She hasn’t seen Meshag—or the wolf—since the evening they arrived. Surely, she thinks, he would say farewell before going back. It isn’t necessarily a well-founded belief. She has no … good assurances.
She tells herself it must not be allowed to matter. The world came to you, and you tried to make of it what you wanted it to be. If you broke upon rocks, as the seas did in room screen paintings she’d seen at court, you broke with your pride.
But no one
She stands up, and bows. “Where will you send me, my lords?”
The small one has a kind face, she decides. It is a kindness hidden by scars, his bald head, the black severity of the Kanlin robes. But it is a gentle face, nonetheless, and so is his voice.
He explains, speaking for the three of them, what is to happen to her. She feels a flicker of fear, listening, like the first tongue of flame as a fire is started, but she pushes it down.
She is, after all, a princess of Kitai, and her father’s daughter, and she sees now, with clarity, that it would have been pursuing a false simplicity to live out her days upon this mountain, pretending otherwise.
SHE GOES LOOKING for Meshag and his wolf when she leaves the pavilion and the elders.
She doesn’t expect to find them unless he wishes it, but she is still certain he will not have gone away, not without speaking with her.
As she winds her way down green terraces late in the day, away from others, among pine trees, the scent of them, she is remembering the cave where she placed her handprints on the body of the king-horse on the wall—before the entrance to the last cave, where she’d been afraid to go.
He’d gone in there, Meshag.
She watches the sun go down.
Late at night, she lies in the narrow bed they have given her, in a simple room with a fireplace, one small table for a washbasin, a chest for belongings, and nothing else, and he comes to her.
A tapping at the door, once and then again. Soft, you could think you had imagined it.
“Wait,” she says. She has not been asleep.
She rises and dons her grey robe and goes to the door and opens it. Moonlight in a cold, clear night. She is barefoot. Goes out nonetheless to where he stands a little distance from her threshold.
She sees, without surprise, the grey wolf not far away, the yellow-gold of its eyes. It is achingly quiet upon the Mountain’s summit. No one stirs. No bells in the dark hours. The moon dims all but the brighter stars. A wind blows.
“Thank you,” she says.
He is lit by moonlight but she cannot see his eyes, which is always the case at night. He is wearing the leggings and boots he wore on their journey.
The wolf sits. It is alert but calm, she thinks. She doesn’t understand wolves, however. She might easily be wrong.
He says, “You were looking for me, before?”
His Kitan has improved, she thinks. Several days of talking with the Kanlins. The open space and the buildings here are silver in the moonlight, otherworldly.
“I was afraid you had gone.”
“Afraid? But you are safe now.”
She had thought he might say that. It pleases her to be right, if only in small things. It is a way of not being lost.
“There is a rebellion. I wonder if anyone is safe.”
“They will not send you back. They have told me this.”
“They won’t. Someone else might. I don’t know.”
She hears the wind. The wolf rises, moves a little, settles.
Meshag, standing very still, says, “I do not think so. Too much will change now, Kitan and Bogu, and others. But if … if they do this, I will know it. And I will come for you again.”
And with that, she begins to cry.
She sees the wolf stand up again as she does so, though she is silent, only the tears sliding down her face. Meshag does not move. And because she hates to cry—she tells herself later—because of that, she steps forward and reaches up and takes his head in both her hands and kisses him. First time she has ever done such a thing, outside of dream.
It feels like a dream here, on the Mountain, in silver light. She holds her eyes open, as long as she can, and so she sees when his dark eyes shut, and only then does she close hers, knowing he is not, after all, entirely gone from the world and needs of men.
His mouth is unexpectedly soft, but his arms do not come around her, and when she steps back, light- headed, a little unsteady on her feet, her heart pounding much too fast, he says, gravely, “I did not take you from my brother to claim you for myself.”
“I know!” she says, too loudly. “Of course I know that.”
The small movement of his mouth she has learned to call a smile. “You are so certain?”
She feels herself flush. Finds she has nothing to say.
He murmurs, “I lose what there is in this, if I take you now.”
“I understand.”
A silence, wind. She is suddenly aware that the wolf has gone. At length, he says, softly, “In different lives …”
He leaves the thought unfinished. He doesn’t have to finish it.
“I understand,” she says again.
Eventually, she adds, “You are leaving now?”
“Yes.”
She’s expected that. She feels the tears on her cheeks in the night. She manages a smile. “I have questions,” she says.
She hears the sound that is his laughter. “Always.”
Another sound, to her right. The wolf is back, and has growled, though softly. Meshag says something to it in his own tongue. He looks back at her. That stiff nod, last time. He lifts one hand—it is not at all a graceful lover’s motion—and touches the side of her face.
Then he goes, running after the running wolf.
His horse will be waiting somewhere, she knows. Probably two or three horses, for the Bogu seldom ride just one when they have a long way to travel.
She thinks of walking out to where she can overlook the slopes and the plain below them to the north; she might see them go. It is cold, though, and there really is no reason to go look.
She stands in the moonlight, alone on the mountain. She wipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe. The world, she thinks, is impossible to measure.
TWO MORNINGS LATER she leaves as well, with a good-sized party of Kanlins, heading south. She is dressed in black, with a hood, as if she is one of them.
They are riding to Teng Pass.
The elders, considering and communing, have decided that this is where Kanlins will be needed. This has happened at that pass, it seems, years ago, and before that, and before.
In warfare there are times of frenzied urgency and violence that saturate the churned earth with blood, and there are periods when everything seems to slow, or even come to a halt.
The rebel armies had taken Yenling with alarming ease and some savagery. An Li’s well-horsed cavalry thundered down from the north, forded the Golden River, and appeared before Yenling’s walls before any opposing force could arrive to defend the second city of the empire.
This had been anticipated within the Ta-Ming Palace. It was accepted by the emperor’s senior mandarins in the Purple Myrtle Court that this would be so.
