Under Heaven

stairs, she reminds herself. No tears at window ledges.

He looks up. The remembered face. She observes little change, but it is not light enough to see closely here, and two years need not alter a man so much.

She murmurs, “I am not deserving of this, my lord.”

He says, “I am not deserving of what you did for me, Rain.”

The voice she also remembers, too vividly. Why, and how, does one voice, one person, come to conjure vibrations in the soul, like an instrument tuned? Why a given man, and not another, or a third? She hasn’t nearly enough wisdom to answer that. She isn’t sure if anyone does.

“Master Shen,” she says formally. “Please stand. Your servant is honoured that you have come.”

He does stand up. When he looks at her, his face, beneath the lantern, shows the intensity she recalls. She pushes memories away. She needs to do that. She says, “Are you alone, my lord?”

He shakes his head. “Three Kanlin are with me, to keep watch. Two more in the street. I’m not allowed to be alone any more, Rain.”

She thinks she understands that. She says, “Is the one I sent to you …?”

“Wei Song is here, yes. She is very capable.”

Rain allows herself a smile. She sees him register that. “I thought she might be. But did she … how did you survive?”

He hesitates. He has changed, she decides. Is weighing his words. “You know where I was?”

She nods. She is glad of the pillar behind her, for support. “I didn’t know, before. I had to have her find your home, start there. I didn’t even know where your father’s home was.”

“I am sorry,” he says, simply.

She ignores that. Says, “I know that Wen Zhou had Lun hire a woman to kill you.”

“Sent with Yan.”

“Yes. Is he all right?”

“He’s dead, Rain. She killed him. I was saved only by … by the ghosts. And Tagurans who came to help, when they saw riders.”

By the ghosts. She isn’t ready to ask about that, to know about it. Yan is dead. A hard thing to learn. A sweet man.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He is silent, looking at her. She is accustomed to men looking at her, but this is different. He is different.

Eventually he says, “He was dead the moment she became his guard, I think.”

She wishes there was wine. She ought to have brought some. “So I did nothing at all?” she says.

He shakes his head. “There was a second attempt. At Chenyao. Wei Song fought a number of men alone, outside my room.”

“A very capable woman, then.” She isn’t sure why she’s said it that way.

Tai only nods. “As I said.” He hesitates again. He isn’t being awkward, she decides, he is choosing what to say. It is a difference from before. “Rain, you would have been killed if this had been discovered.” It is a statement, not a question.

“It was unlikely it would be,” she says. He hasn’t moved from under the lantern, neither has she, from her place by the pillar. She sees fireflies behind him. Hears crickets in the garden. No sign of the Kanlins he mentioned, or anyone else. There is a silence.

“I had to go away,” he says, finally.

This will become difficult now, she thinks.

“I know,” she says. “Your father died.”

“When did … when did he bring you here?”

She smiles at him, her smile has always been an instrument she could use. “Not long after his appointment.”

“As you tried to tell me.”

“As I did tell you, Tai.”

She hadn’t meant to say that so quickly. Or use his name. She sees him smile this time. He steps closer. She wants to close her eyes, but does not.

He says, “No perfume? I have remembered it for two years.”

“Have you really, my lord?” she says, the way she might have in the Pavilion of Moonlight.

He looks down at her, where the light touches her features, catches yellow hair. She has not posed herself, it was simply a place against a column where she could lean back for support. And be on her feet when he came.

He says, “I understand. You wear scent now only for him, and he’s away.”

She keeps her tone light. “I am not sure how I feel about you becoming this perceptive.”

He smiles only a little. Says nothing.

“I can also move more easily undetected without it,” she says. But she is disconcerted that he has so swiftly understood.

“Is that important?” He is asking something else now, she knows.

She lifts her shoulders again, lets them fall.

“Has he been cruel?” he asks. She hears strain in his voice. She knows men well, this one very well.

“No. Never,” she says.

A silence. He is quite close.

“May I kiss you?” he asks.

There it is. She makes herself meet his eyes.

“No. Never,” she says.

And sees sorrow. Not anger, not balked desire. Sorrow, which is—perhaps—why and how another’s voice or soul can resonate within you, she thinks.

“Never?” he asks.

He does not move nearer. There are men who would, she knows. She knows many of those.

No jade stairs, she tells herself.

“Are you asking my views on eternity and the choices of life?” she says brightly. “Are we back to discoursing upon the Sacred Path?”

He waits. The man she remembers would have been eager to cap her own half-witticism with a quip of his own. That, or take the exchange deeper, despite her teasing.

She says, to delay: “You have changed in two years.”

“Where I was,” he says.

Only that. He has not touched her.

She lifts a hand to his cheek. She had not meant to do that. She knows exactly what she’d meant to do among the fireflies tonight. It was not this.

He takes her hand in his, and kisses her palm. He inhales, as if trying to bring her back within himself after so long.

She closes her eyes.

SHE HAS NOT CHANGED, Tai thought, and he realized that it had been childish for him to imagine that she’d appear to him like some fragile princess abducted into sad captivity.

What had happened to Rain was not, he finally understood, his sister’s fate. It was a difficult truth. Had he merged the two of them in his mind, journeying east?

What, truly, was better about a singing girl’s life in the Pavilion of Moonlight? Serving any man who had money and desire? Compare that with existence in this compound with one powerful man she knew— clearly she knew—how to entrance and lure? As for when she grew older: also clear as moonlight on snow, her chances of a protected life were better here. This destiny was what the North District girls all longed to find.

He felt a wave of self-reproach, and sadness.