The silence stretched.
It stretched across the empty middle of City Gate Avenue, across the spilled pork buns and the abandoned shoulder pole and the hundred held breaths in the doorways, and it settled on the back of Liu Mang's bowed neck like a hot iron bar. The blood-bay snorted. Its hooves shifted on the stone. Somewhere a baby started to cry and was hushed.
He could feel her looking at him.
It was a physical thing. Her gaze pressed on the crown of his head where the box had hit him, and on his shoulders, and on the soft back of his neck, steady and heavy and patient, the way a sword's edge rests on a block before it falls. His body knew this weight. His body had felt it many times before. Every muscle in Li Yuguo's flesh was pleading with him to stay exactly as he was—head down, eyes on the stones, small, smaller, invisible.
She's my wife, Liu Mang thought. I'm allowed to look at my own wife.
The body disagreed.
He overruled it anyway—an inch at a time, the way you lift a heavy lid—and slowly raised his head.
The first thing he understood was that he had gotten her wrong.
Not the bones of her. He had drawn the bones correctly. The high, proud carriage; the straight back that never touched the cantle of the saddle; the chin lifted at the exact angle of someone who had been obeyed since she could speak. The heroic spirit came off her the way heat came off the paving—a clean, bright, upright force that made the people cowering in the doorways look crooked by comparison. He had written that. He recognized it.
But he had written a soldier.
What sat on the horse was something far more delicate, and far more dangerous for it. Her face was a small, fine oval, the jaw narrow, the chin pointed. Her brows were long and black and sharply drawn, slanting up toward her temples like two strokes of a sword. Beneath them her eyes were large and dark and slightly tilted, their lashes thick, and the fury in them was so bright that it took him a moment to notice how beautiful they were. Her nose was small and straight. Her lips were pressed into a hard line, but even pressed, they were full, and red without paint—a deep, ripe red, like the inside of a split pomegranate.
He had never been good at describing faces. Now he understood why. There were not enough words.
And then his eyes went lower, and his mind stopped working altogether.
He remembered her design. He had spent an entire evening on it, back in his old life, with reference images open in twelve browser tabs. Nalan Meng, the Luo Sha of Nalan City, rode into battle in a red-and-gold sleeveless turtleneck, high-collared and martial, with a breastplate of black iron strapped over it. He had even written the line himself: a cuirass that covered only a little of her torso, because he had wanted to suggest the curve beneath without showing it. Practical. Fierce. Modest in its way.
That was not what she was wearing.
There was no turtleneck. There was no iron. The top she wore was sleeveless, yes—a thin sheath of crimson silk with gold thread at the edges—but it had no collar at all. It was cut in a deep, plunging line from the hollow of her throat almost to her navel, held together across her ribs by a single loop of gold cord, and it left her breasts very nearly bare to the bottom curve. They were full, round, perfectly shaped, like two bowls of white jade turned upside down, high and firm on her chest, and the silk lay over them so thinly and so tightly that he could see the whole of their shape, the soft swell from her collarbones, the heavy curve beneath, and at the very center of each, pressing up through the crimson, the small hard points of her nipples.
Every time the horse shifted its weight, they moved. A slow, heavy sway. Then stillness. Then another sway.
Liu Mang's throat clicked when he swallowed.
Below the waist it was worse.
What she wore there could not honestly be called a skirt. It was two long panels of the same crimson silk, one hanging in front and one behind, and nothing at all on either side. They fell from a belt of gold-studded leather slung low on her hips, and as she sat astride the horse they parted completely, so that both her legs were bare from the boots to the waist—long, smooth, pale legs, the thighs lean and taut with muscle, gripping the horse's flanks with an easy, unconscious strength. He could see the shadowed crease where her thigh met her hip. He could see the thin strap of something beneath the silk, riding high on the bone of her hip, and nothing else.
The back panel was the worst of all.
It was so thin that the sun shone through it. It lay over the round of her ass like a coat of red water, clinging to every line—the full, heavy curves of each cheek where they pressed into the saddle, the deep shadow of the cleft between them. And the way she sat, leaning forward slightly over the horse's withers, had pulled whatever she wore beneath that silk tight, so tight that it had drawn up into her crack, a thin dark line vanishing between the two pale globes, the silk sinking in after it. The cheeks of her ass swelled out on either side of it, bare under the sheer red, and the edge of the back panel was lifting and falling in the faint breath of wind that came up the avenue from the gate.
A little more wind, and it would slide right off. A little more, and the whole of that perfect round ass would be on display to half of Nalan City.
That is not what I designed, Liu Mang thought numbly. That is not what I designed at all.
Changed some of the world's plot for you. I'm not as bad as you think. Hahahaha.
The letter was still tucked against his chest. He could feel the coarse paper there, faintly cool, as if it were laughing at him.
And his cock was twitching.
He could not stop it. He did not even notice it starting. One moment he was staring, and the next there was a hot, heavy pulse between his legs, a thick throb of blood rushing down into the soft flesh nestled in his silk trousers, and his cock lurched—once, hard—against the inside of his thigh. Then again. Swelling. Lifting. Pushing against the cloth with a dull, eager ache that spread up into his belly. Twenty-eight years of a lonely man's hunger and twenty years of a spoiled young body's appetite had found each other at last, and they were in total agreement.
No. No no no. Not here. Not now. Not in front of—
Then he made the mistake of looking back up at her face.
The fury in it hit him like a bucket of well water. Her eyes had narrowed to two black slits. A muscle was jumping at the corner of her jaw. The knuckles of the hand that held the whip had gone white.
His cock wilted so fast it was almost painful.
Nalan Meng swung down from the saddle.
She did it in one motion, without seeming to use her hands at all—a smooth turn of the hip, a long bare leg sweeping over the horse's back, and then her boots struck the paving with a crisp double click and she was standing. The silk panels settled around her legs. The crimson top shifted over her breasts and settled too.
She walked toward him slowly.
The noon sun blazed straight down on her, so bright it made the air around her body shimmer, and in all that heat her face was strangely, startlingly white. Not pale like a sick woman. White like snow on a mountain, cool and clear, as if the sun could not touch her. Only her cheeks were different. A deep flush had climbed up into them, two spots of hot red high on each cheekbone, spreading toward her ears.
Liu Mang could not tell what it was. Anyone watching would have had the same trouble. It could have been the ride. It could have been the sun. It could have been something hot and shameful, a body reacting to the eyes of a whole avenue crawling over it.
Or it could have been a hatred so pure it had come to the surface of her skin like blood through a bandage.
She stopped three paces from him.
Up close she was smaller than he had expected—a little shorter than this body, her head coming only to his chin—and it made no difference at all. She stared up at him, and he felt like a field mouse being stared at by a hawk.
She did not speak.
She simply looked at him, and in her eyes he watched a whole history go by. He could read it. He was, after all, a writer, and this was the kind of face writers spent their lives trying to describe. There was rage in it, and contempt, and exhaustion. But under all of that, buried deep, there was something worse—a bitter, grinding frustration, the look of someone who has been hammering at the same lump of iron for years, heating it and folding it and beating it, and every single time she pulls it from the fire it is still just iron. Still soft. Still useless. Why won't you become steel? that look said. Why won't you ever become steel?
Her fingers tightened on the whip handle until the leather creaked.
Her teeth were gritted. He could see the line of her jaw locked hard beneath that white skin.
She said nothing at all.
It was much worse than shouting.
He made himself look at the rest of her, if only so he didn't have to keep meeting those eyes.
A light helmet of silver-white steel fitted snugly over her head, close as a cap, sculpted to the shape of her skull, with two swept-back wings at the temples and a short guard at the nape. From beneath it, a long tail of black hair fell straight down her back to her waist, glossy as lacquer. The steel was polished so bright that it threw the sun back in a white star over her brow.
And across her back hung a sword.
It was enormous. Five feet long at least, nearly as tall as she was, in a scabbard of black sharkskin bound with silver. The grip rose over her right shoulder, long enough for two hands, wrapped in red cord, and the pommel and guard were cast in heavy gold. Worked into the guard, in raised relief, was a crest he recognized because he had invented it: a coiling dragon clutching the sun, the coat of arms of the royal house of the Haotian Kingdom. The guard flared out in two great sweeping wings like a bird's, far wider than any practical sword needed. It was exaggerated. It was theatrical. On anyone else, it would have looked like a stage prop.
On her, it looked like it had killed a great many people and expected to kill a great many more.
He found himself staring again—not at the sword, but at the way it sat on her. At how the outfit and the woman worked together. Because the clothes were scandalous, there was no question of that, but they were also right for her in a way he could not have designed. The tight silk and the bare skin did not make her look soft. They made her look sculpted. The light, clinging fabric pulled every line of her into relief, embossed her like a figure carved on a jade seal—the flat taut belly, the long hard muscles of her thighs, the strong straight shoulders, the full breasts riding high on her ribs. And her skin was extraordinary. From the line of her throat down, every inch of it that the crimson silk didn't cover was fair and smooth and faintly translucent, so fine it seemed to glow from within, like lamplight seen through porcelain. Her features were as exquisite as if someone had carved them with a jeweler's knife.
That was the trick of her, he understood now. The thing his own pen had only half grasped.
Nalan Meng was beautiful. She was also the Luo Sha Nv, the female demon of the border wars, a woman who killed without blinking. She had won battles that grown generals had lost. She had personally cut down more enemy soldiers than Liu Mang had written words in some chapters.
Beauty and death in one body. Sweetness and a blade.
A woman like that was rare in any world. He had made her that way himself, and now that he was standing in front of her, he could not decide whether he was proud of himself or terrified.
Terrified, he decided. Definitely terrified.
"Get on the horse," Nalan Meng said.
Her voice was flat and low. It was the first thing she had said since her half-smile.
"W-wait," Liu Mang heard himself stammer. His hands came up, palms out. "Wait, wait a minute. My lady. My—wife. It's not what it looks like. I wasn't running away, I was only—"
Crack!
The whip moved.
He did not see it leave her hand. One moment it was coiled at her side; the next its black tail had lashed down across the paving stones a foot from his boots with a report like a firecracker going off. Pa! A spray of grit and stone chips stung his ankles. Where it had struck, a thin pale line had been gouged into the granite.