Moon Fern

The first two weeks in the gray robe passed surprisingly quietly.

Zhou Kuan lay in his room up the mountain. Meng Hu said he had "something with his chest," and looked at Yao as if he were keeping an account and waiting for the right hour to present it. No one hit him. It was as unfamiliar as the absence of pain in the rib, and in the first days Yao caught himself looking around at every corner. He went to lectures in an eighty-seat hall where an old teacher mumbled about breathing for an hour, ate fish on Thursdays, and his rib knitted the way all bones knit in all people: slowly, with boredom. For the first week the forge was still finishing off the weight from the arena, quietly, like an honest smith after a big order, and then it went still.

And then he began to notice a certain man.

A middle-aged man in a plain gray robe, always at a distance. In the dining hall, on the training grounds, by the library, where it smelled of old paper and wax. He never came close and never looked straight at him, but every time he was nearby, like a shadow at noon. Yao first saw him in the morning fog as he was warming up on the training ground. Then by the library. Then over a bowl of millet porridge: gray robe, indifferent eyes, slow movements. Once the man even sat some twenty steps away, chewing calmly, and not once raised his eyes.

Once is chance. Twice is coincidence.

"And the third time?" asked Yang.

The third time I stop counting and start being afraid.

The answer came from an unexpected direction. Meng Hu had apparently decided that bragging paid better than silence, and at supper he leaned across the table, fiddling with his comb.

"Rejoice, servant. My uncle writes that Elder Fan's people are interested in you. The elder himself asked who you are and where you're from. No one's ever been as lucky as you."

"I'm very flattered," said Yao.

"Not because you're special. He just has a bad habit of collecting interesting things. And then they break."

Meng Hu smirked at his own wit and left, and Yao stared into his bowl for a long time.

"Fan," Yang repeated, slowly, testing the word the way you test a rusted bolt. "That name scraped across me like a fingernail across metal. I can't remember why. I don't like it, kid."

Bronze flashed above the array. And back then, at the examination, I was thirteen, and bronze chimed in the examiner's sleeve too.

"A coincidence, maybe. Or maybe not." Yang was quiet a moment. "Do you remember that examiner's face?"

No. Only the sound.

"Then the sound will be the one watching you."

* * *

For three days Yao tested it. Left, right, the long way around through the herb garden, where it smelled of wormwood and wet earth, past the storehouse where wagons rumbled. Every time, the gray figure appeared within a few minutes, patient as a shadow.

On the third day he stopped and looked straight at the man. The man looked away, straightened his sleeve and unhurriedly turned onto the path to the storehouse.

He isn't afraid. He knows I'm not going anywhere.

"He isn't afraid." Yang's voice lost all its cheer. "Listen carefully. The Body that lives in you comes out of legends, and legends get dissected. If this Fan finds out what you are, he won't invite you to his table. He'll invite you onto a slab."

A chill ran down his spine. Slab. He really said: slab.

Then we play the fool.

"The patient fool. That's an entirely different creature. A patient fool remembers everything and shows nothing."

Yao nodded. He could feel for himself that the stockpile in his bones was burning down, the way you feel that a stove has two shovelfuls of charcoal left. Yang confirmed it that same evening, without a shadow of regret.

"The last log from those six years you burned in the arena. I can see your bones, kid: clean. From now on each layer will demand new weight, live, fresh, and that kind comes only with real trouble. You can't order it from the library or the dining hall."

So, wait.

"So, don't go looking. It'll come on its own, and it'll come at the wrong time."

Yao realized that in those three days he had lost not only his solitude but the protection of not being noticed. Now people were watching him, and even his thoughts he had to pass through himself three times before giving them free rein.

* * *

Qinghe was crying when he found her: after the evening bell he had gone around half the sect before it occurred to him to look behind the Pavilion.

It was late. She sat on the steps behind the Alchemy Pavilion with her knees drawn up, a ruined brew smoking beside her, and the smell of burnt herbs overpowered everything around, even the freshness that always came from her. She held the scorched fingers of her right hand off to the side, as if they belonged to someone else.

"Qinghe."

She flinched and quickly wiped her face.

"It's nothing."

"Your hand is burned."

"I ruined the brew. My mentor got angry." She laughed, thin and bitter. "She said I squander the Pavilion's goods and vouch for servants I don't even know. And that by the end of the month I have to make twelve Spirit Gathering Pills, or they'll send me back to work as a servant."

Yao listened and counted. Twelve jars on the top shelf. The thirteenth place. The Pavilion's seal on paper, next to his name. She didn't say it was because of him. She didn't need to.

"Can you do it?"

"If I had Moon Fern." Her voice broke. "It grows only on the cliffs of the eastern gorge, and disciples are forbidden to go there. A beast nests there."

Yao took the jar of salve from inside his shirt. He had carried it with him all these weeks, unopened, its seal cracked by her fingernail. Now he opened it as simply as you break bread.

"Give me your hand."

"That's…"

"You said, 'We're even.' Let's call it even."

She hesitated. Then she held out her right, the burning one. He spread the salve on it carefully, with his fingertips. The salve went on cool, and Qinghe drew a breath through her teeth. Her fingers trembled in his palms, her skin was hot and thin as paper.

"Same resin," Yang grumbled. "It'll do for a burn too."

He reached for her left hand, hidden in her sleeve.

"Not that one." She jerked it away faster than he expected. "This one's fine. Don't touch this one."

He didn't ask.

"Then I'll get you the fern."

"You can't. It's too dangerous."

He smiled at her, a little crookedly. No list of "what I have" had ever stood so clearly before his eyes as it did now: charcoal not his own, a sect-issued robe, counting, a broken sword. And one more thing, which he had never before thought of as having value.

"Qinghe. I was beaten for six years. Taking blows is the only thing I've always been good at."

She stared at him, and he saw anger fighting fear in her eyes. She wanted to say "no," but she already knew he would go.

"You're a fool," she whispered.

"So I'm told."

The stars came out, cold and sharp above the Pavilion roof. Somewhere a night bird cried twice and went silent. Qinghe pulled her sleeve down over the salved right hand and looked at him for a long time, openly.

"Just come back."

"I'll come back."

* * *

He left an hour before the morning bell. The watcher slept in the neighboring wing of the dormitory and woke only with the bell: Yao had learned that schedule in three days as thoroughly as the path to the dining hall.

The eastern gorge was a jagged crack in the earth, choked with fog. Yao climbed down while it was still dark, wedging his fingers into crevices, with the broken sword hanging on his back, tied with a strap. The rock was damp and slippery and smelled of moss and raw stone, and from below the wind droned as if someone were blowing into a gigantic horn. Yao counted handholds: the hundred and forty-first, the hundred and forty-second. Yang was silent, and you could feel that he was counting too, only something else: how many times a man can slip before he becomes history.

"There," he spoke up at last. "Silvery-blue leaves. See them?"

The Moon Fern clung to the rock some ten cubits lower and glowed faintly in the twilight, like the moon in water. Yao carefully climbed down and tore off stems until the stone beneath him trembled.

From the darkness came a low growl.

"Ah," Yang said calmly. "The nest."

In the mouth of a cave, eyes opened. Yellow, with narrow pupils, enormous. Onto the ledge crawled a stone-scaled lizard as long as a cart, and its scaly flanks moved in time with its breathing, like a sack of rocks.

"A third-rank beast. Roughly like a cultivator of the seventh layer. Well, shall we?"

"Do I have a choice?" Yao hissed, stuffing the fern inside his shirt.

The lizard lunged.

There was no ring here where you could stand and take it. There was a ledge a step and a half wide, and beyond it white fog and nothing. Yao sank onto his heels, put his shoulder forward, and the blow was such that the world rang. He was thrown against the rock. Small stones scattered into the fog and never reached the bottom.

"Don't stand there!" Yang barked. "This isn't the arena. Here you can't fall and you can't retreat, and that's a problem for a clever man, not a tough one!"

How many?

"One crack. In the collarbone. The forge is free, but it's not a miracle worker."

Yao rolled into a narrow fissure where the lizard couldn't turn its whole body, and pressed his back against the stone. His heart was pounding. And then he did the one thing he knew how to do: he stopped being afraid and started counting.

The lizard's lunges weren't random. For four breaths it gathered itself on the ledge, gripping the stone grit with its claws, and for five it drew back, swaying its tail. Nine. Exactly nine. Like the hammer on the night shift measuring out steps.

"Nine," Yao repeated aloud.

"Well done," said Yang. "Now think about what can be done with nine breaths."

The first lunge he took on his shoulder: the collarbone whimpered but held. The second dragged him out of the fissure by the leg, and the tail, broad as a log, struck his thigh from the side. Bone cracked. The crack ran through his thighbone without splitting it in two, but his leg buckled under him, and warm wetness ran down his trouser leg. Blood flooded his fingers and made them slippery on the stone.

He heard his own laughter, hoarse, choking.

"Don't laugh," Yang said sharply. "That's shock. The forge is still on the collarbone, the thigh will get in the queue behind it: the weight won't be lost, but it won't go any faster either. Count."

One. Two. Three.

It helped. Three blows, three cracks: collarbone, thigh, ribs. None had crossed the line yet. The lizard drew back for its five breaths, readying a new lunge, and in that moment his marrow woke.

It was nothing like the arena. There the forge had been lazily burning through the old stockpile, but here it threw its door wide open, and from it came a live, fresh warmth. Yao felt a grinding in his bones, felt something stretching out wider and higher. A metallic sheen flashed across his skin for a moment and went out.

"The fifth layer is on the threshold," said Yang, not hiding his surprise. "The forge will finish building it, but this, kid, isn't the stockpile anymore. This is you. Hold me by the hilt. See the plates on its neck?"

Yao drew the broken blade from behind his back. The rusty fragment, snapped off a palm's width above the hilt, was shorter than a knife, and it felt somehow awkward to threaten something the size of a cart with it.

"The third plate from the head, it's soft under there. It'll turn sideways when it strikes with its tail. On the ninth breath. Then."

Too far.

"That's why you have to be closer."

Yao counted it out. Four breaths for the run-up: he crawled to the edge of the ledge, dragging his leg. Five for the retreat: the lizard backed away, and its tail swept in an arc over the rock. Nine. Yao sprang inside, the tail whistled over his head, and the rusty whisker of metal slid under the third plate as easily as if a gap had been waiting there all along.

The beast roared and rolled over, throwing Yao off the ledge. His hand caught a stone outcrop and held him above the fog. The lizard gathered itself for a new lunge, and for those nine breaths Yao hauled himself up on one arm, his leg dragging like someone else's. Then he swung, grabbed the plate that had been left unguarded, and drove the broken blade in up to the hilt, deeper than common sense allowed.

The tail struck the rock twice and went still. For a moment everything vanished. And then silence settled into his bones: the weight that had entered them lay down in its place, the way a red-hot blank lies down in water. What remained was an even hum and Yang's voice counting along with him: "Nine. Nine more. That's it, kid. That's it."

* * *

He lay until dusk in a stone niche while the forge smelted the new weight. The bleeding stopped within minutes, the edges of the wounds drew together on their own, like lacing. The bone wasn't so easy.

"Skin is the forge," said Yang. "But bone is time. The forge will be cooking the new layer for a week now, no less, and while it's busy, the bone will heal like anyone's. Don't put more on it than you'd put on yourself."

Yao climbed out of the gorge, leaning on a pole from a broken branch. Every step echoed in his thigh, and the pain was clean, like a debt paid to the last coin.

It was already past midnight when he reached the back garden of the Alchemy Pavilion. A quiet fog stood over the wet beds; it smelled of clay and warm stone. In a lantern a moth beat against the glass. Liu Qinghe was pacing back and forth along the path, white as paper.

"Shen Yao!"

She ran to him, managed to catch him when his legs gave out, and gasped at the sight of the wounds.

"What did you do?"

"Brought the fern." He held out a hand with a bunch of silvery leaves and smiled weakly. "Twelve pills. Easy."

"You're a fool." Her voice broke. She hauled him into the room by the garden, lit a lamp and began washing his wounds with trembling hands. He watched her work: brows drawn together, lower lip bitten. She held the end of the bandage in her teeth. The warm fingers on his ribs smelled of mint and steel.

"Twelve pills and not a word about the lizard," Yang muttered, so quietly that Yao barely made it out. "Modesty. A rare disease."

She's crying. Crying silently and breathing on my wounds.

The wounds looked old. He could read it on her face. The skin had closed over them as if a week had passed, though it hadn't even been a day. Qinghe looked at them for a long time without saying a word.

"How many hours ago?"

"Morning."

"That explains nothing." She touched his thigh, where under the scarred skin the crack was still humming. "Shen Yao, what are you?"

He knew that in the gorge nothing was growling anymore and the lizard's body was cooling on the ledge. He would have gone through all of it again, just to see that look and not lie.

He met her eyes.

"I'll tell you. I promise. But not today."

Qinghe was silent for a long time, squeezing a wet rag in her fingers. Then she nodded, quickly, as if afraid she'd change her mind.

"Then at least don't move," she whispered. "Because I won't let you go until I'm done."

He wanted to joke that nobody had ever refused to leave his side so fiercely. But the words wouldn't come. He just sat, watching her hands and listening to someone walking with a lantern in the far wing of the Pavilion.