“I wouldn’t do that now,” she said, mock-contrite.
His turn to laugh. “I am pleased to hear it.” After a moment, he said, “Song, I wanted you on the first night at Iron Gate, when you came in.”
“I know,” she said. He felt her shrug. He knew that motion by now. “I didn’t feel flattered. You’d been alone two years. Any woman …”
“No. It was you. I think from when you walked up in the courtyard.”
“My hair was down,” she said. “Men are very predictable.”
“Are we? Am I?”
A silence. “Not you so much.”
They listened to the bird outside.
“I’ll come north,” he said.
She shook her head emphatically. “No. You’ve made that decision, Tai, bad luck to start a journey after that. Finish your letter. We will take it with us. We have decided that your sister and the fact that Zhou tried to kill you should keep you safe. With the horses.”
“You have decided that?”
“Yes, Lu Chen and I.”
“And what if I decide—?”
“Tai, you already did. It was an honourable choice. I was only afraid.”
“And now I’ll be afraid for you. There is a war, you’re going a long way.”
She laughed softly. “I’m a Kanlin Warrior, riding among sixty others. That is one fear you need not sensibly have.”
“When is fear sensible?”
Her hand stopped moving, lay against his chest.
“And after?” he asked. “After you reach the emperor?”
She hesitated. “There is one thing I need to do.”
He lay there remembering:
He squeezed her arm. “Song, if you kill those two yourself, and anyone links you to me—”
“I know,” she murmured. “That isn’t it. Those two from the Second District army are likely dead already. They shamed us, and our sanctuary will not permit that. I think the emperor knows it. I don’t think he will be unhappy. That is not what I meant.”
“Then what …?”
“I have to ask leave to withdraw from the Kanlins. I must do it at my own sanctuary.”
He said nothing. He was deeply moved.
She misunderstood his silence. “I ask for nothing, Tai. If this is only tonight, I am—”
He placed a hand over her mouth again. “You have to come back, Song. I need you to show me another way to live.”
“I have only been a Kanlin,” she said, as he moved his hand away.
“Might we teach each other?”
He felt her nodding her head. “But I don’t believe the world will let you stay by that stream all your days.”
“It might not. But I do not want to be lost in the dust and noise. To be what Liu became. In the Ta- Ming.”
“If they even reclaim the Ta-Ming.”
“Yes.”
“Do you … do you think they will?”
Tai lay in darkness, thinking about it.
“Yes. It may take time, but the new emperor is wiser than Roshan, and I think Roshan will die soon. This is not the end of the Ninth Dynasty.”
“There will be changes.”
He ran a hand through her hair: the unimaginable gift of his being able to do so. “This is a change, Song.”
“I see. You prefer me this way? Obedient and submissive?” Her hand began moving again.
“Submissive? Is that like the inexperience, before?”
“I have much to learn,” she murmured. “I know it.” And she lifted her head from his shoulder and slipped down towards where her hand had gone.
A little later, Tai managed, with some effort, to say, “Did they teach you that on Stone Drum Mountain?”
“No,” she said, from farther down the bed. And then, in a different voice, “But I’m not a concubine, Tai.”
“Hardly,” he murmured.
He felt her head lift. “What does that mean? I lack the skills you are accustomed to?”
“You could possibly acquire them,” he said judiciously. “With effort and time enough to—”
He made a sharp, strangled sound.
“I didn’t hear that last,” she murmured sweetly.
He made an effort to compose himself. “Oh, Song. Will I survive a life with you?”
“If you are more cautious about what you say,” she said, sounding meditative, “I see no reason why not. But I’m not a concubine, Shen Tai.”
“I said I know that,” he protested. “Before you bit me.”
He cleared his throat. He felt amazingly sure of himself. Sure of the world, or this small part of it.
He said, “It would be a great honour if, Mistress Wei Song, before you took my horses north, I were permitted to learn your father’s name, and your mother’s, and the location of their home, that my mother might correspond with them as to possibilities for the future.”
She stopped moving. He had a sense she was biting her lower lip.
She said, “Your servant would be pleased if your honourable mother were willing to initiate such a correspondence.”
Which formality, given where she was just then, and what she now resumed doing, was remarkable.
He reached down and drew her up (she was so small), and laid her upon her back, and shifted above her. She began, shortly thereafter, making small sounds, and then more urgent ones, and then, some time after, with the bird still singing outside, she said, halfway between a gasp and a cry, “Did you learn that in the North District?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “I like it.”
And twisting her body the way he’d seen her do springing up a wall in Chenyao or fighting assassins alone with two swords, she was above him again. Her mouth found his, and she did something with her teeth that made him realize, suddenly, that it hadn’t been any fox-woman he’d been dreaming about so vividly those nights on the road from Chenyao. It had been her.
The strangeness of the world.
There was a brightness growing within him, vivid as the first spring flower against snow, and a sense that this was all deeply undeserved, that he was not worthy of such a gift.
There was also now—and Tai would not let himself turn away from it—a farewell taking place inside himself, a painful one: to green eyes and golden hair, music, and her own courage.
You were surely allowed to remember these things? It would be wrong not to remember, Tai thought.
Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.
You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.
