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.