Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

second engagements are always better

The summer air was thick, full with a promise of rain that threatened not to fall. It hung about Lotus Pier like smog, choking the shouts of the senior disciples as they ordered practice drills outside Swords Hall and dulling the thuds of the workers as toiling to carve and polish the hazelwood beams lying in neat-stacked piles on the ground.

Down by the riverside, the heat was a little less – the water leeched some of it away and summoned up a gentle, whisking sort of breeze: the kind of thing that fluttered at wisps of hair loose here and there and lifted layers of light, purple-painted silk.

Yanli looked over the table the maids had set: five little china teacups, the teapot on its perch and the tea-tray tucked beside it. Around it, planets orbiting a moon, were a parade of dishes holding melon seeds and peanuts and ragged-edged shards of sesame candy. Nearby, a platter of lotus seed mooncakes sat beaming with a sweet sheen – usually she wouldn’t make them until the approach of the Mid-Autumn Festival, but she had gone to the kitchen and fretted and her hands had found her way to the ingredients without too much thought.

Even so, she found herself doubting. Was it not enough or was it too much? Had she forgotten someone’s favourite or included something someone else detested?

She wondered, quick and sharp as a seizure, if there was enough time left to run to the kitchen and tip a gaggle of cherries into a bowl – but it was a futile thing, because she could hear them arriving, their laughter and the gentle hum of their voices above the river’s sway like a rug over a floor, and then she could see them, flecks of colour against the honey-wood and purple of Lotus Pier.

“Yanli!” Mianmian was first, sleeves tight against her arms as she bowed – not too deep and not too precious – and for all of her nerves, it was easy enough for Yanli to smile back. “Thank you for the invitation.”

“Yes,” Rong Yan added, coming up the stairs to the pavilion with her arm looped through Qin Su’s, gentle bronze over mint green. “Your letter was very mysterious – you are going to tell us what it was about, aren’t you?”

“If not,” Qin Su said and her tone was playfully tart. “We’re planning on holding you hostage until you do tell us.”

Behind them, Yu Qiuyun, silver-spun flowers nestled in her hair, swallowed back a smile, “Not all of us – mostly just Su-er.”

“We all agreed!” Qin Su cried, throwing her arms in a sea-foam wave. “And now, Yanli-jie, they are pinning all the blame on me.”

“Ignore them, we’re just all very curious,” Rong Yan interjected, smoothing over the teasing with a deft hand.

The river lapped up close against the pavilion struts underneath and further downstream, a boatman shouted, tossing a rope out to waiting hands on the pier. Closer, a bunch of disciples marching in three neat pairs headed along the waterfront with bows slung over their backs and swords in hand.

On the table, Yanli touched the rim of a teacup, featherlight and grounding, and, feeling jerky and spindly, like a bird with too-thin wings, she gestured for them all to sit.

“I’ll make the tea,” she said, as they all sat in a rustle of silks. “And then I promise I’ll tell you all everything.”

It was lunchtime and they were arguing again. Rong Yan wasn’t sure if there had ever been a time when her father and her jiujiu hadn’t argued – she suspected that if they didn’t both love her mother, the arguments would be worse.

Usually their arguments were loud, explosive things: full of shouting and words her mother had banned her from ever repeating, ending with a zipping crash as doors were flung open and her jiujiu stomped away from her father’s office, heading down to the stables to vent his frustrations into the wind on a long, circling horse ride.

He had once threatened to ride out in snow thundering down into swelling drifts; Rong Yan had quietly locked the door while her mother talked him down, half-cajoling and half-pleading and always leading him back and back inside the complex.

This time, though, they were arguing in fierce, hushed voices. Now and then, they would rise, sharp and hot, and then duck down again, like chickens when they pecked at seeds.

Stopping by the door, Rong Yan waited, her body curving to listen better.

“– right time,” her jiujiu was saying. “Rong Heng is now old enough to marry and it will be better to find him a wife sooner rather than later. All of the great sects have heirs or leaders who are unmarried. Do you think the Lan will leave Zewu-jun unmarried for long? Or the Nie, or the Jiang? Once they start looking, all the sects will flock to them for their daughters, and a-Heng will be left with whoever fails. Better to look now than to wait and see what happens.”

She heard her father sigh.

“You’ve made this argument before,” her father said, and there was a tiredness in his voice that underlaid the frustration. No doubt they had been talking round in circles on this for a while now. That, too, was usual. “But a-Heng is only twenty-one, there’s no need to rush into anything.”

Her jiujiu snorted, and she could see, in her mind’s eye, him folding his arms in the way he always did when he felt her father – or anyone, really – was being foolish and stubborn, “Of course there is! A- Heng is talented enough, of course, but he can’t compete with the likes of Zewu-jun or Jin-gongzi. If Anping Rong is to raise our status –”

He cut off abruptly. Rong Yan held her breath, moving back from the doorway and folding her hands inside her sleeves, arranging her face and her clothes and her pose so that she looked to be just approaching the doors.

There was silence, for an octet of quick, skipping heartbeats. Then, the rustling of silk as both men shifted uneasily.

“You are assuming that there will be a competition of sorts,” her father replied, and the reasonableness in his voice was too loud and too forced. “That I don’t believe – we have just ended a war, there are more pressing priorities at the moment and these things take time to arrange.”

“So,” and she could hear the disbelief in her jiujiu’s voice. “Your plan is to do nothing for a-Heng and hope that in, say, two years’ time when you finally decide he’s old enough to think about marriage, that Qin Su or Yu Qiuyun are free to marry? All the beauties will be gone.”

“Beauty is not the only quality in a woman,” her father snapped.

To her left, the growing padding of footsteps, and Rong Yan fell back away from the door. She glanced up and a pair of maids, whispering about something like gossips in the taverns, went by the top of the corridor, arms piled with fresh, folded linens in homespun white.

They didn’t so much as look her way – gossip had that effect on people: blindness.

Beauty, she thought, a little bitter and more cold, had a similar effect.

For all of the other qualities women were demanded to possess, beauty somehow always came first. It had always seemed to her that beauty on its own could cover a multitude of failings, while so much else was needed to make up for a lack of it.

It was something girls couldn’t help but be aware of, too: who was beautiful, who was not. So Rong Yan knew very well that Yu Qiuyun and Qin Su were beautiful, that she and Jiang Yanli were not.

Men had a tendency to reduce it to just that, though – just beauty. As though Qin Su’s vibrancy and earnestness weren’t their own strengths; as though Yu Qiuyun’s sleek grace and studied elegance weren’t a silk slip over a precise, steel core.

Of course, she thought, they had mentioned her friends.

Would they ask her to speak to them, perhaps? To test the waters on her brother’s behalf? If it was for the sect – which it would be – she supposed it would a small enough favour to do.

Briefly, she considered her brother: not short but not too tall, broad-shouldered and handsome enough with the same high cheekbones which made her plain. He was a fair hand with a calligraphy brush and a good swordsman; while he lorded it over her, as older siblings were wont to do, dangling insults and sweet-sour compliments over her head until she bit, his confidence was something of a paper tiger when he stepped into a room with other, bigger, better men.

He would be a good husband one day – but for one of her friends?

Rong Yan wondered if perhaps her father and uncle should be reminded there were girls in the world besides her friends. Girls who hadn’t heard about him making her wait up for him to return back from the tavern and then forgetting to let her know he’d arrived back; girls who didn’t think of him as simply Rong Yan’s brother.

Footsteps inside the room and she backed away from the door again – but they paced towards her and then back.

“What about a-Yan?” her jiujiu said and she froze. She couldn’t help it: she leaned in again, resting a hand almost on the doorframe to listen better.

This time, her stomach was heavy with a mingled dread and thrill; it pressed down on her legs, rooting her in place.

“What about a-Yan?” her father said. 

“Well, isn’t she old enough to be married?” her jiujiu said, and the emphasis he put on ‘she’ was clear and unwelcome. Rong Yan sighed, silent and heartfelt; somehow, girls always seemed to be older than boys.

There was a long, confused pause, and then her father said, “I hadn’t really considered that.”

Rong Yan stepped back eight paces, breathed in deep and blinked long once – it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it stung all the same – forward eight paces, and knocked on the door.

“Die,” she said, as they both looked up to see her, a shadow of something on her uncle’s face. “Niang is asking if you will be joining us for lunch or if you would prefer to eat in here.”

Steadily, Yanli lifted the teapot – it was a big thing, big enough to serve all five of them, and heavy with its full belly – with two hands and poured, one by one by one by one by one, until they all had full cups. Little silver spoons clattered against dishes as drops of honey and squeezes of lemon and a pinch of mint were added to taste.

“It’s cold green tea,” she explained. It was unnecessary, as there was no steam, but she felt she should say it all the same. “I thought it would be more refreshing given the heat.”

There was a moment of silence then, as ten hands lifted five cups. On the river, Yanli could see a bird circling lazily through the sky, wheeling round and round above the field of lotuses, their blush-pink flowers at this distance barely more than pinpricks of colour against the carpet of green leaves covering the water’s surface.

On her tongue, the tea was bitter, tinted sharp with a dribble of lemon. The coolness of it settled her stomach – and her nerves.

“So,” Qin Su leaned in, conspiratorial, once they had all breathed in the gently bitter scent of the tea and sipped three times, small and delicate. “What’s the news?”

Yanli set her cup down with a quiet clink; around the table, they all watched her – Mianmian and Rong Yan and Yu Qiuyun and Qin Su – waiting expectantly.

“I’m getting married,” she said simply.

There was a brief blink of silence and then noise: Qin Su squealed, Mianmian clapped her hands together once and loud, and there was an echo of ‘congratulations!’ ringing about under the pavilion roof, bouncing off the dome and back down to clatter about her head.

Congratulations, Yanli-jie, Yanli-er, congratulations!

“Not to Jin-gongzi?” Yu Qiuyun frowned, her silver-pointed nails clicking a quick double-tap on the tabletop.

Something in her stomach twisted and Yanli tasted sourness at the back of her throat.

She had always felt the whispers more than heard them: felt them scratching and scrabbling against her back, cat-like and itching. That it was such a shame – for him to be so handsome and her so plain – that she wasn’t really good enough – too untalented, too dim – that could anyone be sure she would even manage as Jin-furen?

Too weak was perhaps the worst of her sins, she supposed, but talent or beauty would have made up for some of it at least.

Every since she had sent the invitations, Yanli had wondered if it had been a mistake to invite Yu Qiuyun. For all they were cousins, they had never been close.

When she had written the invitations, Yanli had found herself pausing over a fourth: brush hovering in mid-air as little black spots fell like a reluctant fall of rain. She had sat, stuck, wondering and wrestling, weighing reluctance against the curdle of cruelty in her stomach – and then pulled out a new, clean sheet. There was no hesitation this second time; biaomei, she wrote, I would like to invite you to…

“No, not to Jin-gongzi,” she shook her head – and the circle of side-sent glances that scattered around the table at that didn’t escape her. “I am marrying Nie Mingjue.”

It was odd, saying his name out loud like that. Had she ever referred to him by just his name before?

She’d have to get used to it, she supposed – after all, in nine months or so, they would be married and she could hardly be his wife and call him only by his titles. 

Yu Qiuyun relaxed – a small thing visible in the slope of her shoulders – and said simply, “I’m glad.”

“So,” Rong Yan asked, snapping a shard of sesame candy into a cacophony of pieces. “How did it happen?”

Yanli hesitated, buying herself time to think before she spoke by taking a mooncake from the platter. Her fingers stroked over the lotus flower design worked into the top of the pastry, an old tick that had come back with a vengeance.

In her stomach, the lemon ached acidic and spurred something in her chest brash and bubbling and biting.

If she said it out loud, it would either be a scandal or bravery, she thought, and either one would be nothing like her.

“I chose him,” she said, and the admission of it tumbled into a silence that layered over the swish of the river as it trundled on, endlessly tripping down towards the sea. “I negotiated it with Nie-gongzi and Chifeng-zun agreed.”

“No matchmaker?” Yu Qiuyun broke the silence.

“No,” Yanli shook her head.

“You negotiated with Nie-gongzi directly – not your brother?” Rong Yan asked, but there was nothing of the shock or horror or even admiration on her face that Yanli had hoped or worried for, only a thoughtful sort of consideration.

“Yes,” she nodded.

Qin Su hummed, cracking a melon seed between her teeth, and there was an appraising, calculating gleam in her eyes as she looked at Yanli then.

“You,” she said, and she glanced round the table to loop all of them in – all five of them, stringing ribbons of air between them. “Are a dark horse, Yanli-jie. And that is a very interesting story.”

The day Nie Huaisang arrived at Lotus Pier, it was raining. It thundered down, the rain, pooling in dips in the courtyard and threading through cracks in stone paving; on the river, it danced about, heavy enough it seemed to bounce and jump off, splattering like miniscule divers entering a pool.

On the roof of the hall, it drummed a loud, threatening kind of beat. Underneath it, Nie Huaisang’s voice was quiet, but clear – for all the rain’s best efforts, these were words that couldn’t be avoided.

Nie Huaisang was solemn, with silver-knotted braids and flanked by disciples, though solemnity for Huaisang was an ill-fitting thing, hastily assumed and tailored to fit someone else so the flourishes and flutters seemed oversized and almost affected.

It made it feel a weightier thing.

On the Lotus throne, Jiang Cheng was all tired eyes and clenched fists. Zidian glinted where she coiled about his wrist, the cool silver of the metal a contrast to the summer sun’s warm glow. To his other side, Wei Wuxian was a cloud of black, Chenqing spinning nonstop in his fingers.

Nie Huaisang had stopped halfway up the room and given a sweeping, respectful bow. Long sleeves had brushed almost to the floor and behind them, the rows of disciples carrying the requisite gifts – soft-pelted furs, bolts of purple silk, a pile of oranges in a woven basket hung with red ribbons, boxes of fine white tea, and a chest stacked full of gold – followed in almost military formation.

It had taken three weeks for Jiang Cheng to accept that it had to be done – Yanli had waited for him to rage and thunder and hunt for some other solution and then, finally, to give in and concede that she was right – and another month to negotiate her marriage contract and now, ten days after that had concluded and the final, counter-signed copy had been bound with ribbon and sealed with wax, Nie Huaisang was there to give the marriage gifts.

It was strange to look at the piles of gifts and trinkets and to think that together they measured how much she was worth. Her whole life, her whole self counted out in gold and silver.

There would be no going back after this.

A girl could come back from one broken engagement; a woman would struggle to recover from two.

Attempting the impossible was all well and good for boys, she thought, but as a girl you had to pick your battles.

Nie Huaisang’s gaze flickered over her, brief and flittering, before they rested on Jiang Cheng. “Jiang-zongzhu,” and if half the hall flinched a little, the Nie politely pretended not to notice. Jiang Yanli wondered, absently, how long it would take until it fit, hearing her didi called Jiang-zongzhu in their father’s place.

Perhaps, she had thought, secretly at night in her new-old bedroom with its freshly lacquered wood and that horrible, vulnerable loneliness, perhaps it would be easier if she married out. It hadn’t lasted long and afterwards, standing by the railings and looking out over the still-flowing river, the swish of the water soothingly steady, she had chastised herself for even thinking it.

How could she leave her brothers, her sect, when they needed her most?

As it turned out, that was the price for security – and she could not refuse that either.

The hall was resplendent, full of light and glittering wealth. In their sombre grey, the Nie disciples were a silver-ish counterpoint to the yellow-threaded wood; the black borders on Nie Huaisang’s clothes, thick and bold, matched the sweeping art on the fan – mountains she didn’t recognise and a single bird soaring above.

Nie Huaisang spoke very prettily; they didn’t matter as such, the words, and it was customary for it to be flattering, and she tried not to think of it as setting a standard she would be required to live up to.

For all everything was said to her brother, directed to her brother, replied to by her brother, she felt stared at; she never saw people looking at her, but she felt it, felt eyes on her face and her clothes – the Nie disciples weighing up their future Nie-furen.

Yanli made sure to smile; it had been her idea, after all, and she would not have the Nie think that she regretted it.

The tea couldn’t have gone cold since it had never been hot, or even warm, but it had turned bitingly bitter, and the dishes had emptied of almost all of the snacks – there were a handful of melon seeds and a lonely mooncake and some small fragments of sesame candy strewn like litter about the platters.

Yanli was perhaps the only one who saw how the hours had passed by the ebb and flow of the river: tea would do what it would, influenced and tricked by the day’s heat, but the river always stayed the same, responding only to the charm of the moon about her course. Now, it sat lower in its wending, slowly sinking into its bed as the afternoon drew on.

Shen-shi, she guessed – and as though she had thought out loud, there she saw a trio of younger disciples heading pushing off from a dock in a boat, bamboo fishing rods and woven baskets slung over their shoulders.

“Boating would be so lovely,” Yu Qiuyun commented, idle and watching, and the swell of sadness that spooled in Yanli’s stomach, a stale sort of grief, had the soft tang of familiarity.

Summers before they would have done it: bustled and bubbled down to the pier, letting the disciples pull the boats out of the shallows and up to the wooden struts; they would have clambered onboard, skirts splaying and slipping over the low-slung sides, and pushed out and off into the middle of the river, beating a neat, quick pace down to the lotus fields about the bloom as the river fattened.

But the Wen sect had burned all the boats, when they had invaded Lotus Pier. Yanli’s brothers had brought back her parents’ bodies in the last of them, the lone survivor. It still smelt something of blood and ash, no matter how many times it was scrubbed clean and re-caulked with linen and pitch.

“Later in the summer,” Yanli said, and she tried not to think on whether or not they would have managed to rebuild enough, to store and sell enough, to be able to spare the boats for an afternoon of fun.

“We could go lotus-seed picking!” Mianmian enthused. “You invited us once before –”

“Yes,” Qin Su agreed, jumping in. “It would be so sweet, picking lotus seeds on the river, parasols over our heads and the boats gently swaying underneath us…”

Mianmian giggled and for a moment they were all stilled, lost in the half-formed dream of boating on a lake flooded with lotus flowers. Rong Yan broke it with a sidling sort of question:

“So,” she said, her voice low but steady. “Tell us exactly how you did it, Yanli. Negotiated your own marriage,” she added, elaborating though there wasn’t really any need of it.

Yanli found herself faced with four pairs of eyes, expectant and inquisitive. Qin Su was leaning in a little, one arm braced on the table; Yu Qiuyun sat perfectly, deceptively still but she was studying Yanli with sharp, narrowed eyes.

Yanli felt the hot creep of it as she blushed, pink-cheeked and rose-shaped.

“I don’t really know what I can say,” she said – and her reluctance tasted much like awkwardness and a kind of strange, sour modesty.

“We’re not asking for secrets, Yanli,” Rong Yan said, gentler then. She had never been one for cajoling – it didn’t come naturally to her – but gentle she did easily, unthinkingly. “Just some idea of how we could go about it. How we would even begin to start the conversation – or when?”

“And with who – is it even something we can talk about to someone directly?” Qi Su added, a frown creasing her forehead.

“And,” Yu Qiuyun concluded. “How did you get round your brothers and our grandmother all at once?”

They all looked at her again, and Mianmian laughed.

“I think you’re going to have to say something,” she advised, nipping one of the remaining melon seeds from the hollow of its dish. “Otherwise this lot won’t let you go.”

The riverbank was thick with grass and a close canopy of trees overhead, beating back the sun so it lingered on the river in a shimmering silver sheen. Birds twittered, rustling the leaves as they skipped from branch to branch, and the silk of their hanfu swished about their legs as they walked, languid and lazy like the river.

Next to Yanli, Mianmian matched her easily, step for step.

“You didn’t ask about the marriage,” Yanli commented. “Like the others did.” It hung in the air, halfway between a statement and a question.

Mianmian smiled, but it was a small, watered-down sort of thing. “Marriages of sect disciples must be approved by the sect leader,” she said, and that was definitely a statement – and a statement of something they all knew.

It had been easy to forget it, though, and she reached out to squeeze Mianmian’s hand.

“Jin Zixuan is a good man,” she said and her voice stumbled over his name. Somehow, mentioning Jin Zixuan after so much time talking about Nie Mingjue, about her upcoming marriage, was odd, almost scandalous.

She wanted to say his name repeatedly – Jin Zixuan, Jin Zixuan, Zixuan, a-Xuan – but also never, ever again. Not in front of others; not in daylight.

“He’d help you, if you found someone you liked.”

Mianmian smiled at that – wide and laughing – and Yanli remembered too late that Mianmian had spent more time with Jin Zixuan than almost anyone else.

She had wasted so many years marinating in her own jealousy, thick and green-tinted and clinging to her skin like an oil slick, letting it sink in until it stained her mint-ish and sickly; so many years manufacturing reasons to try to dislike Mianmian. It had been a waste of time: she wasn’t strong enough to hold onto that kind of grudge, and Mianmian was too kind to fail to understand.

“Jin Zixuan,” Mianmian pronounced. “Is an idiot. But yes, I think he would.”

In the fullness of the afternoon the heat had set wisps of hair starting to curl about her cheeks and they bounced in the breeze as it brushed past.

Ahead of them, Yu Qiuyun was slowing, sluggish in the stickiness, her cheeks painted a faint pink and her silks clinging to her hips and her legs. She of all of them struggled the most with the heat: the mountains of Meishan Yu rarely staggered hot in the summer, preferring to linger in the fresher, sweetly warmer temperatures.

Qin Su and Rong Yan stopped near a minuscule bay digging into the riverbank; really, it was just a curved ledge of dirt, studded with the occasional stone and jutting tree-root, sitting a foot or so above the Yangtze as it flowed past. Spotting the grass were a litany of peonies, pink and white and a soft, lavender purple, tiny and tucked in between the blades as though they were shy.

They flopped down; Yanli followed Yu Qiuyun as her cousin sank down by the riverside, tucked in the shade but close enough to the water she could lean down and trail a hand in it, feeling the strength of the current as it raced downstream – even this far up, it was still strong enough to whisk twigs and leaves and boats briskly away – and the cool of it against her wrist.

Yu Qiuyun almost lay along the grass, her hair trailing in the grass behind and over her shoulders, dampened around her face by sweat, and Yanli thought that perhaps this was the least perfect she had ever seen Qiuyun look.

“Can we all agree?” Qin Su said, all of a sudden. She was nervous: fingers plucking at some small flaw on her lip – a scar or a crack in the soft skin.

“Agree on what?” Rong Yan asked, leaning back against a tree and glancing over.

Qin Su hesitated – a breath in and out, and said, “On finding our own husbands – well,” she amended. “Spouses.”

The riverside was never really quiet: things splashed about unseen and out of view, the birds shuffled about on their branches and twittered between themselves, and the water itself gurgled and gargled as it rattled into the bank, nibbling away stones and little tumbles of dirt.

“It’s only that if we all do it, then it won’t seem so odd,” Qin Su added, and she brightened a little, cajoling and half-coquettish, as she added, “We might even start a trend.”

“Not all of us worry about trends,” Rong Yan said wryly – before she shook her head. “It’s not a bad idea, though. Less cause for scandal.”

Yu Qiuyun hummed an agreement; Mianmian looked down, her fingers toying with a peony, pinching the stem.

“You must marry someone high-status,” Qin Su declared, tossing a handful of shredded grass at Mianmian, who dodged back with a twitch of her nose. “So that you don’t have to run away from us for menial duties again.”

“I will do my best,” Mianmian laughed, giving a mock bow with a flourish of her arms; her sleeves buffeted the peonies nearby, their heads bobbing as if in approval.

“But Su-er,” Yu Qiuyun said, the hem of her sleeve ducking under the water, indigo dyed night-like. “If Mianmian marries someone high status, she won’t be able to be near you, unless she marries Jin-gongzi.”

Mianmian made something of a disgusted face at that: all wrinkled nose and scrunched face. They all laughed, and Qin Su waved a hand, negligent and cut short from the effort of moving.

“She’ll just have to visit me a lot,” Qin Su said, closing her eyes with a haughty air – a regally manufactured thing. “To make up for the distance."

A round of laughter fluttered about the group, jumping like a bird on a branch from person to person, before it whisked away over the river and downstream.

Leaning down, Yanli ran her fingers through the river, feeling the way it lapped at her wrist. The water itself was clear and salt-free – there would be fish further out, paddlefish with their long noses and shoals of carp – and she thought, absently, that boating really would have been wonderful, had they had the resources to take the boats out.

Had they not had to rebuild. Had they had spare moments for old, childish pleasures.

Perhaps she should invite them all again for lotus seed picking – in the end of August, when the plants would be ready for harvesting and the time not yet run down enough for the harvest to be urgent and less of a leisure.

Mianmian reached down and gently snipped the head off a peony, full and blush-pink-petalled. Gesturing to Qin Su, who was nearest her, to turn her head, she carefully slotted the flower into Qin Su’s hair; Qin Su reached up to touch it and smiled.

Plucking another and another and another, Mianmian beckoned them all over until she had decorated them all with peonies – hot pink in Rong Yan’s hair, white in Yu Qiuyun’s, and a sweet, pale thing in Yanli’s. She didn’t ask for one for herself, but Yanli supposed that Lanling Jin had enough peonies as it was: grown neat in boxed flowerbeds and carpeted in white-and-yellow across the gardens.

“Is it true that there’s a cold spring pond in Cloud Recesses?” Yu Qiuyun asked, and Yanli nodded almost immediately – and bit a smile back at the memory of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji vanishing from it for nearly half a day.

She had fallen while searching for them, she remembered, and fallen into Jin Zixuan’s arms – like a maiden out of a poem.

Yu Qiuyun hummed a sort of consideration, her cheeks definitively flushed with the heat and her thin silks clinging to the curve of her hips.

“I think,” she said. “I would marry Lan-zongzhu now just to be able to sink into cold water.”

“Not,” Qin Su said, fanning herself again. “If I married him first.”

Outside Laoling, the Qin sect’s ancestral seat was nestled among acres and acres of jujube trees, marshalled and wrestled into neat, gridded rows across the fields. This early in the year, the trees were mostly bare, their thorny branches studded with little star-like buds and the first bursts of leaves. Qin Su listened to them and their rattling rustle as she sat in her room, ostensibly brushing her hair.

She had been brushing her hair for half a shichen now. In truth, she had spent most of the time arranging and rearranging a row of enamelled hairpins on her dresser with a rhythmical repetition.

It had been months now; months since the war had ended and Meng Yao had become Jin Guangyao, Lianfang-zun. Months again since Jin Guangyao had written to her or visited her – even since he had been around and, well, available when she had visited Koi Tower with her father.

Once, she had taken the risk to go to his rooms, to knock softly at his door and see if he was there – and he had been so much the same as before: inviting her in, quiet and gentle and all a-smile. The following day, there had been a message slipped in her sleeve: in a-Yao’s elegant writing, it said ‘Do not come to me again – there are too many eyes. Please be patient’.

It hadn’t said what to be patient for – but still, all the same, she had been patient. She had waited all these months, as the seasons turned through the year, as the funerals gave way to quickening weddings and as Jin Guangyao’s letters and visits and acknowledgements lessened.

How long could a girl be expected to wait?

She had cried – last week and last month and last year – but that was now in the past. She was determined, more than ever, to move on from him.

Yes, she had thought she had been in love; thought she had found the man she would marry and spend the rest of her life with; she had thought he was perfect, the ideal man. But then, she reflected, she was only young and all young girls fell in love at some point – it was part of the journey, wasn’t it, to fall in love with someone wholly unsuitable, love them passionately and deeply and terribly, and then to grow a little older, move on and up to Mr Right.

She hadn’t really expected, though, that heartbreak would hurt so much. It wailed a hollow in her chest and in her head, leaving her with a gaping sense of loneliness that seemed to stretch out from around her, like a literal chasm carved about her feet, encircling her wherever she walked.

Could other people see it, this listlessness that she felt?

She hoped not – how would she explain it? And how then would she avoid explaining just how foolish she had been?

Gently, hesitantly, she touched her stomach.

For a moment, once, she had hoped that something might have happened – then, after all, Jin Guangyao would have had to marry her. But it hadn’t and so he wouldn’t and she was beginning to think he had perhaps never intended it at all.

On her desk, Yanli’s letter lay on top of a pile of other pieces of paper: rough sketches of the Laoling gardens, a note which had been attached to a present of some silk from her father – away at Koi Tower, again – and a half-drafted reply to Mianmian’s latest letter.

She had written ‘dear Mianmian-jie’ and stopped. She hadn’t known what else to write.

That was the trouble with secrets – they sat, heavy and greedy, in your stomach, eating you up from the inside out bit by bit until eventually you were consumed by them.

Putting the brush down, Qin Su studied herself in the mirror. She looked much the same: just a little tired, perhaps, and maybe a little sad, but then didn’t she have a right to be?

The candle sputtered out chou-shi in a single, judgemental spit, and she sighed to herself. How much easier it would be if a girl did not have to wait for a boy to decide on marriage.

Chapter Text

first impressions hopefully don’t always count

Mornings in Yunmeng in the summer were always something of a balm against the heat of the day: they drifted from a cool steadiness, licked shivering by a wind which skipped through the colonnades and along the corridors, to a gentle warmth which rose up and about like an embrace. It rose with the sun, peach-yellow to red-hot, and the brief respite from the stultifying crush of the heat was sweet.

Yanli had found herself awake at the end of the night, with twilight still swept across the horizon in a purple-blue blush, awake and restless. Something pulled her mind taut to the sounds outside: the relentless push-pull of the river as it headed down towards the sea, the beat-beat-beat of the disciples on their endless circular rounds.

Too awake for sleep and too restless for lazing somnolent in bed, she had risen, wrapping a plain layer of pink about her shoulders and sliding back her bedroom door to step outside, letting the cold wash over her.

At least, while it wasn’t cold, it felt like it.

She wandered through Lotus Pier, her feet leading her without her mind interfering, hugging her silk robe close about her body. Her eyes kept rising to the rooftops – looking for Wei Wuxian’s usual red ribbon or the tip of his flute straying above the wooden beams.

She dreaded seeing him: for all it was warm enough to sleep outside, she didn’t think it was good all the same.

Turning the corner to edge nearest the river – nearest as she could get without going down to the pier itself – she saw a slim figure standing by the railings. She half-expected to see a line of scarlet or the now-familiar flash of gold about Jiang Cheng’s wrist, but instead there was a drape of pale-dusk indigo.

Yu Qiuyun didn’t see her and Yanli thought, for a moment, about spinning around and heading back, but she wanted too much to stand almost where her cousin was and gaze out over the river in its ink-shades of green and black and so she kept going, until she stopped, close enough to talk quietly.

Yu Qiuyun glanced sideways and flicked a small, sleep-like smile at her.

“It is hard to sleep when it’s hot,” she said, her voice something of a murmur.

Yanli smiled back and nodded. Resting one hand on the polished wood, she looked back out over the river and watched it ripple down in little chirruping waves, shattered and scattered about the surface-water in pieces.

“I had thought I’d persuaded popo to allow me to come here,” Yu Qiuyun commented, a wry tilt to her voice. “But since she already knew your news, I suspect I didn’t do any manoeuvring at all.”

“If I hadn’t told her,” Yanli said – and it sounded like a strange sort of apology and that seemed strange enough in and of itself. “She’d have been furious to find out any other way.”

The smile Yu Qiuyun shot her then bloomed with amusement and a wide-eyed falsity of terror: “Popo would have killed you.”

Yanli felt her mouth pull into an answering knowing smile.

They stood there, together draped in the lightening peach-and-blue swash glazing over everything as it swept up the river behind a burst of light, yellow-white and already promising hot. The silence was calm, though Yanli felt a stir of awkwardness, faint and fleetingly bitter, beginning to grow as the sun rose above the mass of trees on the horizon.

She was used to silences with her cousin – how many hours had they spent thrust together as children, because they were girls and about the same age and both meant to marry out and their family seemed to think that meant they would automatically be the best of friends – but those had been different beasts: weighed down with lead in her stomach and a spurring sickness plastered on the roof of her mouth.

Now, she felt a different person and so she supposed it was only fair that the silences felt different too.

“Nie-zongzhu is a good man,” Yu Qiuyun said, her voice soft. She didn’t say it like it was an opinion, but like a hesitant fact, wriggling out with a tiptoeing comfort Yanli hardly read.

“He is,” Yanli agreed – and she batted away a half-formed thought and fixed instead on the idea that it had to be enough. A good man was better than bad, after all, and a good man was more likely to make a good husband.

“He will be a better husband for you than Jin-gongzi,” Yu Qiuyun said again, and again it was that same halting, proffered fact – but the consolation of it was stronger, firmer.

Yanli swallowed it like swallowing a rock: heavy and scratching stuck in her throat, tasting of dirt and bile and a cool sharp near to pain.

On the railing, her fingers clenched, bones rubbing hard against the wood through her skin, white-thin and pink-tipped. Her other hand clutched at her robe, blunted nails digging into the fabric. She felt brittle with something she couldn’t quite name: was it anger, hurt, a kind of lingering, twinned sadness-and-regret?

She couldn’t think of what to say, or, actually, of any words at all – instead, she made a sort of hum, twitched out between jumping lips.

“It’ll be your turn next,” she said, eventually, finding a façade of gentle levity, glass-sheer and fragile, to push between them. “You’ll put us all to shame as a bride.”

She meant it kindly, teasingly, sweetly – the way she teased all of them: Mianmian, Qin Su, Rong Yan, her brothers – but Yu Qiuyun’s eyes darted down and she turned away, to the river and out, her hands folded in front of her. She didn’t smile and didn’t speak.

With her hair braided loose round to the back of her head and the rest in a long fall of black, bare of any silver or flowers or gentle purple jade, she was still beautiful and Yanli felt a sudden pang of smallness, meanness in comparison.

“I should get ready before breakfast,” Yu Qiuyun said, and she turned and left, smooth steps taking her away quickly, with a whisper of silk, and Yanli stayed there a moment longer, her hand loose on the wooden rail as she wondered, blind, what it was that she had said wrong?

Tucked away in the heart of the Unclean Realm, Yanli could almost pretend the war hadn’t happened at all. This far inside, the moans and coughs and screams from the healing rooms didn’t reach her, kept at bay by layers of thick walls draped in grey-cast hangings and paintings of stern mountains and forest slopes.

Nie Huaisang had met her in the hallway, bustling along and waving her down with an exuberant flourish and a hasty, dramatic bow, catching her before she could return it and gesturing for her to lead the way.

“Hurry, hurry,” had been the plea. “The tea has already been prepared – I was late! – so if we don’t hurry, it’ll have spoiled and that’ll be such a waste!”

Yanli had allowed herself to be rushed along, swallowing down an amused smile; she was certain that on her way over she had passed disciples heading to sabre practice.

Little brothers, it seemed, were the same in every sect.

Inside, Nie Huaisang poured the tea with surprisingly adept, swooping hands. Long sleeves brushed over the table edges haphazardly, but the pour was elegant with a bobbing sort of flair which Yanli knew was entirely Nie Huaisang’s own.

“I ordered a new blend,” Huaisang said, as they raised their cups. They hadn’t been too late and the steam rose from the rim in small, ribbon-like curls before dissipating. “It’s a green tea from near Yunmeng – it’s called –” their nose wrinkled over the rim of the cup, “I forget what it’s called, but the trader assured me it’s delicious!”

Yanli smiled; Nie Huaisang had a strange, skittish way of being earnest.

The tea was fresh and sweetly mellow; it ran clear like water and the bright, gentle yellow of it painted the jade of the cups a pond-ish yellow-green.

Nie Huaisang had arranged for snacks – a little bowl of dates, fresh sliced plums, and a bamboo basket of bao buns, still gleaming from the oven – and she bit into a slice of plum, the juice sinking into her mouth with a tart sweetness.

“Jiang-xiong is still concerned we’re overworking you,” Nie Huaisang said, dipping a bao bun in a dish of hoisin sauce. The sauce dripped onto the plate in a slow, steady sort of beat as Huaisang looked at her. “What with helping with the wounded and the cooking. He keeps muttering about speaking to da-ge about it, so I’m not sure why he also keeps telling me.”

With a desolate huff, Huaisang promptly re-dipped the bao bun – presumably there was now an inadequate amount of sauce on the bun after the dripping.

“You’re not overworking me,” Yanli assured. “And I’ll speak to a-Cheng, don’t worry.”

She took another mouthful of tea – the fresh, bitter-slight of it undercut the sweet-and-sourness of the plums, and folded her hands in front of her on the table.

“I am very happy to help,” she added, and in this room with its hangings and thick fur rugs on the floor, her voice felt not so much soft as swallowed up by it all: eaten by the stone and kept guarded. “I am not much of a cultivator, so these skills, however meagre, are things I can contribute and I enjoy doing them. It’s a small thing to do – especially in comparison to others’ efforts and sacrifices.”

It was so simple to change dressings and cook soup and organise orders of bandages and medicinal herbs. How could she complain about that?

She had seen the wounds left on people’s bodies – Mianmian boasted a new scar, thick and twisted, on her right shoulder, where a Wen blade had tried to take off her arm; Lan Suyin’s left hand was still bandaged in white, her littlest two fingers missing; Rong Yan’s twin brother was marching up and down the corridors when the healers didn’t force him to rest, practicing walking without a limp after an arrow had punctured his thigh.

She had even seen something of the wounds left which couldn’t be fixed with herbs and bandages and rest: Jiang Cheng’s endless restlessness, the music pouring gently out of Lan Xichen’s rooms in the small hours after sundown, and the haunted, hunted shell that seemed to have consumed Wei Wuxian.

No, she couldn’t imagine sitting back and just watching it all unfold.

Nie Huaisang was watching her then, solemn for once, and when they nodded, she felt that perhaps they, more than anyone else, understood: trying to help is hard, when there is so little you can do.

“Well, we are all very grateful for your efforts,” Nie Huaisang told her, and the sincerity of it made her duck her head a little. She didn’t blush but the compliment sat awkwardly on her shoulders.

Her cup was empty; Nie Huaisang spotted it, started like a startled deer, and poured her another with the same flustered elegance.

“I suppose you must be looking forward to once we have all left,” Yanli commented. “Having your home back to yourselves – being able to rebuild.”

She thought of Lotus Pier: ash-ridden and blood-soaked, filled with ghosts from the gates to the river.

Sometimes, she wasn’t sure how Jiang Cheng could be so desperate to get home, to walk back across the threshold and begin washing it all clean. Sometimes, she thought she’d rather burn it all down, let the wind and the spring rains sweep away the ashes, and start again from nothing.

Sometimes, when it was late and she wasn’t tired, it felt overwhelming.

Nie Huaisang nodded, “It will be easier for us than some – though Jiang-guniang, I will miss your cooking. Some guests have been intolerable – Gao Bo was never happier than when he found out Jin Zixun had left! – but you have been delightful company and you would always be welcome back, in any capacity.”

Yanli smiled. “I will miss things here,” she commented. “Gao Bo especially.”

Nie Huaisang gave a squawk of outrage. “More than me? For shame!”

It was true – for all the Nie disciples had been open-hearted and generous, letting her wander around their home and inveigle herself alongside Nie Huaisang with some of the more minor domestic affairs, Gao Bo’s kindness in allowing her to clatter about his kitchens had been the thing she was most grateful for.

What would she have done if she hadn’t had cooking to fall back on for some sort of comfort?

“Ah, I will just have to go back to being lonely,” Nie Huaisang sighed, waving hands about in mock desolation. “No one to have tea with, no one to talk about art and culture and, well, anything other than sabres with.”

Yunmeng Jiang would need to rebuild. Broken but not shattered; humbled but not yet diminished. They would need allies. Jiang Cheng would need support.

Wei Wuxian would need – well. She wasn’t sure, but she worried.

Rumour was it his Yin Tiger Tally was made of Yin Iron: the last, missing piece. Rumour was it Jin Guangshan believed it would be safer out of his hands and in Koi Tower. Rumours, every woman knew, were dangerous things.

She thought: you would be welcome back, in any capacity. She took a breath.

“I am sure that we will always be friends,” she said carefully. She chose her words delicately, speaking slowly to stretch out the time. In her chest, her heart beat loud. “That I will return here and cook for you again, and that Yunmeng Jiang and Qinghe Nie will remain firm allies.”

Nie Huaisang looked at her. It was as solemn as before, but this time there was a flash of something shrewd – something almost calculating.

“Qinghe Nie has no daughters.”

Yanli sipped her tea; her hands were steady and she sat straight. “I know.”

She had been engaged to Jin Zixuan since his hundred-day ceremony; twenty-two years of preparation to be someone’s wife in an unfamiliar palace. What did it matter if the bridegroom changed? At least, this time, it was her own card to play.

The sunlight sank into a yellow-silver rectangle in the courtyard pool, splitting the water into dark and bright where the roofs hung over. It was a small thing, a thin strip of metallic gleam as it bounced, hitting Yanli’s eyes with a gleam. In the heat, the silver of it looked as though it should be cold but it burned heavy with a thick humidity.

Sitting on a low-slung couch, wrapped in gold-spotted purple, Yanli laughed as she watched Qin Su attempting something intended to be like packing.

“Where is it, where is it?” Qin Su fretted, tossing peach-spun silk after olive-green onto the floor. They landed one after another in a kaleidoscope puddle, made blotchy by the clatter of a small book, then a green-jade comb which bumped on its teeth, then a flurry of silk belts.

“If you told us what you’re looking for –” Rong Yan ventured from near the table, guarding the little packet of bangles and jewelled hairpins from similar treatment.

“Ah no, no, it’s fine, I’m sure I packed it so it must be here somewhere,” Qin Su stepped back, her face falling into half a pout and half a frown, and observed the disarray.

Rong Yan nodded, though Qin Su couldn’t really see her – and she must have known it, because she followed it by immediately glancing over to Yanli and rolling her eyes. Yanli smiled back, tempted to dodge as the next cascade of silks sailed through the air in a blur of white-and-embroidered-green.

In the doorway, a crowned-gold shadow crossed in front of the sun and a white underrobe, made of thin silk and decidedly scanty, splashed over his face like a jumping, jacking ghost.

“Aie,” Jiang Cheng burst out. His arms flapped at the offending garment as it fell to the ground. Briefly, he looked at it, then jerked back as though scalded, his cheeks flushed a sharp, bright red. “What’s – what’s going on?”

“Qin Su’s lost something,” Rong Yan said, and she did well to keep the amusement smeared over her face out of her voice.

Jiang Cheng’s eyes took it all in: the mess of silks, the book with its splayed pages, Qin Su breathless and pink and her underrobe pooled at his feet – and he nodded, once, all angles with awkwardness.

“Ah, Sandu Shengshou,” Qin Su blushed blotchy pink, one hand pressed to her mouth. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there. Let me just –” she cut off abruptly, darting forward to go and pluck the underrobe from the wooden boards.

Jiang Cheng bent as if to go and pick it up, but stopped – and flushed that bit deeper, darker. He lingered another minute, hand curling into a fist by his side, and then marched off, Zidian glittering around his wrist in a sort of smile and his sword clacking in its sheath.

Qin Su fluttered out of the room, snatched up the robe and back inside. The doors careened shut behind her with a rattling crash as she pressed her hands together in front of her chest, eyes squeezed shut and cheeks flaming red above a fall of white semi-translucent silk.

For a moment, the room was silent – and then it clattered into laughter.

Nightless City was quiet; sounds stretched thin about the complex as they tried to reach across the wide, flat squares, plucked at incessantly by the screeches of the hawks bred in one of the palace towers as they raced above in arcing lazy loops higher and ever higher.

The quiet was strange and tense: in her yellow silk, Mianmian felt conspicuous – like a sunflower in a cabbage patch.

Crossing the courtyard, her own steps seemed to reverberate off the stone floor. A quartet of red-dressed servants, their clothes patched and their backs bent under baskets full of rice, bobbed past her on their way to the kitchen; nearby, Lan cultivators trailed in a little stream of blue as they made their way towards the long climb down from the fortress.

The door she went in through was guarded by two other Jin cultivators in the same sunflower-yellow silk.

Inside, the humidity sank into a cool, clear sort of damp held at bay by the constant stone all about her. There weren’t any tapestries or hangings or paintings; perhaps there had been once, but if so, they were all gone. There was only stone.

Black-edged inside, like the banners that hung outside, old and faded and dug up out of storage somewhere, the stone was cold and dull and the light beamed in through the windows and lifted the dark of it oddly soothing.

The room they met in was tall, the ceiling vanishing up, up, up, with a square table in the centre of it. It was deceptive, the scale of Nightless City: the table looked small in the room, but it could comfortably seat four people to a side with space for each to set out their papers and their inks as they preferred and still not risk bumping elbows with a neighbour.

She was the last to arrive; she bowed to the others as she entered and quickly took her seat.

Nie Zonghui sat on one side, his sabre laid reverentially next to him; Lan Suyin, her hair in a straight waterfall down her back, had her hands covered by the long sleeves she still wore, despite the damp heat of Qishan.

Nie, Lan, and Jin: they were all there.

The Jiang sect should have had someone there, as the last of the Great Sects, but there had been no one they could send and no other resources they could spare.

Jiang-zongzhu had reportedly been very blunt about that.

“How was the nighthunt?” Mianmian asked, her sword clattering a little against the stone as she set it down beside her. “There were rumours Taibai waited weeks before calling for help – I was worried they had left it too late.”

Nie Zonghui considered it for a moment, “It was a success – the monster wasn’t very strong so it was easily dealt with. No casualties to the civilians and no injuries to any of ours either.”

It was much the same as he’d reported earlier that morning to Wen Qing – when they sat in a grander, bigger room with a cavernous, raw-stone ceiling, lit by candles thicker than her arm as the gentle sunlight seeped through almost too high for it to reach them – and Mianmian felt a little deceived.

For a moment she’d hoped he might have had something else to add, but it seemed she’d been wrong.

“Do you think we could improve that somehow?” she said, feeling more like she was wondering out loud than asking a question. Both Nie Zonghui and Lan Suyin looked over at her. “I mean, if it’s true Taibai waited before asking for help, then it’s only luck which meant the ghost wasn’t strong enough to kill someone. And if that’s happening in Taibai it’s probably happening in other places – and they can’t all be lucky.”

Nie Zonghui watched her, cool and solemn, “What should we do about that?”

Mianmian deflated a little. She hadn’t really wanted that question in reply, but then she wasn’t really sure what she’d been hoping for. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

“We can’t make people report to us if they don’t want to,” Nie Zonghui shrugged. The light streaming in through one of the arched windows glinted off the braids in his hair, caught here and there by small copper-cast rings. “The war is still recent – trust takes time to grow.”

Lan Suyin nodded, resting her right hand briefly on the table in front of her before pulling it back to her lap where it rested, half-draped by her sleeve, over her other, hidden hand.

“We don’t know,” she said. “If the people are frightened of the Wens or frightened of us, and they wouldn’t tell us if we did ask. We can only keep doing our best and hope that our actions prove our sincerity.”

The small, pointed sort of smile she gave Mianmian was a sympathetic thing, but Mianmian found it almost more frustrating than nothing.

Hope was fine, but it grew tiring after a while.

Mianmian thought about Wen Qing – her stiff, statue-like posture in every meeting; the weariness and the humiliation she had to be concealing so carefully; the way she simply carried on regardless, as though nothing was wrong or odd about this: that her senior advisors were all from other sects, all outsiders who had cut down her own people.

She remembered seeing Wen Qing at the Spring Conference: a single spot of ice in all the tension, clear and immovable and steady. She had gone alone – no servants, no retinue – in faded red silk and her single spot of gold in her hair; she had remained alone, a rock in a sea of people, absorbing every insult or slight in silence.

She had been immaculate.

Mianmian had been breathless.

The corridors of Lotus Pier were shaded, covered over from the threat not of rain but the sun: rolls of wood lined up like soldiers in neat, steady lines, two by two by two as they marched down the rows. Like in Cloud Recesses, in next-door Jiangsu state, the tips of the roofs rose in a smile, but these were softer, gentler – birds’ wings rather than the sharp slopes of the mountainside – and some of them didn’t smile at all.

With no breeze outside, they had found a space to sit in the shade, tucked away at the very end of a corridor that stood propped on stilts in the lapping river, secluded enough that they could sit, skirts hoisting up about their legs, on the railings with their feet dangling over the river and low enough that if any of them fell in it would mostly just be a pleasant break.

Nearby, on a little round table, Yanli had directed two servant girls to prop a bowl of sweet mandarin oranges, imported from further south, and a smaller dish to collect the peel.

Mianmian had been the first to clamber over the railings, hopping up and lifting one leg over, then another, her skirts lingering behind in a spray of yellow, rumpled and creased.

“Throw me an orange!” she had asked, holding her hands out to catch, and Yu Qiuyun had taken one from the bowl, tossed it experimentally in a hand as though to throw, all narrowed eyes and Yu intent, and then smiled a little and instead stepped forward and handed it over.

She took a second for herself then, and followed Mianmian to the railings, pausing one moment before vaulting the balustrade and landing in a whirl of indigo-blue on the other side, one hand lightly on the polished wood. With a half-turn, she leaned against the fence, balancing on a cun of width over the water.

“Someone’s going to have to help me,” Qin Su had declared. “Not all of us are half mountain goat.”

“Su-er,” Yu Qiuyun had said, her nails piercing through the orange’s peel to reach the flesh beneath. “I must beg you not to say that about my father – it’s too hot to duel.”

Now, they were all squished up on the wooden bannister, thigh to thigh to thigh to thigh to thigh, bits of orange peel flaking into the river below in little shards of carrot and cotton as they ate, the mandarin juice clear and cool in their mouths.

“I suppose,” Rong Yan said, swallowing a burst of sweetness as she passed another orange along the line, segments neatly arrayed inside to pluck out, one by one. “If we’re going to see about our own spouses, we should really start at the next conference.”

“Isn’t that a bit soon?” Yu Qiuyun asked – and Yanli found herself frowning as well. Wasn’t it? The next conference was only ten days away.

Then again, hadn’t it taken her less time than that to decide on Nie Mingjue?

“Can you all guarantee you’ll be there?” Mianmian asked, taking the orange-peel cup from Qin Su and passing it across to Yanli.

A quiet fell then – it fell in the same way that light dims: softly and easily – and it reverberated with a cacophony of similar, near-cast thoughts.  

Yanli would go, as the future Nie-furen; Qin Su would likely go, accompanying her father in her mother’s place. But Yu-zongzhu might think the journey was too long for Yu Qiuyun to make; or Rong-zongzhu might decide to take only his son; and whether or not Mianmian would go would depend on rosters of guards on shift and how many cultivators were needed for night-hunts.

It lingered, the quiet, above the surface of the water as it lapped about their dangling legs and the swaying swish of their rainbow of silks and wrapped about their heads, stilling thoughts and tongues and hands.

The orange-peel bowl rested in Yanli’s lap; her fingertips smelt of it, citrus and sweet.

“After this,” Qin Su said, and her face brightened with excitement. “You should show us your engagement gifts. Nie Huaisang supposedly has good taste but I think we should be judges of that.”

There was a decisive sniff to the way she said it and Yanli couldn’t help but laugh.

The silver lining, she supposed, to her becoming engaged now, as an adult, was that she could share this with her friends: drape fur pelts and bolts of silk over her arm to show off their sheen, pass around boxes of ground spices and pressed tea leaves in a riot of colour, and let them coo over a parade of silver bangles in the solid, square-ish style of the north, engraved with stylised flowers and budding vines.

For her first engagement, she had been too young to even remember anything of it.

Apparently, Jin Zixuan had cried through most of it, red-faced and wailing and swaddled tight in gold-cloth. No one had ever remarked on what she had done.

The afternoon was drawing on – the sun beaming through the tall, leaf-laden trees on the riverbanks – as Yanli finally sat alone again in her room, among the kaleidoscope of coloured silks and spotted rings of etched silver strewn about her bed where the girls had left them.

Moving about the room, she took them one by one, fanning out the length of each bolt, smoothing it down with one hand to remove any wrinkles, and then rolled them up, careful and almost reverent. She took her time with it, allowing herself to linger over them, feeling the slick of the silk between her fingers and allowing the sense of it – her engagement, the impending marriage that loomed behind them and the man that came with it – to start to sink in.

She stacked them neatly in the wooden trunk which Nie Mingjue had also gifted her, closing the heavy lid with gentle hands.

On her dressing table, she noticed that Yu Qiuyun had replaced the silver bangles in their box, sliding them in neatly and wrapping the thin, purple silk stuffed inside between them to protect them from grating against each other.

“A-jie?” there was a knock outside and a shuffling sort of hesitation which, almost more than the voice, announced that it was Jiang Cheng.

“Come in!” she called, turning to smile at him as he stepped inside.

He was frowning – nothing new, though she ached a little to see how much more deeply it was carved since the war: the extra heaviness of it weighed on her too – and the dark leather of his bracers gleamed in the sunlight. On his head, their father’s headpiece was a glittering gold and all strangeness in his hair.

“What are you doing?” he asked, taking in the remaining mess in her room – the pile of furs on her bed and puddle of engraved hairpins on her dressing table. “It looks like you’ve been robbed.”

“No, no,” Yanli shook her head with another smile, placing the hairpins back into their box, head-to-tail and wrapped in silk. “I showed the engagement gifts to my friends.”

“Oh, right,” Jiang Cheng said. He was still standing just inside the doorway, stiff and awkward, with the honey-wood walls of Lotus Pier shining behind him and stretching his shadow out long and thin across the floor.

“The Summer Conference is coming up,” Jiang Cheng cleared his throat. “Since it would be a long flight and it’s important we’re not late, I’ve arranged for horses and carriages. We’ll leave in four days’ time, at wu-shi.”

Yanli nodded, “Yes, of course.”

Jiang Cheng mimicked her, glancing down and about again and Yanli could see it in him, something on his mind wriggling under his skin.

“A-Cheng,” she asked, gentle. “What’s bothering you?”

Jiang Cheng jerked, hand flexing and clenching, and bit once at his lip, before bursting out, “The announcement’s going to be made at the Summer Conference.”

Yanli nodded again; that had been one of the things agreed when the formalities were concluded.

“Once that’s done,” Jiang Cheng’s frown grew deeper and more troubled and Yanli wanted to go over and run a hand to smooth out the creases like she had done with the silks, but she knew he wouldn’t really appreciate it. “There won’t be any going back. It’ll be done. A-jie,” his throat worked and he looked then so much not Jiang-zongzhu and so much her little brother that it almost hurt.

Sometimes she forgot how young he was.

“A-jie, you understand why I did it, don’t you?”

Crossing the room in a handful of light steps, Yanli took his hands and looked up at him.

“A-Cheng,” she said quietly, putting as much firmness into her voice as possible. “I understand. You don’t need to worry about me.”

He gazed at her for a moment longer before he sighed – though it didn’t wash away the frown entirely – and then he nodded, stepped back, turned on his heel and left.

She closed the door behind him with a silent slide and regarded the pile of furs with something of a sense of exasperation.

How was it that she could essentially arrange her own marriage and yet her brother still thought it had been all his idea?

All around, the mountains roared up into the sky, their sides dusted with tree-studded snow, greyscale and ragged. The sect seat of Meishan Yu sat embedded in among them, a pearl clutched in teeth, surrounded by cliff edges and narrow, winding paths cut from stone.

It was a scattered sort of place, with pavilions here and there, connected by flights of low-chipped walkways cut into the rock and wooden rope-built bridges strung over deep, chasm-like drops. Everywhere, there was some kind of sound: rushing from the waterfalls and springs which trickled past in babbling brooks, whistling as wind hurtled about through the stiff, needle-tipped trees; occasionally, there would be a rumbling, thunderous crash as the mountain wriggled itself back to sleep and the snow and the stone slipped down.

Yu Qiuyun climbed the last few steps to the pavilion, the thicker silk of her hanfu sweeping behind her.

Yu-zongzhu, her hair iron-grey and neat, was already waiting for her, the teapot resting over the burner as it brewed.

“Popo,” Qiuyun bowed. “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting.”

Yu Shimin waved the question away, directing her to sit. “When you get to my age, you will realise waiting is the only true peace you get in a day.”

The pavilion sat on a jut of smooth-shorn rock above a pool of clear water, fed by a spring that fell over an outcrop nearby and raced its way down to through the mountainside, eating its way deeper and deeper down as it searched out a path to the valley floor. It was cool, gently mist-like with the promise of rain, and the chatter of the stream as it burbled was enough to cover conversations from listening ears.

Yu Qiuyun poured the tea; the steam rose quick and vanishing fast.

“Remind me again,” Yu Shimin said, sipping at her tea slowly. “What your objection to He-gongzi was.”

Yu Qiuyun faltered for a moment, and set her cup down gently, folding her hands in her lap.

Her grandmother was watching her, close and hawklike and interminably patient.

“I did not believe I would be a good wife,” Yu Qiuyun said after a pause. It was a familiar recital: they had been here before, when she had said them first about He-gongzi, and about Yao-gongzi before him.

This same place, this same tea with its swirl of vanilla, these same words.

Yu-zongzhu nodded once, twice, taking another sip of tea and choosing a candied jujube from the bowl with a careless air.

“I assume,” she said, and Yu Qiuyun waited, sitting exactly, perfectly still. The tea in her cup had stopped steaming, the heat leeched away by the brisk air. “That remains your position?”

Yu Qiuyun glanced up briefly and then looked back down at the table. “It does.”

There was a semblance of dread, leaden and haunting like a ghost on her shoulder, creeping down her back. She supposed, with hindsight, she should have expected this. The war had given her time, but now, the inevitable was catching up to her.

There are some things that you simply can’t outrun: death, taxes, marriage.

“This position of yours,” Yu Shimin looked away, out over the water as though she was admiring the waterfall in its white-edged ribbon. It was a kindness, of sorts, but it only made Yu Qiuyun feel colder, almost bone-chilled. “Would that apply to other young masters as well? Even just among the great sects, Madam Jin has made no secret that she wants Jin Zixuan married sooner rather than later, and while the Lan are never formally looking, they have two heirs who need to marry.”

Yu Qiuyun tucked her hands inside her sleeves. The chill was all-enveloping for all the spring sun was sweetly warm.

She knew what she wished she could say. She also knew what she should say.

“If popo wishes me to marry, then of course I don’t object,” she said, and the graciousness in her voice was a careful, long-perfected thing.

She found, though, that it was much, much easier to keep looking at the table, with its dark, waxed-sleek wood, than to look up, with her grandmother’s eyes studying her so closely.

“Of course,” Yu-zongzhu continued, as though there had never been a pause and Yu Qiuyun had never spoken. “There is always Wen Qing – while recent times have diminished the Wen sect, that would make the marriage easier to arrange.”

The waterfall sounded loud; the constant drum of the falls a steady accompaniment.

Finally, Yu Qiuyun picked her cup back up again and sipped it. The tea was cold, the delicate notes of it, soft and floral, bittered by the lack of heat. It tasted a little like medicine of a kind; the smooth honeyed end notes buried under the initial sharpness.

She drank it anyway.

“I don’t have any personal preference,” she said eventually, and the lead in her body seemed to be spreading: her legs seemed not to move, her arms felt heavy. “And so I don’t have any objection to marrying who popo feels provides a more advantageous match for the sect.”

Night swallowed up the complex, thick with shadows and looming peaks to block back the stars, and under the cover of that dark, she had imagined it: a husband’s touch glancing over her waist and tugging at her hips, a wife reaching up to cup her breasts and thumb over her nipples, the press of a hand between her legs – and a lingering uncertainty she couldn’t settle.

In the end, a spouse was a spouse was a spouse – what difference was there, really?

Overhead, the clouds trotted across the sky, white-cast and thick, obscuring the mountain summits and dull against the faint glimmer of the snow where it clung to branches and mossy rocks.

Yu Qiuyun poured a second cup of tea, serving it in twin streams of watery bronze, her indigo sleeves falling in folds on the table as the tea tumbled into the cups.

This time, she made sure to drink it hot.

“Qiuyun,” her grandmother said and she glanced up. The tea had settled her: soothing and sweet. “When I was a little older than you are now, I received my first lesson as Yu-zongzhu. The details have long ceased to be important, but the lesson has always stayed with me: the daughter who is too dutiful is almost always a liar.”

The lead in her body turned her, in between heartbeats, into a statue.

For the first time that afternoon, Yu Qiuyun met her grandmother’s eyes. They were identical to her own: a solid, blank black and tinted cold.

They were, unhelpfully, unreadable.

“You will have to tell me at some point,” Yu-zongzhu said, and Qiuyun could only hear a matter-of-fact bluntness in her voice. “And there is only so long you can hope to draw it out.”

Chapter Text

a little gossip never hurt no one

Even in the gardens at the Unclean Realm, there were walls. Tall, sombre stacks of grey-cut bricks, they enclosed the garden in a large, water-filled square; always visible, behind red pine trees sculpted into layers of discs and leafy catalpa trees with their flimsy-looking trunks.

They were still there, the walls: through the windows of the pagoda, even, a bulk of light, patchwork grey.

Looking out at them, Yanli wondered if she could ever get used to them. It was simply so different from Lotus Pier, half on land and half floating over the Yangtze below, and everything in it engineered to turn towards the river and the forests free behind it, rolling banks of green that spat out sputtering birds and hummed a constant sort of song.

Nearby, Rong Yan peered down into the pond below their feet; an ornamental thing, it swam with silver-slipping fish, glancing out of view under bushes leaning drunkenly into the water and the spatter of leaf-shadows over the surface.

They swam around the pavilion, propped up on a stone bed, and Yanli didn’t follow Rong Yan when she turned to watch them go, flashing away into the shade of a pine tree.

“Have you noticed,” Qin Su said, pulling her legs up on the chair where she sat, its scroll arms carved like scales to match, so she could lean on the balustrade next to her and look down to search for the fish. “The sects seem to have brought all of their children this time – and everyone’s managed to get here early.”

Rong Yan nodded, pulling a small leather-tied pouch from her sleeve. Dipping two fingers inside, she tugged out a pinch of something flaky, which she then sprinkled down onto the water below.

Silver fluttered, winking upwards, as the fish flurried up, heads not-quite-breaking the crest of the waters as they ate.

“Die said that it would be an important conference,” Rong Yan said, after they had watched the fish in their frenzy. “That while the last one had dealt with the past, this one would deal with the future, and as it was our future, a-Heng and I should both be here to see it.”

“That,” Qin Su said, with something of a snort. “Is the most elegantly constructed excuse I’ve heard.”

Yanli smiled, crossing over and settling on the chair next to Qin Su, copying her in looking out over the water, the glare of the sun behind them.

“At least,” she commented, holding out a cupped hand for some of the fish feed and watching as Rong Yan carefully poured a small trickle into her palm. “It means you all have plenty of options.”

Qin Su’s nose wrinkled as she watched Yanli tip the fish feed onto the water’s surface. White-water churned as the fish flocked, a snow-ish churn covering over scales and tails flashing a riot of orange-yellow like a blaze.

“That,” she said. “Is only helpful if the options are any good.”

Sitting prim and proper, her hands folded in a little pair on her lap, Qin Su looked oddly older than her age, moon-face haughty and lips pinched. There was something manufactured about her arrogance – something like a performance: all art and careful staging. It was a familiar thing, for Yanli and Rong Yan, that kind of screen hanging over Qin Su.

Sometimes, Yanli thought Qin Su had been born into the wrong life: she would have made a wonderful opera performer – all dramatic flair and bright ferocity.

“That,” Qin Su said. “Is only helpful if the options are any good.”

“Well,” Rong Yan said, with a deceptive lightheartedness. It disguised the gleam in her eyes and the amused twist of her mouth which squished her lips in and revealed the dimples in her cheeks. “You’ve already thrown your underwear at poor Jiang-zongzhu – shouldn’t a girl really be engaged to a man before she does that?”

Throwing her a decidedly snotty look, Qin Su reached down, the silks of her hanfu bunching above her elbow. Quick as a fox, she flicked a shower of water over at Rong Yan as she leaned over the balustrade, her bronze-cast sleeves dipping over the edge.

With a shriek, high and sharp and laughing, Rong Yan ducked, nearly stumbling over her own robes as they caught under her heels. The drops spattered against her sleeves in darker, browning splotches.

“Aie!” a wave of water, rising over the stone-cut edge of the pond, soaked into the hem of Yu Qiuyun’s hanfu, dyeing it a slumping shade of navy.

For a moment, they all stared, dismayed, as the water sank into Yu Qiuyun’s silks, setting the silver embroidery to shining and the navy shrunk against her legs, ink-like and curling. Qin Su’s hands had flown to cover her mouth in a pair, wrapped in water-wet gloves, eyes wide.

One hand in front of her stomach, Yanli gripped her own, light-lilac silk between her fingers; she caught a glimpse of Mianmian’s face and the growing bloom of laughter bubbling beneath the surface.

Yu Qiuyun, tossing a drape of sleek hair over her shoulder, the silver flower-headed pins in her head set with indigo beryl-stones winking dark, levelled her gaze, clear and cold-black, on Qin Su.

“That,” she said, soft and half a purr. “That a mistake.”

The thing about the Yu girls – well, Yu cultivators more generally – was that they all possessed something of an unerring sense of aim: legend had it that Yu-zongzhu trained them all to hit bats on the wing shrouded in the depths of the night.

Yanli was never quite sure if that was true or not, but either way, Yu Qiuyun had something of the legendary aim – even with childish flish-flicking of water.

The one thing the stone walls did have for it, Yanli thought, was that it made the garden feel so secluded, separated out from the rest of the compound, and so it didn’t matter how loudly she and Mianmian laughed, or how high Qin Su shrieked as Yu Qiuyun and Rong Yan splashed water towards her again and again from fingertips and scooped-up palms – they were safe and sound and beyond reproach.

They had scared off the fish; the fish-food sat unattended on the width of the wooden balustrade in its little pouch.

Kneeling, Yanli pushed a dash of water over at her cousin; on Qiuyun’s other side, Qin Su hid behind her sleeves, and Rong Yan, half-covered behind a wood-topped column, seized her chance to hit her instead, eliciting a choked scream-ish.

Yu Qiuyun, hair swinging almost into the tip-top of the waves, flicked another wash at Yanli, who turned her face away, ducking – and ducking almost into a swathe of silver-and-black-ran grey.

“Nie-zongzhu,” Rong Yan said, managing to dip a sort of odd bow.

“Lan-zongzhu,” Qin Su gasped, blushing and pulling her sleeve half-covering her face.

They were both tall men, Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen, and where they stood barely kun away, they loomed, metal-topped mountains glinting in the sunlight. Nie Mingjue’s shadow, broader than its flesh counterpart but squashed shorter, draped over Yanli’s head like a translucent shroud; his head seemed almost to blot out the sun itself, dark against the crush of trees behind him.

Lan Xichen’s constant smile this time was knitted with a startled kind of amusement; Nie Mingjue, for his part, was almost inscrutable – she had never before thought of him as being inscrutable as such but there it was. She didn’t know him much at all, she supposed.

They all hovered there, frozen in a strange tableau – a storm that threatened to break as Yanli watched Mianmian pressing her chin into her chest not to laugh and Yu Qiuyun bit her lip.

“Apologies,” Lan Xichen gave them all a blue-brushing bow. “We didn’t realise anyone else was here.”

“Careful you don’t frighten the fish,” Nie Mingjue warned. “They bite.” And then, as he turned on his heel to leave, Lan Xichen at his shoulder, he grinned, dimpled and suddenly, violently boyish.

A glimpse – that was all it was: a flutter of gold-gilded silk around the corner, the dip of his black-pressed hat – and she felt her stomach cave in and her breath whip out of her throat as though she’d been punched; she stuttered to a stop.

She’d known he would be here – how could he not be? When everyone was bringing their children, when he was his father’s right-hand man, when he had more of a right to be here than she did? – but she hadn’t really thought through what that would mean.

The archway above her head was moon-cut, carved with stocky, straight-edged patterns, and she found herself following the stiff swirl of the patterns as she pressed her back against the stone.

It was cool and dry, the wall, and she tried, scrunching her eyes as she focused, to force herself to concentrate on that: on the way the grainy-smooth of the stone felt under her hands, the way it cackled underneath her nails as she scratched them along, the way the cold, slow and steady, started to fade as it warmed against her body.

In the courtyard, Jin Guangyao’s voice slipped through the usual kind of phrases; he was speaking Jilu dialect – the dialect she’d grown up speaking, which they also spoke in Qinghe – and it made her chest ache.

Her fingers, on the wall, clenched and dug into the stone.

The last time she’d heard him speak Jilu dialect, he’d told her that he loved her.

There were footsteps, then: disciples, on their rounds of the fortress, marching in quick, tight formation, two-by-three, and she pushed herself away from the wall, smothering her face in the closest to a neutral, placid sort of expression as she could get.

Keeping her head a tilted down, she walked past them with little, quick steps – but then there were more people ahead, servants with baskets and she could see a cacophony of coloured silks, grey and bronze and purple, as other disciples mingled, off duty and in gossip.

Turning down a corner, she found herself walking towards Yao-zongzhu, who would inevitably want to ask after her father and mention his very-eligible son, and before he could spot her she ducked under another archway and stepped onto the first of a stair-set but missed the second and tumbled, too upset to even think to scream, already preparing to cry and cry and cry – and landed, not at all gently, in a swathe of thick blue silk.

“Qin-guniang,” Lan Xichen, with a concerned frown, helped her to her feet and stepped back half a pace. “Are you alright?”

Shock had stolen her composure and, politely gentlemanly, Lan Xichen glanced away to let her dampen down her flush, sliding back to a respectable distance, one arm behind his back and his sword at his side. He was in duck-egg robes over the standard Lan pale blue, Shuoyue in hand, the only flashes of silver in his hair and on his headband and the filigree on Shuoyue’s scabbard.

He really was absurdly handsome, she thought as she picked at her skirts – and the guilt that twinged spun fast into a vicious kind of delight.

It was more absurd, that lingering sensation of guilt of thinking another man handsome. Why couldn’t she? What regard should she have for Jin Guangyao’s imagined feelings?

She smiled, coy and dimpled, folding her hands in front of her to hide the slivers of grime under her nails from where she’d scratched the wall.

“Thanks to Zewu-jun, I am,” she said, peeking a glance at up him through her eyelashes.

He was much taller than a-Yao; perhaps a little too tall, she’d have to stretch to kiss him on the cheek.

Lan Xichen nodded and his eyes flicked to hers once and then away. There was a shadow of a smile there – ever-present and pressed on – and she found herself smiling too; was she really such a fool?

At least, she supposed, of all men, Lan Xichen would be safe to fall for: his reputation was as pristine as freshly fallen snow; virtuous beyond virtue. With him, there would be no love-drunk stolen kisses, no honey-hued words murmured in her ears as his hands fumbled under her robes, no lying naked and slick under cold night air with his mouth against her neck – no mistakes.

It took her the length of a gentle sigh, internal and her own, to realise Lan Xichen was about to leave, blue robes swishing about the grass and Shuoyue’s scabbard flirting silver-light.

“Oh,” she felt herself blushing – and she hated blushing: unlike Qiuyun and a-Yan who blushed prettily, a delicate brush of pink, she blushed fierce. “Oh, I think I’m lost.”

Lan Xichen merely blinked once, smiled again, and said, “I would be happy to show Qin-guniang the way.”

As she followed the sweep of his robes across the little dipped-down courtyard full of heavy potted banks of Chinese violet cress with its shredded-looking leaves and raggedy flowers, Qin Su found that though her breath had been returned to her and her stomach settled, there was a new smoke-like dizziness overtaking her. Vindictive and sweet, it swayed her head as she walked towards the rooms assigned to her sect without any idea of what she would do or say once she got there, trailing behind Lan Xichen with scraped nails and smudged eyes.

But, she thought, idle and languidly spiteful, Lan Xichen would be perfect. For all a-Yao – and how long would it take to stop thinking of him like that? As dear and beloved and darling? More foolishness – had far more fine qualities than most were prepared to see, Lan Xichen had all of those and all of the rest as well.

And wouldn’t it be romantic, to be so ardently loved then so cruelly jilted by Jin Guangyao and then fall desperately, hopelessly, happily in love with the man he called his best friend?

Qin Su had always liked a happy ending.

In the mirror, Yu Qiuyun was carefully pressing tongue-wetted lips against lipstick paper. Each press left layers of red, dyeing them a neat, even paint darker and darker: gentle rose red-pink through cinnabar to vermillion. The crushed pearl sprinkled over left a milk-smooth shimmer that caught a line of light over the full body of her bottom lip.

Yanli watched her with the familiar sense of small, pinching envy – she had never, would never dare to wear that kind of shade of red. Perhaps on her wedding day, but no other. Red like that was for girls like Yu Qiuyun and Wen Qing, who were already beautiful and didn’t risk being eaten up by it.

“Stay still,” Rong Yan touched her arm gently, and Yanli smiled a bit in apology; she hadn’t realised she had even twitched. Plucking the pearl-and-amethyst pins from the tray on the side, she slotted them into Yanli’s hair neatly, tightly.

“A-mei, are you –” the door slid open and five faces all turned to look as Rong Heng, sword in hand and limp lingering faint in his thigh, stepped inside and stopped, mouth hovering open before he shut it firmly with a snap.

“You didn’t tell me your friends were going to be here,” he said, glancing over the group of them – their thick silk layers flung on the bed in the corner in a cacophony of colour and blinking thread, and the litany of paints and palettes and little crystal bottles of perfume littering the tables like flies at a feast – with the sort of blusteringly awkward air of a big brother suddenly shaken uncertain.

“I didn’t think I needed to,” Rong Yan replied, her fingers firm as she slid another hairpin into place, clinking quietly against its neighbour. “Do you want something?”

Rong Heng was still loitering in the doorway, already dressed in bronze silk edged with a double border of gold and songbirds rising from near his feet. For all they were twins, Yanli had never thought they looked that similar: they had the same kind of cheekbones, yes, but on Rong Heng they sat in a face with a strong jaw and deep brown eyes. Rong Yan’s face was thinner, sharper and her eyes smaller above her cheeks.

“I was going to go to the courtyard – people are beginning to gather there already, ahead of the banquet,” he said. “I thought you might want to come, but,” and he glanced about the room, a half-hearted attempt to take it all in, but it was plastered over with the casual certainty of an older sibling who’s only saying it because he knows he’s right, “Probably not.”

“You’re probably right,” Rong Yan agreed – and there was a tone in her voice, mellow and diplomatic and teasing that made Yanli nearly duck her head to smother a laugh. She didn’t – if only because Rong Yan was tucking another hairpin in, the pointed end of it scraping briefly against her scalp.

Rong Heng nodded, a little jerkily, and glanced away from Qin Su, who was leaning on an elbow looking artfully bored, and flashed him a sweet, fluttering smile.

“Right,” he said, trying not to look at how Yu Qiuyun was finishing up her lipstick, now a deep carmine and licked shimmering as though she’d just been kissed. “I’ll see you there.”

“Ah, Rong-gongzi,” Mianmian scrambled up from where she’d been sat in a low chair. She was the only one of them who was already finished, her Jin-yellow hanfu the same as standard and her hair pristine. She had borrowed one of Yu Qiuyun’s perfumes to dab on her wrists and the crest of her collarbones and along the line of her neck but that was all.

The Jin sect had requirements for its cultivators and those included a strict detail on make-up.

“I’ll come with you – I need to find Jin-gongzi and, to be honest with you,” Mianmian stepped over a box of hairpins on the floor, its brass clasps pointing threateningly upwards. Her smile was cheeky and confiding, as she half-hopped to the doorway to join him. “They’re not much fun at the moment and they’ll be a while yet.”

“Oh,” Rong Heng shot a grin at his sister. “Sure – actually, I don’t think I’ve seen Jin-gongzi since –” and his voice trailed off as Mianmian, prudent and tidy, shut the door behind them.

“I need the mirror now otherwise we’ll be late,” Qin Su said to Qiuyun, watching as she tilted this way and that at its slanted reflection. “Besides which, I think you have enough lipstick.”

“Mm,” Rong Yan murmured into Yanli’s ear, as Qiuyun, gracious and quiet, moved in a swish of silk to drag her hanfu out from the bundle on the bed. “If she puts any more on, my brother’s going to try to lick it off.”

Was it rude, then, for Yanli to laugh? She rocked forwards, her head jerking out of Rong Yan’s reach, as she pressed a half-caught giggle into a scrunched hand.

Rong Heng, Yanli thought, would have a better chance at melting diamond.

The sound was heavy and solemn; it echoed out in rings which sank into the earth and brushed the treetops so they shivered. It rang once, twice, then thrice – repeated, steady beats laid over the clip-clatter of the horses’ hooves on the dirt road as it morphed into the rock of the Unclean Realm, even this handful of li out.

She could see the gong itself, sun-faced and gleaming bronze in the warm sunlight, on top of the walls, cut into a risen half-moon and shimmering as it shuddered under the blows as they came in, the mallet swinging in off-centre and striking, metronomic, in the same place each time.

The eighth-and-final chime rang discordant with her stepping out from the carriage. Ahead of her Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian were already dismounted from their horses, a Jiang disciple – one new, one a lucky survivor – at each bridle.

Under the press of sunlight, the Unclean Realm seemed to glisten, its walls turning almost to water: they vibrated under their glimmer, a maiden preening, and she felt a little lightheaded.

Behind the open fortress doors, Nie Mingjue was waiting for her – for them – flanked by Nie Huaisang and an older woman, leaning on a cane. The silver rings in his hair winked and blinked at her, leaving her blinded.

She felt tremulous, like a rabbit approaching a wolf’s den, with an anxiousness that grasped her body in a vice-like claw and squeezed, squeezing until she seemed to be walking through a haze, her feet carrying her forward and leaving her mind behind.

She should be smiling, she knew, gracious and sweet and docile, but it seemed an impossibility.

As she walked, she could smell the horses behind her and the thick swell of dust kicked up by their hooves; she hadn’t thought to wear perfume on the trip – to be locked inside the carriage with it for hours at a time – but now, fruitlessly, she wished she had.

Jiang Cheng stopped and, in shuddering concert, so did the rest of their little delegation.

“Welcome to the Unclean Realm,” Nie Mingjue said, once the bows had been completed.

Yanli found herself watching him as he spoke to her brother: studying the way his robes hung loosely about his shoulders, a two-toned dove-grey edged with black, with Baxia’s hilt flashing over his shoulder, smooth leather wrapped about fine steel. He stood still but still with a roil of energy underneath – a tenseness that leaked out – and as Huaisang and Jiang Cheng exchanged greetings, his face twitched and his body finally moved, this way and a little that, and the sideways look he shot at his little brother was a glare but, she thought, of a fond exasperation.

She smiled a bit and then – only then – he met her eyes, just for a heartbeat, and then he turned back to her brother.

It was only a moment, nothing more, but it was – wasn’t it? – the first time she had seen him since their engagement had been agreed and she couldn’t help but feel oddly, belatedly hollow.

Nie Mingjue had always been a man of action, she knew, loud-voiced and quick-tempered and brash-headed; now, though, he was rock-like: stone-faced and inscrutable and unyielding.

Had it been too much to hope that he would at least smile back?

She lingered in the hall; there was a twisting, tumbling nervousness in her stomach – it sent a slick sickly surge up her throat to trip at the back of her mouth, bitter and bilious.

Ahead of her, as the crowd began to dribble out of the hall, passing through the tall, stone-cast doorway, the sliding doors thrown open to admit the sun to leech inside, cutting a fine-drawn rectangle on the smooth floor, Nie Mingjue was hanging towards the back, eyes seeming to scan the mass in front of him even as he spoke with Lan Xichen.

This, she knew, was her opportunity: she should go over, graceful and armed with the gentle smile her friends assured her was lovely, and fall in with them by carefully-contrived accident – and yet. For all she thought about it, she didn’t move.

Clutching and smoothing out a small grasp of silk between her hands, her fingertips running over the raised stitches of the embroidered lilies, picked out in gold with pale lavender leaves, she saw rather than heard him laugh – he laughed small, a little bob of his head and heave of his chest, like a bear snuffling – and she remembered how he had looked when he smiled earlier that day.

How was it so easy to forget that he was only a year or so older than her? Why was it that she thought of him so clearly as a man and felt still herself a girl?

How was it that when he smiled he seemed to bloom, a gemstone cracked open to shine, even if only just for a moment?

She had never thought of him as handsome, but for that moment, he had been – well. Something like it.

Steeling herself, trying to pull together a version of the composure Yu Qiuyun seemed to always have – she didn’t think she could manage Qin Su’s coquettishness or Mianmian’s bright confidence – she started to make her way forward, taking small, quick steps as though it would stretch out the distance to make it last all the longer, drag out her journey so that she would never quite make it, tailing the two of them, Chifeng-zun and Zewu-jun out into the sunshine like a lost puppy –

And Jin Guangshan, his gold-yellow robes nearing criminal, pink-faced and attended by a flurry of yellow-robed disciples, swept in front of Nie Mingjue with a decidedly saccharine smile.

“Chifeng-zun,” he said, and the title sounded less like an honour and more like an affectation. “I wanted to congratulate you on your engagement.”

Nie Mingjue gave a jerk of a nod, “Thank you.”

His shoulders were taut, set like stone, and the frown which dropped over his face, smothering any hint of the laughter there before, was distinctly uncomfortable. Beside him, Lan Xichen smiled and made a small, gentle bow; he made to say something, but Jin Guangshan pretended almost like Lan Xichen wasn’t there.

“It was something of a surprise, I must admit,” Jin Guangshan went on, the trio of solid gold rings on his left hand giving a lazy, blinding wink as he gestured for a serving girl – young, her apple cheeks a little flushed in the heat of the day – to bring him two cups of wine and a bottle. “And to happen so soon after her previous engagement, but I suppose these things happen in war.”

Jin Guangshan’s smile, then, was pointed and sly; there was an implication there and Yanli, still and silent and standing just a few paces away, felt her hands clench again on that same patch of silk, creasing it and crushing it. Her hands would stiffen, her muscles would seize, but at least that would distract from the acid pooling up in her stomach, water creeping up a well shaft.

Holding the two cups in one hand, Jin Guangshan poured them full – the move of his arm as it rose and fell was arrogantly elegant, a careless flair Yanli had thought beautiful as a child.

He thrust the bottle back at the serving girl, who bobbed a curtsey and vanished into the thinning crowd; the courtyard outside was full: somewhere in the background, someone had persuaded the sword-swallowers to perform again and one of them was currently slowly lowering a blade into his mouth, arms stretched wide, palms to the sky.

Offering one to Nie Mingjue, he waited until they had both drunk – Nie Mingjue tossed the cup back with a sour twist of a smile; Jin Guangshan drank his slower, almost cutting it in half – before he leaned in, pretending at friendship, and added, “With the ending of the Sunshot Campaign, it is only natural that so many people are thinking of marriage. I haven’t made a secret of my wishes for Jin Zixuan.”

Jin Guangshan huffed a sort of false laugh: it hung in the air, the performance of it all, for this little audience of three.

This time, before Jin Guangshan looked at Nie Mingjue, his eyes passed over Yanli, skating past Lan Xichen, then landed on Nie Mingjue. Looking up, his eyes, an oddly warm brown, were shrewd and slanted malicious.

“I will tell you, as a friend to another, and in consideration of the fact that the burden of overseeing the Jianghu now falls to us,” Jin Guangshan’s voice was lowered – but only just. Only enough to maintain the façade. “It is no secret in Koi Tower – nor, I am told, in Cloud Recesses, for that matter – that Jiang-guniang had made her preference for my son well known.

“So I am surprised that she has chosen you after all – perhaps you will have to share your secret with the other young men?” the emphasis on ‘you’ sent a wash of sympathy over Yanli: hadn’t that always before been aimed at her, the girl who couldn’t even cultivate, could barely manage her own health and yet, and yet was set to be Jin Zixuan’s wife?

On Nie Mingjue’s back, Baxia hummed something like agreement in her sheath and Yanli, watching it vibrate, imagine putting a hand on the hilt just above the blade itself and waiting until it stilled.

“Chifeng-zun, Zewu-jun,” Jin Guangshan, smiling that shark’s-tooth smile, gave them each a cursory bow. “Jiang-guniang.”

He left, in a flare of yellow that matched the lemon-sharp sick in her belly as Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen both turned, startled, to look at her; there was a prickling near her eyes, too, but that she could control.

“Excuse me,” she said, before Lan Xichen could say anything diplomatic and sympathetic and smoothing; before Nie Mingjue could say anything at all. “I must go and find my friends.”

In Qinghe, twilight fell quickly: the sun bleeding burnt orange stripes across the sky as it dripped down the wide, clean horizon. The clouds strung out had heavy, blotted-blue bellies, almost like the threat of rain. In half a shichen, Yanli knew, it would sink from this into the navy-and-indigo smear of near-night, even in summer.

For now, it was still sweetly painted peach-warm, the drift of heat smudging the light from the red-paper lanterns into a fuzz, and Yanli, tucked away in a quieter corner of the courtyard, found herself admiring it.

It was a strange kind of beauty Qinghe had – wild and rocky and open – but it was beautiful all the same.

They had coalesced back together, the girls, one by one by one, until they were all clustered in a huddle, watching as a group of disciples, grey silk and green and new-bright purple and yellow, drank cup after cup of wine, piling up a pyramid of empty jars as the cheers and the laughs grew louder, failed competitors staggering away to be propped up by new-made friends.

Nearby, a couple of older, wiser heads stood in a little triangle, chatting amiably and occasionally glancing over when the cheers roared raucous; further beyond, others moved about, slower now and softer, as the night wore on.

When she had first found Rong Yan and Qin Su, settled on a wide, stone slab bench, Yanli had sluggishly, eventually recounted the conversation between Jin Guangshan and Nie Mingjue. She hadn’t had to tell it twice or even three times; Qin Su was happy enough to recite the story again, hushed and hasty, to Yu Qiuyun and then Mianmian when they arrived in turn.

Qin Su had been incensed; Rong Yan had frowned and grimaced an apology, and Miamian had reached out to squeeze her hand, a strange sort of guiltiness clouding her face.

Yu Qiuyun had been calm but that calm had slunk sinister when she had said, a murmur under the roar from the drinking competition across the courtyard, “Jin-zongzhu goes too far.”

Now, though, it was getting late and they had sunk quiet, the cool breeze licking away the snatches of conversation they did have – about this robe or who said that – as it whisked away the day. Qin Su’s head was resting on Mianmian’s shoulder as she listened to Yu Qiuyun and Rong Yan discussing a famous poet’s recent work.

Yanli wasn’t really paying attention, letting their voices wash over her in lyrical Wu Suzhou dialect, a sweet almost musical hum in the background. Instead, she was looking out over the courtyard, with its square-topped walls and the sculpted trees in their heavy clay pots – all grey, everything grey and brushes of violet-drenched green as the sun slipped lower.

It seemed so barren, the stone, compared to the rich gleam of the wood which built Lotus Pier: with its honeyed threads and seams of darker brown, the colour of still-whole spice pods.

Through the archway – moon-carved and smooth and white-plastered before the pillars either side – Jin Zixuan strode, for once, oddly, alone, and the guilt that flooded her whole body at having summoned him like this sent the remainder of the wine she’d drunk to her head.

She always forgot quite how handsome he was.

She thought, uncharitable and cruel, that for all Nie Mingjue was close to handsome when he smiled, was it her fault she was just a woman in the end? Swayed by charm and beauty just as much as anyone else?

Then – and she wondered, seized to stone, if she had summoned him, if somehow he had read her thoughts, her private thoughts, on her face – Jin Zixuan walked straight up to their little gang.

They all turned, peeling open like a flower blooming, and Jin Zixuan stopped, abrupt and blinking owlishly in the light as the lantern over their heads beamed down.

“I was looking for Mianmian,” Jin Zixuan said, but the words came out too loud and too quick; the drinking competition didn’t pause, but the others nearby glanced over for just a moment, cataloguing the scene, and a pair of girls, swords in hand and smuggling a bottle of wine between them, craned necks to see who all was there before ducking and disappearing off, through the arch with a crack of chatter.

Mianmian nodded, stepping forwards smartly, a bit stiffly, as though she hadn’t used her legs for too long. With a swish of silk, she turned and gave them all a series of small, dipping bows.

“I’ll see you all tomorrow!” she said, too bright and almost as loud as Jin Zixuan – too much wine, Yanli thought fondly, and this was a fondness which could at least tamper down the guilt.

Awkward and rocking like a ship at anchor, Jin Zixuan lingered a moment, taking them all in, the four of them left now he was taking one away: Qin Su next to Yanli, Yu Qiuyun on her other side, and Yanli herself. He didn’t seem to see Rong Yan; she was most in shadow, her bronze silks blending best into the lengthening shadows.

He hovered, and then, with an abrupt nod – to himself, to them, perhaps he didn’t even know – he turned and left again, stepping quick-march-quick until he and Mianmian were gone under the moon-cut arch.

Yu Qiuyun stirred; something about the way she moved then reminded Yanli of a snake uncurling from hibernation or a long bask in the sun: sinuous and elegant.

“I should go – I would like to take a walk before bed,” she said, and she bowed to them all before following that same path out of the courtyard.

“I suppose we should all be sensible,” Qin Su sighed, stretching her back and fluttering a fan; the movement seemed to jolt her awake again. “Isn’t the nighthunt starting early tomorrow morning?”

She looked at Rong Yan and Yanli trailed after her, but Rong Yan merely nodded, giving a hum of something – agreement? Confirmation? Linking arms between them both, her fan folded, Qin Su marched them slowly, idly towards the exit.

“Qinghe,” she said, with a tone that was half wonder and half wine. “Is so very sleepy in the evenings, don’t you think?”

The lanterns, swaying a little from side to side as the breeze nudged at their also-square bottoms, threw out splashes of light which drowned in the stone, shining only a deep, dull grey: storm-clouds, she thought, and faded yarn.

Night had fully fallen: the sky was a deep, sea-thick navy-black studded with stars above the lanterns and the walls with their draping of tumbling ivy that swung like snakes’ tails in the breeze as it coiled and sprung stronger. Now it was starting to dip cool; the Unclean Realm contained so many shadows and they only multiplied at night until they seemed almost to swallow the whole palace entire, draining the heat from the bricks.

This time, with the corridors emptied of people and the clacking-clanging thumping against the stone gone, felt full of secrets and private, stolen moments.

Yu Qiuyun’s robes, indigo and silver-threaded, were a sly sibilant hiss along the floor as she strolled through, her hands folded inside her sleeves; a buffer of sorts against the nip of the breeze. The length of the day had tugged all of her energy loose, letting it slip away like water through a sluice gate, but her mind still spun, spinning like a dancer through thought after thought and half-cast dream.

Every now and then, round a far corner, came a murmur of voices or the dull stamp-stamp of feet as disciples went past on their rounds; grey robes flickered and the light chattered on the gleam of sword-hilts and filigree in tiny, tiny blinks.

It was almost the perfect balance: she was alone and yet surrounded by reminders of people: the promise of safety in the boots drum-drumming faintly past.

Across a small, neat courtyard, swamped with white-flowered jasmine creeping up and over the walls, she saw Yao Shuchang, his burly form folded stocky as he leaned against a wall, a jar in hand and the pale starlight against his up-turned face. His silks were thick, the embroidery drawing dark on top of dark, and he whistled to himself, muted and sweet.

She slowed then, tentative and uncertain, as she entered the courtyard.

The last time she had seen him, he had been stood beside his aunt, stocky against the tall ceilings of the Yu mountain halls, glancing and re-glancing and looking again, as her grandmother delivered the news: the Yu sect would not be giving Yao-gongzi a bride. She had avoided his eyes, searching and asking, instead keeping her gaze on the floor, brushing along the lines in the wood.

“Yu-wu-guniang,” Yao Shuchang said, and his voice seemed almost loud in the still quiet.

“Yao-gongzi,” she murmured back – and waited, tremulously patient, for him to say something, anything more.

He sighed, a heavy huff, and pushed off the wall, “Can we stop this? I’m not offended – I admit I was a little disappointed, and I don’t think you can blame me for that, but I didn’t ignore your letters or pretend none of it happened.”

Yu Qiuyun regarded him, steady and slow. Her head had still been slinking through thoughts and now it was set on a different track; sometimes, she felt like a swan: an outward façade of calm and careful elegance, and internally, a fierce paddle of pitter-patter wonderings.

“I didn’t want to hear you were angry with me,” she said eventually, and it wasn’t quite an apology. “I did want to reply, I just didn’t know what would be best to say.”

Yao Shuchang laughed; it was a broad, slightly sardonic thing, and cut short by the press of night. “Sometimes there isn’t anything best to say.”

She felt her eyes dip again; inside her sleeves, her fingers curled against her forearms, making the fabric ripple in shades of sea-by-moonlight.

“Come on, I’ll walk you back to your rooms,” Yao Shuchang plucked his sword from where it had been leaning against the wall next to him. It was a long blade, its hilt wrapped in black-dyed leather and rings of polished bronze. “You can tell me how many other people you’ve turned down to make me feel better.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, “You said you felt fine.”

“Humour me,” he shrugged, and for all she rolled her eyes, she fell into step with him easily enough. He always had to slow his pace to match hers – the Yu girls whirled about on their mountainside ledges and rope-strung bridges, but down on land she tended to be much more sedate.

There was no flat, ornamental garden in front of the guest rooms in the Unclean Realm. Instead, there was a winding, maze-like corridor which branched off into little guest rooms, surrounded by shorn rectangles of grass and neat hedges, pots of flowers standing guard at archways and cascades of jasmine perfuming the air heady.

“You know,” Yao Shuchang said, always too serious to be casual. He had never been much his father’s son – in personality, at least. They had the same round, apple-cheeked face. “If you ever decide to accept someone, you have to tell me first.”

Yu Qiuyun considered that, slipping a hand out from her sleeve to gently touch a jasmine bud on the vine, the tip of it just peeking open. It was surrounded by others, blooming clean and bright in the starlight; this one was just later than the others, lingering longer in its youth.

“If I tell you before my grandmother, she’ll kill me,” she commented, idle and starting to slide sleepy. “And if I tell you before my friends, they might kill you.”

He considered it for a moment with a bobbing, robin-like nod.

“I can accept third,” he said. “But no later. As a jilted suiter, I reserve the right to vet my prospective replacements.”

She found herself smiling; she didn’t smile easily, not always – but Yao Shuchang had always had a knack to tug it out of her.

Looking at the late-grown jasmine bud again, her nails, long and pointed and icy silver again, pinching it as though to cut it, she found herself biting her bottom lip between her teeth, the red-red lipstick rubbing off against the white fronts.

“Yao-gongzi,” she said, and for all her voice was measured and perfectly, deceptively calm, her mind was busy, clicking pieces into place like slates on a chess board. “Could I ask you for a favour?”