultivators, the heat was the inner-fire of their medicine-base — and the heat against her palm was the heat of a body she had not, in nine days, been pressed against.
She had been pressed against three.
The cot. The cart bench, through Yan Jiuhe's chest. The wedge of Yan Jiuhe's chest through the wind.
This was the fourth.
The fourth was, by the count of her own pulse against the meat of his shoulder, not the same as the others.
The other three had been hers. This one was — she registered, with the small dry sardonic clarity that was now her standard expression — a stranger's, and the stranger was bleeding, and the stranger had a face she should not be looking at and a voice that had said 药王谷 and a staff full of pills that were more important than the bearer, and her right palm was warming on the meat of his shoulder, and her left hand had — without her permission, without instruction, with the small bright cold patience of a constitution that had decided it was interested — settled on the inside of his elbow.
The thumb of her left hand was on his pulse.
His pulse, under her thumb, was — steady. Slow. Cleaner than her own. Three breaths a beat. The pulse of a man who could lower his own heart-rate by intention.
She had not — in ten years of sect-medicine — read a pulse that calm under a wound that bad.
He, very quietly, with the same quietness with which he had stilled the blackbird, said: "Sister."
"Yes."
"You are — 药王谷-trained."
"No."
"...You — read my pulse like a 药王谷-trained."
"My father read pulses. I watched him for nine years. He died when I was fourteen. I have not — strictly — read a stranger's pulse since."
A small silence.
The pulse under her thumb did not change.
He did not press the question.
He said, instead, looking at her hand and not at her face: "Sister. Your father was — was he a sect-physician."
"He was a 散修 who had once been a sect-physician. The sect was not yours. The sect was — Wanyue 万月. He left before I was born."
A longer silence.
He said: "Then he was either Lin Zhao or he was Bai Yue. There were two. There were always only two."
She said, very quietly: "He was Lin Zhao."
The pulse under her thumb — for one beat, exactly one beat — jumped.
It returned, in the next breath, to its slow steady three-breath pulse.
He did not look up.
She did not look up.
She pressed the wet restoration powder into the wound with the heel of her right hand. The powder bit. He inhaled once, very small, through his nose. He did not move otherwise. The bleeding slowed. The slowing was the slowing of a stream when a hand lowered the upstream stone. Within four breaths the bleed had reduced to a clean weep. Within six breaths the weep had become the dull bruised seep of a wound that had decided, for one day, to be a clot.
He said, in a voice that had become — by the change in her surname, the change in his pulse, the small bright cold time that had passed inside one beat — different:
"Sister Lin."
She did not answer.
"Sister Lin. The bleed will hold to tomorrow night. The poison will reach the lung tomorrow at the hour of the rooster. The 药王谷 hall in Jinhua is six days east — I cannot make it. There is a small healing station two days south, on the 漓江 — the same road, I believe, you are taking. I will travel with you, if you will permit it, two days. I will not — sister — be a burden. I will pay the biāoshī's niece for your room. I have pills the bearer is permitted to dispense if the bearer is dying."
She raised her eyes.
She did not raise her eyes the way her sect-manners had bred. She raised them the third distance, the no-thumb's-breadth-between-us distance, the distance her mother had taught her.
His eyes were waiting.
They were the same clean dark eyes. The pulse under her thumb was the same slow steady pulse.
But the small precise mole at the inside corner of his left brow had a faint pale crescent above it she had not noticed in the first reading — the kind of crescent that came from a cupping-scar when a child had been ill at three and had been cupped, and the cup had left a small pale mark, and the mark had not, in twenty-six years, faded — and the wooden pin in his hair was jade-handled, and the jade was the small flat 药王谷-Lin-friendly jade that was traded only between two families, one of which had been her mother's, one of which had been 药王谷, one hundred and twenty years ago — and the wooden pin was, by the small 月-木 seal in the side of it, initial-stamped, and the initials were S.T.X.
She breathed in. Four count.
She breathed out. Six count.
She did not yet say his three characters aloud.
She said, instead, very quietly, the way her mother had said no at the door: "Two days. You will not call me sister Lin in front of my companion. You will not call me anything. You will be a wounded stranger we have helped. You will sit in the cart-bed and you will not speak unless spoken to. When we reach the 漓江, you will go to your healing station and we will go to our boat. We will not — Su, I am telling you this very precisely — speak of the rest until I have read what is in my father's last talisman, which is sealed and which has two药王谷 hands on it and which has not yet, strictly, opened for me."
His eyes did not change.
He said, very quietly: "Yes. Sister."
The way he said sister this time was not the polite-stranger sister. It was the second sister — the 药王谷 household sister, the one a 药王谷 senior disciple used in private for a 药王谷-adjacent child, the one her mother had once been used for at fourteen by a senior disciple who had then, twelve years later, written the second seal on her father's last talisman.
She said: "Stop."
He stopped.
"You will call me Lin-shimei in private. Sister Lin in front of my companion. Sister in front of strangers. Nothing else. Yet."
"Yes."
"Get up."
He got up. He did it with the staff. He did not, this time, sway.
She turned her face away.
She gathered the canvas pack. She put the fox back inside it. She wiped the meat of her right palm on the inside of her own sleeve. The palm did not, this time, retain the heat of the man she had touched. The heat had gone, very fast, when she had let go.
She wished — for one half-beat she would not, strictly, ever speak about to any man for the rest of her life — that the heat had stayed.
She breathed in. Four count.
She did not breathe out the six count, because Yan Jiuhe came into the grove at exactly that moment, the biāoshī bow on the back of his neck and two travel-permits in his left hand and a smell of fried scallion-cake on his sleeve, and he stopped — one breath — at the line of the trees, and his dark awake eyes took in the bleeding stranger, took in the staff, took in the 药王谷 hemp, took in the small bright cold place where her right hand was now on her own opposite wrist, where the heat of someone else's pulse was still on her thumb, and the third face went on across his bones, and the third face was very steady, and the third face was not afraid of her.
The third face was, this time, adjusting.
He said, conversationally to the bleeding stranger: "Yaōguāizi. Sister Lin has a very bad habit of finding stray dogs. You will, I assume, be a stray dog for two days."
The stranger bowed. Two cùn. Right hand on the staff.
"Two days," he said. "Brother."
"Don't call me brother. Yaōguāizi. You can call me Yan. You can call her Sister Lin. You will sit in the cart. You will eat nothing of mine. You will look at no part of her except the part she is showing you, which will be the back of her right shoulder for two days. We will reach the 漓江 by the hour of the rat on the second night. Is that acceptable."
"Yes."
"Lin Yao," said Yan Jiuhe.
"Yes."
"You have decided this."
"I have."
He looked at her.
He did not look at the stranger.
He looked at her for a count of three breaths, and his dark awake eyes were not the second face and not the first; they were the third face she had seen first in the cart and again at the shrine and again at the bench, and the third face was, this morning, doing a kind of arithmetic she could not, yet, follow.
He bowed.
He said, to her face: "Lin Yao. You have decided this. I will be the door."
He turned. He led the way out of the grove. The bleeding stranger followed at the polite four-pace distance of a wounded yaōguāizi. The fox in the canvas pack was — she could feel through the cloth — sitting upright with her ears forward. The fox did not, on this occasion, file the stranger in any direction she could read.
Lin Yao came last.
She did not look back at the beech root.
She did, however — once, briefly, at the edge of the trees where the blackbird had been singing again as if nothing had happened — touch the inside of her own left wrist with her right thumb, at the place where her own pulse beat, and her pulse was, by the count of three breaths a beat, exactly the pulse of the man in front of her in the staff-and-hemp.
She had — in the small bright cold time of one wound-dressing in a beech grove — taken his rhythm.
She did not know whether the rhythm would return to her in an hour.
She walked.
The cart-line picked them up at the south gate of Smoke-Lock at the hour of the goat. The new permits cleared. The biāoshī did not look twice at the bleeding stranger. The cart-bed had a fourth bench. The fourth bench had been, this morning, empty.
It was no longer.