The first three days of the two weeks passed quite normally, Lianxi thought.
She rose before dawn, cleansed her meridians, practiced Core Manipulation until her mental power ran thin, and spent the afternoons in the study with her master. In the evenings she read. Her routine was exactly what it had been before the boy in the cave, and she was, by every measure she could apply, functioning perfectly.
It was only that she kept looking west.
She noticed it on the fourth day, while gathering herbs at the edge of the barrier. She had stopped walking without deciding to, and found herself standing at the boundary looking out through the trees, and could not account for how long she had been there.
She catalogued it as an interesting lapse in concentration and resolved to be more disciplined.
By the seventh day she had made a great many resolutions.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Again," said Master Gao.
Lianxi lowered her needles and looked at the array laid out on the table. Twelve silver pins in a star pattern, each one meant to strike a precise point on the wooden practice doll. She had done it correctly perhaps four hundred times.
She had missed three.
"Yes, Master." She reset the needles and tried again.
She missed two.
Master Gao said nothing. He picked up his teacup, drank, and set it down.
"That's enough for today."
"It isn't. I haven't finished the set."
"I said that's enough."
Lianxi's hands stilled. She put the needles away, one by one, in order of length, and did not look up.
"Sit," her master said.
She sat.
He poured a second cup and pushed it across the table toward her. Lianxi accepted it with both hands and held it without drinking, watching the steam curl and thin in the cool air of the study.
Outside, the afternoon light was going long and gold through the pines. Somewhere beyond the barrier, a bird she didn't recognize was calling.
"Your work has been sloppy for six days," Master Gao said.
"I know. I apologize. I'll be more—"
"I'm not scolding you."
She glanced up.
He was watching her over the rim of his cup with those sharp cobalt eyes, and she had the uncomfortable sensation, familiar from childhood, of being read from the inside out.
"What's troubling you?"
"Nothing is troubling me."
"Xiao Xi."
Lianxi looked down into her tea. She examined the question honestly, the way she examined everything, and found that she did not have an answer she could give him. Because the truthful answer was that nothing was wrong at all. She was safe. Her training was on schedule. Her master was well. There was no problem to diagnose, no wound to treat, no error to correct.
There was only a strange dullness that had settled over everything, as though someone had taken the color out of the days.
"Master," she said slowly, "is it possible to feel unwell without being ill?"
Master Gao set his cup down.
"Where does it hurt?"
She pressed a hand to her chest. "Here. But there's nothing wrong. I've checked. Pulse, breathing, qi circulation, all normal. I ruled out poisoning on the second day."
"Of course you did."
"I also considered a qi deviation from over-practicing Core Manipulation, but the symptoms don't match. Qi deviation produces heat and agitation. This is…" She searched for the right description. "Heavy. And cold. And it's worse when the house is quiet."
Her master was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "You miss the boy."
Lianxi looked up sharply.
"I don't," she said.
Master Gao raised an eyebrow.
"I don't," she repeated, with slightly less certainty. "I've only known him for a few months. And we agreed to meet in two weeks, which is a perfectly reasonable interval. Fourteen days is nothing. In the context of a cultivator's lifespan, fourteen days is—"
"Xiao Xi."
"—statistically insignificant," she finished, rather weakly.
Her master looked at her with an expression she could not name.
"Drink your tea," he said.
She drank her tea.
✦ ✦ ✦
They sat in silence for a while. It was not an uncomfortable silence. Nine years of living together had worn the awkwardness out of the spaces between them, and there was something in the quiet of that study, the smell of herbs and old paper, the scratch of the pines against the roof, that Lianxi had always found more soothing than any medicine she knew how to refine.
Then Master Gao said, unexpectedly:
"I knew someone once who made very good tea."
Lianxi looked up.
Her master was not looking at her. He was looking at the window, and at nothing beyond it, and his face had gone strangely young.
"It was a terrible skill to be proud of," he continued. "Anyone can boil water. But he was proud of it all the same. He would spend an entire morning on the temperature alone. He said the difference between good tea and excellent tea was a matter of about ten breaths, and that most people were too impatient to find out which ten."
Lianxi sat very still. In nine years, she could count on one hand the number of times her master had spoken about anyone at all.
"Was he your friend?" she asked carefully.
"He was." A pause. "He was the closest friend I ever had."
"What happened to him?"
"I left."
The two words fell into the room and sat there.
"He didn't know I was going," Master Gao said. "I couldn't tell him. If I had told him, he would have followed, and if he had followed, he would have died. So I let him believe I would see him the following week, and then I walked out of his life without a word, and I have not spoken to him since." He turned his cup slowly on the table. "That was a very long time ago."
"Did he ever find out why?"
"No."
"Then he must have thought—" Lianxi stopped.
"Yes," her master said. "He must have."
Lianxi's hands tightened around her cup.
She had a hundred questions and she knew, with the certainty of long experience, that she would be permitted perhaps two of them.
"Master," she said. "Where did you come from?"
"Somewhere far away."
"Why did you have to leave?"
"Because staying would have cost more than leaving." He said it evenly, the way he might state the boiling point of water. "That's all, Xiao Xi."
"But—"
"That's all."
She subsided.
It was the same wall she had run into all her life, smooth and patient and absolutely immovable. But today there was a crack in it, and through the crack she had glimpsed a young man arguing about tea temperatures with someone he loved, and it changed the shape of her master in her mind in a way she could not quite settle.
She had always known that Master Gao was hiding. She had never before considered that he was also grieving.
✦ ✦ ✦
Master Gao watched his disciple turn the cup in her small hands and felt, as he often did lately, a sharp and unfamiliar shame.
She was nine years old.
He forgot, constantly. It was easy to forget. She corrected his array diagrams. She discussed the properties of Ghost Flower poison with the detachment of a court physician of forty years' standing. She had the patience of a stone and the discipline of a man three times her age, and when she spoke, she spoke in the measured cadences of the old scrolls she had raised herself on, because she had learned language from books and from him and from nothing else in this world.
But she was nine years old.
What did children do, at nine? He tried to remember. They ran about and shrieked. They formed intense alliances over nothing and dissolved them by evening. They were loud, and sticky, and utterly useless, and they were surrounded, always, by a dozen others exactly like them.
His disciple had a barrier, a wooden house, several hundred medical texts, and a boring old man.
He had told her to go and enjoy herself. He had said it more than once, and she had always nodded politely and gone back to her needles, and what else could she have done? There was no one out there for her. He had made certain of that. He had built a wall of trees and arrays around this child and called it protection, and it was protection, and it was also a cage, and both of those things were true at the same time and he had made his peace with it years ago.
Then a boy had wandered in out of the storm, and for the first time since he had pulled her from that river, Gao Yun had watched her come home with her face lit up.
That was why he had said yes. That was the entire reason. He had weighed a decade of caution against the look on her face and the caution had lost, and he was not certain, even now, that he had chosen correctly.
And now she was sitting across from him with the light gone out of her again, staying away from the only friend she had ever had, and doing it for his sake, and apologizing to him for missing three needles.
"Xiao Xi," he began.
"Master, you're feeling guilty."
Gao Yun stopped.
Lianxi was looking directly at him. She had set down her cup.
"You do this," she said. "You look at me for a long time and then your qi becomes unsettled, and then you tell me to go and have fun, which is a thing you only say when you feel guilty, because you don't actually approve of fun." A small pause. "You think I'm lonely. You think it's your fault."
"…You are remarkably difficult to keep things from."
"I'm not lonely," said Lianxi.
"You are nine."
"I don't see what my age has to do with the accuracy of my self-assessment."
Gao Yun opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
"Master." Lianxi's voice had changed. It had lost its briskness, and what was underneath was very quiet and very young. "May I say something, and you won't interrupt?"
He inclined his head.
She was silent for a moment, gathering it.
"I know that you're hiding," she said. "I've always known. I don't know from what, and I've stopped asking, and I won't ask again. I know there's a reason I can't tell anyone my name, or yours, or where we live. I know that if I ever make a mistake about it, something terrible will happen, because you've only ever looked frightened once in my whole life, and it was when you made me promise."
Gao Yun did not move.
"And I know that because of it, I can't go to the villages, or the markets, or any of the places in the books. I can't have neighbors. I can't be anyone's disciple but yours." She looked down at her hands. "If I met a hundred people, I would have to lie to all of them."
"Xiao Xi—"
"You said you wouldn't interrupt."
He fell silent.
"I've thought about this," Lianxi said. "I've thought about it a great deal, because I think about everything a great deal, and I always reach the same conclusion." She raised her head. "I would give all of it up. Every single one of them. A hundred people, a thousand, the whole continent. I'd cut every one of them out and never look back, and it wouldn't cost me anything at all."
Her eyes were shining.
"Because I have you," she said. "And you're worth more than all of them together."
Gao Yun's hand, resting on the table, went very still.
"You pulled me out of a river," she went on, the words coming faster now. "I was dying. Nobody in the world wanted me, and I was thrown away like something broken, and you picked me up. You gave me a dantian. You gave me nine years of your time, which you will never get back, and you taught me everything you know when you didn't have to teach me anything, and you built a house so I wouldn't be cold. You set a barrier so I could sleep. And every time I asked for something impossible, you sighed at me and then you gave it to me anyway."
"Child—"
"I'm not finished." Her voice wavered and she pushed through it. "I'm grateful. I'll be grateful until the day I die. But that isn't what I'm trying to say." She pressed her hand flat against her chest, over the place that had ached all week. "I care about you, Master. Not because of what you've given me. I would care about you if you'd given me nothing at all."
"Every word you say is a golden rule to me. I learned to speak by listening to you. Everything I know about what is right, I know because you told me." She swallowed hard. "And I'm happy here. Every day. I like the mornings and the tea and the way you pretend to be annoyed when I correct your arrays. If I could stay exactly like this, here, with Master, for the rest of my life, then I would want nothing else. Not one thing."
The tears came then, and she didn't seem aware of them.
"You're my only family," she said. "You're all I have and you're all I want."
Silence.
Gao Yun sat with his hands on the table and found that he could not speak.
He had lived a very long time. He had been called many things in his life, some of them titles, some of them accusations, and he had let all of them slide off him. He had made his choices and buried the cost and told himself it was the price of survival, and in nine years of exile in a forest at the edge of nowhere, with nothing but a child and a secret and a burden he could not put down, he had never once permitted himself to consider whether any of it had been worth it.
He looked at the girl across the table, weeping and entirely unaware of it, and something in his chest came apart.
"Xiao Xi," he said, and his voice was not steady.
She looked up.
And the old man who had never, in nine years, shown her anything but discipline, reached across the table and put his hand over her small one.
His eyes were wet.
Lianxi stared at him, astonished.
"You foolish child," he said thickly. "I am a poor sort of family for anyone."
"You're the best sort," she said at once. "I've read four hundred and twelve books and I've never encountered a better one."
Gao Yun laughed. It came out broken.
They sat like that for a while, the old man's hand over his disciple's, the tea going cold between them, while the light through the window turned from gold to amber.
✦ ✦ ✦
"You'll have to leave, you know."
Lianxi went rigid.
"Not yet," Master Gao said gently. "Not for some years. But it will come, and I won't have you unprepared for it." He withdrew his hand and sat back. "You can't reach the peak of this path in a forest. Strength comes from experience, and experience comes from the world: from rivals who are better than you, from cities and sects and libraries, from a hundred things I cannot give you here. You have a talent I have not seen the like of in my life. To keep it in this clearing would be a crime."
"I don't want to hear this."
"I know."
"I mean it." Her hands had closed into fists in her lap. "Master, I don't— I can't—" She stopped, and steadied her breathing with visible effort, and when she spoke again her voice was small. "Let's not think about it for now. Please."
Gao Yun looked at her for a long moment.
"…Very well," he said. "Not for now."
Lianxi nodded quickly and took the thought, whole and unexamined, and pushed it into the furthest corner of her mind, in the manner of someone locking a door on a room they intend never to enter. It would still be there. She knew it would still be there. But she could not hold it and remain upright at the same time, and so she would deal with it on the day she had no choice.
Not today. Not while he was still sitting across from her, pouring more tea.
✦ ✦ ✦
The sun was nearly down when her master spoke again.
"Do you want to know what I concluded?" he said. "About my friend. About leaving."
Lianxi looked up.
"For a long time, I told myself I'd been wise." He turned his cup slowly. "I weighed his life against a friendship and I chose his life. That is the correct calculation. Any sensible man would make it. I made it in an afternoon, and I congratulated myself on my clear thinking, and I walked away and I did not look back."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I have had a long time to examine that decision. Longer than you can imagine. And I still believe the reasoning was sound." He looked up, and his eyes were terrible. "And there has not been a single year since when I haven't wished I'd stayed."
Lianxi did not breathe.
"That's the part they don't write in the books, Xiao Xi. A choice can be correct and still ruin you. The logic holds perfectly and the heart never accepts the verdict. You may be right, entirely right, unanswerably right, and you will still wake at night forty years on and think of the tea, and the way he laughed, and wonder what he thought of you when you didn't come back." His voice roughened. "Regret is not a debt that can be settled. It only accrues interest."
"Then—" Lianxi's throat was tight. "Then what should a person do?"
"Ah." Her master smiled faintly. "That is the question, isn't it."
He rose and went to the window, his white hair catching the last of the light, and stood there with his hands behind his back.
"A mind can only reason from what it knows," he said. "And a mind never knows everything. That is why the cleverest people in the world make the worst mistakes: they trust a calculation built from half the facts and mistake it for the truth. But the heart is a different instrument. It is not clever, and it cannot argue, and it will not explain itself. It simply knows. And in my long experience, it is right rather more often than the mind is willing to admit."
He turned.
"So trust yourself, child. Believe in your own judgment. Weigh what you can, and reason as far as reason will carry you, and then, when you reach the place where thinking stops, listen to what your heart is telling you. It has been telling you all along. You have merely been too busy calculating to hear it."
Lianxi sat frozen, the cold cup in her hands.
"And Xiao Xi." He held her gaze. "Whatever else you do in this life. Do not deny your heart what it wants. Not out of caution. Not out of duty. Not out of the belief that you are protecting someone, which is the most seductive excuse of all, because it lets a coward feel noble." His mouth twisted. "Set it down and walk away, and you will carry that absence for the rest of your days, and it will be heavier than anything you thought you were avoiding."
"But what if keeping it is dangerous?"
"Then it is dangerous."
"What if I had to lie? Constantly. For years. And live in fear of being found out, every single day?"
Gao Yun was silent for a long moment.
"I lied for forty years," he said at last. "And I lived in fear for every one of them." He looked out at the darkening trees. "It was not the lying that broke me, child. It was the empty chair across the table."
He turned back to her.
"If there is a person you cannot bear to lose, then bear the fear. Bear the lies. Bear all of it, gladly, and count yourself fortunate. The strain of keeping a secret is a small price. I would pay it a thousand times over for one more afternoon of arguing about the temperature of water."
The room was nearly dark.
Lianxi sat very still, and understood, dimly, that her master had just told her something enormous, and that he had told it to her deliberately, and that he had known exactly what she had been thinking on the walk home six days ago, because he always knew.
"Master," she said quietly. "Was any of that about me?"
Gao Yun picked up the teapot.
"Your tea is cold," he said. "Shall I make another pot?"
"…Yes, please."
✦ ✦ ✦
That night, Lianxi lay in bed and looked at the ceiling.
She had made a decision on the forest path six days ago. She had examined it from every angle and found it flawless. Cut the thread cleanly, before anyone got hurt. It was the correct calculation. Any sensible person would make it.
A choice can be correct and still ruin you.
She turned onto her side.
Eight days remained.
For the first time since the clearing, she found that she did not know what she was going to do when they were over. And somewhere beneath her ribs, in the place that had ached all week, something small and stubborn and entirely unreasonable had already decided.