The morning began with reed-flutes and the sound of water poured from clay jars; an ordinary music the village had made for as long as Luo Chen could remember. Girls crossed the packed earth of the drying square with baskets on their hips. Boys chased a leather ball patched with gut-string, shouting an old rhyme that made even the goats raise their heads to listen. Smoke rose from low hearths. Millet porridge thickened, onion and wild thyme turning plain food into comfort.
"Your fingers will never learn if your eyes keep watching the sky," his mother said, setting the shuttle into his hands. She was laughing at him, not unkindly. Her loom clicked, threads lifting and falling with the exact patience of someone who had learned to measure days in cloth. On the beam beside her hung a narrow pouch of blue cloth where she kept three things only: a bone needle, a sprig of dried herb the elder swore soothed fever, and a smooth pendant of blue stone veined with a single thread of red. Luo Chen had asked a dozen times to touch it; each time she smiled and said, "Not yet."
He wedged the reeds between his knees and tried to make the braid lie flat. It didn't. The cord twisted, bunched, and split. His mother hummed an old tune and pretended not to notice his struggle until he burst out, "It won't mind me!"
"Then you must learn to mind it," she said. "We do not bend reeds by shouting."
A pebble thocked his shoulder. He turned to see Jun standing just beyond the doorway, skinny as a fishing pole, hair sticking up where a cowlick refused to be tamed. Jun grinned with unrepentant mischief and lifted a sling, the leather pouch dangling between two cords he'd stitched himself.
Everyone in the village knew Jun's story. He had no parents; fever had taken them when he was too small to remember their faces. Since then, he had lived in whichever doorway had room, shared whichever meal someone offered, and somehow survived with a grin that dared the world to forget him. Most often he was found at Luo Chen's home, eating at their fire as if he belonged. The villagers no longer pitied him out loud; they accepted that Jun was, in a way, half a son of Luo Chen's family, a boy the household had gathered in like a stray pup.
The village by morning had a hundred small movements that together made a kind of heartbeat. The blacksmith's boy pumped the bellows until sparks leaped like insects; old Miao counted dried fish with his lips, tapping two fingers against his palm; three dogs slept nose-to-tail under the shade of the grain shed; the elder sat on the step of the longhouse with a bundle of grass and began trimming each blade to length for some purpose only he knew. He looked up when the boys ran past and lifted a forefinger. The gesture meant: See that the day knows you. Do not borrow what you cannot repay. The elder had never needed more than one finger to say a book's worth.
Jun looped the ball under his arm and slung his sling over his chest. "If I win, you bring me a strip of dried meat at midday," he said.
"If I win, you admit my braid is better than yours."
"Unfair bet," Jun said solemnly. "I have no braid."
"Then you will have to learn," Luo Chen said, because repetition of a mother's wisdom felt like wearing her protection.
They ran to the totem—an old pine trunk polished by a century of hands, its sides carved in spirals and wolf-teeth. The horns mounted at its crown belonged to a goat so valued that when it died the whole village had eaten and then sung sorrow after. The boys had been told not to throw the ball at the horn. Naturally, this was what made a game.
Jun's first throw missed high. Luo Chen retrieved the ball from where it bounced off a bundle of reeds and tried the sling. The stone flew too straight; it was a sling for birds, not for arcing a ball. Jun snatched the ball and performed a ridiculous hop-step-lunge, leaping to catch the horn on a rebound. They were laughing too hard to notice the elder watching with a twitch at the corner of his mouth—disapproval balanced by the understanding that boys must learn the shape of no by finding it.
They fell into comfortable silence. A lark landed on the totem's crossbar, cocked its head, and flew. From the far side of the palisade drifted the sound of Luo Chen's father's axe: a strike, a breath, a strike. Heavy enough to break, steady enough not to falter. The rhythm lodged itself in Luo Chen as a second pulse.
By midmorning the sun tasted of baked clay. The boys took the ball to the marshy edge where frogs hid in reeds and dragonflies stitched the air with blue thread. They set three stones on a fallen log and took turns knocking them down with sling-shot. Jun's aim was better; Luo Chen's patience was longer. When Jun grew bored and went looking for the shiny carapace of beetles, Luo Chen kept practicing the same swing until his shoulder burned and the stone finally cracked the topmost rock cleanly. He felt stupidly proud.
"See?" Jun said, returning with a fistful of iridescent shells. "Patience is only stubbornness with manners."
They followed the old herders' path along the palisade's outer ditch, away from the marsh. Two lengths beyond the gate, the grass had been singed. Luo Chen crouched to touch a blade; black ash smeared his fingertips. He lifted them to his nose: not the sweet ash of cooking-chaff, not the pine pitch they used to kindle fires, but something thicker. Oil. Jun sniffed too, then rubbed a smear across his tongue and spat so violently he stumbled.
"Don't," Luo Chen said.
"It's in the air anyway." Jun wiped his mouth on his sleeve and frowned toward the horizon. "Who would waste oil on grass?"
"A fool," Luo Chen said.
"Or someone who wants the wind to learn his name," Jun muttered, which was the elder's way of describing arrogance. He pointed at faint grooves in the dust: the crescent of a hoof, the straight scrape of a wrapped horseshoe, the scuff where a rider had stood in the stirrup to scan with a spy-glass. "Not our herders."
They walked the line of damage a little farther, then turned back with a prickling at the base of their necks that neither wanted to name aloud. At the gate, the watchman—a man with gray in his beard who kept his spear as clean as a priest kept an altar—squinted at their hands and at the smear on Jun's sleeve. He said nothing, but he lifted his eyes toward the longhouse where the elder had gone.
Just then, one of the dogs that had been lying in the shade rose to its feet, hackles bristling. Its low growl rolled like a warning. On the ridge, a flock of crows startled into the sky, wheeling in dark confusion. A thin breeze shifted, and with it came again that bitter tang of oil and scorched grass. The watchman's jaw tightened. He gripped his spear a little harder. The elder stepped out from the longhouse, saw the boys, the dog, the sky, and for an instant his knife paused in the bundle of grass. He smoothed the moment quickly, resuming his work as though nothing had changed, but his eyes lingered too long on the horizon.
The villagers still moved as they always did—fetching water, pounding grain, mending tools—but an undercurrent had begun, like a drumbeat muffled by cloth. The air held a weight that had not been there before. Even Jun, who laughed at almost everything, was quieter as they carried the ball back toward the square.
By midday the square filled as it always did when the day bent toward heat. Men loosened belts and ate, squatting in a circle with bowls cupped in callused hands. Women sat together and traded the quick talk that mended quarrels before they became trouble. Children formed a ragged ring around the elder's staff. They had heard his stories, every one, more often than they could count. But stories are the only work that never finishes. They carry a day's worth of weight without growing heavy.
"Long ago," he began, "fire walked without leash." The words always struck a different chord when sun stood at its highest. "It grieved those who tried to chain it; it blessed those who learned to carry it. They called it the seed that grows without soil—the ember that waits in ash and rises when breath finds it."
He tapped his staff against the earth. A thin, hollow sound. "Flame remembers."
The children echoed obediently. Jun's voice slid in late, like a sling stone thrown after the target had already moved, and he smirked when the elder's eyebrow rose. Luo Chen elbowed him and received a grin.
But the elder's tone was quieter than usual, and some of the adults exchanged glances. Luo Chen noticed the watchman still hadn't touched his bowl, his spear laid across his knees as if it might be needed sooner than anyone wanted. Even Jun's grin dimmed when the wind shifted and brought again that bitter tang of oil on grass.
The elder smoothed his face as a weaver smooths a snag. "We have a song for the wind," he said. "We offer it bread when it arrives hungry; we ask it to leave our roofs unbroken when it sulks. We cannot command it, but we can keep its friendship." He began to hum a simple melody and the women joined, voices braiding the tune into a rope strong enough for even the most anxious child to hold.
When the song ended, life resumed. The blacksmith's boy fetched more charcoal. The old men argued about whether last year's drought had begun a week earlier or later. Jun stole a piece of dried fruit from a sleeping trader and divided it in two, half into his own mouth and half into Luo Chen's, the solemn ceremony of thieves who had stolen together since they were small.
"Your father said he'll split the stump by the wall tonight," Jun said.
"He has said he will split it every dusk since winter," Luo Chen said.
"Then tonight must be the night," Jun said, as if there were no proof in the world stronger than his desire to see things happen.
Afternoon bled gold into the thatch. Shadows sharpened. A herd of goats returned dusty and unsatisfied with their own forage. Two crows argued on the palisade about ownership of a snail shell. Mothers unrolled mats and counted bowls. The air held that particular stillness that sometimes arrives before storms—a resting of wings, a pause in breath, a refusal of the day to say what it intends.
Jun stood with Luo Chen at the totem, flipping the bone whistle he wore around his neck. It was a poor thing, carved from a goat's leg, drilled with holes that made it shriek when he had first learned to play it, and he loved it because the shriek had once made a dog so angry it taught Jun to run faster than he thought he could.
"If we get separated," he said—not solemn, because Jun had never learned solemn properly, but with an awkward weight that made Luo Chen straighten—"blow this twice, then once. It will sound like a goose dying. I will still come."
"We won't be separated," Luo Chen said, which was the kind of lie boys tell to tame the shape of a shadow with the weight of words.
"Take it anyway." Jun looped the thong over Luo Chen's head, tucking the bone beside the half-made reed cord at his belt. "And if you lose it, I will haunt you fat."
"That isn't how haunting works," Luo Chen said.
"It is if I do it," Jun said, and that was the end of argument.
The first horn came as the sun touched the ridge with two fingers of light. It rose from the horizon like something the ground had been holding under its tongue and only now allowed to speak. The sound was too low to be a hunter's call and too long to be anything but a verdict. Dogs froze. The goats bunched flank to flank, heads shifting. The elder's staff clicked once against the ground, then twice, then remained still.
Women snatched up children. Boys too young for spears ran for water. The watchman bellowed names and hands found the places they had always known they would someday be called to: at the gate, on the wall, by the grain shed where small fires could be doused at a shout. Luo Chen's mother tied her pouch of blue cloth shut with a quick jerk and then, as an afterthought that somehow felt like the opposite of after, slipped the smooth blue pendant inside, fingers pausing to feel its weight. She looked at Luo Chen, at the tangle of his half-braid, at the bone whistle resting against his chest, and smiled so hard the smile became a kind of armor.
"Come," she said. "If there is trouble, we stand where we can see each other." She did not add and where I can reach you. Some truths are strong enough not to be spoken.
Jun had already thrown the ball to a smaller child—because even thieves obey a village's rules when fear begins—and he grabbed Luo Chen's arm. "If we go to the wall, we go together."
"We go together," Luo Chen echoed.
They climbed the ladder to the palisade. From there the horizon revealed what the horn had promised. Not stars this time: fire. Points of orange in traveling pairs, distant and then less so, torches smearing their own smoke across the bruised sky. Behind those pairs, darker movement, a ripple like wind over barley but against the wind. Hooves. The line of them bent in a curve.
"Wolffire," the watchman said, under his breath, as if the name could taste the air and follow it back to the mouth that spoke it.
Jun spat over the wall as if to insult a storm. "Let them choke."
"Save your spit," the watchman said. "You will need your breath."
Below, the elder's voice lifted, not with story now but with prayer. He did not shout. He did not need to. What he said was the oldest thing anyone in the village knew how to say: "Flame remembers." Men and women took up the words. They had not believed prayer was a shield; now they wanted even a veil.
"Get the small ones under the carts," Luo Chen's mother told the younger women. "Two jars of water by each doorway. Wet the mats. If fire comes, throw a wet mat at its face like an insulted aunt." She said it with such certainty that two of the girls laughed in reflex, and the laughter eased hands that would otherwise have shaken too badly to tie knots.
Jun peered along the wall, judging distances with the instincts of a boy who had spent more time than he ought measuring the arc of stones. "If they light the grass downwind, the fire will hesitate where the ditch is damp," he said.
"How do you know?" Luo Chen asked.
"I don't," Jun said. "But it will, because we need it to."
The second horn rolled over them like a weight pushed by the sky. The orange points had become a smear of flame, the smear a wall. The curve had tightened into a half-ring, its open mouth aligned with the wind. One door left open, the wolves' door. The riders' bone-charms clacked, wolves answered from the long grass, and the first arrows hissed high enough for hope to mistake them for falling stars.
Luo Chen's father stepped onto the walkway with an axe that had always seemed too heavy for a single man to carry and lifted it as if grief had made his arms into new tools. He looked at the boys—at his son and at the not-quite-son who would have eaten at his table if there had been more bread—and nodded once. It was not permission to be brave; it was recognition that they already were.
"Hold," the watchman said, and the wall itself seemed to draw breath. The wind leaned. The fire obeyed. Somewhere at the far edge of sight a horse screamed.
Jun's hand found Luo Chen's and squeezed so hard the bones protested. "Together," he said, not loud. "If we run, we run together."
"Together," Luo Chen said.
The night opened its mouth.