mercies
by bloodletter

mercies

bloodletter

Summary

Of all the prisons in which she's spent time, Lotus Pier may be the kindest.

Notes

All three sections of this story will be going up today (Feb 17), I'm just posting them one at a time as I finish formatting. Credits, thank-yous, etc will be in the final end note.

This fic deals with a variety of heavy subject matter, which I've tried to approach in as serious and non-flippant a manner as possible. If you need more elaboration on the content warnings in the fic tags, please read the following note (contains spoilers). If you'd rather not be spoiled, please scroll past to the story itself.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

Dubious consent: the fic involves a political marriage of convenience/necessity where the romantic feelings remain one-sided. Sex is consensual as possible within the circumstances.

Pregnancy: the POV character is pregnant for part of the story. It is planned but she has complicated feelings about it. There are brief, nongraphic depictions of childbirth.

Mommy issues: discussion of canon-typical child abuse; oedipal overtones.

Major character death: applies to Jiang Cheng.

Otherwise, as stated: canon-typical war atrocities, suicidal ideation, grief/mourning, under-negotiated kink.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 28840692.

Chapter 1

The child was born in autumn, like her father, so her hundredth day falls in midwinter. This is less of a concern than it might be elsewhere, because Yunmeng’s seasons are warm and lush, besides the occasional torrential rains. If the lake ever freezes, it’s only crinkled frost at the edges, where the surface meets the bank: the kind of ice that can be snapped with the press of a finger.

Wen Qing has always been diligent, and no less here than elsewhere. Yiling was never a region of particular glamour; Yunmeng is larger, more important, and its ruling sect is kept busy. Its people are, as a rule, friendly and lively. They trade extensively in fish, rice, and vegetables of all kinds. The land is warm and fertile, well-suited to growing things. She corresponds daily with town magistrates, trade captains, and the variety of smaller clans who look to Yunmeng Jiang to settle their disputes.

She has been able to avoid seeing members of the other great sects since the massacre at Heavenly Nightless City, but this could not last. Seasons change, people grow older, and in what feels like the flicker of a candle flame being blown out, her daughter has reached the age of her public debut. Wen Qing spends a week preparing a stack of invitations, and as she stamps the letters with her husband's seal, she wonders if Yu Ziyuan ever did the same, or if Jiang Fengmian handled all his own affairs.

-

The banquet has ended, the guests have been shown to their rooms, and Wen Qing has overseen the return of her daughter to the nursery. She usually doesn’t linger here, but she’s tired, and she is sitting in one of the chairs intended for the wet-nurses when she hears the wood-on-wood murmur of a door sliding open.

A gentle, whispered voice: “Wen-furen—”

She doesn’t look away from the sleeping form in the bassinet. From the doorway, Jiang Yanli murmurs, “Forgive me. I shouldn’t disturb you.”

Wen Qing breathes in and out, purging herself of feeling, and shifts her body until she faces the door. “What is it, Jin-furen?”

There's something about the quality of Jiang Yanli’s silence. Her brother could be read by anyone who looked at him, but her wide, wet eyes are full of judgments she refuses to reveal.

“Would you mind giving me some company on the walk back to my rooms?”

Would she? She’s not sure she’s considered whether or not she wants something in some time.

Wen Qing glances once more at the squalling thing beside her, finally asleep and so swaddled in blankets it could be nothing but a pile of cloth, and thinks, I don't know what I have to give you. The cask has been emptied. I've given it all.

Walking the halls of Lotus Pier after dark with Jiang Yanli is the most pleasant interaction she’s had with anyone since their guests arrived. Her sister-in-law isn’t one to fill silence with meaningless chatter. They share silence until they reach the guest wing; a few paces out from the door of the suite she was given, Jiang Yanli murmurs, “I was curious whether you’d keep going by Wen-furen.”

“Do you disapprove?”

Jiang Yanli holds back the edge of her sleeve with one hand and pulls on the door’s handle with the other. Her face is cast in shadow from the low evening light, so her smile is only half-visible. “Not at all. You may not know, but our mother went by Yu-furen all her life.”

Something shivers down her spine, but nothing on Jiang Yanli’s face indicates she meant anything by it. She inclines her head and leaves Wen Qing in the hall, and Wen Qing makes her way back to the sect leader’s wife’s apartments alone.

She’s heard that, on the day Lotus Pier fell, Wang Lingjiao sat on the throne that still heads the great hall and gave Yu Ziyuan advice on how to run her household. To those few Jiang disciples who survived the Yunmeng Supervisory Office, Wen Qing no doubt looks much the same.

When she was a little girl, Wen Qing's father took her to the dungeons beneath Yiling. He held a torch aloft to light the way for them, and Wen Qing held the bottom of her skirt so not to trip herself as she followed him down the stairs. She was a little afraid; not of the darkness, or the iron bars on the doors of the cells, which looked like animal cages, but of the odor. As soon as they were underground, the air smelled unclean, like a festering wound. Wen Qing had seen wounds before and had a strong stomach, but she'd never been anywhere that stank as though the air itself was rotting.

He slid aside a small iron panel built into one of the cell doors at his eye-level, and placed the torch in a sconce at the wall before picking her up by the armpits and lifting her to see through the gap. She spluttered—she was nine years old—and she didn't want to look, but she didn't want to disappoint him by looking away. Wen Qing was not a coward.

Inside was a man, who she supposed was a bad man, but at that moment she didn't think that he looked like one; he looked small, and sad, and sick. She wondered if he was to be locked up here forever, or if he was awaiting punishment, and if so, what form it would take. She wondered if he had been anyone important.

Father shortly set her down and knelt to look her in the eye. He explained that the man was a cultivator, like them, who had done something awful, and he was to stay here until the elders had decided what to do with him. She nodded, unsure what she was supposed to say in reply. Maybe nothing; he placed a hand on her head, stroking over her hair, and led her back out of the dungeons into the light.

About a month later, she asked her mother why he'd taken her there. She was grinding herbs with the small mortar and pestle she'd been given for her own when she was eight and placing the powdered product into bowls for her mother. Her mother had hmmed, not looking up from her hands as she measured the powder out on a scale.

“When you’re older, you might have to decide what happens to bad people,” she’d replied, and that night, under her blankets, Wen Qing wondered what it was he did that was so awful. She hadn’t considered that cultivators could be criminals, too. Wasn’t the point of cultivation to become righteous and cleanse the world of resentment?

It was seven months from then, more or less, that the dancing fairy came alive, and Wen Qing left Yiling for Qishan with her brother, confused and clinging to her skirts. She didn’t think about the man in the Yiling cell. She rarely had reason to visit the dungeons below Heavenly Nightless City, though she knew them to be much more cavernous than those under Yiling. The handful of times she visited her uncle’s prisoners, she was called to intervene upon someone who had been interrogated too harshly but was too valuable to let die. She kept focussed on her work, and didn’t let her gaze wander around the surroundings, lest she see something she’s better off not knowing about.

-

Wen Qing is incarcerated in that same cell below Yiling for a little less than three months. She judges this by the frequency with which she is brought water by the guards. They know she is a cultivator capable of sustaining limited inedia for short periods of time, and so they are not particularly attentive to her, but she is not one of the immortal ones who can truly live on air; they have to feed her and let her drink every so often, though she braces herself for what’s to come every time she hears the stomp of boots down the hall.

She sleeps in fitful lapses, at inconsistent times, usually with a-Ning tucked into her side. It’s two rations of water into her imprisonment when she wakes to an empty cell, with nothing more left of a-Ning than the place the dust was disturbed by his sleeping form. She doesn’t know how they managed to remove him without waking her.

When she hears footfalls coming towards her again on the other side of the heavy wooden doors, she doesn’t bother to prepare herself. She doesn’t even look up until the doors have been pulled open and she notices the unfamiliar lilt to the men’s voices.

Her mind is slow from hunger, so she only identifies their Yunmeng accents when she hears the one cultivator mutter to the other, “Shit, go get Jiang-zongzhu. I think this one’s still alive.”

Her rescuer, such as he is, stands before her today as Jiang-zongzhu, but when he sees her and blurts out, “I didn't think our paths would cross again. What did they do to you?”, Jiang Wanyin’s face is as open and nervous as when they first met at the Cloud Recesses.

She’s woozy and light-headed. Her mouth has the stale tang of dehydration. She had not been tortured in any way that shows on the body, besides the usual unpleasantness of starvation, but the way Jiang Wanyin looks at her, one would think she’d been scarred horribly. Has he never seen a refugee before? Hasn’t he been fighting a war? Surely even Yunmeng has vagrants.

They exchange clipped inquiries. He’s in search of Wei Wuxian; she hasn’t seen him since he limped down the mountain, and she can tell it frustrates Jiang Wanyin when she can offer him no leads.

She wonders whether he’s jealous of the easy treatment she's earned herself, considering the state in which Jiang Wanyin was brought to Yiling the last time he was in the city. He interrogates her with a furrowed brow, brusque but clearly confused and concerned. Is he surprised to find her here? Surely he wasn’t so naive as to think the Qishan Wen would spare her if she was found out to have aided him. Shouldn’t he, of all people, know their capability for punishment?

"You've saved me before. If you are willing to leave the Wen Clan, I..."

She turns over his words, her mind slow with starvation and disuse. "A-Ning. They took A-Ning away. He's still in Qishan."

It’s as if he hasn’t heard her. "Wen Qing. Leave the Wen Clan. I... I can—"

Her temper rises, quicker than she’s prepared for. She’s had no target for her anger for three long months, and how can he fail to understand? He has a brother, too.

“Jiang-zongzhu, what can you do? I'm still a member of the Wen Clan. I have a little brother and a family to take care of. You can protect me, but can you protect the lives of all my family members?”

Does he think she’d go with him without bringing her people? Without binding them to her in a way that matters? When he turns to her, his eyes are lost and desperate, like a little boy. She is starving and dirty, no doubt smelling rank as a pig. What does he see, when he sees her? He desired her once, and apparently still does, but surely any moment now he’ll see sense. He could kill her on the spot with the golden core she gave him and be held up as a hero for it. Yet, she pities him. Maybe if her cousin had waited a few years, Jiang Wanyin would have been ready for this burden. She hasn't seen him since he left the mountain, but he was not ready then, and he isn't now.

“What if—” He pauses, fighting with himself as to whether or not he ought to speak what's on his mind, and it’s only then she takes the possibility seriously that he might do something rash.

“What is it, Jiang-zongzhu?”

“If I—if we—” He summons some of his battlefield mettle, and looks her in the eye. “Come back to Lotus Pier. I could protect your brother, when they find him.”

“I have nothing to offer you. There will be no dowry, or gifts.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“My uncle will not give his consent. People will say you forced me. They may question your honour.”

Why is she doing her best to talk him out of it? Surely she should seize this opportunity by two hands, while she still has it. Nothing more fortunate is likely to come her way, for her or for the rest of them—even if the Qishan Wen were to recover and crush the rebellion for good, she was put here by her own cousin. But she doesn’t want him to rescind the offer, either; now that she’s back on her feet, she feels a nearly painful pricking sensation of hope in her chest at the thought of seeing sky and grass again. She wants him to know, she supposes, where they stand with one another. It's better for both of them if he’s aware that this is an act of desperation, lest she be accused later of lying or leading him on.

He frowns. The prospect of his honour being called into question has distracted him from his floundering, boyish embarrassment, as she thought it might. “You were locked up. I rescued you.”

“If you’re serious, I’ll accept. But I want to know you've considered the consequences. You're a sect leader. You could make an offer for any other woman.”

“I don't want—”

She blinks at him, slowly, and watches the discomfort and guilt play out on his face. Wen Qing was not at Lotus Pier in the aftermath, but a-Ning had told her, in his halting, tender way, how it had looked. The stench of blood and smoke and wine. The way that he hadn't been sure, at first, that Jiang Wanyin was alive when he found him.

“Alright.”

It takes a moment to register for him; she realizes, watching his expression become washed over with confusion and shock, that he didn’t expect her to accept, and this provokes more curiosity in her than anything he’s yet done. She respects a willingness to take risks, despite bad odds.

-

They exit the dungeon together, she no longer in chains but still following behind him, still flanked by his men; no one who watches could mistake her for being free. She wonders how much the men who'd accompanied Jiang Wanyin into her cell had overheard, once he banished them back into the hall.

Lan Wangji stands outside, a beacon of untainted white amidst the scene of destruction and death that has been made of the courtyard where she spent her childhood. Corpses sprawl across garden beds that have nourished healing herbs for generations. The living men dressed in Jiang colours, assemble quickly as they near. Perhaps it's natural for the disciples around them to look to their leader, but she feels the weight of their eyes. The Second Jade of Lan watches their approach impassively, his eyes catching on her for a moment before sliding back to Jiang Wanyin. She is dirty and visibly starved, and perhaps it would be wise to appear meek, reducing the chance anyone could see her, or any of her family, wherever they are, as a threat. She can’t make herself do it; she has never liked to make herself small, and no amount of cowering will change the fact that she looks no different from the Wens who ravaged these people’s homes.

Wen Qing turns up her chin and keeps her eyes fixed on some indeterminate point far off in her field of vision. Let Lan Wangji think what he will of her. She has seen him, in her position, brought low before those who hate them; she knows that he did the same.

During the Sunshot Campaign, all the Jiang cousins of any note died at the hands of Wen Qing’s own kin. Wen Qing ought to be glad that no one remains with the authority to throw her out on the street, but if there were only someone to whom she could reasonably abdicate, she would leave willingly. She has skills. She could take her child and go as far as it takes to reach a place no one knows her family name. But there is no one, and so Wen Qing has been allowed to remain mistress of Lotus Pier, despite having no father, brother, husband or son left alive to fix her to the place. Her daughter is, in a sense, the last living Jiang; her aunt belongs to a different family, now, the only living member of the family who hasn’t married into another sect.

Wen Qing didn’t expect Jiang Yanli to linger any longer than the celebration. Jiang Yanli has a child of her own, after all, waiting for her at Carp Tower. Wen Qing would have been exhausted at the prospect of having to continue to entertain any other guests, but Jiang Yanli has conducted herself as unobtrusively as if this were her own home, which, of course, it is.

She expected Jiang Yanli to fuss, to flutter around her with a surfeit of attention until Wen Qing is able to satisfy her with repeated insistence that she’s alright. But Jiang Yanli has stayed at arm’s length since returning to Lotus Pier, for the most part; the steadiest reminder of her constant presence is the hot meals left without fanfare on the desk Wen Qing has set up, for now, in her quarters.

They’re her own quarters, now, though she never spent enough time at Lotus Pier while Jiang Wanyin was alive for them to feel like her own. Most of the original furnishings were destroyed or taken away during the Wen occupation of Lotus Pier and its subsequent reclamation by Yunmeng Jiang—or so she’s heard—and she herself bought the desk newly-made the previous year. Even so, in Wen Qing’s mind she works at Yu-furen’s desk, just as she sleeps in Yu-furen’s bed and eats at Yu-furen’s table.

She can go almost a full day without seeing Yu-furen’s daughter unless Wen Qing looks for her. As far as Wen Qing can tell, Jiang Yanli has spent her days back at Lotus Pier cooking, though they have a full kitchen staff, tending to her niece, though they have wet nurses, and whiling away the rest of her time in sitting rooms and gardens, tending to her needlework, like any well-tempered gentlewoman.

On the fourth day after the celebration concluded, Wen Qing invites Jiang Yanli to take dinner with her in her own rooms, and forbids her from cooking.

It is an unfittingly sombre day; evening falls prematurely in the afternoon when storm clouds roll in from the west, blotting out the sun and turning the surface of the lake black and reflectionless. “It might rain tonight,” Jiang Yanli offers, as she spoons out each of their portions of rice. It’s the kind of self-evident observation that would annoy Wen Qing if made by someone else, but Jiang Yanli isn’t telling Wen Qing anything new. She’s asking how Wen Qing feels about this. It's a habit of hers, Wen Qing has come to know; sometimes it's spoken and other times silent, but Jiang Yanli makes it her business to discern whether those around her are happy, and, if not, whether it's something she has the power to fix.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I was glad to see so many people at the celebration, but I’m grateful it’s over.” The corner of Jiang Yanli’s eyes crinkle, as though this were a scandalous admission. “I think all the attention was making her fussy.”

Wen Qing nods; her sister-in-law has good instincts about these things. She’s better with the baby than Wen Qing is, by far. Wen Qing is comfortable around children, but Jiang Yanli is warm. She holds her niece at every opportunity; Wen Qing has watched her through open doorways as Jiang Yanli carries a-Xia around the courtyards, murmuring to her and occasionally picking reeds or strands of grasses around which she may clench her tiny fist. What does she tell her? Wen Qing wouldn’t presume to ask.

Wen Qing visits her daughter each day at dawn and dusk, and each time she walks to the nursery with a dull, irrational conviction that she’ll open the door to see an empty cradle, like she’s been stolen away in the night. Each time she’s proven wrong, but the sight of her, sleeping or crying or, rarely, awake and quiet and blinking around the room, isn’t enough to settle her. She’s never able to suppress the need to pick her up to feel her uncanny lightness, or, if she’s resting, brushing the precociously thick mass of hair into order with her fingertips.

Despite that, Wen Qing rarely speaks to her child. She doesn’t know what she would say.

What kind of household is a widow and a little girl? A sad story, for others to look at and count their luck. Or, from another angle, a lame animal hobbling through a field while eagles watch from a tree. And what a tragedy to lose such a man: so young, and brave, and capable of anything. How do you grieve someone like that? They saved each other, shared a life for a little while, whatever kind of life it was, and now—what’s left of it? He was young. He made her feel old, but that was nothing new.

What, she wonders, will she be able to one day tell her daughter about her father without lying? Perhaps she won’t need to. Whatever doubts anyone may have had about the young Jiang-zongzhu while he was alive, his death has made him a hero: the sect leader who gave his life to save the world from his villainous brother.

Her daughter may come to resent her, brittle and alive, compared to the shadow of a hallowed father she never met. She will never have to grapple with his temper, his naivete, or the way that he always looked around for approval so clearly anyone could smell it on him, like wolves scenting the blood of a wounded calf.

She may have that. We are all entitled to nurse our private bitternesses. But Wen Qing will not lie to her; she’s spent enough time holding Wei Wuxian’s secret inside of herself. There’s no room for anything else.

Surely there are things she can speak well of. He survived a great deal of hardship. He loved his elder sister very much.

Dishes, emptied of food, are exchanged for tea. Wen Qing insists on pouring this time; the readiness with which Jiang Yanli serves others is almost unnerving. As she reaches for the pot, the light catches on Zidian’s surface, and she realizes that Jiang Yanli’s eyes have been tracking her wrist all evening.

“I’ll need to return to Carp Tower soon. I’ve already been gone a little too long, I shouldn’t make them worry.”

“I understand.”

“Would I be able to ask a favour of you before I leave, Wen-furen? Only if it’s no trouble.”

“I’m sure it won’t be.”

“Would you use your needles on me? I haven’t been in the best of health this past year.”

No need to ask why. She remembers Jiang Yanli as a sickly person, ever since they first met at the Cloud Recesses, but, though Jiang Yanli was never tortured or imprisoned, the body cannot bear sorrow forever. When Wen Qing lays down at night, every year she’s lived weighs like a bull standing on her back.

“Of course.” She cups her tea between her palms, feeling its warmth, and adds, “Though you may need to come back in the future for regular treatment, if you want to see consistent results.”

She wakes in a grey-furnished room, quiet and tidy, and immediately distrusts the stillness. Her first thought is of a-Ning: she can't see him and doesn’t know where he is, and the pit of her stomach ices over before he remembers she hasn't seen him in months, and not knowing where he is is nothing new. It settles into a familiar, queasy dread, though it's not enough to quell her appetite; her body is malnourished and fighting to regain what was lost.

The door opens while she’s lost in thought, and she fails to fully conceal her flinch. The visitor is only Jiang Yanli, returning from wherever she was. She’s dressed like a peasant; they managed to find Wen Qing clothes somewhat befitting a gentry woman, so there must be some drapers in Qinghe who still have finer cloth, but the homespun weave suits Jiang Yanli better than one might expect. On some well-to-do young mistresses, it would look like a costume, but Jiang Yanli carries herself with a sincere lack of vanity.

“Ah, Wen-guniang. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“You haven’t.”

Jiang Yanli steps closer, all gentle concern. Wen Qing doubts this is an act; it’s been this way every time Wen Qing has been around her. “Are you feeling alright?”

She nods, twice, and puts on a smile she hopes is reassuring.

Upon their arrival at the Unclean Realms, Wen Qing was put up in chambers adjacent to Jiang Yanli's, ostensibly to keep her company, though she suspects in part to ensure no one breaks in after drinking too much, eager to kill another Wen. She has passed through Qinghe only once before the banquet following Wei Wuxian's return. It's rather quaint in comparison to Qishan, but larger than Yiling, and it's packed to the rafters with cultivators now, nearly all of whom look at her with undisguised malice whenever she leaves her rooms. She’s been permitted implicit freedom of movement, but she knows that straying too far from Yunmeng Jiang disciples while she’s here would not be wise, so for the last few days, she has made rounds among the wounded with Jiang Yanli. Everywhere she walks she draws the eye of people who, at best, see her as Sect Leader Jiang’s spoils of war, but with the kinds of losses they’ve taken, they can’t afford to turn away a competent doctor.

Wen Qing walks with Jiang Yanli to the banquet held that evening in Wei Wuxian’s honour, and is seated by her side. She avoids bearing the brunt of the suspicious gazes, however; the food has hardly been served before Wei Wuxian is taken to task for his lack of a sword, and he leaves the hall, liquor in hand, not long after. Lan Wangji’s seat remains suspiciously empty.

She hasn’t spoken to Wei Wuxian alone since his return, and each time she’s seen him at Qinghe he’s had the kind of smile on his face that makes you want to wipe it off. He’s always been arrogant, but this has no warmth to it. As soon as she can find an acceptable opportunity to leave the banquet, Wen Qing goes looking for him. She finds him leaning against a pillar in a darkened courtyard, his arms folded across his chest and his gaze on the murky night sky.

He looks to the side, and upon seeing her Wei Wuxian gives her a salute which, to his credit, is more polite than anything else he’s said or done all evening.

“Wen-guniang.” He’s skinnier and more exhausted than even he looked at the Yiling Supervisory Office, but he does offer her a thin, crooked smile, which makes him look like himself. “Congratulations on your engagement.”

His tone is odd. She nods, and he looks back out into the garden.

She’d wanted to speak with him, but now that she’s here she doesn’t know what she wanted to say. The words that eventually come out of her mouth are the ones she’s been holding within her since she left the dungeon; she doesn’t so much decide to speak them aloud as have them burst forth. “Have you heard anything, when you were—” He blinks at her, slow and canny, waiting to see what she says— “away, about where they might be keeping a-Ning?”

Wei Wuxian huffs, something between a snort and a laugh, and drops his gaze before shaking his head.

She nods and folds her hands together within her sleeves. Out of doors, Qinghe is chilly in the evening.

“I’ll help you find him, if he’s still lost after all this.” He laughs, a little more convincingly, this time, and looks back at her. “It’s only fair, right? I owe you one.”

Her blood flares with dull irritation, and she turns to face him with her gravest face, the one forged as much through decades of sisterly scolding as facing the members of her uncle’s court. “Do you really think you'll be able to hide it from him much longer?”

Wei Wuxian gives her a sideways smile, but doesn’t meet her eyes. “He doesn't suspect anything. Why would he?”

His hand keeps straying to the flute on his hip before he remembers what his body's doing and pulls it back, as if he's clinging to it out of habit rather than conscious intent.

“Whatever you’ve been using to—”

He interrupts her, which takes her aback; she can’t remember him doing that to her before. “Don’t say ‘I told you so,’ Wen-guniang.”

He's drunk, she realizes, drunker than she's ever seen him. He had a reputation at the Cloud Recesses, of course, but that was just youthful mischief, or so she'd thought. This is belligerent and ugly. There’s a doctor’s instinct she’s developed that tells her when it’s no longer worth expending much energy on a patient who doesn’t want to recover. She feels it now.

“You know what you’re doing, I suppose.”

“As do you, right?”

To that, she has no reply, and after they have been standing in silence for long moments, he salutes her once more—she thinks this is only half-sardonic—and pushes himself off his pillar to wander away into the night. She stays in the garden, watching his back as his black-clothed figure fades into the night.

It’s not long before she can hear footsteps coming toward her again. She doesn't turn to look; she doubts anyone who would come to harm her would approach so tentatively. When the footfalls stop, she hears an unconvincingly-casual voice, still not quite familiar to her; it takes her a moment to place him.

“Wen-guniang,” Jiang Wanyin begins, and she feels a mixture of exhaustion and idle curiosity before she drops her gaze from the moon to look in his direction.

“Jiang-zongzhu.”

“Have you seen Wei Wuxian?”

She nods. “I spoke with him earlier. I'm not sure where he went.”

He curses under his breath, too low for her to make out the words—not that it matters, the intent is clear enough—and curls his hands into fists. However, he doesn't turn on his heel and continue his search; he remains where he is, watching her under the moonlight, looking like he wants to say something else. She waits a moment longer, giving him an opportunity, should he choose to take it; when he doesn't, she takes a half-step closer to him.

“Is something on your mind?”

He looks like he's steeling himself, and she can almost feel the release of tension through his body when he says, “There's something I meant to give you.”

Jiang Wanyin reaches into his robes, withdraws a small bundle of cloth, and extends it out to her. After letting a moment elapse in her surprise, Wen Qing takes it from him. She unwraps the silk to reveal an engraved wooden comb, neither lavish nor cheap. When she takes it from him, his hand remains in the air between them, hovering, before he withdraws it and lays both his hands at his sides with visible effort.

In the dim light, he might be blushing. It could be a residual glow from the banquet, though she didn't see him drink any more than the requisite toasts.

“Where did you get this?”

“In Caiyi Town,” he says, and his face colours further. That long ago? It shouldn’t surprise her, yet it does.

She raises her eyebrows, and he blinks helplessly. “I meant to give it to you before, but there was never a good time.”

It's a gentlemanly thing to do, she thinks, to try and communicate feelings he doesn't know how to speak, but in this case it strikes her more as boyish than artful. It's not as though she didn't have an idea of the way he felt, before they entered into all of this, but things were different at the Cloud Recesses, when she had no reason to believe their paths would continue to cross. Just like he did in the dungeon cell, he looks at her as if she could run him through, if she chose to.

She absently remembers that in a few months she will be this man's wife, with all the expectations that follow. When she looks at him she feels neither desire nor repulsion. He's simply a headstrong young man with a way of clenching his jaw that lays bare every thought in his head.

She lacks the temperament to be a truly good wife; she knows herself well enough to know this. Oh, she can manage a household, and do her duty. She will not talk back disrespectfully. She will raise any children under her care. All this she’s already proven herself capable of. But if her heart is capable of loving a man, of feeling alert to his touch and longing for his attention, it's given her no indication thus far.

“It's not too late to call it off, you know,” she replies evenly. She holds the comb in her hand, bundled in the scarf he’d wrapped it in for safekeeping, but doesn't put it away, yet. If he wants to take it back, he has only to reach out and pluck it out of her palm.

His brow furrows. “Is that what you want?”

“If you're having second thoughts, I understand.”

“I gave you my word,” he says, and he looks earnest, though a little frustrated; she's pricked at his pride, she suspects.

He looks at his elder sister like she's the source of everything good in the world. It's not so different from how he looks at Wen Qing: there's more blushing and flusteredness involved, but his eyes are always wide, like he's beseeching her for guidance.

The idea of being tied to him—it could be worse, she knows. In her heart, she's always prepared herself for the prospect of worse, if ever her uncle decided she was more use to him as a tool of marriage alliance than a physician. But it had never happened; he needed her. She's spent years unsure whether or not she ought to be grateful for that.

Jiang Wanyin is prideful enough not to let others disrespect her in front of him. He doesn't have a reputation for running after other women, or any other vices she can think of. But the rest of their lives is a very long time, and a cold, hard weight calcifies in the pit of her stomach as she looks into his uncertain eyes and thinks about the golden core resting in his body. If he finds out—and for how long can it remain concealed, when Wei Wuxian is already drawing attention to himself? She doesn't know what to expect from Jiang Wanyin when he discovers the truth. She's seen him in despair before and isn't eager to see it again, and for her own part, Wen Qing is in no position to easily weather accusations of lies, or betrayal.

He must be aware of what people are saying. Since Wei Wuxian’s return, new worries seem to be setting in for Jiang Wanyin at just as fast a pace as relief. Is he beginning to understand that, though Wen Qing may have put herself on the line, he has risked just as much? She had little to lose and nowhere else to go but begging on the streets or into a prison of another kind. He has a reputation to maintain, a face to save. Her name, among the people on this side of the war, is enough to condemn her.

There are five types of girls unsuitable for marriage: those from a rebellious family, those from a dissolute family, those whose families have produced criminals for more than one generation, those from a family of lepers, and those whose male elders are all dead. No Wen that she knows of is leprous, but other than that, she ought to be grateful that Jiang Wanyin has no parents to consult and enough clumsy desire to make commitments he may come to regret.

Her fingers close around the comb in her palm. She wraps the little parcel in the cloth it came in and tucks it away in her robes. He smiles a little, stuttering and irrepressible. He's scared too, she realizes. It's small comfort, but comfort all the same.

“Wen-furen.” Lan Xichen pours tea, first for her, and then for himself; she is generally immune to beautiful men, but his movements are so graceful it’s difficult to take her eyes away from his hands. “Do you still prefer to be addressed that way?”

“It’s fine.”

“You’re entitled to call yourself Jiang-zongzhu. The sect will look to you for leadership for a while yet.”

“Thank you, Zewu-jun.” She recognizes his support for the boon it is, but the idea of insisting that the disciples back at Lotus Pier refer to her as their sect leader is ludicrous. When they say “the old sect leader,” they mean Jiang Fengmian; when they say “the young sect leader,” it’s Jiang Wanyin they speak of. To her face, they call her Wen-furen. When she isn’t around, she doesn’t know the names they use, though she can guess.

“I was glad to see your daughter looking so healthy.” Lan Xichen attended the hundred days celebration, leaving Lan Qiren in Gusu to look after sect business temporarily. Lan Wangji did not come to Lotus Pier, and there was no mention of him within her earshot at any point, but he hasn’t been seen outside the Cloud Recesses in over a year, so she doesn’t take it as a slight. “She takes after both of her parents strongly.”

Wen Qing hears the true message: the Gusu Lan hold no credence to the whispered rumours that the child is a bastard, conceived after Jiang Wanyin’s death in an attempt to seize control of Yunmeng Jiang, or just to save her own skin, depending on how power-hungry the speaker believes Wen Qing to be. Nonetheless, his words produce an echo of the uneasy recognition that strikes her whenever she looks at her daughter. How strange it is to see something that came out of your own body that has traces of another person in its face.

Four months have passed since Jiang Yanli returned to Carp Tower, and it is the first time since Wen Qing’s child was born that she’s left Yunmeng for more than a few hours at a time. Yunmeng Jiang has business with Gusu Lan on the subject of lumber, and Wen Qing has business with Lan Xichen on the subject of politics.

She knows better than to try appealing to Nie Mingjue; he despises all Wens for what her uncle did to his father, and rumour also tells that his temperament has worsened since the end of the war. Lan Xichen is her only hope.

“Lan-zongzhu, may I ask your honest opinion?” Lan Xichen nods, and she sits a little straighter. “What do you think it would take Yunmeng Jiang to buy Jiang Yanli back from Jin-zongzhu?”

No visible shock plays out across his perfect face, but he takes his time to sip thoughtfully before replying. “I’ll admit, I didn’t expect this. I would have to give it some thought. May I ask why Wen-furen wishes to do so?”

“She hasn't been well. It would do her good to return to a familiar place.”

“You’re a very thoughtful sister-in-law.” He pours them both a little more tea. “But I have no authority over anything within the Lanling Jin sect. I'm unsure what advice I can give you.”

“I've heard that the rebuilding of the Cloud Recesses was financed by the Lanling Jin. Is that true?”

At this, he looks taken aback; after a moment, he nods. “A-Yao has been extremely generous.”

“Surely he has some sway, now that he is the heir.”

“His position is precarious. He cannot afford to displease his father.”

“Yunmeng Jiang was also razed by my uncle's men.” She has not referred to Wen Ruohan as her uncle since he died. She is unsure why she does so now. “We have had to rebuild without such support.”

Jiang Wanyin would have been too proud to accept any without something given in exchange, even were it offered, but she leaves this unsaid. Rather than receive gifts from Lanling Jin, Yunmeng Jiang paid out. She has seen the records in the study detailing the cost of Jiang Yanli's dowry: jewelry and lavish clothing, wooden chests full of porcelain. Wen Qing remembers the lengths to which Jiang Wanyin went to find the funds to supply his sister’s new family properly, to ensure no one could accuse him of giving her away for cheap.

Lan Xichen inclines his head respectfully. “Yunmeng Jiang has proven itself strong and resourceful.”

“If Jiang Yanli were to return to Lotus Pier, I believe it would secure stability until a-Xia comes of age.”

“And what of her son?”

“Compromises can be made.”

“Would she be content with a compromise?”

Wen Qing does not respond immediately, and the honourable Zewu-jun offers her one of his serene smiles which could mean anything or nothing. Did he teach Lianfang-zun to smile like that, or was it the other way around? Whichever the case, she has seen the look before.

Before she can answer, Lan Xichen asks her another question. “What would you do with yourself then?”

“Try and live quietly.”

He laughs, and sets his cup down. “Wen-furen, how much do you know about my parents' marriage?”

She blinks. “Qingheng-jun spent most of his time in seclusion. I don't know anything else.”

“It’s a long and complicated story, so I won’t trouble you with it. I only brought it up because I can understand how you feel about the position within which you've been placed. But I would caution you, Wen-furen, about the temptation to recede from the world.”

Look what happened to your brother and Wei Wuxian, he doesn’t say, but it rings out in the space between them.

“Was your mother good to you, Zewu-jun?”

He looks down to his finger, tracing the rim of his cup. Her eyes are pulled to it as well, mesmerized by the soundless elegance of his movements, so she can’t see his face when he speaks. “I remember that she was kind. But I’m not sure that being kind is all that’s required to be good.”

In the end, the Sunshot Campaign is decided not by any of its generals, but by two men of dubious repute. Wen Ruohan is slain on the steps of the Hellfire Palace by a little-known cultivator shortly revealed to be one of Jin Guangshan's illegitimate sons. Before his assassination, the tide of the battle for Heavenly Nightless City was turned by Wei Wuxian, revealed to be in position of a mysterious Stygian Tiger Seal, which allowed him to combat Wen Ruohan's puppets.

The conditions of the wartime agreement are thus: the surviving Yiling Wen sect members are to be indentured by the Yunmeng Jiang sect as reparations for the massacre at Lotus Pier, with the stipulation that those suspected of having knowledge of the whereabouts of the Yin Iron, or having aided in the war effort on behalf of the Qishan Wen, may be summoned to Lanling for questioning at any time by the newly-appointed Chief Cultivator. The remnants of the Qishan Wen are to be kept under observation by the Chief Cultivator until such time as they are proven not to pose a threat to the other sects. All of Wen Ruohan's direct bloodline have been extinguished, with the exception of his niece, who will wed Jiang Wanyin as a show of compliance. Her brother and other immediate family members are still unaccounted for, but they are all old, young, or sickly enough to be generally accepted not to pose a threat.

Public reception to these terms is mixed: some call the deal too lenient towards the Wen survivors, while others question why Yunmeng Jiang and Lanling Jin should receive the bulk of the forced labour when the Cloud Recesses was also put to the torch and the Unclean Realms occupied by the Wen-dogs for almost a year. Still others point to the rumours that Jiang Wanyin found his new wife-to-be half-dead in a Wen torture chamber: how honourable could such a marriage be?

The skies at dawn on Wen Qing’s wedding day are pink as a new scar. The surface of the lake ripples under a harsh wind; it is the first time she’d seen the waters surrounding Lotus Pier less than still, and her sister-to-be assures her that this level of squalling is unusual. No one says anything about inauspicious omens. They are already thinking it clearly enough.

The halls of Lotus Pier, still under reconstruction, are draped in red cloth for the occasion. During the formal, public engagement process, Yunmeng Jiang had provided the bridal gifts—lotus pods, farm equipment, ceramics—to be given back to them on Wen Qing's behalf, to preserve face, but surely no outside onlookers were fooled; what would Wen Qing have to give? If it weren’t for Yunmeng Jiang’s generosity, she’d be shivering in a work camp somewhere outside of Lanling.

The biggest trouble, in the handful of days before the ceremony, was how to find the appropriate level of elaborate furnishings to receive high-ranking guests. They were, after all, at war until recently, and Yunmeng was not quite back to its prior state, for all Jiang Wanyin’s efforts. Two days before the wedding, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin got into a heated argument—the heatedness was one-sided, while Wei Wuxian was sullen and evasive—over Wei Wuxian's erratic hours. He'd taken to stumbling into the practice yard past midday, if he surfaced from his rooms at all.

She had wondered if her dread would give way to relief the closer she got to the day, but it remains, even in the morning when she’s dressed in the finest clothes she’s ever worn, her face made up, her hair done up elaborately. She’s not afraid, exactly. What’s to come is nothing she should be unprepared for. She’s not some sheltered girl who’s never left her family’s village. Her husband-to-be is handsome, she supposes, and more to the point respected, wealthy and powerful. She ought to be counting her blessings and praising heaven with every breath; in the eyes of the rest of the world, she ought to be rotting in a mass grave. Compared to that, how bad could it be to become a sect leader’s wife, even if people speak of her as if she’s hardly better than Wang Lingjiao?

For the ceremony, the survivors and new recruits of Yunmeng Jiang congregate in full force. For her part, there are a handful of the Yiling Wen that they have so far managed to locate, dressed in the best garments peasants in exile can possess; they hang back at the furthest edges of the halls, trying not to attract any more attention.

He’s solemn during the tea ceremony, but Jiang Wanyin smiles during the feast, at first in small glimpses, and then deeper, more free as the evening goes on and he receives toasts in his honour. He looks sweet and very young, and manages not to let stress overtake him completely even when Wei Wuxian begins to speak agitatedly with another guest in a situation that Jiang Yanli thankfully defuses before it can disrupt the proceedings.

She can't say whether or not she wishes a-Ning were here. He might worry for her, and she doesn't think she could take the sight of him sad on her behalf.

The day rushes past her, the colours bleeding together. By the time they find themselves in the bridal chamber, she feels nothing but a sombre sense of purpose, and would like to get over with the inevitable.

After the door closes behind them, Jiang Wanyin stands motionless in the middle of the room, looking stricken.

“If—I—Wen-guniang—”

She sits on the edge of the bed. Blinks.

“Jiang-zongzhu?”

When she extends her hand to him, after a moment, he doesn’t move to take it. He can’t suppress the visible tension in his body; he isn't far from wringing his hands.

How old is he? She realizes she doesn't know. Younger than Wei Wuxian, older than a-Ning. A sect leader, all the same. Nie Mingjue led Qinghe Nie at fifteen. In name, she led the Yiling Wen at fourteen, though she was living in Heavenly Nightless City by that time. Jiang Wanyin is a man, though a young one, and he will adjust. He must.

“You don't need to call me that.”

“Husband, then.”

A frustrated flare of his nostrils; with her or himself?

She cannot claim to be comfortable with this. She thought herself beyond nervousness about something so mundane; she hasn’t thought of herself as a girl since the Dancing Fairy came to life and rendered her a-Ning’s only family, but she is surprised to find herself feeling uncertain, here.

It’s not such a terrible task, she reminds herself. The two of them came close to a brawl in that wine shop, and she had come away tingling from the feeling of his body pressed against her own. There must be something there she can work with. She has not touched another person like that, feeling the surge of animal force, in a very long time. Under Jiang Wanyin’s uncertain gaze, her stomach curls with unease.

He marshals his courage. “We don't have to—do anything. We can just sleep. If you'd rather.”

He’s so uncomfortable he looks like he might prefer that option himself. She almost wishes he was straightforward about it, instead of this hemming and hawing, wanting her enough to make her aware of it but not enough to reach out and take what he wants. If he did, she would know what she's in for, and would be able to predict him. It would be easier, in some ways, if she could hate him.

"We can't avoid it forever," she replies, attempting some form of gentleness. I don't want to give anyone basis to question my legitimacy, she thinks, and more harshly, I don't want you to be able to dismiss this and claim it was only ever a show, should you change your mind.

She made this gamble before the war had even ended; she can’t come this far without paying for what she’s purchased. She’s been through much worse to survive. She stood by and watched as her uncle’s puppets tore living men into shreds; she slept on cold stone floors in the cells below her father’s own ancestral home and had common guards tell her to kowtow for a handful of stale bread.

Jiang Wanyin’s brow creases as he looks over her, his fingers opening and clenching in the fabric of his robe by his sides. She can’t stand it any longer: she reaches up with a steady hand and pulls the veil away from her own face.

“Come here,” she says, the gentleness gone, and pats the sheet by her side. At last, he gives in, kneeling on the bed, tipping her towards him slightly with the shift in weight.

In the end, it’s not so complicated. As layers are shed, she can see the remaining scars from Wen Chao’s whipping on his chest and back. She can feel the energy of the golden core inside him flow through his meridians, steady as a heartbeat. Though healed enough to hardly be visible, she knows the wound is there; she could touch it, trace her hands over it, if she chose. No doctor can undo an injury, only attempt to repair it.

He moves like he’s afraid: of his own body, of his desire, of her. Back then, on the mountain, she held him down as he thrashed. The sedative did its job, but his body had still reacted with instinctive flinches. She hopes he has no recollection of the feeling of Baoshan Sanren's hands, the scent of her hair, or the timbre of her voice when she’d spoken, low and confident, as Wen Qing imagined an immortal would.

Chapter 2

They've been repeating this ritual each of the past three days since Jiang Yanli returned to Lotus Pier, and although the initial moment of hesitance before Jiang Yanli lets her clothing fall away has faded, it hasn’t vanished entirely.

She withdraws her needles from her doctor’s kit, and Jiang Yanli watches her fingers move. Her sister-in-law doesn’t shy away from the sight of them, like some people do. She lays still, as directed, and her expression is perfectly calm.

Wen Qing could perform acupuncture in her sleep, but today she focuses particularly hard on keeping her hands steady. She usually keeps silent while she works, but as she readies the first needle over its point, she asks, “I know you had headaches at the Cloud Recesses, but how long has it been going on beyond that?”

They’d agreed, after the hundred days’ celebration, that Jiang Yanli would return to Lotus Pier for treatment as soon as she could, but between the demands of new motherhood and other obligations, almost half a year has passed. There was no hesitant moment where they both tried to remember how to speak to one another. Jiang Yanli’s company is effortlessly easy to bear.

“The headaches? I’ve had them since I was about twelve. The rest...” The corner of Jiang Yanli’s mouth moves in a little private expression, as if in communication with herself. “Most of my life, really. I was a sickly child. A-Ling seems to take after his father, thankfully. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him sneeze.”

“What do you mean by ‘the rest’?”

Jiang Yanli makes another one of her sheepish laughs. She does this often; they don’t sound particularly joyful. Rather, they’re embarrassed, apologetic. They seem to say, Don’t think of me too harshly, if I may be so bold as to presume. “It comes and goes. I get headaches easily, as you’ve seen, or I’ll feel nauseous even when I’m not sick, that sort of thing. I used to faint whenever I got dizzy, but I think I’ve grown out of that.”

An orderly row of needles are coming to rest across Jiang Yanli’s forehead and along her meridian lines. In her role as a physician, Wen Qing is never anything but detached. Patients’ bodies are sexless to her. Her gaze never lingers; her touch is firm and gentle. Even so, each time Wen Qing places another, she feels the heat of Jiang Yanli’s skin in the air by her hand. It contrasts with the coolness of the steel. “Did you also get acupuncture, back then?”

“No.”

“How was it treated?”

“Oh, we didn’t treat it much.”

She leans back to survey her progress, and for the first time since she got out the needles she meets Jiang Yanli’s eyes. “Why not?”

“Well, it wasn’t ever so bad.” Jiang Yanli sounds evasive.

“It’s bad enough for you to need treatment now, and you said it used to be worse. Did your parents know?”

Jiang Yanli’s gaze strays around the room, and Wen Qing backs off, not wanting her to feel scrutinized. She begins placing the last few needles, and Jiang Yanli eventually looks back up at the ceiling, as she was before. “My father got headaches, too, so we could take the same medicine, and my mother would let me go lie down if I needed to as long as I didn’t make a spectacle.”

It is extremely hard to imagine Jiang Yanli ever making a spectacle. “You’ve had these symptoms for so long there must be an underlying cause. It might not be so bad for you now if they’d addressed it sooner.” She slides the last needle into place. “Do any of these points hurt? Does anything feel off?”

When Jiang Yanli laughs, the corners of her eyes crinkle. “You always ask me that, Wen-furen, but it never does.”

-

At lunch, Jiang Yanli serves both of their portions. Wen Qing has given up telling her it's unnecessary, as Jiang Yanli either ignores her or simply cannot stop herself.

Wen Qing associates Jiang Yanli’s cooking with her better memories of Lotus Pier. Jiang Yanli is to return to Carp Tower by the end of the week, so Wen Qing must savour it while she can. Wen Qing has an infant of her own, so she can’t blame her for wanting to return, but she already feels all too keenly the passing of time.

“Do you think you’re feeling well enough to try it today?”

Jiang Yanli’s hand pauses midway to her mouth, and a fleeting look Wen Qing can’t pin down passes over her face quickly before vanishing.

“It’s as good a day as ever,” she replies.

-

Each time she’s seen Zidian pass between one person and another, Wen Qing has been struck by the way the weapon seems to come alive. She’s never seen another spiritual tool quite like it. She clasps Jiang Yanli’s hand in her own, concentrates on the flow of qi within her body, and, with the sensation akin to tumblers twisting in a lock, the bracelet and ring on her wrist melt away into a serpentine flow of energy, nosing along the back of her hand to curl around Jiang Yanli’s palm. When the weight is off, Wen Qing registers in a realization more physical than intellectual that this is the first time it's been off of her wrist since Heavenly Nightless City.

The snake coils slowly and uncertainly, but eventually settles. For a breathless moment, Wen Qing forgets to let go of her hand.

“How does it feel?”

It’s a clement, slightly breezy afternoon, and the sunlight glimmers off of Zidian’s surface. Jiang Yanli sits down on a patch of grass and looks at her wrist with an expression of faint disbelief.

Wen Qing tries her best to infuse her tone with softness. “It hasn't rejected you. That’s a good sign.”

“Is it supposed to feel so... uneasy?”

“It can tell you're insecure.” Wen Qing can only remember one time it ever felt comfortable, herself, but it’s not the same. Jiang Yanli has a birthright.

“I don't know if I'll ever feel confident with it,” Jiang Yanli says. She laughs under her breath, but it sounds more like punctuation than an expression of any real feeling.

“He would've wanted you to have it,” Wen Qing insists. “It was your mother's, and…” I think it hates me. She has been able to wield it, but whenever she has it's felt malevolent, like a single wrong move could send it lashing back on herself.

“It used to scare me when she used it,” Jiang Yanli replies, in a small but even tone. Her eyes fixed on her hands, folded in her lap. Zidian’s purple looks well on her; Jin golds are too pale for her skin. They make her look more sickly than she actually is.

“There are ways to use it besides just whipping,” Wen Qing replies, carefully neutral. “Your mother bound you all together on the boat away from Lotus Pier, didn't she? He told me.”

Jiang Yanli nods, slowly. Her gaze hasn’t left Zidian since it came to rest on her arm.

If Jiang Yanli had this weapon, Wen Qing could be sure she’d never use it in anger. She can’t say the same for herself. Ever since it came to her, she’s felt it hum with intent on her wrist any time she’s felt impatience or frustration. She doesn’t trust herself with those feelings anymore.

“Will you at least try to wield it once?”

She’s not entirely sure where the desperation in her own voice comes from. Wen Qing feels not unlike she did while speaking to Lan Xichen; she wants, so badly, for someone to agree with her, that Jiang Yanli has it within her to take her mother’s place in this household. Wen Qing can’t imagine holding the sect together on her own for another sixteen years. She failed to consider the possibility, when she agreed to Jiang Wanyin’s offer, and she certainly never intended to bear this sort of weapon. It means too many things to too many people, and it makes her feel like she’s wearing an ill-fitting costume. The Yiling Wen are healers. What is she supposed to do with something so violent?

“Your meridians are clear. If you’re worried about losing control of it, these are the best conditions for you to try.”

Jiang Yanli gets to her feet, walks toward Wen Qing, and clasps her hand. She doesn’t look angry, but the set of her eyes is firm, and Wen Qing knows this look. Jiang Yanli is quiet and delicate, easily tired, with weak cultivation and a faint stutter that comes out under duress, but she isn’t timid. Jiang Wanyin was brash but easily cowed. His sister stands her ground.

“I appreciate you showing me how to use it, but I’d rather not take Zidian. I’ll let you know if I change my mind again.”

Wen Qing has hated Carp Tower since the moment she arrived. It might have been better for politics’ sake for Wen Qing to have remained at Lotus Pier instead of attending the Phoenix Mountain crowd hunt, but not enough time has passed since the wedding for them to stop worrying about managing appearances. It’s in both their interests to prove their marriage is honourable, rather than an opportunistic wartime concubinage, so she accompanies him to places where her presence is only tenuously tolerated.

To avoid accusations of the other sort—that she’s some kind of temptress manipulating her husband, or worse, using wicked tricks to hold him under a sinister sway—she spends most of the crowd hunt and subsequent banquet by Jiang Yanli’s side. She has few complaints about that; her sister-in-law is pleasant and intelligent, and she has a knack for politely steering the conversation in other directions whenever anyone they speak to begins to take a nasty tone towards Wen Qing.

-

Things go awry almost immediately. It begins with Wei Wuxian’s flute piping prey into their nets, and ends with a countdown in the middle of Carp Tower’s finest reception hall.

He’s been flitting in and out of the Yunmeng Jiang delegation since they arrived in Lanling. She’d assumed, perhaps naively, that he was snatching time away with Lan Wangji, but when Wei Wuxian walks up the Carp Tower stairs to make a direct pathway for Jin Zixun, he catches her eye with enough meaning in his gaze that she knows, even before he speaks, that at last he’s done what seemingly no other cultivator could: he’s located the missing remnants of the Yiling Wen.

She’s grateful, but he still carries himself like he doesn’t care about the consequences of anything he does, and she’s wary of the things people are willing to do when they stop believing in their own future. However, her capacity for reason peters out when she hears him speak a-Ning’s name.

Time moves very slowly; threats are exchanged, tempers escalate. At one point, Jiang Wanyin gets to his feet, but he seems unsure what to do with himself but twitch with anxiety. How has he come this far and not learned how to make his feelings opaque? Wen Qing has been practicing that skill since she was a girl.

The eyes of the hall's occupants flicker between the players before them. There are too many to all be watched closely at once: Wei Wuxian, Jin Zixun, her husband, Jin Guangshan. She’s drawing stares, though she hasn’t said a word. She doesn’t need to; she may be dressed in Yunmeng Jiang colours for appearances, but Wen Qing is the only Wen still living within the gentry. Lan Wangji looks a single breath from getting to his feet; she has never seen him so uncomposed.

Eventually, Wei Wuxian’s patience begins to run out. As he counts down to one and he reaches for the flute on his hip, the air in the room seems to chill like a cold spring, but in the end, Jin Zixun cracks. A-Ning and the others are being held at Qiongqi Way.

Wen Qing gets to her feet without any conscious thought, but as Wei Wuxian turns to leave, he meets her eyes, once more, and this time he shakes his head. She tightens her jaw, as if to protest, but over his shoulder she can see Jiang Wanyin; his expression is close to a look of betrayal.

She doesn’t follow him out of the hall, but as Wei Wuxian passes her, she reaches out to catch him by the wrist. He gives her a sidelong glance; his eyes haven’t lost their manic shine. Her gut is so full of foreboding it aches.

For the hundredth time, Wen Qing wonders whether she made the right decision, letting Wei Wuxian give his golden core away. But regret is a useless feeling; it accomplishes nothing. Jiang Wanyin may not have lived this long if she hadn’t given in to Wei Wuxian’s desperate plan, and then where would they be?

She whispers, urgently, “Whatever you find, you have to bring them back.”

He nods, and tugs his arm free from her grip.

As soon as Wei Wuxian is out of sight, the tension breaks in a crash of flipped tables and angry muttering. Jiang Wanyin is standing, stranded and alone, in the middle of the room; he and Jin Zixun bristle in each other’s direction, and she’s not sure whether she’d rather see her husband pick a fight with him or walk away.

After a moment, she crosses the floor to collect him before he can do something regrettable. Whatever sentence Jin Zixun was in the middle of, he changes tack when he sees her approach; he sneers, and she’s close enough to hear him mutter, “Well, we haven't all been so lucky in our spoils of war as you, Jiang-zongzhu.”

She inhales through her teeth and places a cautioning hand on his arm. It's a simple act of instinct; she feels him stiffen, and realizes they haven’t touched intentionally since the wedding. For a moment, she thinks Jiang Wanyin is about to let Zidian loose in the middle of the banquet chamber, but if the ring on his finger crackles with lightning it could just as easily be the gleam of light on its surface as he clenches his fist.

“You go too far,” he hisses.

“Why should Lotus Pier reap all of the benefits of war reparations? Yunmeng Jiang are not the only sect to have seen loss. Shouldn't Gusu Lan take half of them? Even Qinghe was occupied.”

She’s grateful, in a savage sort of way, that Jin Zixun is pigheaded enough to insult him so straightforwardly. While angry, Jiang Wanyin looks like all he should be: tall and determined, set on a course of action wholly his own. Perhaps in time he'll learn to be commanding without these bursts of rage. For now, she can only be glad he’s given himself over to it. Better wrath than his damnable boyish indecision.

Jiang Wanyin stalks out of the hall, and Wen Qing follows him.

-

As soon as the door to their rooms shuts behind them, he’s seething. “When he comes back, I’ll—” Jiang Wanyin cuts himself off; she wonders if he even knows what it is he's trying to say.

"He's protecting people he cares about. My people." And you aren't. “Will you let them run all over you?”

He turns to her, looking wounded. “I have a sect to think about.”

She blinks, slowly. It takes more to cow her than a raised voice and quick temper; stronger men than this have threatened her. “Yes. You do. As well as obligations to my family.”

“I can't afford to turn the other sect leaders against me! And if he—” He swallows. “He told me he would help me when I was the sect leader. That he would stay, and help us rebuild.”

Outside, the sky has darkened, and rain comes down heavy on the roof. She walks away from Jiang Wanyin to look out the window, where the blackness of the night is hidden behind the paper panels. Every so often, she can make out the sound of distant thunderclaps. “He’ll be back.” She says it with more confidence than she feels.

“I don’t know if I should take him back.”

“He’s your brother.”

“You saw him out there.”

“Do you know what they say about you? These other sect leaders think your inexperience makes you weak. You’ll seem stronger to them in the long run if you hold your ground.”

“And what happens when they decide we’re the next threat? Shielding Wei Wuxian looks bad enough, but—” He looks sidelong at her and cuts himself off, his jaw twitching.

“But what, Jiang-zongzhu?”

He doesn’t answer. By the window, she watches for bolts of lightning. None have yet come, but the air has the necessary volatility. She wonders whether Wei Wuxian has taken shelter, whether he’s found what he’s looking for, and, if he has, whether there’s shelter enough for all of them. A-Ning is a sickly person, and among her other missing clan members are the very old and very young.

She isn't sure when she'd made the conscious decision, but after it had become clear Wen Qing intended to refer to herself as Wen-furen, the rest of the sect followed suit. No one at Lotus Pier or elsewhere is going to forget who she is, so, with a childish possessiveness, she clings to what she still has of her own.

“You knew my name. It’s too late to regret it now.”

Does it make him feel sore to hear her referred to in that way—a reminder, in case he could ever forget, that even by being here she’s chosen her family over his, and that were it not for the war they may never have married at all? He ought to understand, he too has lost almost everything, but even at his darkest point his family remained his family. In order to protect them, she had to give them up.

His shoulders are shaking, and there are wet glimmers inside his eyes.

Wen Qing turns back to him and levels him with a look, head-on, so he can't ignore her. She never does have trouble getting his attention. When they regard each other, she thinks he's looking for something in her face, like guidance. His expression is like a plea for someone to tell him what to do. Does he know about this side of himself? She wonders what she can do with it, whether it can be put to use.

She doesn’t need to wonder what she would do in his position, weighing the safety of a few undesirables over the safety of herself and her clan. They both know what it is she did when a-Ning brought the Jiang siblings to Yiling. She wonders if his knowledge of it makes him angrier than he would be otherwise; no one likes to be weighed on a scale and found wanting.

The harder she presses him, the more he’ll dig his heels into the dirt. It’s the way of someone who can’t forget the feeling of loss; any challenge is seen as an attempt to take something else away from him. She wants to tell him, I’m on your side, can’t you see?, but she’s not sure it’s true. He hasn’t chosen a side. Until then, all she can do is wait, and try her best to remind him of his obligations—the ones he owes her, as well as the ones he inherited.

They are both orphans, but to her it is an old wound, the kind that twinges only on rainy days. It’s different, too, for an elder sibling; they grow up knowing there are others whose pain matters more. Jiang Wanyin never learned that sort of numbness. Every emotion hits him as though the skin over his heart is raw and easily scratched.

“Jiang Wanyin,” she says, in as crisp and detached a tone as she can muster, and she notices the way his spine freezes at the shift in her voice. “I think we should eat.”

“I’m not hungry.” Even so, when she takes a seat at the table, not a minute has passed before he sighs and joins her.

At Carp Tower, all it takes is to ring a little bell in the hallway and platters of hot food will be brought almost immediately. It’s good food, but he’s stewing in his own anger. She needs to distract him, to divert his attention. Idly, she wonders whether she should try and seduce him. It wouldn't be hard. It's just like the night they were married; once she commands him, he becomes free-flowing and malleable as water. But the idea doesn’t hold much appeal, for many reasons. She feels like a bowstring drawn taut.

Another thunderclap sounds outside, and her gaze lands on the ring on his finger. It’s currently dormant, but earlier she’d been worried he was going to lose control and start lashing it out in the middle of the hall.

“Your spiritual tool was your mother's, wasn’t it?”

Jiang Wanyin looks up at her, and then down at his own hand. He nods.

Wen Qing was never much for night hunting or socializing with other sects, but everyone knew Jiang Fengmian’s wife by reputation. Yu Ziyuan, the Violet Spider. Zidian, her famous spiritual tool, was made for her, as a prize for winning a competitive crowd hunt when she was still xiao-Yu-guniang. After she married, she presumably had less freedom to roam and test her strength, but looking at the steel serpent twist around Jiang Wanyin's wrist, Wen Qing can imagine the kind of woman she must have been, how it must have felt to grow up under her stern eye.

Wen Qing’s uncle was a demanding man, too, and he expected a great deal of his charges. If he were not so strong and powerful, it might have been easier for her loyalty to fray earlier, but what good would that have done for her, or a-Ning, or anyone else? They were under his protection, and she had nowhere else to go. Daughters stay and do their duty, until their duty sends them elsewhere, where they will stay again.

The truth is, for some time she admired him. He was kind to her, for the most part. He spent almost as much time instructing her as he did his own sons, before he began to withdraw from the world completely. He had told her, often, that he expected her to do great things.

She has never heard Jiang Wanyin speak of his parents as people. He brings them up often, but always as an invocation, a justification. In fairness, everyone knows the story of what happened: it’s such a wide and yawning sorrow it needs no further explanation. But they were mother and father to him, and he must miss them as people, too, and remember the detail of their faces.

It’s been some time since she’s remembered the look of her own parents’ features. She remembers the feeling of hands ruffling her hair or cupping her own fingers, showing her how to grind ingredients into powder without decreasing their potency. She hears their voices whenever a-Ning speaks; his stutter is an inheritance from their mother's side, one that Wen Qing has never had the heart to train him out of.

“What was she like?” She scoops another portion of rice onto his plate; he may have said he wasn’t hungry, but he’s eating all the same.

“She gave me Zidian before she died protecting Lotus Pier. She tied us up with it and sent us away on a barge so we couldn’t join the battle.”

It doesn’t, as such, answer her question, but she can’t say she’s surprised by that. “It can be used as a rope, too? Not only a whip?”

He nods, cautiously, and his gaze strays back to her for a moment, before glancing back at his hand. The metal glints silver and violet in the light of day, but here, in the candlelight, it looks warmer than that, almost gold. She’s only ever seen him use it to strike; she wonders if he’s ever tried using it for anything else.

“What does it feel like when you use it?”

He sets his chopsticks down, lifts his arm, and turns his wrist slowly, as if trying to summon the body's memory.

“Cold,” he replies. “It feels—numb. And heavy.”

Summer rolls into Lotus Pier, hot and damp enough for Wen Qing’s clothes to stick to her skin like the tight jacket of scales on a fish. Sweat trickles down her brow whenever she leaves the shade for any length of time. Each year she spends here, she understands more clearly why the people of Yunmeng Jiang are so attached to the water.

When she was young, in Yiling, her family would wear the simplest, thinnest clothing in the heat, but she's never had that privilege as an adult; coming into her uncle's care meant living as a real gentry woman, rather than a cousin from a farming village that happened to cultivate, and she dresses according to her station. The young boys of Yunmeng run around bare-chested with rolled-up cuffs, and it gives her pangs of homesickness that are nostalgia more specific to a memory than a place.

When she first arrived at Lotus Pier, everything smelled like the lake. She no longer notices, most of the time, but out on the water in a little flat-bottomed boat, it's strong and unavoidable once again: the freshness of growing plants melds with the congealed, dark, silty scent of decomposing things.

Jiang Yanli reaches down and trails her fingertips through the water. “Ah, it's been a cool spring. It's not usually so cold, this time of year. I hope the fish don't mind.”

They float without a destination. On the placid surface of the lake, without exerting effort to move their boat by oar or cultivation, they drift in a slow, meandering trail wherever the wind deigns to blow. The water sends out uneven ripples where the boat shifts in accordance with their weight. Jiang Yanli is better at being on the water than Wen Qing—no surprise there; she seems to intrinsically know how to hold herself as not to disturb their balance.

“Do you know how to swim, Wen-furen?”

“A little.” She can wade and splash around in a creek, but that’s a different kind of water from a lake, so still and fathomless. Water ought to move, she thinks, to remind you it's part of the natural world. Lake water only moves when it's displaced. It has no current of its own, no heartbeat. If you listen for it, you hear nothing but the splashes made by animals or the soft lapping of the wind.

She wonders what kind of surveys have been made of this lake over the years: did a Jiang ancestor measure the depth with a weighted rope, as she’s heard of being done elsewhere? Records of that kind are exactly the sort of thing that were stolen or destroyed during the Wen occupation of Lotus Pier. There are histories of the land and its inhabitants which have sunk to the bottom of that unknowable lakebed, where all the dead matter of Yunmeng eventually finds its way.

“There’s a spot further out from where anyone lives or works that makes for nice swimming. I’d like to take you, while it’s still warm.”

Sunlight gleams in Jiang Yanli's hair. She sits more casually than Wen Qing can remember ever seeing her; instead of tucked into her body, her legs are stretched out in the space between them, one foot folded delicately over the other ankle. Wen Qing has seen Jiang Yanli undressed as a physician, but professionalism doesn’t wholly erase the memory of the shape of her bare calves. She tears her eyes away to look to the opposite shore, observing the sway of the trees in the gentle breeze.

“Did you go there as a child?”

“We spent most of the summers in the water,” Jiang Yanli replies. Wen Qing notices the unconscious slide from the singular to the plural; that’s how it is, to be an elder sister. “We were taught how to swim quite young, in case we ever fell out of a boat. It was so long ago it feels like I’ve always known.”

It’s late afternoon, but this time of year the days are long, and the sun is only beginning to tip towards the horizon. They aren’t so far out that they can’t see the shore; there are children in Yunmeng Jiang violet racing each other barefoot on the docks. From this distance, she can’t make out the details of their faces. It takes no effort to imagine any two of the gangly boys could be Jiang Wanyin and Wei Wuxian, shoving at each other with elbows and splashing among the reeds. Jiang Yanli wouldn’t have raced with them, she doesn’t think, even when she was young, but Wen Qing can clearly see her watching from the shade of one of the roofed portions of the pier, her hands resting on a wooden railing, leaning towards them to keep them in sight and her lungs full of breath fit for scolding them for lack of safety but held in, lest it come out instead as a laugh.

Jiang Yanli may be thinking of it too; her face is covered with a faraway cast, the sort one develops through repeated practice at keeping oneself in control. They have managed to avoid speaking to each other of either of Jiang Yanli’s brothers in so many words except for when necessary, and Wen Qing is hesitant to break from the pattern. She’s unsure of where the limitations of her own kindness and tact lie.

“Will you bring a-Ling here to teach him, when he’s old enough?”

Jiang Yanli blinks, her face clears, and she turns to look at Wen Qing with softness lining her eyes. “I would like that very much, Wen-furen. Maybe next summer.”

Clouds are brewing over the far tree-line, and there’s a prickle on the back of her neck. It’s not unlike the way goosebumps rise on her arm when Zidian begins crackling, fighting to break free. The lake is beautiful, but it’s disconcerting, too; despite the serenity of its surface, it can drown a person as easily as a river, and their bodies sink to the bottom with no current to move them back up. Only the most violent of storms can return to the shore what’s lost.

“Jin-furen, perhaps we should head back to shore. It looks like it might begin to rain.”

Jiang Yanli tilts her head back to look at the sky above. “I think you’re right.”

Her neck is a long, pale line, and Wen Qing doesn’t look away quickly enough to avoid being caught when she brings her gaze back down. Jiang Yanli’s eyes are soft, but the expression on her face is sharper than it was only moments ago.

“There’s no need for you to call me Jin-furen anymore, though, don’t you think? We’ve gotten to know each other well enough for you to use my name.”

When she rises in the morning, it is to a gift. It’s not the first, though they’ve been modestly paced out. They’ve risen in value over the months, as the sect’s finances have become more stable, though they’re not outrageously opulent. A series of engraved hairpins have appeared in her rooms in unmarked boxes alongside her morning meal. She adds each one next to the others in her growing collection. It’s a strange feeling to be courted by one’s own husband, not least when it comes in such a stilted, shy way.

The plum trees have shed their fruits, and autumn is just over the hill; she can feel its breath on the back of her neck. The pace of Lotus Pier’s rebuilding has picked up speed in response. They can little afford to waste a harvest, and every day there is more work to do than could be accomplished with twice their number. The sect has neither the people nor the finances for its inner disciples to enjoy a leisurely summer, but Jiang Wanyin and Jiang Yanli are both hard workers. Wen Qing’s grateful for that. She respects it, and she spent enough time around Wen Chao to know it’s difficult to defer to people she doesn’t respect.

Unlike the Cloud Recesses, Lotus Pier’s buildings were left mostly intact, but some structures were damaged either during the initial massacre or subsequent waves of looting. Emergency food stores, in case of drought or disaster, had been expropriated for the war effort; valuables were taken elsewhere, some to be recovered, some not. Now they must make up for it, working away while the seasons are on their side to repair storehouses and docks, all as they still assist neighbouring minor clans with their own recovery efforts and recruit new Yunmeng Jiang disciples to replace those who were lost. Jiang Wanyin is more settled than she’s seen him since they first met. He still often struggles, and the tasks are not easy, but he’s much more at ease with practical matters. He knows who he is, like this. He is one to sink his teeth into something and not let go, which is a useful mentality when it comes to laying stone and rallying the loyalty of those under his protection, but negotiations can leave him easily flustered.

For her part, Wen Qing has many skills and is not prone to false modesty, but delicacy is not among them. She can be polite and keep her head down when she needs to, but the subtleties of diplomacy are not something she’s needed to study with much intent. But politics are hidden in everything, and when in need they both turn to Jiang Yanli.

Their days always converge here: hers, his, and his sister’s. They eat at midday under a shaded awning and go over any particularly complex issues of the day. By the time Wen Qing arrives this afternoon, the siblings are both seated, leafing through letters.

Jiang Yanli glances at Wen Qing as she approaches and offers her a warm smile before turning back to Jiang Cheng. “Hasn't this happened before? What did we do then?”

His hair looks mussed; she wonders if he’s been running his fingers through it in agitation. “Mother went herself to supervise, remember? That was when she and father…”

“I remember,” Jiang Yanli says, quiet but firm, as Wen Qing reaches her seat. Jiang Cheng looks away from both of them. They're aware she doesn't have the knowledge to follow the direction of the conversation, but neither of them looks to fill her in. They've closed rank, invisibly, and she's reminded that she is an outsider. Even so, Jiang Yanli gives her another of those enveloping smiles, and begins to serve Wen Qing lunch before Wen Qing can beat her to it.

This is the first day she’s worn one of the hairpins since they began arriving; Jiang Wanyin takes one proper look at her and glances away, his face scalded pink.

To distract himself, he resumes leafing through letters. “Did you hear that Lan Wangji went to visit Wei Wuxian? Doesn’t he have better things to do at the Cloud Recesses? Just because they have Lanling Jin money to help them rebuild, Hanguang-jun can roam the countryside making social calls?”

Jiang Wanyin visited Wei Wuxian at the Burial Mounds himself, but he had gone alone. He hadn’t told her where he was going until he’d returned, upon which they’d not spoken for three weeks. Jiang Yanli was their go-between, ferrying messages between two different wings at Lotus Pier.

“There’s a little room in the accounts now, a-Cheng, if you’re worried about that.”

“Everything extra is for the wedding.” He doesn’t say “your wedding,” probably as not to sound accusatory. To his credit, he does take caution with his sister’s feelings.

Every time Jiang Yanli’s upcoming nuptials are brought up, Wen Qing must contain a frown. If it will be anything like her own marriage, it hurts her heart to imagine Jiang Yanli in a strange place, surrounded by people she cannot trust, and exhausted, even on a good day, from the effort of navigating around a man’s moods. Granted, Jiang Yanli does the latter already, but she belongs here, and there’s never any doubt that her brother cherishes her. She’s like the glimmer of stars; man-made light can overwhelm her brightness, and everything at Carp Tower is artificial and gleaming.

Jiang Yanli’s tone is soothing. “If we have to, we can write to grandmother for help.”

“We can’t ask them again. They’ve already lent us more than we can afford to return.”

Jiang Yanli places a hand on his shoulder-blade. “They’re our family. It’s alright. I’ll write, just to see how they’re doing. I won’t even mention it to them until we hear back.”

Something stirs in her line of sight, and Wen Qing, who has been chewing since she sat down, looks up to see a disciple approaching the table with a harried look on his face. Jiang Yanli and Jiang Wanyin follow the direction of her gaze, and Jiang Wanyin straightens, visibly donning his sect leader’s face, but after the man salutes them, it’s Wen Qing he addresses.

“There’s been an accident—Wen-furen—”

She’s on her feet before he can finish speaking.

-

It’s not so dire as it might have been, but she needs to act quickly. One of the youngest junior disciples slipped while playing in a creek and got a sharp stick halfway through the sole of his foot. It’s not life-threatening, but there’s a lot of blood.

She’s not happy this happened, of course, but she can’t say she doesn’t, at times, enjoy the mindset of a surgeon. When each second counts, there’s no space for worries about the future or regrets about the past. There’s no room for doubt. Her hands move with steady urgency. Now, perhaps more than ever, she has reason to cherish it. If she couldn’t save her brother, at least there are others. She needs this reassurance that anything she’s done since she accepted Jiang Wanyin’s proposal has mattered.

Wen Qing had found out what had happened at Qiongqi Way the same way the rest of them did: Jin Guangyao came to them, looking sallow and pained, and delivered the news that Wei Wuxian had resurrected the dead. Not only that, but made off with some of the Wen remnants that Lanling Jin had been guarding.

She worries for the rest of the surviving Wens who Wei Wuxian liberated from the camp they were being held in like livestock. She worries for Wei Wuxian. These feelings are eclipsed by what she feels for a-Ning. Worry is inadequate a word.

It was a mistake to let Wei Wuxian go alone. If she had been there, could she have saved a-Ning, so resurrection would not have been necessary? She’s done the impossible before, to save one of their brothers.

It is an awful thing to keep to herself. She made a promise to Wei Wuxian that she would keep the secret of what happened on Baoshan Sanren’s mountain, but at the time she thought—hoped—it would be the last they would ever see of each other. It would have been better for everyone if Wen Qing could be Jiang Wanyin’s silent benefactor who faded into the fog of memory after they parted. On that mountain, with her scalpel in hand, she didn’t know she would go on to sit across from him at meals every day as he frets over the problems Wei Wuxian’s wicked cultivation has brought about. It’s agonizing. So is the thought of betraying Wei Wuxian’s trust. Jiang Wanyin is being pushed to his limit as it is. She doesn’t know what he would do if he learned the truth, but it would be rash, and she has no desire to see him as he was in his sickbed in Yiling, when his eyes were dull and he couldn’t be compelled to eat.

The boy’s injury itself will heal, but it’s messy; she spends quite some time picking splinters of wood buried deep in the boy’s foot, to avoid further infection. By the time she’s finished with him, the rest of the disciples are beginning to congregate for dinner.

She’s covered in blood and sweat. Wen Qing doesn’t hurry to get out of the water, even as the sun begins to set. She lets it lap around her, studies the paths of her veins running under her skin, and wonders what it is to be alive.

-

When she leaves her chambers, she is quickly received by Jiang Yanli and, improbably, a still-warm pot of soup. They eat beneath one of the awnings on the piers. The deep, heavy taste of slow-simmered pork melds with the lotus roots' delicate starchiness, alongside a darting flash of ginger and a hint of citrus rind.

“When I was little, I’d sit out here and look out at the water—I remember doing that even before a-Cheng was born. The view is different, though. That dock didn't used to be there.” She points, and Wen Qing follows the direction of her finger: in the falling light of dusk, she can make out that it's one of the newer ones, built during the initial rebuilding to accommodate increased demand for shipping lumber and other supplies to Lotus Pier. It was completed just a week before her own wedding day, when they needed to be ready to accommodate an influx of guests.

Wen Qing has helped Jiang Wanyin parse the eloquently impenetrable letters they have been receiving for months on the topic of settling Jiang Yanli’s marriage arrangements. Auspicious dates have been selected, astrologers consulted. It’s all very different from the conditions of their own engagement, which was haphazard and hurried along by necessity, but that was wartime, and peace brings the leisure of pomp and circumstance.

“Will you miss it when you’re at Carp Tower?”

Wen Qing’s spoon rings out against the bottom of her empty bowl. Her eyelids are heavy, but she wants to stay awake a little longer to savour Jiang Yanli’s company in the quietness. The moon quivers on the surface of the water as it moves with the faint wind.

“Yes,” Jiang Yanli replies, but it’s not the tone Wen Qing would have expected—wistful and melancholy—but, instead, she sounds almost embarrassed.

Wen Qing looks Jiang Yanli in the eye, and Jiang Yanli flushes. “I know it's bad of me to be excited to leave, especially when a-Cheng still needs so much help. But some days…” Her voice is quiet. “I love it here. I do. But do you ever wish you could be someone else?”

The darkness and solitude of the night is having an effect on both of them, it seems. Wen Qing is as surprised as Jiang Yanli by the words coming out of Jiang Yanli's mouth, but she doesn't let it show. “You don't need to feel guilty for that.”

“But things are so difficult here. Wouldn’t you feel guilty to leave your brother behind?” Jiang Yanli realizes her mistake immediately. Her face floods with remorse. “Oh, Wen-furen, I didn’t mean—I’m sorry—”

Wen Qing brushes her apology aside. The pit of her chest aches, but she’s embarrassed by Jiang Yanli's pity; she reaches out for Jiang Yanli's hand, hoping that whatever else they have to say to one another can be spoken through touch.

When her father had lifted her up to observe what just punishment looked like—an evil man alone in a cell, awaiting his reckoning—it had seemed so simple: the world was divided into good and bad people, and her father could draw the line between the two, and he would always be present to shield her from danger. She never learned which crime that man committed. It was likely a fair sentence; her father was not an aggressive man, he didn't assign punishment lightly. But when Wen Qing first descended into the Yiling dungeon, she had never experienced true hunger. She now knows the lengths people will go to when desperation has become an old friend.

It's too late for her to wonder whether she did the right thing by coming here. There's nothing left to do but stay the course. If she can provide protection for her family by staying apart from them and advocating for them where they cannot, it’s a price she will continue to pay. But she's never been away from a-Ning for so long, and if he'd not been found by Wei Wuxian, then...

Jiang Yanli clutches Wen Qing's fingers, giving them comforting squeezes. Wen Qing is always tired, but it’s rare for her to feel the urge to lay her head on someone else’s shoulder.

When Jiang Yanli was a child, was she always serious beyond her age, like Wen Qing? But even then, Wen Qing remembers that she used to have a lightness inside herself. That feeling is far away from her now, though it’s closer in these stolen moments of companionship. She's not afraid that Jiang Yanli will read malice or cruelty into a quick laugh or a dry joke. She wishes she could have known Jiang Yanli when they were girls, before Wen Qing lost that part of herself. Maybe she would have been able to repay Jiang Yanli's warmth in kind. For now, Wen Qing can only take it.

A-Xia keeps her up all night crying and Wen Qing carries herself into the next day like a paper puppet on strings. The wet nurses and she all agree it’s not colic, or any of the other conditions that can take babies in the night, but after it goes on for enough hours she has her brought from the nursery to her own chambers and set up in a crib in the side-room attached to the clan leader's residence.

Wen Qing tries to sleep in her bed, but eventually moves to the floor of the side-room. It's as if, whenever her daughter's out of sight, anything could happen. She could vanish, like all she ever was was a strange, bittersweet dream whose details begin to fade immediately upon waking.

-

"You're here for your health. You should rest, instead of worrying about this."

"You've done a good job with me. You don't need to worry."

Jiang Yanli's mind is hard to change once she's made it up, so Wen Qing doesn't fight her on it. She's grateful for her presence, though Wen Qing feels strange sitting on the lotus throne with Jiang Yanli at her side.

Once a week, Wen Qing sees non-cultivators for public audiences. This is how Jiang Wanyin did things, so she follows his example; he must have learned this from his father. Even in its fragile state, Yunmeng Jiang is an influential sect, and there are always outsiders seeking aid.

As she always has, Jiang Yanli listens attentively and offers quiet, measured observations whenever Wen Qing turns to her. Some of the petitioners look at Jiang Yanli when they speak; there are locals with longstanding relationships with the sect who must remember when Jiang Yanli was a little girl. It's not necessarily a slight to Wen Qing, except for the times that it is.

The sun is descending into the late afternoon when the last petitioner is brought forward. He bows, but doesn't so much as glance at Wen Qing when he raises his head.

“What is your concern?”

“There has been a rash of thefts around my estate.”

“Do you believe spirits are the cause?”

He glances at Wen Qing perfunctorily before looking back to Jiang Yanli. “No.”

“Yunmeng Jiang is a cultivation sect. We don't deal with the enforcement of mundane laws. You should seek an audience with the local magistrate.”

“I've come here because I believe the thieves are residents of Lotus Pier. My hope was that Jiang-furen may be able to punish those responsible and see my property returned.”

“That is a serious allegation. I hope you have evidence.”

“One of my stableboys saw a stranger lurking around the barns a few nights before the robber.” His eyes dart between Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing. “They were wearing red.”

“Red is not one of Yunmeng Jiang's colours.”

“I had heard there were Qishan Wen cultivators receiving shelter here.”

The makeup of Yunmeng Jiang in the first of the rebuilding years was such that they could not afford to pass up any labouring bodies they could get, especially when presented the way the postwar agreements were phrased—restitutions, indenturement—pragmatic contracts, like her marriage.

“They are no longer associated with Qishan. They have been in Yunmeng for several years, and have earned their place. In any case, they are provided for. They have no need to steal from our neighbors.”

“Do they not live separately from the rest of the sect? They could be acting without Wen-furen's knowledge.”

They live on the outskirts of the sect's compound, away from the old guard Yunmeng Jiang cultivators, because Wen Qing cannot be everywhere, and the massacre is fresh enough in its survivors' minds that she cannot trust that small disputes won't break into fights to the death. Nevermind that none of these people were with Wen Chao's soldiers, or that they're largely women, children, and the elderly, being those who were not on the front lines of the Sunshot Campaign, and have more in common with those killed in the establishing of the Yunmeng Supervisory Office than those who founded it; she knows, by now, that a Wen is a Wen, each as guilty as any other.

Wen Qing has been keeping her expression in check, but this man's disrespect surprises her with its sheer brazenness. She takes in a heavy breath, but before she can respond, a quiet, clear voice speaks over her shoulder.

“Many people wear red, sir. And if the thieves were seen at night, how can the witness be sure of the colour?

He blinks at Jiang Yanli with a look of shock before recovering his face. “Pardon me, Jin-furen, but they seemed quite sure what they saw.”

“Since you were not one of the witnesses yourself, I don't believe Wen-furen will be able to make a judgement on the basis of a secondhand report. Would you be able to return with the boy who saw the thieves another day, and we may revisit your concerns?”

Wen Qing thinks, I am not the woman who belongs in this seat. Jiang Yanli is, if anything, more beautiful as she hardens like a pearl in a shell. Her eyes glimmer with restrained impatience, and she shines.

-

A-Xia has another restless night. Wen Qing suspects she is teething. After an incense stick’s length of time by the crib, she sends the wet nurses to bed and takes her daughter out to the darkened pier. The motion seems to soothe her, or perhaps it’s the gentle lapping of the water as it brushes against the land.

She doesn’t talk to her, like Jiang Yanli would. Wen Qing hums instead: nameless songs from her childhood she must dredge from her memory like sunken jewels. She rocks her in her arms as she walks along the boards and marvels at how heavy she has become so quickly. It feels like she grows bigger for every hour Wen Qing goes without seeing her. It's not that Wen Qing avoids her, or doesn’t want to look at her. It's not as though she doesn’t love her. Wen Qing loves her more than she knows what to do with. She wishes that Jiang Wanyin knew that he was survived by something miraculous, but that feeling is one of familiar guilt, and can be added to the pile with the rest of it.

The Burial Mounds outside of Yiling have been abandoned by mortals since before living memory. Evil spirits walk the earth there, and nothing good will grow; every child in the Yiling Wen knows this. If they act out, sometimes their parents threaten to abandon them there, but it’s such an extravagant threat that they could tell it wasn’t meant in sincerity. After all, no one’s parents willingly set foot there, either.

As such, it was no particular surprise when a demon lord took his host to establish his lair in such a place. By all accounts, the Yiling Patriarch, could live off of the ghost-grasses and bitter roots that came out of the soil. He dwelled there with his coterie of traitors and fierce corpses, including, it was believed, the resurrected form of the man once named Wen Ning, who had been responsible for everything that had happened to the overseers at Qiongqi Path. No decent person had seen the Yiling Patriarch since he abandoned his sect, who had raised him from nothing only to be repaid with betrayal, but the village gossip between Yiling and Yunmeng was all in agreement that strange lights and flickering shadows could be seen in the mountains at twilight, if one was brave enough to come close.

No lights or shadows followed Wei Wuxian when he descended into Yiling to see his sister’s wedding dress, but it was still daylight, so perhaps they were yet to come.

She hadn’t dared to hope, but when he appears in the square, Wen Qing immediately looks past Wei Wuxian to see a-Ning with him: standing, walking, smiling like a living man. When the five of them enter the abandoned courtyard they had selected as a meeting place, Wen Qing stands aside for a-Ning to go ahead of her. Jiang Wanyin looks displeased by the sight of him, but he doesn’t say anything when she raises her eyebrows, questioning.

Jiang Yanli looks beautiful in red. The dress is magnificent; Jiang Wanyin spared no expense. Wen Qing has seen it before in fittings, but this is the first time she’s seen her sister-in-law as she’ll look on her wedding day, and it’s hard to look away from her. Her usual shyness looks now like poise. The golden embellishments draw the eye to the curve of her small breasts under the bodice of the dress.

Jiang Yanli serves soup around the table before anyone else can take the opportunity, and Wen Qing can recognize in her movements a familiar feeling, refuge taken in industriousness. She serves a bowl for Wen Qing and another for Wen Ning, and Wen Qing hopes her own gratitude comes across in her eyes. There is a fourth seat empty at the table, but not a fifth, and so she withdraws with Wen Ning to the other side of the courtyard.

She brushes her skirts out of the way to sit on the low stone ledge they have for a bench, and a-Ning follows her lead. He moves like he used to; if she doesn’t look at him, she wouldn’t be able to tell he was any different from how he’s always been. His skin is bone-white and black veins spread up his neck like hairline fractures.

For all she’s been living in hopes of this moment, now that she has him before her, Wen Qing can't put words to the things she needs to say to her brother. There is too much to be asked, and not enough time. They can all be distilled to the same question: Are you safe and happy?

“Let’s get you out of that hat so I can see you,” she whispers, at last, and lifts it off of his head. His hair hangs loose around his shoulders. Within her chest, her heart is shattering from relief, and he smiles at her more knowingly than he has any right to, as though she’s doing something sweet and not just staring at him dumbly. Where is her little a-Ning who followed her lead in everything? But then again, ever since he met Wei Wuxian, he hasn't followed her lead. All she's been able to do for him is attempt to keep him safe when he strays, the best she can. It's why she's here, isn't it? In this courtyard today, and also by the side of the man she’ll leave here with. And she still doesn't know if it'll do her brother any good.

She fusses with his hair, combing it through with her fingers, and tuts under her breath, murmuring about his ramshackle appearance, while he laughs at her under his breath. Her mind can’t wrap itself around the contradictions she sees: it’s her little brother in front of her, as kind and sweet as ever. She never saw him die, so she could dismiss it as mere rumour were it not for the signs that all is not as it should be, but even those aren’t enough to change how he comes across as full of life as the last time she saw him. Moreso: the last time she saw him, he was beaten bloody on the floor of a Yiling dungeon. He smells like dirt and must, but not like death; she knows that smell well enough to be able to tell.

Across the walled courtyard, Wei Wuxian and his martial siblings sit, triangulated, three bodies to the four-sided table. They're too far away for her to hear their conversations; they look tense, but more happy than not, and too wrapped up in each other to pay the two of them much mind. Not for the first time, she wonders what kind of parents could have produced sons like these: two boys, one always spoiling for a fight and the other believing himself to be forever losing one. The firstborn daughter—there Wen Qing needs to exert no imagination. A quiet and hardworking young woman flattening herself into a shadow to keep the peace: Wen Qing knows that story well.

Whenever she glances at them, her eye is caught by the brightness of Jiang Yanli's wedding gown; Wen Qing had caught flashes of it through the black cloak Jiang Yanli had worn overtop to travel here, but she's never seen the full ensemble, not even when they set out this morning. She looks like a different person; this bride is regal and glittering, but Wen Qing can see the familiar woman when she turns down her chin to hide the brightness of her smile.

What does Jin Zixuan know about how to treat a woman like that? Jiang Yanli seems happy and in love, but Wen Qing hasn't forgotten how difficult her fiance made it for her to get here. Jiang Yanli is poorly-suited for a place like Carp Tower, with its opulence and insincerity. She is truthful and honest and kind. Wen Qing hopes she'll have the strength of will to remain so, after she begins her married life.

Eventually, a-Ning pulls her hands away from fiddling with his clothes, and sets their hands on her knee. His hands are cold, of course, but she’s surprised by the size and shape, too: have his hands always been so much larger than her own? She hasn’t seen him in so long; the longer they’ve been apart, the younger he’s become in her mind, shrinking until he’s a child again.

“How is a-Yuan?”

A-Ning smiles, as small and natural as any time from their childhood. “He’s doing well. He loves Wei-gongzi. I’m going to bring the soup back for him.”

She withdraws her hands to place the saucer overtop of the bowl’s rim, and holds it out to him. “Take mine too.”

“No, a-jie, you should eat.”

“I can have Jiang-guniang’s soup anytime I want, a-Ning. Listen to your sister, will you?”

All too quickly, the sun begins to creep down the skyline, and the figures at the table get to their feet. When Jiang Wanyin’s back is turned, busy helping his sister secure a slipping hairpin before she draws the cloak’s hood back over her head, Wei Wuxian gestures to Wen Qing to come closer.

“It’s still not too late to come back,” she murmurs, too quietly for Jiang Wanyin to hear. Wei Wuxian gives her one of his tiny, crooked smiles; she doesn’t think he’s mocking her, but it’s wry.

“It is, Wen-furen.” He tilts his head. “Unless you’re going by Jiang-furen, now?”

“No,” she says. “Wen-furen is right.”

He looks away for a moment and nods like she’s answered a different question than the one he’d asked. When he meets her eyes again, his gaze is bright again, though the redness around his eyes from crying, earlier, at the sight of his sister hasn’t fully faded.

“Take a boat out onto the lake when you get back to Lotus Pier, will you? For me.”

-

Yiling and Yunmeng aren’t far apart; they make it back to Lotus Pier by nightfall. After a moment’s hesitation, Wen Qing asks Jiang Wanyin to follow her to her rooms. She has things she’d rather not say in the open halls. When she offers him the invitation, his face is first blank, then surprised, then nervous.

He stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, visibly not knowing what to do with himself, until she tells him to sit at the table while she prepares tea. Every room in this house belongs to him, but she’s never brought him back here before; she remembers, distantly, that these were his mother’s chambers before they were given over to her.

She’s not one to avoid eye contact, but she begins speaking while her back is turned, out of a desire not to make him think she’s on the attack. “If Wei Wuxian keeps his word and doesn’t stir up trouble, it may all blow over.” She says it with more conviction than she feels.

He scoffs. “Wei Wuxian has never been able to go without stirring up trouble in his life.”

She returns to the table with the pot and two cups. Jiang Yanli retired to her own rooms earlier in the evening, and Wen Qing finds herself for once relieved by her absence; when the three of them are together, it becomes harder to understand the role she's meant to play, or where to divide her attention.

“What will you do if he does?”

“He’s the one who defected from the sect. He’s not my responsibility anymore.”

As if she didn’t know he told his sister to ask Wei Wuxian to give his future nephew a name. He lies so easily, but he’d never admit they’re lies, since he lies to himself as much as to anyone else.

“When you asked me to become your wife, you made me a promise.”

“We thought Wei Wuxian might be dead! How was I supposed to know he would come back and do—this!”

“So you’ll stand by and do nothing, if the other sects come for them?”

It surprises her how even-handedly she’s able to discuss a possibility such as this, when she doesn’t know how she could go on if it were to come to pass. She’s not a fool, and doesn’t lie to herself. She knows it may be beyond her power to keep them safe even if she did manage to convince Wei Wuxian to bring their people to Yunmeng. Perhaps they are safer hidden away in their lair.

She should be with them, but she made her choice, and only time will tell whether she ought to regret it.

He doesn’t answer her; instead, he leaves the table to pace around the room, bristling like a spooked cat. Do you think you can intimidate me with huffing and a furrowed brow? I attended on my uncle for most of my life.

She finds she’s not thirsty, and her tea is rapidly cooling beyond pleasantness. She pushes it away from her, into the centre of the table, and asks, “Do you regret marrying me?”

He stops walking and turns back to face her. “No,” he says, with a confused look on his face. She doesn't think he's lying, which, in a way, makes everything harder. They would at least be on even ground, if he wished it had never happened.

“But you're unhappy.”

“Not because…” His mouth goes crooked, like his expression got lost somewhere along the way.

Since Jiang Yanli let down her cloak to show off her finery, Wen Qing has felt restless and jealous in a petty way she would have thought beneath her. She’d never dreamed about marriage, the way that most girls do, before it became a part of her life through necessity, yet she felt cheated and sore at the sight of Jiang Yanli in scarlet, looking shimmering, happy, and in love.

Her position is both more secure and more highly-ranked than it’s been since she was a little girl in Yiling, the daughter of a small, subsidiary clan leader in a small stop-over region for travellers. She is the wife of a war hero who leads a great sect. The sect has its hardships, but the people are resilient; there is every indication that in ten years, or twenty, Yunmeng Jiang will be strong and prosperous once again, by which point people may forget there was ever a time when Jiang-zongzhu hadn’t been married to Wen Ruohan’s niece. They will, surely, have children by then; she is already older than Jiang Wanyin by a few years, and they cannot wait forever, although he seems to be in no hurry for the time being, or at least unwilling to take the initiative.

When she draws the vision up, it’s not without appeal. There have been moments, over the past year, when she’s felt as though she could make a place for herself here after all, but she’s realizing how deeply Jiang Yanli is responsible for her fragile sense of welcome. Soon, she’ll be gone, and Wen Qing will remain, cut off from her own family and with Jiang Wanyin as the only person in Lotus Pier she knows.

She shouldn’t be so sorry for herself. She’s lucky enough to have been given a choice, when it came to marriage. Even in peacetime, most women don’t get that much. However, she thinks Jiang Wanyin may be feeling the same way she is, now that the reality of what's to come is sinking in. He looks as miserable as if he's sending his sister to her grave, instead of a palace of wealthy people he may visit as often as sect business allows.

Does he know how to love anyone in a way that doesn't hurt? Hurting in the abstract isn't so bad, but there are different sorts of pain: there's the kind that teaches you a lesson and the kind that can only be borne, that does nothing but lessen you from what you were before it. Ever since she met him, Jiang Wanyin has been walking around like he’s bearing a wound that won’t close, and she doesn’t think it’s made him any wiser.

Wen Qing is exhausted, but she can’t remember the last time she wasn’t; the idea of feeling refreshed seems to her like an idealistic daydream from childhood, better off forgotten. She gets to her feet; his head whips towards her, as she knew it would.

“It's getting late, and I think we’re both tired.”

He frowns deeper, as she thought he would, and opens his mouth either to retort or make his leave, but she cuts him off: “Sit on the bed.”

He flushes scarlet. His eyes widen and his gaze drops to the floor, but he does what he's told; he stiffly walks over to the bed and, out of what looks like a desire to seem occupied, begins taking off his boots.

She doesn't think Jiang Wanyin knows this about himself, but regardless of his title, he isn't a leader; he doesn’t have the temperament. The only times she’s seen him relaxed is when he’s being taken in hand.

She turns her back to him and runs her hands over her own clothes, checking that everything is in the right place, just to buy herself some time. It’s clear he still wants her. She isn’t opposed to it; she knew what she was getting herself into when she agreed to this. She expected he would have broached the subject already, and continues to be surprised by his reluctance. Instead, he sneaks longing glances at her when he thinks she can’t see, as if they’re still at the Cloud Recesses. Perhaps it would make things simpler if she were to give him what he wants, but she doesn’t think that desire is what either of them currently have in mind. She glances behind her; he's sitting on the bed with his legs crossed and his hands clasped on his knees, watching her raptly, looking for all the world like a junior disciple learning how to meditate.

Wen Qing walks over to the vanity in the corner of the room, opens a drawer, and withdraws the first gift he ever gave her. His eyes are wide and searching as she unwraps the comb from the fabric in which she's kept it. She's never used it once since she received it; she's never even unwrapped it to look at it. She’s kept it stowed away inside a drawer, like something secret or dangerous.

When she sits on the edge of the bed, physical tiredness washes over her as if there are weights on the soles of her feet. She folds her legs under herself and shifts so that she is sitting on the pillows at the head of the bed, leaving quite a bit of space between them. He glances at her sidelong, and she catches his gaze before he can look away.

“Take your hair down.”

He slowly withdraws the hairpin keeping his guan in place and sets them both aside. His eyes are back on the floor, and when he’s finished, his hair falling loose around his face and shoulders, she leans between them enough to take his chin in her fingers and turn his face towards her.

A muscle works in his jaw; he looks balky, like he’s ready to start spluttering at any moment, and her hand drifts to the collar of his robe. When she tugs him to lay next to her, he goes: stiffly, but he goes. Something curls in her belly like a snake in the sun.

She's unsure what she hopes to accomplish, but the simple truth is that she doesn't know how to be a wife. A doctor, a niece, a sister: this is what she's capable of. She used to do this for a-Ning, back when he was the smaller one, and occasionally even after that, so she draws from the roles she knows how to perform.

Wen Qing guides him to lay his head beside her lap, and then reaches out and gathers the thick mass of his loose hair within her own loose fist. Spreads it across her thigh, and begins to run it through with the comb.

At first, he looks as uncomfortable as if she’s trying to pull it on purpose, but after a little while the lines of his body seem to relax. His hair rolls across her knees to hang over the edge of the bed, and it flows heavy through her hands as she works it through.

“Your parents fought, didn't they.”

His eyes have drifted closed. He looks like a child, here; his brow, for once, is smooth. She notes that he doesn’t question the direction of conversation. “Everyone's parents fight.”

“Not mine.”

As she moves between sections of hair, he begins to fidget with Zidian’s ring on his finger. “Maybe not where you could see them.”

Everything in this family seems to come back to the mother. Jiang Wanyin speaks of his father like an elder several generations back whom he never met: reverential but dispassionate. Even in memory, Yu-furen seems vital and terrible. She wishes she'd had the opportunity to see Yu Ziyuan alive, even once; it feels as though a glance at her is all it would take to understand how her children’s lives came to be. Wen Qing may ask about her all she likes, but no child is capable of telling the full truth about their parents, and the way Jiang Wanyin speaks of his mother is like the way a child would describe a figure from a myth: admiration, but at a removal, as if the person he describes has only ever existed in his imagination.

Based on her impressions of Yu-furen, Wen Qing doubts she would've allowed her only son to take a traitor as his wife. She wonders what Jiang Wanyin has told himself to excuse this. What went through his mind at their wedding ceremony, when he made his bows to empty chairs?

She sets that thought aside, for now, and replies, “When they were angry with each other my father would go out into the mountains by himself for a few days, and when he came back they’d had time to make peace.” The way his hair is spread out over her thigh reminds her for a moment of wood on an axeman’s block. “And what about you? Are you angry with me?”

His shoulders hunch a little, as though he's been caught out in something. With Jiang Wanyin, you need only wait him out until he cracks. He's not the kind of person who can keep himself to himself. He needs someone to look at him and provide a verdict.

Maybe it was the wrong sort of question. She’s not sure he knows how to respond to something so direct, when it pertains to his feelings.

“Are you getting what you wanted?”

She thinks he’s going to ignore this one, too, but as she begins running her comb through the tangles at his ends, he mutters, “I just wanted you.”

It’s not, as such, an answer to her question; she wonders whether Jiang Wanyin means it as a yes or a no.

She releases the comb, which leaves a delicate, soundless crater where it falls in the sheets. Her fingers drift through his newly smooth hair before tracing paths along his hairline, across his forehead, down his cheekbones, over his nose. She can no longer hold it in her heart to be angry with him in a lasting way. Jiang Wanyin, Jiang-gongzi, Jiang-zongzhu, Jiang Cheng, all of your faces look the same, each one pulled in too many directions to move at all. I'm sorry, she thinks, for the first time; he is a boy who learned to take what he was given, and what she gives him he takes, though it's not enough.

The next morning, Wen Qing sets all of her paperwork aside, and heads into the gardens to make a survey.

She’s reviewed the almanacs and planting records of Yunmeng Jiang before. There were months, here and there, when she and her husband had the sort of working relationship any sect leader could be expected to have with his wife. They were in the thick of the rebuilding efforts, back then, and they’d poured over maps and traded sorely for seeds just to restore the most basic of subsistence crops. But those hardscrabble days are mostly past her; now, the sect’s finances offer the slimmest margins of freedom, and she answers to no one. If she wishes to plant an apothecary, she may do so.

It's full summer, too late to begin the planting season. But she has nothing but time, and she'll need to source seeds and plantings in any case. To even begin to replenish the breadth of herbs they had at their disposal in Yunmeng, she’ll also need to requisition dried ingredients that can't be grown here; not everything thrives in the heat and the damp. For those plants that do, she must evaluate the land, plot out what will grow best where, and prepare the earth before the onset of spring.

She runs her hands through the soil, feeling the cool smoothness pass through her fingers, dotted through with rocks and partially decomposed twigs. She tosses aside a few troublesome stones. Even soil well-suited for farming, such as this, presents its little challenges to even the most optimistic gardener, and to excavate the earth here is a task that must be approached cautiously. Strewn under the surface of the ground are charred pieces of wreckage from structures that were damaged in the conquering of Lotus Pier. Now and again, workers still come across splintered beams and shattered pottery shards buried shallowly in the earth.

Early on in the work of reclaiming the clan’s holdings, a pit was discovered, outside of Lotus Pier proper, which contained nine bodies. When they were pulled into the sun, they were identified as servants who had been in the service of Yunmeng Jiang all their lives, for whom the reward of loyalty was an unmarked mass grave. They must have survived the initial massacre only to incur Wen Chao’s wrath, or presented themselves as easy targets when he was frustrated. They haven’t found anything of the kind in a few years, but a vague dread persists whenever she has reason to dig.

The Yiling Wen were a cultivation sect, but they never lived in palaces. Wen Qing grew up much the same as the mundane folk of Yiling did. Her family has never shied away from labour, and she's come to appreciate that, though they live much more grandly, the Yunmeng Jiang have some of the same grit to them. She never saw Jiang Wanyin call for a servant to serve him tea, and upon the Jiangs' return to Lotus Pier after the Sunshot Campaign had ended, he'd insisted on being taught some basic carpentry. The work goes on without him, but his absence is felt. Even the lowest-ranking members of the sect speak of him as if they knew him personally.

It's impossible to grasp pharmacopoeia without some knowledge of what it takes to grow things from the earth, but Wen Qing has always been better at using the products once harvested than determining the best way to plant for maximum yield. That was her father's specialty, but by the time he died he had only begun to show her how to nurture a doctor's garden. At Heavenly Nightless City, she continued her education from books and the kinds of preparations that could be practiced indoors with ingredients from jars, grown elsewhere. Even so, she knows enough to begin. The ground is much wetter and more clay-tacky than in Yiling; not as productive for growing safflower, but perhaps licorice could take root.

“Have you ever harvested lotuses before, Wen-furen?”

Wen Qing looks up to see Jiang Yanli standing above her. She sits back on her heels and lifts her hand to shield her eyes from the sun in order to get a good look; a little dirt rubs off on Wen Qing’s forehead. Jiang Yanli is dressed in some of her simplest robes, the kind worn to get dirty. She looks like a battlefield nurse at Qinghe once again. Her eye glitters with a rare look of mischief.

“I haven’t. I’ll need to be shown.”

A handful of junior disciples had asked to play with the baby while Wen Qing went digging in the dirt, and now they follow Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli as they walk from the fields to the water. Even once she and Jiang Yanli are wading among the lotuses, she can’t help but be wary of some vague threat. Whenever she checks, the scene is calm. The older girls look confident with young children, and they pass her around between them while the others make faces and play peek-a-boo.

The disciples of Lotus Pier don't need to love Wen Qing to love her child. Jiang Wanyin’s memory is universally beloved, and children are never more beloved than in the face of loss.

Is this what her daughter’s future will be: playing in the Yunmeng sun while being doted on and watched over by shixiongs and shijies who’ve known her since birth? It’s too gentle a thought, too kind. It feels like a trap, like something horrible will come knocking one day, demanding repayment for this measure of happiness.

Lotus harvesting takes place in the mud; some of the other juniors are already out there, combing through the lakebed. The water churns brown around them from the displaced earth. Jiang Yanli takes her by the hand and leads her into the water; it eddies around Wen Qing’s calves while Jiang Yanli shows her the way to grip the pole to jostle the roots free.

She’d like to teach Jiang Yanli something, someday; her sister-in-law is a skilled cook, and preparing medicines isn’t so different, so Wen Qing thinks she might have a hand for it. By the time a-Xia is old enough to understand, Wen Qing’s herbs should be several cycles into harvesting. Her mother and her aunt can each teach her ways of coaxing life out of the land.

Her parents, then a-Ning; each generation of her family has suffered death before its time. It must end, surely, someday. Her success at salvaging things from wreckage has been mixed, but when she envisions the only kind of future worth living in, she sees that inheritance ending, here, with her. Each evening that she goes to bed without having drowned herself in the lake is out of a dogged determination to ensure that the debt will be paid: that her daughter, who is fumbling towards crawling with the single-mindedness of instinct, will see adulthood: that Wen Qing will be able to find for her a younger son of some minor clan, who will treat her well and not mind his children being born into Yunmeng Jiang: that she will be spared the suffering of her parents’ generation, and live out her days as a peacetime ruler: and, when Wen Qing allows herself to hope, that her daughter will teach her own children the lessons Wen Qing taught her about needles and herbs and the value of human life, so that when Wen Qing is given to the earth the Yiling Wen will live on, even as their name fades out of notoriety and into oblivion.

Chapter 3

She has always taken comfort in having a vocation. Most women's girlhoods are spent waiting for their lives to begin, but her time and her work have always been both necessary and useful. Even the Lanling Jin know better than to claim they have superior midwives, when it comes time for Jiang Yanli to have her baby.

Wen Qing has guided patients through both birth and death, and birth is far harder. There are so many more mistakes to be made. All her doctors' tricks can’t make it easy. She’s never had a mother die in the birthing bed, even at the end of two long days' labour and a pool of blood, but this is one more way in which she's reminded that her power has limits, and that life is bought at the cost of pain, for gentry as much as farmers' wives.

Jiang Yanli is small, sickly, and has little spiritual power to speak of, but Wen Qing has more confidence in her than she can rationally explain.

It takes the whole night, but Jin Ling enters the world fat and healthy and screaming almost as loudly as his mother. Jiang Yanli leaves three lilac bruises on the back of Wen Qing's wrist in the shape of her fingers. By the time it’s over, the moon is setting over Carp Tower, and she hears secondhand that Jiang Wanyin has been pacing spirals in the courtyard since sundown. Wen Qing sends a servant to tell Jin Zixuan that his wife and son have pulled through without complications, followed by a second messenger to find her husband outside in the grey dawn and deliver the news that his sister and nephew are sleeping and his wife will be along soon, though she needs to bathe first.

-

“Do you wish he was here?”

“Why should I miss him? He's the one who left.”

He's always more agitated away from home. Lakes are unique among all bodies of water; they’re calm under almost any circumstance. Strange, then, that the people of Lotus Pier are inclined to turbulent natures; Jiang Yanli is the only one in the family has met who takes her temperament from the environment that raised her. She left him, too, though Jiang Wanyin wouldn’t let himself be angry with her for that, especially when she’s just given him a nephew. But nephew or not, at Carp Tower she stays, and like everyone else he’s loved, Jiang Wanyin will go home and not be able to do anything but miss her.

Wen Qing wonders how he feels about the way her presence endures past the others who cared for him more demonstrably. Does he expect her to get up and leave, too? She certainly considers it, from time to time. She doesn't stay out of loyalty—not to him, at any rate. But on the days she allows herself to hope, to believe that what she's done means something, she thinks that her continued presence here, by his side, shows the world that even Wens still have names, and faces, and can keep their promises. If the rest of the cultivation world sees Wen Qing's constancy, perhaps they will remember that her kin in the Burial Mounds are no less worthy of toleration.

She thinks, take care of my little brother, Wei Wuxian, and I'll do my best to look after yours.

They sleep in separate rooms at Lotus Pier, as any gentry couple does, but for one reason or another their hosts at Carp Tower always see fit to house them together; perhaps the Lanling Jin simply don't wish to acknowledge Wen Qing any more than they must. This is the same suite they were given for the crowd hunt, she realizes; she remembers looking out the window at the bone-white flash of faraway lightning behind the pane.

On the other side of the room, he's the one staring out the window, this time. Sleeplessness is written in the way his body hangs on its frame. His face is wan with the effort of love.

She's tired from the long night and long day that followed, but so tired that she's beyond sleep. After it all ended, Jiang Yanli was washed and dressed and given her son to hold, and Wen Qing had waited and watched, halfway out the door, far after the point her medical expertise was needed. It was hard to look away from Jiang Yanli's exhausted, triumphant pride, her ferocious gentleness.

Wen Qing envies that: to look at something and know it’s yours, in a way no one can deny. She doesn’t feel ready, is anyone ever ready for children? She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be more prepared than she is now. When you’re young, adults seem so mature, so ready for anything; it’s not until you get older that you realize everyone has always been fumbling along, learning how to live as they go, and hoping other people will be fooled. If Wen Qing isn’t grown up by now, she can’t imagine what else it would take. She's taken care of people all her life, but it's different, she thinks, to have something that can’t be taken from you.

“Jiang Cheng.”

He turns to her, his mouth open as though about to comment on her choice of address, but the words never escape him. The book she had opened in her lap has been set down; she smooths her skirt back into order and places one of her palms, delicately, on her knee. His eyes follow the movement of her hand.

“Come here. It’s late.”

As she’s come to understand, he takes to instruction keenly, when he’s in a certain state of mind. He crosses the room until he’s close enough to be touched, where he stops. She stands from where she sat on the edge of the bed, and before she has the opportunity to overthink, she reaches out between them to begin unfastening his robes. His face is overtaken with a bloodless look of shock.

She observes the peculiar self-consciousness in him as she strips him out of his clothes: his shifting weight from one foot to the other, the rigid lines of his shoulders, until all of his fine clothes are puddled on the floor by his feet. There are tan lines at his wrists and neck where long days under the Yunmeng sun have left their mark.

Zidian winds around his right wrist. It holds the candlelight on its surface and catches her eye. She’s never seen him take it off: not to sleep nor bathe, nor even that night when he told her how his mother gave it to him. He watches her watching him, and flexes his fingers on that hand before collecting himself, standing straighter.

Just like on their wedding night, she sits back down and pats the blanket beside her. His eyes are fearful—they have been each time they’ve touched. Desire is there, too, but the fear is very real. He takes one step closer, and when no reproach comes he takes another, until he sits next to her on the bed, two hands’ widths apart.

Since the wedding, he's never pushed her for more. The idea of being Jiang-zongzhu's good wife who dresses up for him and rolls onto her back every night is appalling, but in fairness, he's never asked it of her, and Wen Qing has come to suspect that it's not what he wants, either, whether or not he knows it.

Almost leisurely, she unfastens the belt at her waist and lets it fall to the bed. He shifts, unsure whether to kneel atop the bed, to sit, to lay back; his eyes follow the movements of her hands, moving slowly, as though passing through water rather than air.

It’s her turn, now, and she unfolds her layers: the outer robe—a mid-toned lilac, signalling her allegiance to Yunmeng Jiang but not so dark as to make her seem severe—followed by the second layer, dark crimson, peeking through the collar. She sets each of them aside until even her inner robes and underclothes are gone. He looks away, as if the sight of her skin is too bright to be borne.

Even on their wedding night, neither of them fully undressed. When they share rooms, they change behind screens. She has seen his naked body more often before they were married than she has since, but he was her patient, and she touched him no more than was necessary: puncturing his skin with needles, apply poultices of coagulating grasses, and slicing into his dantian to look for the hollow place inside him where a golden core once lived.

Goosebumps rise on her arms. She plucks Jiang Cheng's innermost robe off the ground beside the bed and pulls her arms through the sleeves. It’s comically large on her body, one of the shoulders already slipping down, but the violet silk is soft on her skin.

She holds the robe together by one light hand at her waist. When she looks back at him, she sees a face filled with so much bare longing it looks almost like pain.

Once again, she pulls him down to lay on the bed; this time, instead of placing his head on her knee and combing his hair, she lays beside him, curling her arms around him loosely. Jiang Cheng holds himself awkwardly, as if he’s not used to being touched this way; once he's suitably convinced it's permitted, he presses close to her everywhere they touch. He lays his cheek against her ribcage, turning his face against the poorly-fastened cloth between their skin.

Did Yu-furen hold you, Jiang Cheng? Wen Qing doesn't think she did, at least not very often; he wouldn't be so hungry for it now, if she had. She can't imagine having a child and not loving it in a way that can be felt. Jiang Cheng is difficult to love, but children aren’t born like that, not in her experience.

Wen Qing wants to tell him that she knows he's tired and wrung out and that it's alright, for a time, to be weak. She doesn't need to love him to see his loneliness and fear and think, I'm lonely and frightened, too, and I want to forget I'm anything but a body. She wants a sliver of Jiang Yanli's happiness. She wants, also, to know her brother and her family will be safe, after all, that her lingering unease is only the product of her bitterness and paranoia, but that Jiang Cheng is either unwilling or unable—she changes her mind by the day on which it is—to provide.

The last time they’d slept in these rooms, she’d thought about sleeping with him, but decided against it. She'd asked him about his mother's whip, instead. She cannot give him what he needs; perhaps she is incapable of it. To Jiang Cheng, she will be just another person in the line of people to whom he believes he is not first in their heart. But she can give him this for an evening, a little mutual touch. It can't be said she feels nothing for him, even if it's only the cumulative result of proximity. All that time spent at someone's side, mending their roofs and training their disciples, forms a bond, even if she kept herself at arm's length.

She shifts, uncurling her arms from around his chest and pushing herself up to look down at him. With two fingers under his chin, she turns his face up, forcing him to meet her eyes.

“You’ve never asked me for anything like this. Not once. Why?”

“You don’t need to suffer through sleeping with me,” he mutters; it sounds scathing, but his eyes dart away with shame.

“And if it wasn’t suffering; would you let me? Or do you just not like sex? It’s alright, if that’s all it is.”

Jiang Cheng looks back at her. “No, I—” His eyes are wide and suspicious, like a lost child's. Having to speak about this candidly has him flustered. She can feel him swallow against the fingertips she has pressed against his neck. “I’d let you.”

She ought to leave off tormenting him. She lets his chin go and sits up, so she can swing her thigh over his chest so she straddles his ribcage, bracing her weight on her knees. His expression becomes one of soft, vacant shock.

She extends her hand toward him, holding it between them, and nods at Zidian on his wrist.

“Will you let me take it for the night?”

He blinks a few times, lifts his arm, and glances at the weapon on his wrist. “Why?”

“You’ve been carrying it a long time. It might feel good to let someone else hold it, to give yourself a rest.”

He looks hesitant, like the betrayal is thick in his mouth. She knew to expect this—how could he be expected to give away the only thing with which his mother left him? As if he didn't care for her sacrifice, or her difficult love?

Her hand is still motionless in the air, palm-down, fingers loose and tingling with anticipation. If he says no to this, she will understand. But—

Jiang Cheng closes his eyes with a look as if it pains him. The metal on his wrist begins to shift and twist, and she leans close enough to his own hand their fingertips could brush.

The serpent's mouth touches her, tentatively, as if smelling her skin to test whether or not she is trustworthy. It must find something worth trusting in her, because it begins to curl around her forearm. Her wrist is much thinner than Jiang Cheng's, and Zidian seems to sense it; it coils much tighter, the length of it extending higher up her arm, overtop of the sleeve of Jiang Cheng's borrowed robe. When the bracelet has settled in its place, the ring begins to form around her middle finger, until that, too, stills and solidifies, looking like a piece of jewelry again instead of the crackling liquid power it becomes when it transfers from one person to another.

She lifts her arm back to her own eye-level and examines the way Zidian sits on her skin. Jiang Cheng was right; it is heavy. The steel already begins to cool on her wrist. She wonders when she will get used to its weight.

Wen Qing flexes her fingers, feels force gather within her palm. She has only seen him use it to inflict pain, but they are very different people, she and her husband. If she struck him with it, would it hurt? Would it recognize him as its true master, or would it lash out under her command as it would his? She wonders, but she's seen Jiang Cheng's scars. He’s been whipped before. She brought him back from the edge of death from such a treatment; she could not bring herself to undo her own work, curiosity aside.

She lets the force all but dissipate, so when she brings her hand up to touch the planes of his face, tracing over the slopes of his brow, his cheeks, his mouth, all it does is dust his skin with a handful of residual sparks. He flinches, more preemptively than out of fear. It can't have hurt much, so perhaps it was a shudder of a different meaning.

This is different from anything that came before; she notices, for the first time, an unignorable surge of desire for him, or at least for the way that he is making her feel: a pulsing, hot, sick sort of intensity flowing down from her chest to hum dangerously between her legs and crackling across her skin like sparks.

Wen Qing reaches out for the guan holding his hair in place: a nine-petaled lotus, his father's, recovered from the Yunmeng Supervisory Office. She withdraws a few pins and lets it free. The shower of hair falling around his face makes him look so young. She gathers a handful of it in her fist and watches him still. The frozen cast to his eyes goes slack. She hasn't even pulled.

“Open your mouth,” she says. He blanches, and then parts his lips obediently.

Wen Qing begins with two fingers, sliding over the flat of his tongue. It jumps at the press of her fingertips, but he seems to be making an effort to stay still, which is almost sweet. The inside of his mouth is warm and wet. When she reaches her knuckle—she doesn’t have particularly long fingers, but he's fighting the urge to gag—she takes care not to knock Zidian's ring against his teeth, lest they chip on the metal.

Her left hand still holds his head in place by his hair; she tightens her grip before she adds a third finger.

Like this, he’s having to hold his jaw open with some effort; this is even more true when she begins fucking his face with her hand, not fast but deep, pushing her fingertips back as far as she can as he splutters and chokes around her. He has his eyes closed so tightly, as if the sight of her would burn.

She pulls her hand back, her fingers wet with spit, and she casts her gaze around the clothes scattered across the bed until she leans over to pick up one of her sashes. Slowly, carefully, to give him time to pull away or protest, she covers his eyes. He doesn't resist, so she ties the cloth at the back of his head, tight enough it won't slip.

Around the blindfold, his face is flushed bright red. It's better for her, too, if she isn't being watched. She can play Baoshan Sanren again for him; it’s easier than playing herself, when it comes to this. There's no need for her to reconcile the way she feels about him, at times either repulsed or compelled by the prospect of his touch. The loose silk on her bare skin is cool, and she's aware of every movement she makes as it shifts over her bare flesh.

She hadn't thought she was capable of enjoying this. She had no base for comparison, and the only other time was their wedding night—him nervous, her impatient, it had taken forever to get started and ended very fast. She's never been with anyone else; when would she have had the opportunity? No man she's ever known has appealed to her enough to seem worth the risk.

But Wen Qing had liked it, back at Carp Tower, when he tipped his head back for her and let her arrange his hair on her lap. It was different from the way he looked to her for mothering the rest of the time. This, too, doesn't feel like it takes anything away from her; it feels like she's drawing from him, soaking up the regard he pays her until it's something she could wield. For once, the only thing that matters is what she wants. No longer is she responsible for nurturing or self-denial. All she needs to give Jiang Cheng is permission to no longer be strong.

She raises her hand back to his face, but instead of putting her fingers back inside his mouth—though he parts his lips obligingly when he can feel her touch—she brushes her knuckles against his cheek, gently, just enough for him to feel the rasp of Zidian's ring. “You said that your mother once tied you with this.”

A slow nod, and his face burns still redder, his flush covering his skin like a stain spreading through cloth.

Wen Qing catches his bare wrists in her grip and pushes his arms up, bringing them together, and leans forward until he begins to understand. He shuffles back, pushing himself with his heels, until his shoulders reach the edge of the bed, where a wrought headboard extends past the edge of the mattress.

Zidian sparks back to life and surges toward Jiang Cheng's wrists; it winds itself around his forearms, binding him to the headboard. It responds to her will so quickly. Her arm already feels light in its absence; she can only imagine how he felt giving it away after having lived with it attached to him like another limb.

His arms are extended over his head, exposing his chest to the light and illuminating the sweat that has already come to the surface. She doesn't know where this is headed, besides the obvious destination, but when she lifts some of her weight off of his thighs, his arms and shoulders tighten, but he doesn't pull away.

Men and women have been doing such things since the beginning of the world, no? Even if the specifics are unusual. It pleases her that he goes still when she guides him inside her; she'd wondered whether at some point a sense of shame and masculine obligation would cause him to try and take charge, but he lets himself be acted upon. Sweat drips down from his brow to wet the cloth over his eyes. His mouth parts now and again in silent flickers of shock.

She pauses when she comes to rest on his hips, adjusting to the strange, foreign pressure. They didn't make it this far, before. On their wedding night, he came while only halfway inside and rolled away immediately in embarrassment. She'd eventually taken pity on him and stroked his back with her palm, trying to soothe him.

This is more overwhelming than that had been, more challenging; it hurts, at first, in a dull way, due to muscles being stretched in a way she's had no reason to get used to. It's an inescapable feeling. She supports herself on her knees, braced on either side of his hips, and can hear the frantic patter of his breath any time she shifts in place. Jiang Cheng is too far gone like this to worry about anything, even his own dignity. If life were kinder, perhaps he would be able to access these parts of himself more easily, this quietness and trust. They stir something protective within her heart.

It doesn’t take much longer, after that, before he cries out. She lets him slip out of her, coming to kneel instead over one of his thighs. Her whole being feels at once slippery and tense.

Zidian unfurls from around his arms to settle on his skin in its everyday form. Gingerly, he sits up enough to bring his hands to hover in the air around her hips, not quite touching her but extending an offer: she takes him by the wrist and guides his hand to her cunt, where she can feel wetness smeared down the inside of her thigh. She curls her fingers around his, shows him how to press around her clit, circling it with pressure just shy of too-much. He has nice hands, long fingers rough with calluses, and she pulls his hand further until she’s grinding against the heel of his palm, and he’s crooking two fingers inside her, moving easily through the slickness, and her eyes fall closed. She reaches up with her free hand to tug at her own breast, twisting a nipple between her finger and thumb with enough sudden sharpness it makes her whole body jerk like she touched a hot coal, a feeling that only spreads outwards as it mellows, running through her limbs in pulses outward from her cunt, spasming around Jiang Cheng’s hand.

She kisses him once, closed-mouth, before reaching behind his head to unfasten the blindfold. She doesn’t acknowledge the wet glimmer of his eyes, but when she pulls a blanket over them both she pulls him down by the neck one more to press his face against her chest, out of sight.

Eventually, he shifts off of her to sleep, but even after exerting themselves it doesn't come easily. They lay together in the dark, each feigning sleep but breathing too quickly, fidgeting too frequently. She thinks she may have fallen asleep first, but throughout the night she wakes several times. In the early morning, when dawn is beginning to leak through the windows, he’s curled in on himself, twitching faintly. He’s muttering under his breath, indistinguishable words of distress. After a few minutes of this, she takes his hand, to give him something to clutch onto.

Jiang Yanli works on her embroidery. Across from her, Wen Qing works with a different kind of needle; she cleans and dries each piece of her doctor’s kit.

"Do you think you'd ever be willing to try wielding Zidian again?"

Her hands pause on her needlework. “It seems important to you, Wen-furen. I'm not sure I understand why.”

“If you're worried about your health, I can help you.” Wen Qing has read almost every medical text in her parents’ library, looking for any leads that could help a-Ning with the disturbances in his spiritual energy. It never led anywhere, but she still wishes she had some of them now, in case she’d have more luck treating Jiang Yanli. “Not just the acupuncture—there are other avenues of treatment, too. Even if it takes me a long time, I'll figure something out—”

“I appreciate your help, Wen-furen. You're very kind. But what if…” Jiang Yanli pauses, her lips a thin, tight line across her face. Her brother used to make the same expression. “And if this is all I'll ever be? Would that be alright?”

“Didn’t you come here for treatment?”

Jiang Yanli laughs, softly, like Wen Qing is a little child with naive ideas about the world, and sets aside her embroidery. “I did. And you’ve given it to me. I’d like to get less headaches, and be less easily tired, and I’m happy to take whatever steps you recommend. But that’s not why I don’t want to take Zidian from you. Do you understand?”

She does. She can’t pretend otherwise; she’s gotten to know this family too well. But even so; Wen Qing tells the truth. “I’m not the right person to keep it.”

“It chose you, didn’t it? He must have wanted you to have it.”

He granted it to her once, and the permission must have held after his death. She used it to use him, because she was lonely and wanted a baby, and he was desperate for something approaching his mother’s touch. It says nothing about what Wen Qing deserves, and she knows herself. She doesn't want to be another woman married into this house whose resentment thickens over the years until all that's left of her is a venomous tongue and a lash that strikes most harshly at the ones she holds closest. Jiang Wanyin's most precious heirloom ought to go to someone with whom it can be trusted. Someone who loved him.

“Would you ever come back, if you had the chance? Come back to stay?”

“Is that what this has been about, Wen-furen?”

“The people love you. When they look at me, they see the people who killed their families.” She dislikes the naked desperation in her own voice. Wen Qing is not a diplomat. She is not the kind of person who knows how to maneuver events into place. Like any doctor, her instinct is to hold back, observe the damage, and salvage what's left. Whatever the world thinks of Jiang Yanli, Wen Qing knows the truth: Jiang Yanli is clever and well-spoken. She is fair-minded and thoughtful. The love in her heart seems to spring from an inexhaustible well. She is a stronger swimmer than her frailness would suggest.

“What would you do?”

She sounds like Lan Xichen. He and Jiang Yanli aren't so different from each other; they're both even-tempered and obliging to the point of frustration. But Lan Xichen is an ally at best and a potential threat at worst, while Jiang Yanli is no longer someone about whom Wen Qing can make rational judgements.

“I'd work in the gardens. There are always people in need of healing, even in peacetime.”

Of all the prisons in which she's spent time, Lotus Pier may be the kindest. Since her parents died, Wen Qing has moved between one enclosure to another. Heavenly Nightless City was a strange place to come of age, where paranoia rose thick and choking in the dry, smoky air. She was locked up below Yiling for months, not knowing if she'd ever see the sky again, until she was liberated into the custody of Yunmeng Jiang. Yet Wen Qing would prefer not to be chained to it as fast as she is now. She craves the freedom that being of less consequence to the place would bring her. She would like to go missing for days, paying house calls on sick farmers. She would like to be a little less Jiang.

“You can still do those things, Wen-furen. I'll help you as much as I can. And you don’t need to use Zidian, if you don’t want to. Keep it safe for your daughter. That’s enough.”

Come home, she wants to beg. I'll be able to rest, then. It's not my home, but I would stay for you. The water might look beautiful to me, if there was someone here to love it.

“Are you happy at Carp Tower?”

“Are you asking if I prefer it? No, I don't. But I made a promise when I was married, and there are people I care about. Not just a-Ling; Su-mei is lonely, I think. And Jin-furen…” Jiang Yanli's mouth flattens; she speaks with delicate precision. “She has more patience for a-Yao when she has some companionship.”

Still playing that role? The way Jiang Yanli speaks of it, she knows already; she understands her own skills, painfully earned though they may be. Wen Qing is hardly any different. They continue on as they always have, if only because they don’t know any other way.

Before she left the Cloud Recesses, Wen Qing had lingered at Lan Xichen’s door and asked, Didn’t a daughter of Gusu Lan go on to become a great leader of the sect?

He’d nodded, with a small smile playing around his mouth. Lan Yi led the Gusu Lan sect on her own for many years, Lan Xichen had said.

She’d replied, That seems like a lonely life.

Great people are often lonely, I think. But I've heard she hunted with Baoshan Sanren, while Baoshan Sanren still walked among mortals. Of course, that was long before our time, so it's hard to tell which of the legends are true.

Wen Qing thinks, now, aren’t you lonely, Yanli? I can’t be the only one that wishes I didn’t sleep alone.

Jiang Yanli has folded up her embroidery; she stands, holding it between her clasped hands, and murmurs, “I am sorry that I can't give you what you're asking for.”

She gently bows, and leaves the room.

Wen Qing slides the last of her needles into its case, and registers that she feels like doing something unlike her, like crying.

The weeks after Jin Ling’s birth pass by so quickly that when Wen Qing and Jiang Wanyin return to Carp Tower, it still feels like they hardly left. Dawn rises pearlescent above the gleaming palace, gold and light blue, like the colours of sunrise fading into day. The moon lingers in the sky past its time of obligation, as if it, too, wishes to lend a hand in the preparations for the day ahead.

Wen Qing has always disliked Carp Tower, a feeling only slightly lessened by the fact that the reason for her most recent visits have been to see her sister-in-law. Jin Ling's one hundredth day has arrived, and the Lanling Jin have spared no expense. Jin Guangyao is everywhere—Wen Qing wonders if he's slept in days. He seems to be subsisting solely on the power of manic fastidiousness.

Carp Tower is waiting for the arrival of the last of the major guests before the banquets and festivities begin, but it’s the early morning of the first day, and attendees are already filing past the murals of Jin forebears into the palace halls. Jiang Wanyin has left Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli alone for the time being—taken aside to speak with Jin Guangshan, sect leader-to-sect leader. Unease twists through her at the thought that, within the day, Wei Wuxian will be back here. For once, she finds herself hoping he leaves a-Ning behind. This time, she’ll worry about her brother less the further away he remains.

Jiang Yanli glimmers like the morning moon: an unexpected, unassuming beauty. Her happiness is palpable, and when they're in each other's presence Wen Qing can almost forget the reasons she dreads setting foot here. They sit together on a bench in one of Carp Tower's many elaborate gardens, pressed together side-to-side. Her body is so soft that Wen Qing wants to lean in closer, to feel her warmth through their clothes.

“I know you draw attention to yourself whenever you're kind to me here,” Wen Qing says. “I won't be offended if you hold back.”

Jiang Yanli blinks with what looks like genuine shock, and reaches out to tuck some loose hair behind Wen Qing’s ear. Goosebumps prickle down Wen Qing’s spine. “You're part of my family, Wen-furen. What could anyone say to that?”

-

They walk through elaborate ornamental gardens, their elbows brushing from how close to one another they stand.

“How has your health been?”

Jiang Yanli smiles as though she thinks she’s being fussed over. “I’m really alright. I’m lucky to have been taken in such good care.”

Wen Qing and Jiang Wanyin have spent nearly as much time at Carp Tower since a-Ling was born as they have at Lotus Pier. Being an uncle suits Jiang Wanyin; he likes the baby almost as much as he likes having an excuse to dote on his sister.

“Has a-Cheng been alright?”

Wen Qing nods. Of late he reminds her of the way he was when they first met: nervous, but pleasantly so, enjoying the rituals of shyly dropped glances and cautiously avoided touch. It’s not that he’s become easy company, but he’s more comfortable around her than he’s ever been, and in turn easier to deal with. Less likely to lash out in self-defense over half-imagined slights.

“It made it easier for me to leave home, knowing you were going to stay. That he wouldn’t be alone.”

It hurts her to hear that, for some reason Wen Qing doesn't understand.

-

She came to Carp Tower knowing that Jiang Yanli must be the first person to be told, but Wen Qing hadn’t prepared a speech. Perhaps there are standard ways of delivering such news, but Wen Qing must assume that, if there are, they are one of the things she would’ve learned from her own mother, had she the chance.

In the end, there comes a lull in the conversation, and Wen Qing collects herself. No better opportunity will present itself, and she’s half-expecting at any moment to be interrupted by a messenger beckoning Jiang Yanli come collect her son and be present for the proper festivities. Delaying won’t do her any good.

Wen Qing has been lucky enough not to have much trouble getting food down so far, and the more obvious physical signs will be able to be obscured for months yet. Even so, throughout her days she will frequently pause, mid-motion, as the realization skitters through her body like a tremor: soon her body will be a foreign land.

What had Wen Qing’s mother thought, when she learned she was to have her first child? Did she sense a quickening in her qi fluctuation the same way Wen Qing had, or did she learn the same way peasant women do, with morning sickness and missed cycles? Was she happy? Her mother was practical and unsentimental, but forgiving. She brought her children up well, for as long as she could. Wen Qing imagines she must've seen something worth celebrating in it.

She asks whether there is a generational naming system within the Jiang inner family, and lets Jiang Yanli come to the correct conclusion on her own, between Wen Qing’s words and the intent, subdued expression she imagines must be on her face. Jiang Yanli’s eyes widen and her eyebrows fly up her face. She’s happy. Wen Qing knew she would be happy. Wen Qing herself is not unhappy. She doesn’t know what she is.

Wen Qing has everything she could reasonably hope for: Wei Wuxian and her kin at the Burial Mounds have survived another year, and they may be closer to reconciliation with the wider cultivation world than she’d dared hope for. Any indications that Jiang Wanyin regrets marrying her have subsided, for now, and he doesn’t even yet know—

She has what she wanted from him, doesn’t she? What was it she was after: a sliver of Jiang Yanli’s happiness? To have something of her own, that no one could deny her? Jiang Yanli clasps Wen Qing’s hands and whispers in a giddy rush about how their children will be less than a year apart, and Wen Qing’s eyes are drawn to the shape of her mouth. She thinks in a moment of fervent certainty that, if Wen Qing were to kiss her neck, Jiang Yanli’s lips would part like she was startled. Wen Qing has this thought before she realizes how badly she wants to kiss Jiang Yanli’s neck, to inhale the scent of her delicate Lanling perfume, to sink her teeth into her skin and leave it raw and indecent, and it's though she had been stepping along a forest floor only to find a sinkhole where she thought there was solid earth.

She remembers those uncertain days at the Cloud Recesses, wandering the paths in search of Gusu Lan's ancestral secrets in order to deliver them to a man she knew fully well would only use them for ill. Coming across the eldest daughter of Yunmeng Jiang sitting daintily on a log on the side of a path, holding her head in her hands and massaging her temples, and apologizing upon the sight of Wen Qing as if Jiang Yanli were the trespasser. How Wen Qing had wavered for only a moment before she'd pursed her lips and extended her hand, saying something about cures for headaches she had back at her dormitory, and how the warm clasp of Jiang Yanli's hand felt on her own. She’d been grateful for the excuse to leave off her mission for a few hours and tend to this woman with quiet, knowing eyes and a steady manner, who had looked at Wen Qing as if Wen Qing were dressed in white like all the rest of them, instead of an interloper plainly sent to do harm.

She had been kind to Jiang Yanli, yes, but it had been selfish; all Wen Qing had wanted was to spend a few hours believing she was the woman her mother would've raised her to be, instead of a cold heart with room for duty and little more. Jiang Yanli had given her that. She has always given her that. A kind dream, to be lived in here and there, when they find a spare moment to exchange it.

Wen Qing begins to laugh, or rather a panicked laugh begins to escape from her and she is helpless to suppress it. Jiang Yanli smiles, and begins to laugh along, until a light in her eyes shifts, and her expression sobers.

“It’s alright to be nervous. I was too. But you really don’t need to worry. You’ll be good at it.”

She wants to correct Jiang Yanli, and say, No, you’ve got it wrong; it’s not nervousness. But, she realizes, that’s not quite true. She climbed to the foot of the mountain with the dispassionate confidence of one for whom the mysteries of life no longer hold much mystery, only to be confronted with the immensity of all the things she doesn't know. How is she supposed to believe she understands the world enough to bring up a child, when she doesn’t even know her own heart?

Wen Qing shakes her head and opens her mouth to say something in reply—anything, though she doesn’t know what she can say in reply to Jiang Yanli’s unfailing faith in her—but she’s saved when a figure comes briskly toward them: Jin Guangyao, looking faintly harried, though when he greets them it is solicitous and polite.

“Xiao-Jin-furen, Wen-furen; I’m sorry to intrude, but have either of you seen Zixuan?”

Jiang Yanli looks up from Wen Qing’s face for the first time in what seems like hours; her attention is so rapt, being without it makes Wen Qing feel both more at ease and slightly melancholy. She offers a smile to Jin Guangyao, but it’s different from the one she’d given to Wen Qing earlier. It’s kind and genuine, but her eyes are missing some of the tenderness that is present when Jiang Yanli looks at her. It’s not a question of whether or not Jiang Yanli feels tenderly towards her, but of the form of that tenderness.

“I think he’s with Father in the main hall, a-Yao. I’ve been with Wen-furen all morning. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

True to his title, a faint, sweet fragrance remains on the air even after Lianfang-zun leaves their sight. Jiang Yanli hums. “I wonder what he needs Zixuan for? I hope everything’s alright.”

If the process of cooking is similar to the preparation of medicines, the reverse is also true, so Wen Qing is able to follow along with Jiang Yanli’s gentle instructions without any trouble. She’s never seen Jiang Yanli move more confidently than she does in a kitchen; she’s been living in Carp Tower for years, now, and yet she navigates this space like she’s the mistress of Lotus Pier, and not Wen Qing. Her motions are deft, her slim fingers clever. More than once, Wen Qing finds herself having lapsed into idleness watching Jiang Yanli’s hands preparing broth or checking roots for blemishes.

Once the stock has begun to bubble, Jiang Yanli passes Wen Qing the basket of roots they gathered that afternoon, and asks her to slice them into rounds. Jiang Yanli herself sets about dressing the meat; it’s a strange sight to see her fingers bloody, but she’s not at all squeamish.

“I’m glad I came back, Wen-furen. I think the acupuncture is already helping me quite a bit.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Wen Qing has noticed the qi in Jiang Yanli’s meridians flowing more evenly than it was even at the start of the week. Once again, she regrets that Jiang Yanli’s home is elsewhere, and Wen Qing cannot offer her regular treatment. “I’ve been glad to have the opportunity to eat your cooking once again.”

Jiang Yanli smiles, the satisfied look of one who knows better than to affect false modesty.

“Did your mother teach you how to cook?”

“Oh, no. I learned from my aunties—on my father’s side.” Dead, like all the rest. If there were other living Jiangs within a few degrees of relation, Wen Qing would know. “She wished I would’ve cooked less.”

“I would’ve thought cooking was appropriate for a daughter.”

“Ah, maybe for some.” The meat squishes gently under Jiang Yanli’s blade. “I think you might’ve been the sort of daughter she would’ve preferred to have.”

A prickle of unease runs up Wen Qing’s spine. “Why do you say that?”

“You’re strong and brave.”

“So are you,” Wen Qing says, more forcefully than she intends.

“You’re very kind, Wen-furen,” Jiang Yanli replies, in a tone that suggests she disagrees, but is too polite to say so.

The kitchen is quiet but for the sounds of the bubbling pot and the rhythm of their knives. When Jiang Yanli speaks again, her tone is so even it’s almost flat. “My mother came from a family of sisters. In Meishan, they send all of their daughters on night hunts along with their sons. I don’t think it was meant to be, with me.” Her shoulders give a funny little shrug.

Wen Qing nods, and continues to slice the lotus into even rounds, but overcautiously. This moment feels like a confession. Jiang Yanli stays silent for the time it takes Wen Qing to get through two more roots, and then continues, her voice rushed and breathless, as though she fought to keep the words inside and lost: “I really do like to cook. I know I don’t need to do it, but it makes me happy. That should be enough, don’t you think? If a-Ling wanted to do something that made him happy, and there wasn’t any harm in it, I would let him.”

“You're a good mother.”

“Our mother gave her life for us,” Jiang Yanli replies, her voice soft and unreadable.

“I’m grateful to her for that, Jin-furen.”

Jiang Yanli sets down the cleaver in her hands. She laughs, but it's shrill; it's then that Wen Qing notices the tear tracks on Jiang Yanli's cheeks. “You can call me Yanli, I told you.”

Her hands are covered in the residue of meat, so Jiang Yanli holds them aloft in the air as she keeps laughing. Her eyes are closed, and she shakes her head with a crooked smile on her face—with this expression, she looks more like Wei Wuxian than she does Jiang Wanyin—as the tears roll down her face.

Wen Qing sets aside her own knife next to the orderly pile of sliced roots, wipes her fingers with a clean cloth, and steps closer to Jiang Yanli. Jiang Yanli goes still as Wen Qing brings up the edge of her sleeve to dab away the worst of the wetness. It's a thoughtless gesture, one she's made many times; a-Ning was a crier when he was young. He had a sensitive nature. She soaks up the tears on Jiang Yanli's face, turning the fist holding the cloth as parts of it get too wet to be absorbent.

She'd shocked her into stopping at first, but now Jiang Yanli blinks her eyes open and a few more tears, fainter now, fall into Wen Qing's waiting sleeve. The laughter has stopped, but Jiang Yanli smiles. This time it's trembling and cautious, but less like a brave face for the benefit of someone else and more like true feeling leaking through to the surface.

It’s hard to look Jiang Yanli in the face—she offers too much unspoken gratitude for Wen Qing to know how to take, and yet Wen Qing can’t leave. Wen Qing reaches out and pulls Jiang Yanli against her, holding Jiang Yanli fast against her own body with one hand on top of Jiang Yanli’s head and the other resting on the small of her back.

Within her embrace, time is sluggish. She thinks that Jiang Yanli’s tears have subsided, judging by the pace of her breathing and the fact that Wen Qing’s hair is only slightly damp where Jiang Yanli’s closed eyes are tucked against it. Wen Qing’s heartbeat is catastrophically loud. Her face is nestled against Jiang Yanli’s temple, and she can hear every exhale from her own lungs.

They have both become very still. Jiang Yanli’s hands came to rest on Wen Qing’s shoulder-blades when Wen Qing first brought her close, though they’re covered in meat juices, and Wen Qing holds her fast, feeling the rise and fall of Jiang Yanli’s vertebrae under her palm. Like meeting a doe in the woods, Wen Qing can only have this moment for as long as she stays quiet. No sudden movements.

She carefully lowers her head to press her nose against Jiang Yanli’s neck. Jiang Yanli’s fingers curl against Wen Qing’s back, and Jiang Yanli’s gasp runs underneath Wen Qing’s skin. Jiang Yanli is all warmth, a silken throat and soft chest, and there’s a wet hitch in her voice as she whispers, “Wen Qing—”

Wen Qing parts her lips for just long enough to run her open mouth across the skin there for the length of a single heartbeat, and she murmurs, level and polite, “I’d like to watch you finish the dish. Jin-furen is a good teacher.”

The hills are dark, the way barren, until she emerges into the settlement nestled in the heart of the trees. This is the place her parents warned her never to go, a repository of her childhood fears, and now Wen Qing has entered the Burial Mounds to find modest little structures built against the rock faces and pieces of clothing hung up to dry, fluttering in the weak, dusty wind. The meagre amount of arable land has been maximized for planting, and she recognizes familiar row patterns and staking methods from back home in Yiling. She learned the difference over the last few years, where she observed the way they grow crops in Yunmeng; the basics are the same, but adjusted for climate. The people of Yiling must work harder to conserve water in order to bring life out of less fertile land. Her heart swells with painful pride that they were able to manage it even here, in this domain of dead things—but she scans the surroundings, and sees no signs of its inhabitants.

Ashes in the fire-pits are cold. Everyday belongings have been left behind, so the owners likely haven’t willingly relocated somewhere else, but there are no signs of struggle. Perhaps they expected to return. She begins opening doors with frantic haste.

She calls out for a-Ning, and then for Wei Wuxian; after those cries go unanswered, she begins listing the names of all of the people she knows were living here, from shi-shu to Granny Wen. Her voice rises in pitch as it echoes off the stone walls of the gully until she hears a voice that is not her own. A whimper of confusion, almost animalian.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing responds but the rippling of bare branches in the wind, and she wonders if it was a strange echo of her own voice until she hears it again: smaller this time, but she follows its direction, and when she recognizes what looks in the twilight like a bundle of rags for what it is, she runs.

When she reaches a-Yuan’s side, Wen Qing drops to her knees in the dirt and presses the back of her hand to his cheek. His skin is sallow and he’s limp when she picks him up, but it still strikes her how much heavier he’s become. He was hardly more than a baby the last time she saw him.

She rocks him in her arms, whispering gentle nonsense, while she feeds him enough qi to stabilize him. After a few minutes, he begins to stir again, and he blinks blearily at her before his attention is caught by something over her shoulder. The hair on the back of Wen Qing’s neck stands up, and she realizes that the faint rustling behind her is not the trees, but silk moving in the breeze.

Wen Qing turns around, a-Yuan in one arm and her sheathed sword held in the other, to see Lan Wangji standing no more than two blades’ widths from her. His white robes nearly glow in the dusk.

“Lan-er-gongzi.”

“Wen-furen,” he responds, a moment too late to sound natural. He meets her eyes for only as long as necessary before they fix on a-Yuan.

“Did you come here alone?” His blade is sheathed, but she knows better to think she could ever overcome Hanguang-jun in a contest of strength, let alone when she has a toddler to keep out of a coma. She’s never been able to read Lan Wangji, but from what she’s seen of him since the end of the war, she believes, perhaps naively, that there is a chance he will not escort her back to Lotus Pier.

“Jin-zongzhu sent messengers.”

“Here? With what message?”

“The Ghost General Wen Ning must surrender himself at Carp Tower.”

A wave of cold nausea passes through her, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. “But the rest of them? Where are the rest?”

He has the decency to hesitate before replying, “He was accompanied.” His eyes stray back to a-Yuan, in her arms, who has slipped back under since he’d last woken.

“Are they standing trial?”

He shakes his head, once, with brutal finality.

“And Wei Wuxian is with them?”

“Wei Ying has not been seen.” Of course not; why else would Lan Wangji be here?

He looks at her curiously; she braces herself for a dispassionate demand for an explanation as to why she isn’t at Lotus Pier or Carp Tower, but it doesn’t come. Not so surprising, when one considers that Lan Wangji is likely supposed to be elsewhere as well. His expression is whet with an intensity that makes her doubt that the forbiddance of Lan Qiren or Zewu-jun could stop Lan Wangji from coming here any more than Jiang Wanyin’s command of her to return to Lotus Pier prevented her from leaving Carp Tower by sword before she could be escorted home.

When the news of what had happened at Qiongqi Way had reached Carp Tower, borne by Jin Guangyao's delicate, nervous tongue, Wen Qing had felt as though she were swimming through white water. Jiang Wanyin's face had been blanched, and she'd wondered which worry was first in his mind: Wei Wuxian's inevitable calling to account, or his sister's hollow shock.

Wen Qing had abandoned any attempts to preserve her own face. She had spoken out of turn in a room full of the most powerful cultivators in the world, many of whom she remembered calling for raids on the Burial Mounds as soon as they'd become established. She'd appealed to the possibility of misunderstanding, or miscommunication, with rising insistence. Before long, some Jin cousin had muttered in an audible undertone that Jiang-zongzhu ought to send away his hysterical wife.

She had been confined to their rooms at Carp Tower for two days and a night. For her own protection, allegedly, and she could at least admit that much was likely true.

Jiang Wanyin must have suspected the Lanling Jin’s demands that were to come. Charitably, he wanted to spare her the sight of their punishment; possibly, he foresaw the possibility she would take drastic measures once she and her family were in the same place. If he knew her at all, he should have known that she wouldn’t want mercy if it only extended to herself. She thinks he would have done the same, in her place. But she remembers the hallowed tone in which he’d told her about how, the last time he saw his mother’s face, he was bound and sent away instead of being allowed to die by her side. Protection is one of the shapes of love, even when it comes as an unwanted gift.

She remembers the soft, fond sound of a-Ning's voice—she can't think of his face, or she'll crumble—telling her of how a-Yuan had taken to Wei-gongzi. At the time, she'd thought a-Ning was speaking of his own feelings as much as anything to do with a-Yuan, but the stunned intensity of Lan Wangji's face causes her to re-evaluate.

She's noticed Lan Wangji's longing before, but for the first time she truly recognizes its shape. She's always known loyalty, and recent years have taught her the exhausting feeling of keeping faith in people the world has deemed beyond absolution. But that's not what's brought him here. When you can't have the one you want, one must cling to the things they leave behind. If the rest of the world was more perceptive, no one would think of Lan Wangji as cold. He looks at the child in her arms, and his face burns with devotion.

Wen Qing cannot look after one more person. She’s not sure she’ll even be safe much longer, herself. The whole flight here, one question whirled through her mind: did she make a mistake? Was it all in vain? This is one of the great cruelnesses of life: regret's uncertainty cuts both ways. She once would’ve thought it a terrible fate to live with having made the wrong choice, but is it any easier to bear having made the right one and knowing that the outcome, however bitter, is the best she could have hoped for?

“Lan-er-gongzi, would you take him back to the Cloud Recesses? Would you hide him? No one can ever know who he is. Change his name. But I—I can’t—”

A look passes over his face, normally so flat and cold, like the shadow of a fish moving under a sheet of ice.

Lan Wangji sheathes Bichen and walks past her, more slowly and carefully than she’s ever seen him move, to pick up a-Yuan’s unconscious form from her outstretched arms. He retreats at once to stand at a remove from her, but cautious enough not to wake his charge, and Wen Qing’s youngest cousin nuzzles his dirty face into the crook of the Second Jade of Lan’s neck.

“They are meeting at Heavenly Nightless City,” Lan Wangji says, and inclines his head before he turns away. Soon he is little more than a pale ghost moving through the trees. With his back turned, a-Yuan is invisible in his arms. She wonders whether this, too, will be one of her regrets.

“I'm sorry for what I said earlier. I was rude to you.”

Jiang Yanli looks up. She looks both surprised and not to see Wen Qing in the doorway. “It's alright, Wen-furen. You don't need to apologize.”

The scene is unassuming. There are flowers in a vase on the windowsill, drooping with night. Jiang Yanli must have cut them herself; Wen Qing has observed her taking clippings in the gardens, though she’s never seen the resulting arrangements. She closes the door behind her and takes the proffered seat at Jiang Yanli's table. There's a book of poems in her hands. Wen Qing must have interrupted her reading by candlelight.

“You're allowed to be angry with people when they speak thoughtlessly.”

“You were speaking from your heart.” Jiang Yanli closes her book and holds her hands on the table. “Why didn't you ask me sooner, Wen-furen?”

“You have your place, and I have mine. I should've known, anyway. This is just the way things are.”

“He did love you, you know. He never said anything about it to me, but I was glad to see it, even at the start. He’d always been so serious, I didn’t know if he’d ever let himself feel something like that. But I thought—well, I suppose I didn’t think anything would come of it.” Wen Qing doesn’t reply. Jiang Yanli asks, cooly, “Do you regret it?”

To protect a-Ning? To save her people? Wen Qing did worse for her uncle for less, even if it was fruitless in the end. Her expression gives nothing away. “There’s nothing to regret, not for me.”

Jiang Yanli's eyes on Wen Qing's face are rapt. “I was betrothed to Zixuan because our mothers were so close. If he had been a girl, it would’ve been a sworn sisterhood instead, or sworn brotherhood if it went the other way. I don’t know if it would’ve happened otherwise.” She pauses. “If she’d planned anything for a-Cheng, he would’ve gone through with it, whether or not he liked it. I’m glad he got to choose.”

“Even knowing how he chose?”

Jiang Yanli looks surprised. “There’s no one I’d rather he have chosen.”

“Would you remarry, if you could?”

“It’s hard to imagine. We were betrothed since we were young. Now that Zixuan is gone... It went by so quickly.” Wen Qing waits her out, and sure enough, she continues. “Would you, Wen-furen?”

“I don’t want to be anyone else’s wife again.”

This feels dangerous. Jiang Yanli has a canny look in her eye. “Don’t you get lonely?”

“That’s why I wanted you here. To stay.” There is a kindness to summer nights, a side effect of their brevity. Darkness becomes a precious commodity, a respite from toil and the tyranny of the sun. They are amenable to the keeping of secrets; even the cicadas are eager to help, providing cover with their cries. Wen Qing’s restraint has dissolved, and she adds, weakly, “I can’t keep doing this on my own.”

“I can't stay, but whatever companionship I can give you, you can have it.”

Wen Qing’s pulse is racing, but she wouldn’t describe her emotion as fear. It’s as if her body is insistently reminding her of the reasons why she feels such a desperation to make herself clear. She’s still alive; what’s that gift for, if not for her to finally put voice to things she’s spent so long wanting? “I would take more than just your companionship, if I could.”

Jiang Yanli doesn’t seem surprised, but a blush rises across her cheeks. “I wondered, sometimes. But I thought…” She lets out a self-deprecating laugh. “I guess I thought I shouldn’t have such a high opinion of myself.”

“We don’t need to speak of it again, if…” Wen Qing’s tongue feels thick and heavy. She’d imagined herself more composed than this, when she’d contemplated having this conversation all of the times it’s crossed her mind in the past. She has a lifetime of practice at arranging her face, but she feels translucent now—after all the times she looked down on her husband for it, she’s no better, now that she’s offering up her own heart.

Jiang Yanli watches her with eyes so soft and kind that Wen Qing can’t tell whether pity is really there, or if she’s only imagining it. Maybe she should leave. Maybe she’s taken one of the few things she has left and ruined it beyond recovery.

Then, Jiang Yanli gets to her feet, walks to the window, and pulls the curtains closed.

-

“Have you done this before? I mean, with another woman.”

“I've always wanted to,” Wen Qing replies, which is true. The longing had always been there, waiting for her to wake up to it. Maybe if she'd had a more typical girlhood, with friends and companions to play around with when chaperones' backs were turned, she would've realized sooner, but she spent most of her younger days alone in a nest of vipers, and the source of her own strength, she's come to understand, is the adeptness with which she's trained herself out of her own desires. And even if she had known earlier—what would it have changed? The demands of obligation to sect and family don't bend to morality or comfort; they certainly don't change in the face of longing for impossible things.

But they are here now, in a dim room growing ever dimmer, and Jiang Yanli has unfolded herself so willingly that for a moment everything seems not only possible but to be already happening. For something so hard to take hold of, it's so easy. Everywhere Wen Qing touches Jiang Yanli, her skin is hot and trembling. She has some stretch marks across her stomach and hips, and Wen Qing reaches out to touch them with her own fingertips, lightly but reverentially. She wants to kiss them. She wants to curl Jiang Yanli's legs back over her shoulders and wring sounds out of her until Jiang Yanli is crying and shaking and numb.

Is this what it's supposed to feel like? Could it have been like this, for her, always? She wants Jiang Yanli too much to think. Wen Qing wants to see her naked in the daylight, to watch the way the sun turns her skin golden.

When Jiang Yanli tips back to lay, open and askew, on the bedspread, she murmurs, “I should warn you... with Zixuan, I... it can take me a long time. It's nothing to do with you. You're... very beautiful.”

Wen Qing can’t think of anything to say in reply that isn’t an insult to Jiang Yanli’s husband’s memory, so instead she kneels between her legs and runs her hands up Jiang Yanli’s bare calves.

When she was with her husband, everything she did was thought-through and narrated to herself like one would instruct a student. With her hands on Jiang Yanli's skin, the division between thought and action has become erased. Wen Qing is nothing but a body detached from time, flushing, aching, wanton.

Jiang Yanli's eyes are hot and lush. When Wen Qing removes her clothes, Jiang Yanli’s skin is red with blood and bashfulness. Wen Qing guides Jiang Yanli's slim fingers into her hair, where they curl, and it hurts just enough to run through her in a shudder.

When her palms reach the unbearable softness and warmth of Jiang Yanli’s thighs, they part at the slightest pressure, and she’s already drunk on her own desire reflected back to her. It feels so different from her own body, even though she's touched herself to the thought of this until the fantasies wore thin. There is nowhere on Jiang Yanli she doesn’t want to kiss. Wen Qing wants to protect her like a husband and hold her like a wife.

She'd thought Jiang Yanli would make soft sounds, and she does, at first, little hitches of shock as Wen Qing's mouth sucks bruises over the expanse of her bare skin, down from her breasts to her stomach and the valley of her hip, but when Wen Qing reaches the joining of her thighs Jiang Yanli's gasps become full-throated moans, nothing girlish about them. Be selfish, she wants to say. Be loud, be petulant.

Wen Qing has only experienced this act from the other side; during those strange weeks she spent in and out of her husband's bed, burning with longing for something just within her reach and not wanting to take any chances, he had fumbled through asking if he could put his mouth on her. It wasn't strictly necessary for her purpose, but she'd indulged him, and she didn’t mind it; she could close her eyes, steady her hands on her thighs, and let her mind drift, not thinking of anything but the feeling of wet heat and dutiful worship, loosening her even as it drew a coiling heat within her body to a point.

Jiang Yanli comes the first time against Wen Qing's tongue; she looks up in time to catch the startled flush of her face. Her small, parted mouth gasps for air like she’s drowning. Jiang Yanli’s eyes roll up in her head at the same time as her head tips back against the sheets, and her soft thighs won't stop trembling next to Wen Qing's face; she turns her head to press kisses over the skin until she's pressing her cheek into it, feeling the tremors run through the muscle.

They lie like that for a long time. There are wispy hairs stuck to Jiang Yanli's face by sweat.

Jiang Yanli reaches out with her free hand to tip Wen Qing's face up with a firm press of fingers under her chin. Wen Qing’s bare throat tilts back, an offering, an invitation: Take whatever you want from me, anything I have to give.

A shift in position—Jiang Yanli undresses Wen Qing as attentively as a handmaid, but no servant has ever rearranged Wen Qing's limbs so decisively and unapologetically, and Wen Qing succumbs a little more with each soft-voiced direction; her hands keep skimming over Jiang Yanli's bare forearms, as if to reassure herself this is happening outside of her imagination. Jiang Yanli laughs under her breath. “Why don’t you relax? You’ve taken such good care of me.”

This is not what Wen Qing dreamed of when she dreamed of taking Jiang Yanli to bed. Jiang Yanli is so kind and gentle and worn-down by the world, Wen Qing has always wanted to lavish her in all the attention and praise she’s too rarely been given. Wen Qing is not a passive person. Jiang Yanli is quiet and unassuming. Except, Wen Qing knows, not always, and she realizes the depth of her oversight when she’s now fixed under the pearl-hardened sheen of Jiang Yanli's determination.

She ends up straddling Jiang Yanli’s thighs as Jiang Yanli sits upright. Wen Qing’s back is pressed against her chest, and when Jiang Yanli leans forward to place her chin on Wen Qing’s shoulder, Wen Qing can feel her breasts brush her own shoulder-blades. She’s cradled in Jiang Yanli’s arms, her body traced over by Jiang Yanli’s hands, both enclosed and spread open.

There’s so much sensation, it slips past her before she can cling to any one thing: Jiang Yanli’s soothing but steely tone whispering reassurances, the slight burn in Wen Qing’s thighs as she holds herself above Jiang Yanli’s lap, the way she hasn’t caught her breath since she first put her mouth to work. The way the core of her is throbbing fitfully against nothing. Jiang Yanli’s fingers are slim, her hand small. It is torturous, her patience, as she draws her fingertips across Wen Qing’s skin, never touching her where she’s aching to be touched.

“Please,” she whispers.

Jiang Yanli’s nose brushes her temple. The pace of her teasing hand doesn’t change. “Wen Qing, won’t you let me take care of you?”

When she thinks back on it later, she has no words about the happenings after that. Wen Qing is pulled into a place beyond obligation, where she’s too buffeted by surprise and pleasure to hold herself together for the benefit of anyone else, where there is no one else, no one but the two of them. This happiness is precious, like a flower that will begin to wilt as soon as it's picked. Even putting it under observation feels violent.

When they were both young, Wen Qing once scolded a-Ning so harshly he cried. He'd left the rooms they were given to go wandering around the palace; she found him walking on top of a railing, testing his balance, his hands extended on either side like wings. They were new to Heavenly Nightless City then, and she could already sense the danger, even if she didn't yet understand the things her uncle was capable of. A-Ning was young, and this was her first glimpse of his streak of recklessness. She'd cried, too, after she'd sent him to his room; she was appalled with her powerlessness to make him understand, in his child's mind, how serious their situation truly was without hurting him in turn. Try as she might, she wasn't strong enough to put herself between him and the rest of the world. He was all she had, and it would take so little for her to lose him, too. It never occurred to her until much, much later that her tears had been for herself, as well; she didn't know how to feel grief except on another's behalf.

-

The reports of what exactly happened at Heavenly Nightless City are, as with everything communicated by word-of-mouth, inconsistent, even within the same account. Wen Qing saw almost none of it with her own eyes. By the time she had arrived, the sects had already begun stirring each other into a frenzy. She remembers little of what happened after that; there was shouting, and there were toasts to the dead, and she thinks she saw Jiang Wanyin assembled with the other sect leaders at the head of the crowd. If she'd known it was the last time she'd see him alive, she would've taken a closer look.

But there was a tug at her sleeve, and a familiar voice calling, “Wen-furen, Wen-furen,” and not until Jiang Yanli whispered, “Wen Qing,” in a tone of low urgency did she turn her head and let Jiang Yanli tow her away from the mob.

They weaved through the graveyard of abandoned buildings, barracks and libraries and cultivators' residences, each one familiar to Wen Qing from the adolescent decade of her life spent here—under the protection of an foul man, yes, but she had been newly orphaned, and he was, after all, her family.

Later, Wen Qing would realize that Jiang Yanli had pulled her away not only for her protection—Yunmeng Jiang robes or no, Wen Qing was well-recognized, and the better part of the cultivation world was baying for Wen blood—but because she didn't want Wen Qing to see what they'd done to a-Ning's ashes. If she had seen it, she wouldn't have been able to restrain herself. Upon her return to Lotus Pier, she wonders whether or not it's fair of her to resent Jiang Yanli for holding her back, although Wen Qing did the same, when their positions were reversed.

-

Jiang Wanyin fell on the battlefield to a sword meant for Wei Wuxian. She knows better than to think death by sword is necessarily simple or quick; doctors cannot be sentimental about these things. But it is more noble than hanging, and his body was returned to his family intact rather than burnt and scattered on the wind.

According to the stories, Wei Wuxian lost the last of his control after seeing Jiang Wanyin run through. She hopes her husband saw, before the end, the proof that Wei Wuxian had always loved him. Wei Wuxian himself is said to have fallen to his death, but no body has yet been found. Both terrible ways to meet an end, but there are no good ways to die.

Was it all for nothing, then, that Wen Qing bought Jiang Wanyin a few more years at so dear a cost? When they'd at last found his body, Zidian had come to life before even touching her skin. It moved towards her, claiming her, and even after it settled, the surface of the steel was hot to the touch. She hadn't flinched; it'd been a long time since she worried about being hurt.

It wasn't until the snakes finished twisting around her wrist that she’d understood she was a widow. She'd felt almost nothing about the realization, at the time; her capacity for sorrow had been extinguished, and wouldn't return for days. She remembers closing her grip, watching the metal glint in the faint dawn light.

-

At the Yiling Supervisory Office, when a-Ning brought her Wei Wuxian and the Jiangs, she’d thought at first that Jiang Wanyin was already dead. In subsequent days, she’d gathered that he only wished he was. She’d only gone along with the golden core operation because she could sense, as clearly as Wei Wuxian could, that Jiang Wanyin had lost something without which he didn’t know how to live. She’s known loss before, many times, but it’s not until now that she understands how he’d felt: like a piece of paper money light enough to blow away on the wind.

The rainy season is upon them, and clouds hang heavy over Yunmeng. At dusk, they’re soft pink and orange, like the first flowers of spring, darkening into crimson and violet with the approach of night. The rain has stopped, for now, and the water is still; if it weren’t for the trees on the horizon, the colours of the sky would blend seamlessly into the surface of the lake. There's nothing more human than the arrogance to look at the sun in grief and be disappointed it doesn't answer, as if nature should reflect our own sorrow.

Wen Qing takes off her boots and socks and dangles her feet off the edge of the pier, into the water. A night-bird is calling from the other side of the lake, and its cry travels well enough for her to hear it clearly; it's a low, melancholy sound, and it goes unanswered.

The water laps at her ankles and she wonders, idly, how long she would be able to hold her breath if she were to submerge herself. How long does drowning take? She’s seen death, but never that way. They say that when Wei Wuxian retook the Yiling Supervisory Office, the Qishan Wen soldiers died all manner of unnatural deaths, none the same as the man next to him. Some were smothered, some slit their own throats, and others drowned on solid land. She hadn’t had the opportunity to examine any of the corpses to verify whether or not it was true, as she was in custody, woozy from dehydration, and preoccupied with the fact she was engaged to be married. Perhaps it was only ever one more piece of outlandish gossip about the Yiling Patriarch, but she doubts it. Wei Wuxian accomplished more impossible acts than that, in his time.

Twilight descends; the violet of the sky fades into indigo and inky black. The sun has bled out into the water here a thousand times before and will again. Even if the Yunmeng Jiang family line really was to come to an end, the lake’s uncaring beauty will remain the same as it was when they held claim to it. After all, the sunrise above Yiling hasn't dimmed.

-

Jiang Yanli is here, she believes, to assist with funeral preparations. Perhaps she simply couldn't do any more grieving in such a sterile place as Carp Tower. At Lotus Pier, it's common to find dirt under one's nails; there's permission given, in that, to indulge in moments of less than total self-control. Or perhaps she simply misses home.

They can only speak of the important things sideways, when they’re occupied with tasks, and can avoid looking one another in the eye. The two of them sit side by side, Wen Qing measuring and cutting bandages, Jiang Yanli folding them, and Wen Qing asks, “Are you angry that I kept you back from the battle?”

Jiang Yanli sounds hollowed out. “No, Wen-furen, I—no.” She pauses, and murmurs, “You were right to remind me. About a-Ling. I couldn’t think straight, when a-Cheng and… when they were out there without me.”

Perhaps Jiang Yanli feels compelled to share her mourning with the only person to whom she can admit that she grieves for Wei Wuxian and not receive censure. Not that they speak of it in so many words.

“I won’t apologize,” Wen Qing replies flatly. “I couldn’t raise your son for you if you’d died, too.”

“No one would ask that of you.”

Maybe not, but Jiang Wanyin would have raised a-Ling like his own son, whether asked to or not, and though Wen Qing feels little need to emulate him in most things, the responsibility of caring for Jiang Yanli has fallen onto her shoulders. Wen Qing struggles to imagine how she could live more than a few days ahead of her at any time, like an animal that never thinks past shelter and its next meal. But she loves her. What was a few weeks ago a bittersweet longing has become the polestar against which Wen Qing may orient herself. It’s not a matter of choice; who else will do it? The idea of Jiang Yanli, unloved, is unthinkable. Wen Qing has no family, no clan besides a handful of remnants who barely know her, but if Jiang Wanyin and Jin Zixuan and Wei Wuxian have died, Wen Qing must love Jiang Yanli all the more in their absence. It pulses within her like another heartbeat, quiet and fierce and desperate.

“How much did a-Cheng tell you about our mother?”

It is late, and Wen Qing is awake: tired, half-dressed, and sticky with the summer heat. She hadn’t noticed, until Jiang Yanli spoke, that she was rubbing her thumb over Zidian's ring absent-mindedly. Wen Qing remembers this as one of Jiang Wanyin’s nervous habits; she wonders how often she engages in it unconsciously.

To lie in sweat-soaked sheets with a woman who smiles like Wen Qing is something it pleases her to see, Wen Qing feels smothered with impossible relief; she doesn’t feel the foreboding Jiang Yanli’s question might otherwise provoke. “She seemed like a complicated woman.”

Jiang Yanli laughs. It’s a tired sound that doesn’t linger long in the air.

“Our mother used to travel for night hunts, much more than our father did. She had two handmaidens who were devoted to her, from before she was married, and she’d take them with her.” Her fingers uncurl on the sheets between them, and Wen Qing watches the delicate bones shift under her skin. “Sometimes I wonder—well. It doesn’t matter now.” She closes her eyes and lays her palm flat on the bed.

“I think she would've been better off traveling the world with them and ridding the world of evil, instead of being kept here. I don't know if she was ever happy. I don't blame her for that. But…”

She trails off into silence, but Wen Qing thinks, by now, she understands what neither of Yu Ziyuan’s children were willing to say: the things she did were forgivable because she was their mother, and unforgivable because of the same.

A few minutes later, Jiang Yanli speaks again, in a more sedate tone: “Really, I think I had it the easiest of all of us. She never expected much of me, so she never paid me much attention. That was as much my fault as anyone’s. I never earned much attention, or wanted it. And there were times—I do have some good memories.”

Wen Qing reaches out and lays her hand flat on the bed with her fingertips barely touching Jiang Yanli's. Zidian wakes and begins to move, its liquid metal pouring across the back of her own hand to nose at Jiang Yanli's, inquisitive, feeling her out. She grasps Jiang Yanli’s wrist, and meets her eyes as Zidian twines around both their wrists, refusing to settle on either. Jiang Yanli opens her eyes, and they look troubled.

“Are you still afraid of it?”

“A little,” Jiang Yanli whispers, and laughs a little, this time at herself. With her other hand, Wen Qing reaches out to touch the side of her face, and some skin by the corner of Jiang Yanli's eye crinkles; she smiles, sweet and sad, with glimmering tears in the corner of her eyes. Jiang Yanli reaches up to brush them away with a delicately folded knuckle, and adds, “But not when you use it.”

“You said that your mother would’ve preferred a daughter like me, but there are other kinds of strength.”

Jiang Yanli’s smile smooths out into a wistful look, a little regretful, and she replies, “Have you ever visited Meishan?”

Wen Qing shakes her head, and Jiang Yanli tells her stories of a beautiful mountain, like something from a fairy-tale, where her mother grew up: a place where women live like heroes and do all kinds of magnificent deeds. It must be difficult to leave a place like that for the rest of the world, to live the rest of your life as a wife in a man's house.

“I'd like to see it, someday,” Wen Qing replies, and she means it.

“We should go together,” Jiang Yanli whispers. “We can bring the children to see their great-grandparents, and I’ll show you everything I saw when I was a little girl.”

Wen Qing remembers almost nothing from her labour besides the physical effort and the pain, but she can recall the first time they brought her child to her, after they’d both been washed and rested. She’d looked at the tiny, wrinkled, nearly weightless bundle in her arms, and couldn’t connect it to the long months of discomfort and dread and dislike of her own reflection that had preceded this thing she was forced to recognize as a life. After that, she registered: a daughter—of course. Nothing in her life is ever easy. Yet the better part of a year has passed, and she has been surprised how little the question of inheritance has been posed. Perhaps it's only desperate relief that an heir remains at all, but the people of Yunmeng Jiang have already begun to speak of the sect leader to come.

She imagines Meishan, that place Jiang Yanli speaks of through a veil of nostalgia; it reminds Wen Qing of that nameless mountaintop outside Yiling where Wen Qing performed the greatest feat of her life, which will go with her to her grave, unspoken. She'd pretended to be an immortal for Jiang Wanyin's sake, but if Baoshan Sanren really lives, Wen Qing imagines her domain looks something like the mountain realm Jiang Yanli describes: a place shrouded in fog, where girls grow sharp-tongued and deadly. Like the immortal mountain, once one descends from such a place, is it ever possible to truly return? Could the world below ever compare?

Wen Qing brushes the bones on the back of Jiang Yanli's hand with her fingertips before moving over her knuckles and across her even fingernails. Jiang Yanli has beautiful hands; they aren't as soft as one would expect. There are small, faint scars from minor burns and knife-cuts, just as there are on Wen Qing's own.

“Yanli.”

Jiang Yanli’s eyes widen, and she turns her face towards Wen Qing. “Yes?”

“Write to me when you return to Carp Tower. Anything. Just—anything. Until I can see you again.”

A shy smile blossoms across Jiang Yanli’s face, the remnants of tears clogging her eyelashes like dew.

When the Yunmeng Jiang retook Lotus Pier, they performed rites of cleansing and proper burial for any dead they found. No ritual was neglected. They were determined to live here, not only survive but live. Yet in the early hours of the morning, when mist rises off the water, she often feels as though she's waiting for something, the emergence of something weary and disturbed and looking to be put to rest. Who it could be, she isn't sure. She has many shades to choose from.

Even if she never returns to the Burial Mounds, Wen Qing carries it with her; to grow up in Yiling is to grow up among ghosts.

-

Months pass without asking if she's ready to greet them. She is busy; there were many people badly injured in the aftermath, and she can inhabit the role of a doctor without having to be human beyond it. It’s easy to do. Wen Qing has never been able to harden her heart to things that need her.

Wen Qing is all that remains of the Yiling Wen. She didn’t see the proof, so her mind keeps slipping over the truth of it. Well, it’s not quite true. Somewhere in Gusu, a-Yuan is hidden away, and somewhere inside her is the last of their kind, floating in the dark but waiting to come screaming into the light.

She is showing heavily, but long before that, her state became common knowledge. Wen Qing was eventually able to infer that Jiang Yanli had intervened in the chaos following the massacre at Heavenly Nightless City, making sure that the knowledge that Wen Qing was the mother of the future Yunmeng Jiang sect leader was widely-enough known that high-spirited calls from some of the more aggressive clans that she ought to stand trial for nebulous crimes were set aside.

In lieu of Baoshan Sanren descending her mountain and proving the legends true, if any living cultivator could be said to have performed a miracle, it would be Wen Qing. Beyond that, she's delivered many children of other mothers. She'd thought these things meant that facing childbirth would be different for her, compared to other women, but there's something within her trying to kick its way into the world, and the more she feels it stirring within her, the more terrified she becomes.

Grief takes a toll which all the qi-balancing prescriptions in the world cannot undo. She is not to attend funerals or touch coffins, under the conventional wisdom, but mourning is not a matter of ceremonies or dress. It blows through her like wind through grass, and she must bow under its weight. She is a master at bending and carrying-on, but ought there not to be a limit to how much a body can take?

-

A month before she is due the preparations begin. A delivery room is set aside and furnished appropriately. Wen Qing begins preparing and drinking herbal decoctions intended to aid the infant’s passage. She must find attendants; Wen Qing has no living adult family members besides her sister-in-law, who has been ill and is currently considered unfit to travel by the Carp Tower doctors.

They have lived here since her wedding, but Wen Qing has visited the Wen encampment on Lotus Pier's far edge only a handful of times in the ensuing years. It's for their protection; she hopes they realize that. There was enough discordant rumbling when they were provided with humble dwellings and left largely to themselves, besides the rebuilding work they were tasked with, alongside the rest of the sect. They don't train with the Jiang disciples; the cultivators among the Yunmeng Wen gave up their swords in exchange for their safe refuge.

Wen they may be, but they are not, as such, her own people. At the same time, they are not unfamiliar to her; She lived in Heavenly Nightless City for long enough to become used to the accents and customs of the Qishan Wen. In its prime, it was a large sect. The greatest of the great. Those born into its main branches carry a sense of pride that their pacifistic cousins in Yiling do not share. But even in the greatest of great sects, there are ordinary people: servants, minor retainers, wak cultivators. It is these sorts of people who survived the war and avoided a bloody death in a Lanling Jin labour camp by nothing more than luck. Luck and Wen Qing's marriage.

Walking any distance is uncomfortable and frustrating. Her weight is distributed oddly, and her whole being is unwieldy, traitorous, and too visible.

When she enters the makeshift main hall at the centre of the collection of modest dwellings, a hush falls over the room, which had been buzzing with voices. A group of women are weaving baskets while small children play in the corner. Their faces are wary, but they seem in good enough health.

There is a stillness, and then the women get to their feet and make their obeisance to her. How does she look to them? When they address her as Wen-furen, does it afford her respect or derision? Does it look like a costume, to be worn or taken off at will? No one else with that name belongs to a great sect's inner family any longer. Wen Qing was imprisoned for three months, but they all know what happened to the rest of her family, and she has no idea what these women have been through before they were brought to Yunmeng. She got off easily, in anyone's estimation.

She doesn't disagree. She doesn't belong here. She should've been there, with her family, when they put them down like animals. She should've held a-Ning's hand until the end. But by the time she found out what had happened, it was too late, and even if she'd learned in time, her body was by then no longer her own, to simply do with as her heart demanded. Which brings her here.

Wen Qing bows in return to the women, and gestures for them to sit down again. She may own the land on which they stand, but in this room she is a guest.

“Are there any midwives among you?” She takes a long breath. “Even women who have only assisted would do.”

Wen Qing’s expertise dwarfs any of theirs, of course, but she’s not so arrogant as to try and deliver her own baby if she has any superior options.

It’s only her own branch of the clan that specializes in medicine; it’s not as though these women are likely to have much more to offer her than their Jiang counterparts. But there’s a few weeks left. She could teach them what she knows.

Far away, where she can no longer reach him, A-Yuan is no doubt already being brought up a proper Lan. He will become very educated and gentlemanly, but over time everything Wen about him will be worn away under the weight of all those rules of conduct. It’s for his safety; she wouldn’t want anything less. Yet, she wonders: are the Lan as strict and humourless with their young ones as they are with their older students? Do they tell their children stories at night? Do they ever sing?

She has no particular fear of death, for her own sake, but she’s come up close enough to the edge that she’s had to contemplate it. Women die in childbirth every day, even cultivators. But if she were to die now, everything she knows dies with her: every medical text, stolen or burnt or sold; every secret family remedy; the memory of her brother’s smile, of the way they once lived, the two of them and their mother and father in a tidy house in Yiling, close to the Burial Mounds, but not so close that gardens could not grow, and people could not be healed.

With each step forward, the lake welcomes her. The hushed sounds of still water, now disturbed, are inexpressible in human language but incredibly comforting.

Between her toes are fibrous roots and the whispering softness of silt. Her left shin tingles at the glancing touch of a small, darting fish. The moon reflects off the water; she wades in as far as her chest, and when she looks down, her limbs are blurry silver shapes within a world of blue-black.

On the shore, Jiang Yanli sits, watching, her pale robes glimmering in the dark. This stretch of lakefront is far from the pier, or any other dwellings, and Wen Qing has no doubt Jiang Yanli is alert to any passers-by, but she feels the weight of eyes on her nearly-bare shoulder blades like the purposeful caress of the back of a hand. Wen Qing had asked her, Won't you come in?, and Jiang Yanli had replied, with an impish smile, I'd rather watch you swim.

Above them, a field of stars blossoms like night-blooming flowers: yang jin hua, a herb that looks so beautiful Wen Qing hesitated the first time her mother showed her how to harvest it. Wen Qing breathes in deeply through her nose and submerges herself. Her hair swirls around her, slow as movement within a dream.

Underwater, all she can hear is the rush of motion around her and the drum of her own heartbeat. When she emerges, she listens to the splash of water where her toes breach the surface of the lake, and she feels, spreading like a ripple through her consciousness, a simple truth: she is glad to be alive. She will feel guilty about it later, but there’s no room in her heart for it now. It’s a blessing to have had this moment, brief as it may be.

In the morning they will part. Not forever, but for longer than she would like. The way that Wen Qing feels about her daughter, the constant fear that she'll vanish when she leaves Wen Qing's sight, she feels about Jiang Yanli, too. Maybe it will subside, maybe she'll live with it forever, but Jiang Yanli has her own child, and must feel the same way herself, no? That she's brave enough to leave him for as long as she has is a testament to her strength, and the boundless reserves of her trust. There’s only one person Wen Qing has known who had the same ability to believe in the goodness of the world despite all evidence to the contrary, and a-Ning is far from her now.

After an innumerable length of time has passed, she returns to shore. Wen Qing swims until her knees brush the lakebed as she kicks; she plants her feet on the bottom and stands up, suddenly dripping and cold in the evening air. She is naked but for a thin robe, now wet and clinging to her form, and the weight of Zidian on her wrist. Before she can be thoroughly swarmed by insects, Jiang Yanli peels the wet robe from her skin in the privacy of the dark. Wen Qing’s heart skips within her chest even as Jiang Yanli drapes her shoulders with a fresh robe and ties it closed with brisk, dispassionate hands.

“Thank you,” Wen Qing replies evenly, and receives a nod in return, as well as the ghost of a smile. They walk back to Lotus Pier in silence. She can feel the warm lake water dripping out of her hair and down her back. The sensation should be uncomfortable, but instead feels like summer memories from a childhood Wen Qing didn’t have.

Just as she led them to the water, Jiang Yanli shows Wen Qing the way back to Lotus Pier. Though it’s dark, Wen Qing strains to memorize the surroundings; she wants to be able to return, even after Jiang Yanli has left.

Here they are, two of the most important gentry wives alive, wandering aimlessly through the woods and fields in the dead hours of the night. But who could rebuke them? Wen Qing owns everything they can see, and no one would dare tell Jiang Yanli where she may go at Lotus Pier, being Jin-furen or not. They walk the paths as quietly as they can, so not to cause a disturbance, but a twig breaks underfoot and Wen Qing has to stifle a giggle that wants to burst out of her chest. She imagines this is the way adolescence mischievousness felt, for people who were allowed to have that.

They approach the main compound, but the path winds them through the newly-tilled patches of soil Wen Qing has been preparing for spring, and Jiang Yanli catches her hand to stop Wen Qing from passing them by.

“Show me the garden, Wen Qing.”

The name shivers down her spine like a dripping bead of water. “It hasn’t been planted yet.”

“I know. But you can show me what it will be.”

Wen Qing is so overtired that, when she shuts her eyes, she can feel the phantom sensation of the water lapping around her, like she's still immersed in its black embrace. Yet she casts her mind back to the diagrams she’s been sketching, which occupy a sacred place on her desk, and the vision unfolds behind her eyelids. She points, for Jiang Yanli’s benefit, but she keeps her eyes closed; she doesn’t need to look to know how the land is plotted out.

“On this side I’ll plant chuan xiong. Over here, du huo.” Two different roots, both used in the treatment of chronic headaches, among other conditions.

Jiang Yanli runs her fingers through the wet hair at the nape of Wen Qing’s neck and hums attentively. Do all lovers feel this way: split open, like a budding seed, with the water of life’s sweetness pouring in through the cracks?

Wen Qing has lived too long to believe she can change the nature of the world just by wishing it to be different. But, someday, Wen Qing will relinquish Zidian for the last time, when she has ensured that Yu Ziyuan’s granddaughter has learned how to mitigate any pain she might cause.

“On that side, bai lian. For burns, lacerations, any wound that needs cleaning.”

The precocious summer sun threatens to rise at any moment, and bring with it the observing eyes of a busy sect, and so they return to Jiang Yanli’s childhood bedroom. In less hours than she can count on her fingers, Jiang Yanli will board the boat that will bear her across the lake, up the winding riverways, until she reaches the carriage that will take her back to the palace where Wen Qing’s family met their end and where even now Jiang Yanli’s son is sleeping, no doubt aware that his mother is gone, even if he lacks language to understand why, or where, or for how long. When he’s a little older he may board that carriage with her, and drift down that river, and cross the surface of the lake, and Wen Qing will be on the far shore, having waited, having prepared to receive them.

Wen Qing ought to bathe again, to wash any stray mud or twigs from her hair. She draws her own bathwater, and the steam rises in voluptuous curls. The tub is generous and Wen Qing has a small frame; she steps in and looks back over her shoulder, where Jiang Yanli watches her once more with eyes that are dark, wide, and warm.

“Won’t you come in?”