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?”