Spring comes, and Nie Huaisang is seen with his sabre for the first time since— anyone's guess as to when.
He wonders, for all the seconds it takes for Tang Fan to start to move, if he’s fallen asleep again. He’s not convinced it is at all possible for him to have a dream as odd as this, as ominous, as wonderful. The Tang Fan that is trying to kick his bare feet beneath the lifted linens while all the heat Sui Zhou’s body has pressed into them escapes is too wholly fleshed out to be one of Sui Zhou’s fantasies.
Ding Rong has walked himself through five vivid calculations of Wang Zhi’s death at his hands in the carriage before Wang Zhi speaks.
“I’m in need of a second,” he says.
On the one night of their journey that suspends itself in the in-between, not yet Hetao but no longer home, Wang Zhi joins him for dinner.
“You missed the discussion conference,” Jiang Cheng snaps back at him, whipping his head up stiffly from his perfunctory bow.
Nie Huaisang’s smile doesn’t waver, his entire expression perfectly, painstakingly polite. He looks pale, but anyone of his mettle would, clad in the violent contrast of silver and black. It all relinquishes nothing to Jiang Cheng but the means to inflame his irritation for the situation and for himself. He had left the conference too quickly to contemplate his choice, and now, in Qinghe Nie’s main hall, he’s slowed down enough for the whiplash of regret to be both immediate and immense.
A sabre is, by nature, forthright.
If Lan Wangji has learned anything from his atonement for Wei Wuxian’s death, it is that patience is neither simple nor shallow.
Janet is there for the trial, and afterward.
One night only — this is the only way they meet, with her bruises on his body, with his old name at the back of her throat, choked. He's broken away from what he used to be, but what he is now, there's no name for — just a warm shape in the dark.