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Summer

It was summer. Phoenix blossoms blazed like a sunset before the gates of Four Seasons Manor, forming a dense carpet of butterfly-shaped crimson velvet petals beneath which the glaring sun no longer struck the skin quite so mercilessly.

Still, it was hot. And the disciples of Four Seasons Manor saw little sense in attending to their duties under such heat.

One might have thought that upon a mountain whose peak stretched so majestically into the heavens, a cool wind would blow, but the opposite was true: the air seemed to stand utterly still around it, as though it had settled heavily upon its rocky shoulders like a cloak, and not a single breeze stirred the sweat at the nape of Zhou Zishu’s neck as he practiced his forms.

Breathing came hard in the oppressive heat. He felt as though he had to drag the air into his lungs before swallowing it down dry, and yet within him pulsed a vivid vitality born of the heat pent up in and around him, beating inside him like a flickering flame. It set his movements trembling with strength, let energy surge unrestrained through his body, and lent his strikes such force that dust billowed beneath his feet and the red blossoms above his head fluttered their butterfly wings.

Around him drifted the sounds of the other idle disciples—their exuberant laughter spilling from the shade where they cooled themselves, their playful chatter carrying across the entire courtyard. All of them had abandoned their training once the sun reached its zenith and now rested without the slightest pang of guilt.

Zhou Zishu did not possess that luxury. Relentlessly he drove himself onward, allowing only brief pauses to wipe the sweat from his brow when it ran into his eyes. He could not be like the others, could not sprawl lazily beneath the shade of the phoenix trees and eat chilled watermelon. How else was he meant to move forward? He was nearly ten years old; there was so little time left to master the fundamentals before it would be too late to ever truly excel at them. He already felt behind. Surely his shifu had progressed further at his age.

That he had begun too late was beyond his power to change. But with discipline and will, he could make up for what he had missed in his early years.

“Zishu!”

He froze mid-movement. His temples throbbed so loudly he almost thought he had imagined it, but when he turned his head, his shifu stood beneath one of the red-blooming trees. The all-penetrating sunlight burned a pattern of red-gold and white speckles into his pale blue robe, so shimmering and fluid that Zhou Zishu felt dizzy at the sight. Perhaps he had drunk too little.

“Shifu,” he greeted him formally, swallowing down his panting and consciously breathing only through his nose.

Qin Huaizhang stepped out from the shade of the trees, narrowing his eyes as the sun struck his face. “Zishu, I can see that you are practicing diligently. But don’t you think it’s time to take a break? The sun is already high in the sky.”

Zhou Zishu forcibly peeled his furry tongue from his palate. “I don’t see what the sun has to do with my training. It’s only midday.”

“It is very hot,” Qin Huaizhang remarked, raising an eyebrow—and when that fell upon deaf ears, added, “and I have received complaints from a young man who is quite sad that you have no time for him.”

“Jiuxiao,” Zhou Zishu muttered under his breath.

His shifu possessed excellent hearing. “Yes, Liang Jiuxiao. He would very much like to play with you, so he sent me to order you either to stop training or to let him join in.”

“He’s too young to train,” Zhou Zishu replied with a wrinkle of his nose. The sweat evaporating from his skin made his face itch. “And I’m too old to play.”

With a sigh that drifted through the stagnant air like a cool breath of wind, Qin Huaizhang seated himself on the steps before the training grounds and beckoned Zhou Zishu closer. The disciple sat down beside him at a careful distance so as not to soil his pale blue robe. Dust leapt away from his clothing with every movement, and even his hands were slick with sweat.

“You know, Zishu,” Qin Huaizhang said, drawing a handkerchief from his sleeve in a graceful motion and offering it to him, “I am much older than you. And yet I would never refuse if one of my disciples invited me to play. Do you know why?”

Zhou Zishu accepted the handkerchief, wiped his hands and face, and shook his head. He could not imagine what his shifu meant. Was this meant to teach some lesson? Did he weave small tests into his games to examine them?

“Because it’s fun,” Qin Huaizhang replied when it became clear his student could not follow his meaning. “Everyone needs a bit of joy and happiness in life, even the greatest and wisest master.”

It was summer. Red phoenix blossoms at Four Seasons Manor. When one drifted down toward them, Qin Huaizhang lifted his arm and caught it neatly between his index and middle finger.

“I bet you can’t make it fly farther than I can,” he challenged Zhou Zishu—and then, laughing with open delight, tossed it across the training grounds.

Autumn

It was autumn. The osmanthus blossoms bowed their clusters before the gates of Four Seasons Manor, as though offering a final obeisance to their leader, golden-orange like candles in an ancestral hall.

Zhou Zishu was only fifteen years old. His shoulders were still too narrow to bear the heavy robes Qin Huaizhang had worn as clan leader, and so he kept the plain garments of a disciple. Yet the other disciples of the sect on Mount Siji recognized him as their leader even without ceremonial finery, for he wore Qin Huaizhang’s sword at his waist wherever he went.

It was called Baiyi—White Cloth Sword—and Zhou Zishu did not know why. He had not had the time to wonder when Qin Huaizhang entrusted it to him; he had been far too occupied with asking: Why now? Why me? How? And now it belonged to him, and he did not even know it. He made the effort to learn.

It was a strange sword, slender and supple as a willow branch, its tip bending so far that it could curl past the hilt, coiling itself to sleep like a serpent. The grip was gold, set with a blue gemstone; the blade gleamed silver, thin as a needle, yet cut sharper than the edge of paper. None of it resembled white cloth; perhaps it was a foolish name Qin Huaizhang had given it simply because he favored pale robes.

Zhou Zishu had other concerns than the name of his sword. With every step he took through Four Seasons Manor, the other disciples followed close at his heels, their young, damp eyes lifted to him like dewdrops to the moon. They sought direction—someone to tell them what must be done, to remind them of their duties with stern words and assign them tasks so their thoughts would not wander aimlessly—and Zhou Zishu could give them that, for as the eldest disciple he was accustomed to issuing orders. They sought comfort—

Liang Jiuxiao was the only one to whom Zhou Zishu did not deny that. He was so young, just old enough to understand death, but not old enough to master himself in its presence. Zhou Zishu found him a few days later outside the gates, curled among the roots of an osmanthus tree like a sleeping animal, his arms wrapped tightly around himself against the cold and the pain.

He was a cold-hearted man, even at fifteen, but Zhou Zishu had also promised Qin Huaizhang that he would protect Jiuxiao. When he found him among the roots, he laid his autumn cloak over him like a blanket and plucked the osmanthus blossoms from his hair, where they clung like little stars in a dark night sky. He remained silent until Liang Jiuxiao stirred. Large black eyes found him sitting beside him; small hands wrestled with the heavy cloak until he had draped half of it over Zhou Zishu’s left shoulder.

“It’s cold,” he said by way of explanation. “And shifu always said we should share.”

He sniffed more than he breathed, his eyes and sinuses swollen with hot tears that no longer spilled down his face. In front of Zhou Zishu, he no longer dared to cry.

“Hm,” Zhou Zishu answered shortly, adjusting the cloak so it lay properly around both his shoulders and Liang Jiuxiao’s. It was their shifu’s cloak, far too large to be worn by either of them alone. Together, they fit beneath it perfectly.

He wrapped an arm around his shidi, allowing him to rest his head against his chest. It was warmer this way. And it allowed Jiuxiao to shed silent tears where Zhou Zishu could not see them and did not have to scold him for them.

His throat had tightened—the cold—and his words scraped through the air like thin smoke. “Everything will be as it was before. Nothing will change if I become sect leader.”

It was autumn. Orange osmanthus blossoms in Four Seasons Manor. They fell around him and Liang Jiuxiao like sunlit raindrops, washing away his lies with their heavy softness. Autumn was the season of change, even here on ever-blooming Mount Siji.

The osmanthus blossoms returned every year. But Zhou Zishu would see them only a few more times before he left for the capital.

Winter

It was winter. Plum blossoms fell like pink-white snowflakes from the trees of Four Seasons Manor, settling softly upon the ground, their delicate petals left unbroken by the frost.

It had been snowing when Zhou Zishu went searching for Liang Jiuxiao on the battlefield. That much he still remembered. When he had entered Princess Jing’an’s tent, it had still been raining—heavy drops that soaked him through to the skin, that nearly washed the mask from his face, so that pale patches gleamed faintly through it.

It had been raining. But when he stepped back outside, snowflakes drifted toward him, thick and powdery. The cold of encroaching winter had frozen the raindrops, hardened their structure, and yet they landed more softly upon his shoulders than the rain ever had. Hard and crystallized without, gentle and fragile within… Oh, what had he done to his foolish heart, that it should be the same?

Princess Jing’an’s description had flowed through his ears like ice water, her voice cold and unfeeling as cut glass as she explained in clipped words where he should look for his shidi. He had dreamed of a mountain filled with peach blossoms, and you saying that you would take him to roam jianghu together, she had said.

Then, crueler still: he felt that he’d be satisfied even in death. You don’t need to look for him.

He knew what she meant. He could guess what sight awaited him when he searched for Jiuxiao’s body among the other fallen soldiers—broken limbs like shattered butterfly wings, bloodless skin like the empty cocoon of a caterpillar. And yet he made her describe the place precisely, and then he set out with quick steps, never once looking down at his feet, where his boots sank with wet splashes into mud and snow and blood.

He stripped off his mask as he walked. It was so soaked it clung to him like a poor papier-mâché shell, and when it fell from his face, he flung it away, somewhere into the mud. He wanted to meet Liang Jiuxiao with his true face. He had worn too many masks around him for too long.

Finding him among the soldiers was strangely easy. In truth, he looked like any of the others—the same blood-smeared clothing whose original color could no longer be discerned, the same oddly twisted limbs, the same rigid stillness of the face. Zhou Zishu would have recognized him all the same, that foolish boy, because even in death his eyes carried that glimmer of hope and honesty, resilient against the cold ruthlessness of the world. Not even in death did he accept its cruelty. Not even in death.

Peach blossoms…

Zhou Zishu knelt beside him, pulled away another soldier who had collapsed atop him. Liang Jiuxiao’s body was softened wood, cold and clammy and heavy in his arms as he lifted him, the legs so stiff they barely bent. He wiped the blood from his face, using melted snowflakes as water.

Zhou Zishu was not someone who cried out in pain. He did not weep, did not bury his face in Jiuxiao’s hair with sobs, did not clutch him helplessly to feel the last traces of warmth seeping from rigid flesh.

He carried him silently from the battlefield, without shedding a single tear. But his face felt dead, numb, as though he wore a thousand masks layered atop one another, and he did not feel the cold of the falling snow.

Peach blossoms… Liang Jiuxiao, I promised you. I promised you.

It was winter. White plum blossoms in Four Seasons Manor. On the wall inside his Northern house, he painted the the ninety-seventh red. Eighty-one souls he had brought to this and other battlefields, ninety-seven lost. He had not wept for a single one of them.

He drove in the first nail that very same day.

Jiuxiao… I will find that mountain with the peach blossoms, and meet you there in our next lifetime. For now, let me be free at last.

Plum blossoms snowed down into an empty courtyard. No one stood beneath them, and no one bent to pick them up.

Spring 

It was spring. Azaleas laid themselves over Four Seasons Manor like a blush upon a pale cheek, their pink blossoms vying each day to rival the sunrise in brilliance.

A cuckoo had settled in the wooden structure just before the front gate, calling into the house every morning, so that even Zhou Zishu—who wished to sleep long—was woken by its cry. They had not yet set up proper beds in the manor, sleeping instead on mats laid across the floor, but when he opened his eyes and saw the familiar walls around him, he felt more at ease than he ever had in the most luxurious inn in the capital.

In a sense, it was his home.

The dusty wooden floors, the limewashed walls bleached by sun, the black roof tiles with some missing—every imperfection reminded him that the house had once been lived in and used. For every scratch on one of the sandalwood tables, he wondered who had left it, and which of his shidi had gotten into trouble because of it.

More than eighty people had once filled this house with life and voices. It had almost been as though he had a large family, all living together on the same estate, and Zhou Zishu had never been lonely. Now he felt lonely. He had awakened alone on the hard floor.

With a quiet sigh, swallowed by the empty room like cotton, he pushed himself upright and cast the blanket aside. It was an unusually warm spring day on Mount Siji, and the nails no longer tormented him with the same metallic cold they had in winter. The warmth seemed to soften them, as though their hard edges were melting beneath the blushing spring sun.

And yet his chest felt hollow. The emptiness tugged at his insides, as if it meant to bend his ribs inward, and breathing came difficult. He stepped outside to let fresh air soothe his lungs.

In the courtyard, he heard the cuckoo crying at the gate. Its call echoed through the walls like a sorrowful poem, weighing even heavier on Zhou Zishu’s heart than on his lungs. But another sound caught his attention: the shallow glide of metal shears sliding against one another, fleeting as a sharp gust of wind. Zhou Zishu turned and saw Zhang Chengling busy at one of the azalea bushes, trying to cut away a particularly full-bloomed branch.

It felt as though he were cutting into his own flesh.

“Chengling,” Zhou Zishu called sternly, his sleep-roughened voice scraping across the courtyard like frost over stone. “What are you doing?”

His disciple turned to him, eyes shining with hopeful delight. He looked so young, and so much like Jiuxiao, that Zhou Zishu had to blink to drive the image from his mind.

“Shifu,” he said respectfully, but with far too much excitement to notice Zhou Zishu’s disapproving gaze. “Shishu told me to bring him the prettiest branch from the courtyard.”

With those words, he snipped through the final fiber holding the wood together and held up the azalea branch, pink and slender like a lady’s fan. Zhou Zishu wanted to scold him, to punish him, but he was too tired for it, and he knew it was not Chengling’s fault. Only Wen Kexing could be frivolous enough to pluck nature’s most beautiful flowers simply to adorn his rooms.

“We tidied and cleaned the rooms while you were sleeping,” Zhang Chengling explained proudly, grabbing Zhou Zishu’s arm with his free hand to show him the results. “Starting tonight, we’ll all be sleeping in beds again.”

Zhou Zishu allowed himself to be led into the large room that had been meant for him from the very beginning. It had been his room once before, when he had taken over leadership of Four Seasons Manor—but it had been abandoned, dusty, and uninhabitable when they opened it two days ago.

Now, however, the floor gleamed golden with cleanliness; a charming embroidered cloth lay upon the table, its origin unknown to him; the bed was made, and the lamps, their shades cleaned, burned even brighter than before. He looked around in astonishment, his gaze brushing Chengling’s radiant face and then his own in the mirror, which gleamed polished and gold-bright atop the washstand.

“Chengling,” a familiar voice called from a side room. “Are you slow? Where are the flowers?”

Wen Kexing stepped through an open door and paused when he caught sight of Zhou Zishu. A slow smile spread across his face, so infectiously bright that Zhou Zishu found himself smiling in return. Wen Kexing’s gaze slid to Chengling, and he let out an audible breath.

“Finally. Don’t keep me waiting so long.” With nimble fingers, he swept the azaleas from Chengling’s reluctant hands and settled them into a vase standing near the window. Then he turned to Zhou Zishu. “Your room is finished now. I thought that if the mild night breeze carries the azalea scent through here, you might sleep better.”

Too late, Zhou Zishu thought—he had long since lost his sense of smell—but he felt his facial muscles soften as he met Wen Kexing’s earnest, almost hopeful look. He stepped toward the branch in the vase, plucked a single blossom free, and hesitantly lifted it toward his nose. Halfway there, he changed course instead, holding it out to Wen Kexing—pink and waxen-shining like sweet candy.

“Tell me, Lao Wen,” he asked quietly, “does it smell sweet?”

Wen Kexing closed his eyes and breathed in its scent, deliberately shaping his mouth into a rapturous smile. “Sweeter than heaven.”

“Then you should wear it, to match your perfume,” Zhou Zishu said lightly, though his heart beat traitorously, and tucked the blossom behind Wen Kexing’s ear, into his silken hair. When it rested there like a precious ornament, a pink hue crept over Wen Kexing’s cheeks, lovelier still than the flower’s delicate petals, and he smiled almost shyly. Chengling’s eyes gleamed with joy.

Zhou Zishu looked at the two of them and no longer felt alone. Three were enough for a family.

Let me have this. Just one year, and it would be enough.

It was spring. Pink azaleas in Four Seasons Manor. He prayed that he would see them again next year, just as they were now, nestled in Wen Kexing’s beautiful hair.

Let me have this. It would be enough.