Chen Chou kicks his feet where they dangle from the walkway around the biggest courtyard of the Zhang mansion in the capital city. The Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, Zhang Ping, lives here, of course, and so does Chief Accountant Chou of the Court of Judicial Review. It’s a large enough house that it’s not even strange for two unmarried men to share it, saving on heating costs and servants’ wages.

He leans back on his hands, but not for long before he’s up and walking a circuit of the courtyard. He checks that the dinner he’s prepared for the evening is still gently warming over a low fire. He leans down to sniff at the delicate yellow orchid on Zhang Ping’s side of their sitting room. It was a gift to Zhang xiong from Lan Peizhi, though Chen Chou is the one who most often waters it. He’s not nervous, just bored: since the cook and butler have been given the afternoon off, if Chen Chou finds something interesting to fiddle with to while away the time till Xu Dong comes to visit, he’s more than likely to miss his arrival.

Chen Chou first met Xu Dong back when he and Zhang xiong were first preparing for the Capital Examination, when they all got drawn into the series of weird cases that led up to a failed coup and everyone in the capital nearly dying from a mist of red pollen. Their relationship has only been like this since Chen Chou and Zhang Ping moved to Yiping County, though. It started when he threw a happy arm around Xu Dong’s shoulders in the Yiping marketplace and dragged him off to show him all around the town.

“Ah… where to first?” he wondered out loud, once they were a street away in no particular direction. He still had his apron on from serving noodles and half a carrot in one hand, and his excitement had started to transmute into feeling foolish and young next to Xu Dong.

Xu Dong lifted the carrot in his own hand, which Chen Chou had pressed on him without thinking back at the noodle stall, and tapped it slowly against his lips as if thinking. He had a very expressive face, Chen Chou thought, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was expressing right now. “You mean you’re not taking me back to the magistrate’s house?” he asked.

“Sure, you can see that!” Chen Chou said.

They were barely inside the reception hall, the maid sent off to other duties, before Xu Dong was slowly crowding him against the wall and giving Chen Chou his very first kiss.

Oh, this is why I was so happy to see him, Chen Chou realised.

The pair of them got back to the marketplace an hour later. Chen Chou was sure it must have been absolutely clear what they’d been doing—at least to Zhang xiong, who was so observant—what with the redness of his mouth from Xu Dong’s moustache rubbing at it and how dazed he felt, constantly having to remind himself that it hadn’t been a dream. Somehow, though, Zhang xiong was still making and serving noodles. A stack of dirty bowls waited for Chen Chou on the cart. Lan daren was sitting to one side reading, and no one said anything about it.

Xu Dong’s mouth, both their mouths, had tasted of fresh carrot. That taste has been embarrassingly erotic for Chen Chou ever since.

Not long after that, one night while watching Zhang xiong insist on cooking for them both although he’d been hearing cases all day, Chen Chou realised that there was something else he wanted—had been wanting—in their friendship. He felt like a fool for not knowing it sooner. He felt almost like a fraud: was that why he’d made such fast friends with Zhang xiong, just to get into bed with him? That didn’t sound like the person that Chen Chou thought he was at all. So what else might he be wrong about?

It distracted him so much that even Zhang xiong noticed and asked him what was wrong. In the conversation that followed, they established that Zhang xiong wasn’t interested in that with Chen Chou, Lan daren or anyone else.

Things were awkward for a while. But then there was the case with the fake cinnabar and the poisoned robes, where each of them saved the other’s life at least once, and it was all right again.

Xu Dong would spend time with him whenever he and Lan daren came by to Yiping, or if they happened to meet on the road, which was more often than you’d expect, really. It helped Chen Chou sort things out in his mind: he and Xu Dong were friendly but a long way from being zhiji. They’d share a meal and a bottle of wine and a bed, if there was one at hand—if not, a couch or a tree trunk or a sack of rice would do as well—and then their ways would part until the next time. His friendship with Zhang xiong was something different entirely.

Those were good years, the ones they spent in Yiping. When Xu Dong wasn’t around, there was a certain wineshop that Chen Chou might drop into now and again. Zhang xiong never asked about it, but when the path of solving a case wound through that part of town—like the time with the amnesiac soldier and the missing salt revenue—he was happy to follow Chen Chou’s lead. In the evenings, they would sit together and talk about some new mechanical advance Zhang xiong had read about, or the latest ghost story that was doing the rounds of the market.

Chen Chou even started learning to play the xiao. The real xiao, that is. He’d had plenty of practice otherwise.

In short, in Yiping, he had everything he needed.

Then the two of them moved back to Beijing, so that Zhang xiong could take up the position of Minister of Judicial Review and Chen Chou could take the Capital Examination again. And fail the Capital Examination again.

He was still crying in their sitting room when Zhang xiong told him it didn’t matter: the Ministry of Judicial Review needed an accountant too, and Chen Chou was the best person there could be to fill the role. He seemed relieved, even, that he wouldn’t have to adjust to an entirely new staff in his new position.

Lan daren invited him to tea at his mansion and said that of course he’d put in a good word for Chen Chou wherever it might help. Chen Chou thanked him sincerely and wondered if anything would come of that. Lan daren had been leery of doing favours and putting in good words since his old friend had tried to usurp the heavenly throne and killed the Dowager Empress. It was making his life as Minister of Rites more difficult than it had to be.

After all that, it was Xu Dong who sat up with him late into the night, telling tales of his life before he met Lan daren that made Chen Chou’s hair stand on end. He left his message unspoken, but Chen Chou understood it: if a desperado like Xu Dong could come good, so could a failed scholar like him.

Chen Chou made Xu Dong teach him as many of his tricks with a knife as he could. They’ve come in useful on many occasions since then.

Accountancy might not be as honorable a profession as serving directly in government, but Chen Chou found he was good at it. In the Ministry of Judicial Review, with a Minister who was categorically less interested in how things had always been done than in what found answers, his tasks expanded. Before long, Chen Chou had gone from keeping the Ministry’s books to examining other people’s books and, eventually, following the trails of coin, banknotes, goods and merchants’ promises across the country.

It was on one of these trips, to the northeast, that he and Xu Dong shared a carriage, its unoccupied seats loaded with boxes and bags. Xu Dong whispered in his ear, “Don’t make a sound,” opened his robes and trousers and stroked him off so slowly and steadily that Chen Chou was shaking by the time he came, gripping the wooden bench so hard his fingers ached, sweat pouring down his face. Xu Dong caught his spend in a silk handkerchief, folded it neatly and tucked it smugly away in his own lapel. The servants riding on the outside of the carriage didn’t hear a thing.

Three days later, when the two of them were jammed together beneath the false floor of a mule-drawn cart, sneaking—they hoped—into the mountain hideout of a gang, Xu Dong laid his hand on Chen Chou’s thigh and Chen Chou got hard so quickly his head spun.

Zhang xiong spends more time with Lan Peizhi and Wang Mowen, now that they’re all in the capital most of the time and the three of them attend court together. To Chen Chou’s mixed relief, their days with the noodle cart are finally over too. “A noodle detective is one thing, a noodle magistrate is another, but a noodle Minister of Judicial Review,” the Emperor said when he appointed Zhang xiong to the position, “is really going too far.”

That is to say, a certain well-dressed customer, visiting Yiping from Beijing, said that. Chen Chou had been moving awkwardly around the man’s barely-disguised Imperial Guards to collect bowls, unsure whether he was supposed to know he was the Emperor or not.

Chen Chou sees how Lan Peizhi and Wang Mowen look at Zhang xiong, when they all spend time together—not just when the servants have dimmed the lanterns and switched the incense for a subtler, deeper blend, but before that too, when they get as rowdy as those two ever dare, challenging each other on points in the Classics that Chen Chou has honestly half forgotten and where Zhang xiong has his own idiosyncratic, meticulously backed-up interpretations. Sometimes he leaves a little early, those nights, just in case Zhang xiong’s changed his mind. Still, he’s never quite asleep before he hears the slide of Zhang xiong’s bedroom door across the courtyard from his own.

“Peizhi asked me if I wanted to marry his cousin,” Zhang xiong said over breakfast, one of the mornings after those nights. He was gazing at the bowls of pickles and greens without seeing them, his brows drawn together. “Or Mowen’s youngest sister.”

“What did you say?” Chen Chou asked, trying to remember if he’d ever met either young lady.

“No, of course. I don’t want a wife,” he replied, and Chen Chou was struck once again with that exasperated affection he’d only ever felt for Zhang Ping.

“Zhang xiong! Do you remember how I told you and told you to bring a gift to Lan daren before the exams, and when you finally took him over a box, it was full of zongzi?”

“What?”

The confusion in his eyes was so honest, Chen Chou just said, “Never mind,” and turned away to feed a piece of egg to Puffball the cat, who’d been rubbing her head against his knee and purring.

At this point in their lives, none of them should expect Zhang Ping to understand what it means to curry favour with an official, or just why a man would try to marry you to his sister.

He’ll have to get married himself at some point, hopefully to a woman with plenty to occupy her in her own life and not much need for a husband. Still, it’ll be his village Zhang xiong comes back to for New Year, not the Wang or Lan family seats. Zhang xiong is tireless at helping in the kitchen and carrying all Chen Chou’s nieces and nephews around on his perilously tall shoulders; if Chen Chou didn’t bring him home one year without a good excuse, his mother would have his head.

There’s a polite rap at the front gate. Chen Chou jumps up to open it and tug Xu Dong in by the hand, laughing.

“Welcome back to the capital,” he says.

“Thanks,” Xu Dong says. He casts a shrewd eye around the courtyard. “Zhang daren isn’t here?”

“No one’s here but us,” Chen Chou confirms, and pulls him in right there for a long, hot kiss.

There are white threads in Xu Dong’s moustache, these days, but the arms that hold Chen Chou are as strong as they’ve ever been and there’s heat coming through his robes everywhere they’re pressed together, from chest to thigh. Chen Chou fantasises about putting off tea and dinner and just taking Xu Dong back to his bedroom.

It’s been a while since they’ve been able to take their leisure together. Suddenly, he wants nothing else but to see his friend laid out on the bed in front of him, his compact muscular back damp with sweat while Chen Chou kneels between his thighs and slides inside him. He’s used to doing it the other way round, of course—with the older man on top—but Xu Dong’s and his own preferences happen to match up nicely in the reverse of convention. There’s a lot to be said for leaving aside the way things are supposed to be done, Chen Chou will admit.

“I brought you something from Hangzhou,” Xu Dong says when they separate. He’s breathing rather hard. “Two things, actually: there’s a very tasteful incense burner, and there’s the story of how I got it and why it’s not your everyday souvenir from West Lake.”

Chen Chou bites his lip. “Is it a good story?”

“Very exciting,” Xu Dong grins.

“Then I don’t want to rush it. Tell me over dinner—later.” He slings an arm around Xu Dong’s shoulders, once again, and they walk across the courtyard together in the late afternoon sun.