歃血; blood oath

“Do you smell that?”

Something was on fire. It could be the rice, it could be a field full of opium poppies, it could be an effigy. No matter, because it wasn’t anything with a heart. Zhou Zishu would know what that smelled like.

So, “No,” was what he said. It was only partially a lie. As long as it wasn’t the hair on his head, he didn’t care. What burned would burn. He sank deeper into his nest of sandbags, trying to find the divot his body had made the night before. There was alcohol in his blood and opium in his brain, and he was beyond caring.

Here was what Zhou Zishu could smell—the street, the wheat beneath him, the hot shelled grain, the pass of a hundred bodies. Opium sat inside him in brown, scaly coils, and he tipped his head back waiting for sleep. Most nights, dreams crumbled over him in wet handfuls. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t dream at all. He wasn’t often lucky.

“Hand me some of that. If you’re going to stink up my entire shack with it, you might as well share, street bum.”

Zhou Zishu held out his pipe without opening his eyes, aiming in the direction of his neighbor’s voice. A disgruntled sigh, and then they swiped it out of his hand. The acrid, yellow-sour smell of opium wafted over him.

“This rotten flower will kill you, you know?”

He knew. He was hoping it would.

Zhou Zishu cracked one eye open, because the bun seller would not shut up, and if they saw how annoyed he was, perhaps they finally would. Unsuccessful—with hair this ragged, and clothes that looked like they’d been used to wipe down a horse, Zhou Zishu passed for little more than a pile of ashes with eyes now. Once, perhaps, all he’d have to do was turn his gaze upon something and it would cower. Now, he did the cowering.

Brazier fire turned the opium pipe into bone shaft in the bun seller’s hands, his fingers always chapped, white with an omnipresent layer of flour. The bowl glowed with dark opium rocks. Zhou Zishu held his hand out for it again, and they passed it back.

“It does kill,” he said. “And so?”

“You’re but a young bachelor, you bum of a boy,” said the bun seller. Ma Tao, or Hu Tao, or Pu Tao—Zhou Zishu chuckled to himself. He had never learned. He couldn’t remember. Opium had been burning holes in his brain for days—weeks? months?—and he was thankful for it. “Why aren’t you following the righteous path to become a scholar, or a martial master, or even a merchant? Life is long for you, ungrateful vagrant. Not like me,” they patted their belly, rounded out from years of drinking off hours at work with cheap shaoxing wine, then balanced their elbow on bent knee. “I’m damned to make these buns until I shrivel.”

“Hn.” Zhou Zishu inhaled more opium, holding it inside him until it hurt. Hurt made it taste real. The lobes of his lungs ached, and he rested the pipe over his chest as he breathed out. The mouthpiece was loose, the bowl ugly and charred, but such were the fates of thieves. It was the most inconspicuous thing he’d found in the back of a mule cart.

“The watch towers have been lit.”

The bun seller leaned out of the open-air doorway, back pressed against the wooden frame of their shared shack, slouched like an old sack of flour. “That must be the smell, the wood,” they went on. “I wonder what for. It’s been ages since they’ve lit it. I hope it’s not war. Not again.” Without asking this time, he snatched the opium pipe for another puff. “In war, we nobodies suffer the cruelest fates.”

Silence. The bun seller toed Zhou Zishu’s ribs unceremoniously, like they were kicking over a dead sparrow to check its belly for maggots. “Hey, are you listening to me, bum? War. What if it’s war?”

“Let it come, then.” The last time the watch towers had been lit, Zhou Zishu had pretended to die.

“You don’t want to see jianghu before war destroys it again? You really are crazy, bum. You just want to smoke yourself to death where you lie.”

“Seen it,” grunted Zhou Zishu. “Seen enough.”

“You, young thing? What do you know of jianghu, of the world? Of people? What have you seen?”

Zhou Zishu laughed. He beckoned again for his pipe, sucking in a sticky choke of a breath. Unwind him one day and he would be all hardened vein and tar.

“The burning,” he said.

For the Tiger’s Tooth of Yujian Bang, being dead was easier than being alive. He was not too happy to wake up alive.

“Bangzhu.”

Everything shook. Zhou Zishu’s brain glugged unintelligently inside his head, spongy as beached coral. “Bangzhu, please, wake up. Please don’t be dead. Open your eyes, can you hear me? Bangzhu, it’s Han Ying.”

Morning stabbed him in the eyes. The descent of this summer had been unkind and would only get viler, every morning gelatinous and half-dreamt, running its sticky-flour hands on any part of his body where skin was exposed. Han Ying’s face swam when Zhou Zishu tried to focus on him—if only the world would stop spinning. He opened his mouth and wondered if, overnight, the opium had wandered up from his belly to his throat, and if he spoke his tongue would be forked.

“Bangzhu! Thank the heavens and earth. It’s Han Ying, Yujian Bang’s Han Ying. You recognize me, right?”

His bones shifted. None of them were connected to each other, like he could fall and they’d all come apart. Han Ying sat back on his heels when Zhou Zishu pushed himself up and off the sandbags. There had to be a crease in his cheek, and his opium pipe clattered to the floor between them. When Han Ying retrieved it, he stared like it was a piece of rib that had fallen through Zhou Zishu’s skin.

“What are you doing here?” Everything throbbed. Everything was in double.

“Bangzhu, how have you been? You—have you not been well?” Han Ying took him by the elbows, staring down at Zhou Zishu’s hands. “You removed your jade bangles...”

Zhou Zishu followed his gaze as if shocked by his own arms, then wrested them from Han Ying’s grip. For the last year, he had been curled up in an anonymous corner of a city far from the north, draped in traveler’s clothes that had worn down to poor man’s clothes, down to beggar’s clothes. The last time he’d tried to run a brush through his hair, the teeth had broken off in the matted tangles, and he’d had to shake them out like a shower of broken cricket legs. When he was lucky, he would harvest enough opium to forget the entire last week, and when he wasn’t lucky, he’d subsist off whatever hard, stale bun his neighbor felt like sharing. He had moved less than the sun had. At some point he would die, and if he did it far enough in the back of the shack, the bun seller wouldn’t find his body until it turned the stone black beneath him.

He had never been better.

“What happened to you, Bangzhu? You—one day you were there. The next, you were gone. All of Yujian Bang panicked, it was chaos. The struggle for your position ended in blood. We thought the same thing that had happened to you, that you’d been kidnapped like—”

“It doesn’t matter what happened to me, Ying-er,” Zhou Zishu said. He closes his eyes. His mouth tasted of dark, sour green; if he spat, it would burn what it touched. Han Ying was speaking too fast for him to keep up with. “How did you find me? Why are you here? It’s not safe for either of us.”

“We need you to return, Bangzhu. We’ve prepared a story for you already for if I found you. You need to come back to Yujian Bang. There’s going to be a hunt at the foot of Blood Mountain, word is that there’s an ambush planned. The spies that climbed Scarlet Peak have returned to the base with intel saying that we should expect mass casualties. No one has a strategy for the movements of our men. We’re blocked in by valleys—”

Zhou Zishu held a hand up, and Han Ying fell silent. “I will not come back, Ying-er. Do not ask me again.”

“Bangzhu, please.” Han Ying grabbed him by the shoulders and, even fuzzed by opium, Zhou Zishu reflexively knocked his hands away. First Han Ying startled back, then arranged himself into a kneel, pulled his gloves off by the tip of each finger, and saluted Zhou Zishu with his fists. Silvered burns ran across his knuckles and towards his wrists where his own jade bangles were fitted, and Zhou Zishu frowned. How had he been burned so badly? “We are not the Yujian Bang without you. We haven’t been for a long time. I know it is not my place to question the motives of our leader, so I shall not. But I will be so bold as to beg you to return, even if it is just for this one hunt.”

“Why?”

“Han Ying fears it will be our last stand.”

His fingers were clammy and hot when Zhou Zishu reached out and took Han Ying’s hands into his. The cicadas had begun to scream. “What are you talking about, Ying-er?”

“It is not the same Yujian Bang that you left, Bangzhu,” was all Han Ying said. Then, “There are far more martial practitioners within the Xuefan Pai now, more than ever before, and the next ambush will likely destroy what is left of us. Jin Wang has turned deaf ears to our advice. He has bled us drier than any Blood Prisoner has. We are dying, Bangzhu.”

“Then run, Ying-er.” Zhou Zishu squeezed his hands, but his own were trembling. His skin prickled with his headache. “Vanish like I did. Do not stay for the bloodbath. That is what I did, and I do not wish it for you. I would not wish that last night in Yujian Bang on anyone.”

Han Ying finally met Zhou Zishu’s eyes. “Bangzhu.”

“What is it?”

“Was it at the Blood Feud of Luoyang that you saw Jing Beiyuan for the last time?”

Zhou Zishu’s skin sang, and not from the opium. Swallowing was impossible. The slimy heartbeat of memory filled his mouth. “Why?”

“Though Yujian Bang is starting to eat itself,” said Han Ying, “our spies have reported sightings of Jing Beiyuan in Blood Mountain. It is impossible to know for certain. But there have been reports that he is alive, Bangzhu. There may be a chance of saving him. We just need you to return.”

The air took its time to leave his body. Zhou Zishu shut his eyes, ducking his head like a bird over a stream, staring at a reflection of someone he no longer recognized. Buried things began to sprout from the earth, with hours separating him and the opium from last night—the smell, the squelch underfoot, the waxy touch of drying blood and the milk-skin film it created when it did. Jing Beiyuan. Liang Jiuxiao. Bangzhu coming out of mouths without tongues and throats without jaws. The burning.

“Please. You’re the Tiger’s Tooth. You’re our leader.”

“I’m an opium bum.”

“All the better,” Han Ying said. Desperation had become him. He spoke like he knew the date of his death the same way a bride knew the date of her wedding. “Even if the last thing you can ever do for us is drug the Blood Prisoners when they eat you.”

What do you want to do after this, Shixiong?

I don’t know if there is an after for us, Jiuxiao.

The new base of Yujian Bang sat at the foot of Blood Mountain. Stand where the mountains began, tilt your head back during the summer months, and the sunset would turn the clouds into sweaty cuts of meat overhead. Once, every spot their feet touched belonged to an active, ash-spewing volcano. Now, the other side was a glacial caldera—and anyone that made it over Scarlet Peak hadn’t returned.

Zhou Zishu had blocked all of Jin Wang’s attempts to station them here for all the years he’d been the Tiger’s Tooth. It was the kind of insanity that only worked once, and the payoff would be as high as the body count. Not that he should have been surprised about Jin Wang’s disregard for body count, but he clearly was no longer interested in even pretending.

“Bangzhu, you’ll want to put this on,” Han Ying said, catching up to where their horses were tied. He offered a dark bundle of fabric. A hood was folded over the top. “It’s still cold here in the north.”

Zhou Zishu flicked his eyes down, then back up at Han Ying.

“And also,” says Han Ying, diverting his gaze, “it would be keener to conceal your identity and return for the purpose of maintaining order.”

Zhou Zishu shook out the cloak to swing around his shoulders. On their trek, he’d changed into the anonymous black and green of a Yujian Bang assassin, wrestled a brush through his hair and swept it up into a ponytail, and washed himself until his skin was newborn and stinging. When he’d caught his reflection at the storefront of a mirror and ceramics polisher—clean, sharp, draped in acid and shadow—he’d been repulsed by the sight of himself.

“I get the feeling it would have simply been easier to smuggle me in as an opium bum.”

“That’s far too unbecoming for you, Bangzhu!”

“It was comfortable.” Zhou Zishu drew the hood up. “Let’s keep moving.”

Once the city fell away, the expanse of the sky was suffocating. All that open space had no ramshackle buildings to pin it back, and dusk turned the sky the color of a black eye, a slice of moon swollen half-shut after a fist to face. Han Ying led the way off the main road, into dirt. Then even that path turned to a narrow trickle of sand through grass. Most of it was yellowed from nightly frosts.

Zhou Zishu pulled his hood lower over his face when he saw the gates of the encampment. A fire rose in the middle of the base. Blood Prisoners would smell the smoke on their clothes from dozens of li away.

Garlands of beaded jade ran along the walls that boxed the camp in. They’d trussed together wooden barriers with twine with wood sharpened to needlepoint. Anything that tried to climb it would be pierced upon the spires. Browning blood stained an entire stretch of wall, and a wagon full of animal pelts was pushed up against one particularly gory span. Zhou Zishu winced when they let themselves in and a physical chill fell over them, as if he’d stepped through the gates of winter. The doors, its knockers, and even the sign that hung above them—Yujian Base, it read, words glowing like eyes in the night—had been embossed with jade inlay.

“From where under this sky did Yujian Bang get its paws on this much jade?” Zhou Zishu asked in an undertone, pulling his horse up beside Han Ying’s. Ice jade, at that—it was far harder to come by and trade than standard jade. “This is excessive. It wouldn’t be necessary if this base weren’t built in the heart of Xuefan territory.”

Han Ying shook his head. His silence was smothered and damning.

The peace was a taut hum. They were the only things that moved, and no other Yujian assassins were in sight, but Zhou Zishu could feel eyes upon him as they passed through. If anyone recognized him, no one burst out of their tent flaps to say so. Han Ying dismounted when they reached the central military tent, pitched in the middle of the base with a set of stairs leading up to the entrance.

“Bangzhu, come with me,” said Han Ying, nodding towards the flight of stairs. “And don’t speak until I prompt you to.”

Zhou Zishu nodded. His head still pounded from withdrawal, temples ringing like lighthouse gongs, and if he thought too hard about this he wanted to laugh—his last surviving inner circle hand, telling him to keep his head down and his mouth shut as they walked back into territory where Zhou Zishu had once shifted the pieces himself.

Who was in that tent, now? Cut skin open and blood would rush to fill the open gaps, to pull the flesh back together with clots and fiber. He dismembered Yujian Bang himself. Now he had to wonder what had grown back in his place. A hand? An eye? A head? Not a heart. Not possibly a heart.

“Report,” Han Ying announced as he drew back the entrance flaps, then lifted his fists in salute. “Duan Shouling, Han Ying comes bearing news.”

Duan Pengju. Of course—he had been the informal leader of Zhou Zishu’s inner circle in his last days, and it only made sense that he’d risen to fill the position. Seeing him stand where Zhou Zishu once had, wearing the collared jade cloak that Zhou Zishu never left base without, throbbed in the backs of his eyes.

“Han Ying,” said Duan Pengju. He faced a wide, sprawling map so marked up with positions and movements that it was hardly legible, as if a coopful of chickens had their feet dipped in ink and been set loose across a spread of parchment. He didn’t turn, arms clasped behind his back. “There’s a wind coming.”

Zhou Zishu stiffened. The air outside was flat as tempered glass. It was well and truly night now, and the stars swam in thick, unbroken floods overhead. The back of his brain itched. Yujian Bang employed codes, and there’d been different ways to whisper so no one could understand what they were planning. There’s a wind coming—not a cloud in the sky. There’s a wind coming.

“Han Ying has brought a visitor ahead of our planned stationing at the foot of Blood Mountain,” said Han Ying, “in order to head off the ambush that our spies anticipate will be taking place tomorrow near midnight.”

Duan Pengju finally turned, and if he was shocked to see Zhou Zishu standing behind him, he didn’t show it. They looked at each other for one throttled heartbeat, and then he reached up to lower the hood from his face. The back of Zhou Zishu’s neck tingled, as if something with a long, cold tongue had leaned in and licked him where the wisps of his hair began.

A bloated pause, and then Duan Pengju said, “You look terrible.”

No Bangzhu. No Shouling. Not even Tiger’s Tooth, just you, and Zhou Zishu told himself it didn’t bother him. There was a new sword and its ornate sheath strapped to Duan Pengju’s waist, one that he certainly had never carried before. That dark snake coil in the base of Zhou Zishu’s neck itched again. He knew it from somewhere. He’d commanded the wielder before.

The opium fog made him stupid. Zhou Zishu tipped his chin up, breathed in, and said nothing.

“Duan Shouling, I brought Zhou Bangzhu back for the purposes of directing the ambush front,” Han Ying said, saluting his fists again and bowing deep enough that the nape of his neck was exposed. “Please forgive Han Ying for this transgression. I have no intention to breach or challenge Shouling’s order, nor do wish to overstep and seize power for myself. But our xiongdi are afraid, and the strategy we’ve built for tomorrow’s standoff breeds fear within our assassin ranks. There is no one better suited to planning the movements of our men except Zhou Bangzhu. He has led so many doomed hunts to victory, Shouling. Should this one prove successful, then you can choose to remove him from Yujian Bang as you see fit, but without surviving this stand, Han Ying—Han Ying fears it will be our last.”

Another silence, this one tender to the touch, painful as deep infection. Duan Pengju looked from Han Ying, to Zhou Zishu, and then back. His face was more lined from a year at the helm than Zhou Zishu ever remembered.

“You still call him bangzhu,” was all he said.

Han Ying looked up without straightening from his bow, but Zhou Zishu interrupted before Duan Pengju could antagonize him more—he knew that look, the one that had begun in his last years before he left Yujian Bang. They were Blood Prisoner assassins and executioners. But Duan Pengju, and a growing number of his followers, liked to play with their food.

“Duan Shouling, Han Ying has brought me here for the purpose of helping Yujian Bang. I have no interest in usurping power or regaining any old positions.” He nodded at the map. “All I’m here for is to help strategize this one hunt.”

“And see it through,” Han Ying added hopefully. Zhou Zishu cast a sideways glance without quite meeting Han Ying’s eyes, and he fell silent.

“And see it through, should it help,” he said.

Duan Pengju had the look of someone who’d just trodden on a large, waterlogged snail. Then he stepped to the side behind his desk so there would be room for Zhou Zishu to stand beside him and crossed his arms.

“What’s different about this hunt?” Zhou Zishu asked. Once he’d drawn behind this desk, too, with Han Ying, Liang Jiuxiao, and other Yujian assassins watching. There were slashes through names, scrubbed-out inkspots like holes punched through time, and red smears that stood for Blood Prisoners. Towards the north, the Scarlet Peak of Blood Mountain rose high above their tiny pin-marked cities.

“To begin with, it’s not a hunt,” said Duan Pengju. “It will be a Blood Feud.”

Zhou Zishu frowned. “The Prisoners have never used hunts to feed.”

“Do you think they’re stupid? Once they heard the Tiger’s Tooth had fled Yujian Bang, all laws of warfare crumbled. It made killing them easier, but it also made tracking them harder. Fewer of them are tied into bloodbonds now, so they’re feral as jackals. They move in pods, instead of clans. They’ve gotten bold and bloodthirsty. We choked off their supply of human feeders, and they’ve come down the mountain for food.”

Long, cascading lines of red were dragged from the slopes of the Blood Mountain range across the right end of the board. Tiny huts stood for Yujian bases, and at least half of them were crossed out angry ink splatters. Some of them looked like they’d been drawn on with fingers. Green pins stood for assassin clusters, and black for neutral territories.

A constellation of pockmarks stretched along the board and ended in a dagger too small to be good for anything except skinning rabbits and cracking open water chestnuts. Zhou Zishu stepped around Duan Pengju to where it was driven into the board, halfway up the city-facing slope of Scarlet Peak. It slid out with a rasping snick of metal against wood. One side of the blade was stained with blood.

“What’s this?”

“A marker,” said Duan Pengju. “It stands for the position of the Blood Keeper.”

Zhou Zishu turned, and beyond Duan Pengju’s shoulder, he caught Han Ying’s expression—the fear that trampled the exhaustion. He still had the dagger in hand. “But the Blood Keeper has never crossed Scarlet Peak.”

The jade that lined every step of the base. Everyone carrying heavier, deadlier jade weapons that Zhou Zishu always made a point to regulate, because too much strain on it could shatter meridians. The wild look in Han Ying’s eyes.

“Things are different now, Zhou Zishu,” Duan Pengju said. He was just as tired, but he tilted his chin up with smug triumph. Whether or not the other assassins saw him as their true leader held no weight when he knew more about the past year than Zhou Zishu could hope to learn in a single night.

“How do you know it was him?”

“Because he is insane,” Duan Pengju said, and this part he sounded less happy to know. “He is a madman, bloodthirsty and brutal in a way that no other Prisoner is. He tears out victims’ throats and leaves them there because he wants to, not because he has to feed. A higher jade tolerance than most other Prisoners.”

“That can’t be right,” said Zhou Zishu. “The Blood Keeper is known to have jade sensitivity. That’s why he never ventures over Scarlet Peak, that’s why he always sends his Prisoners for attacks. He’s a coward. You’ve got the wrong person.”

“The Keeper you knew from your time is dead!”

The silence stank like a hanged body.

“There’s a new Keeper now,” Han Ying finally piped in, voice tiny. “And I know it’s him, Zhou Bang—Zhou qianbei. I was there when he made himself Keeper. I saw him. I saw it happen myself. We haven’t got the wrong person.”

“How did he make himself Keeper?”

Han Ying swallowed. His expression was haunted. “By eating the old one.”

Morning was hot wax and lit matches.

The greasy pungence of skinned animals filtered under the feet of the tent, and Zhou Zishu woke up as hard and fast as he’d fallen asleep. The base had come alive with the touch of daylight, but he rolled over in his ragged cot and waited for the pale, prickling opium nausea to fade. Then he sat up and willed himself not to vomit at the omnipresent smell of blood.

It was inevitable, the smell—it hung around every Yujian Bang assassin and spy like a damp robe, trailing out behind them in ribbons. Prostitutes and brothel workers always smelled of flowers and tea, scholars smelled of ink and incense, and upstanding martial warriors smelled of the wind and the loam. The bottoms of ponds and rivers. Mulch. Yujian Bang, the Jade Sword Gang, smelled of blood—of animals, of Blood Prisoners, of their own. Even after Zhou Zishu had left and jumped into the first freezing river and scrubbed until he felt like he’d been reborn, he could still smell it on himself, on all his clothes: the iron stink, the inside of someone’s veins.

That was what they didn’t tell you—the stains would be easier to get out than the smell.

None of the faces were familiar in the camp. Zhou Zishu had pulled on the same clothes that every other assassin wore, and save for a few curious glances, nobody’s gaze lingered on him. Was Han Ying the only person left in this base who could recognize him on sight alone? The thought unsettled him. Everyone that he’d once known, and that had known him, was dead, or dying, or sentenced to die.

Being alive with no one to recognize you wasn’t being alive at all. A living death. He couldn’t afford to let himself think about it.

“Zhou—Zhou qianbei, you’re awake.” Han Ying jogged up to him and saluted. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes,” said Zhou Zishu. His sleep had been plagued with shadowed, unmoving figures standing in militant rows. Just watching, like they were waiting for his word. Last night, after he’d figured out what resources they had—and they were even more paltry than Han Ying would have let him think—he’d written up the best strategy he could think of. The prospects were bleak at best. “Did you have something to ask of me?”

“Come with me. Several of our assassins returned from the armory in the night, and they brought your jade.”

They crossed the camp without disturbance, but under the glare of the sun, Zhou Zishu noticed that everyone they passed carried prominent jade swords. He couldn’t name any of them, but he knew that some of them had to be too young to be carrying these swords—they couldn’t have earned them. Jade swords were difficult and time consuming to forge, and only altered after assassins proved their internal energy was strong enough to wield them.

They had handed children loaded crossbows tipped with poison.

Unless—unless. The graves—

The opium nausea nosed at his jugular, so close to the roof of his mouth that Zhou Zishu barely fought down a heave.

“Here we are.” Han Ying held aside the tent entrance flap. “Bangzhu, after you.”

The tent was empty and appeared to be where Han Ying slept. A rickety table kept guard in the corner with a single dented washbasin and a thick bundle of rags, and Han Ying brought the armful of tattered fabric to Zhou Zishu, paused, and held it out to him.

“Your weapons, Bangzhu.”

Zhou Zishu stared. He took it and began unwrapping as if he’d been told the head of his mother was in the center of this parcel, but the promised pieces began to tumble out as he unraveled. First came the bangles, which he snagged before they could clink to the dirt, and he held them up in a looped finger.

“They’re not yours,” says Han Ying sheepishly. “Since you left with the ones fitted to you. But these were retrieved from the armory with hopes that they’ll fit.”

Then, more—a jade guan, not unlike the one Zhou Zishu used to wear, that he’d destroyed alongside his bangles. A jade pendant carved with the likeness of Guan Yin, strung with woven red thread long enough to rest over his heart. His tasseled jade belt, so the ribbon ends clacked against each other whenever he shifted or walked. His sword.

Baiyi had a flexible blade so that he could wear it wrapped around his waist, but the handle had been slowly replaced over the years. Once, there’d been a single pearl of jade embedded in the hilt; then, it had been lined. Then wrapped. By the end, the handle of Zhou Zishu’s sword was constructed of Ice jade all the way through its core, with studs extending up the blade in segments so the metal would still bend and give. It would give any younger or less experienced assassin a migraine just to pick up his blade.

“If anyone is looking closely, they’ll notice these pieces are missing in a few days,” said Han Ying. “But hopefully, by then, things will be all said and done, and you can choose to return it, or throw it away, or do what you will with it, Bangzhu.”

“Han Ying.”

“Yes, Bangzhu.”

“You speak with such assured finality that we’re walking to our deaths,” he said. They were, but that was for him to know and smoke opium about when this was done. “What makes you think this is the end?”

“Bangzhu has not witnessed a Blood Feud since his departure.” The same dark, wild-eyed look of an animal with its neck caught between claws returned to Han Ying’s face. “Duan Shouling does not exaggerate when he says that the laws of warfare have crumbled. They’re bloodbaths. We sent half a dozen spies up Scarlet Peak in their search for Jing Beiyuan, and only one returned.”

Sweat feathered the undersides of Zhou Zishu’s shoulder blades. “What evidence do you even have that Beiyuan is alive? It should be impossible that he survived, and even if he did, he’d be a Prisoner now. Leave him be if he is.” He’d almost forgotten about Jiuxiao, had come so close to smoking him out of his brain like the last sluggish, undying wasp out of its hive, and now the memory was back to sink its stingers into every part of him until he swelled.

“He vanished with his jade bangles. Someone recognized his internal energy signature—they said it was his.” Han Ying shook his head. “I wasn’t part of the spy pod, so Han Ying cannot confirm. It’s a risk that Duan Shouling is willing to take—proof that Yujian Bang is still worth Jin Wang’s time.”

Zhou Zishu raised his eyebrows. “Wangye is letting Yujian Bang rot because he sees no value in maintaining us, now that Beiyuan is gone?”

Han Ying hung his head.

“He thinks we’re responsible,” Zhou Zishu concluded.

“The Blood Prisoners will kill us all eventually.”

Not if Zhou Zishu had any say left. Han Ying watched as he slipped the bangles onto his wrists—a hair too loose on him, but they’d have to do—tucked the guan into his collars to redo his knot, and curled Baiyi around his waist again. In the past, putting on new jade was ceremonial, retrieving lost jade victorious, and neither was done in silent witness within an anonymous tent, the sun baking the dirt into orange leather on the other side of the tarps. First swords were celebrated like weddings.

Zhou Zishu chained himself up in old stones as if tying his own noose.

Another assassin hurried past the tent when they stepped out, weighed down by an armful of cypress firewood, forehead dotted with a pearly sheen of sweat. Their sword clattered in their haste. Zhou Zishu knew he’d seen it elsewhere before—in someone else’s hand, in a face, and then in a grave.

He couldn’t remember whose.

In the end, they came from behind.

The Blood Prisoners were only afraid of one thing, and Zhou Zishu wore so much of it right now that his skin throbbed like a bitten tongue. He’d been chewing on the inside of his own mouth all evening; kiss him and he’d be a shriek of wet iron. His lips were probably red in the dark, black in the night.

All evening he’d been holding the flood back—memory, headache, nausea. They were all the same. He needed some fucking opium.

“Can you be still?” one of the assassins snapped at him when he shifted again. “You’re going to attract them from twenty li away if you keep fidgeting. If you can’t handle wearing so much Ice jade, wear standard grade. Heavens, why Han Ying recruited a spineless new fool like you…”

Zhou Zishu fought down his chuckle. Gravel crunched underfoot. It wasn’t ideal for an offensive stance, but at the foot of the mountain, they had few choices. Anywhere they ran was lying belly-up waiting to be skinned. Not that Duan Pengju would listen to anything Zhou Zishu had said. In the end, he’d reread Zhou Zishu’s strategy plan, grunted, and said, “I’ll think about it.”

So he figured he’d be dying in a few hours.

The entire body of the base was fanned out along the edges of Scarlet Peak, with some manning the other side of the mountain with rocky terrain and a stiff drop from a cliff into a ravine where the sound of rushing water was the only proof that it ended at all. Still others stood by carts piled high with cypress wood, the cuts still oozing with sap, the kindling was so fresh. Everything bled when they cut into it.

“They did say the Blood Feud would be tonight, didn’t they? Why haven’t they come? There’s something wrong, I don’t like how this feels.”

“They? Only Yu-xiongdi returned from Scarlet Peak, and he was half mad by the time he did. Duan Shouling is just as mad as him for planning this with no one to guard the base, but what better chances do we have? If we stayed in our tents with our tails between our legs, they’d pick us off one by one eventually. You scared?”

“Bastard, I’m not scared.” The other assassin looked no older than sixteen—barely older than Zhou Zishu had been when he’d first joined. His eyes were bloodshot and watery. He was carrying far too much jade for his internal energy to handle.

“You’ve never been to a Feud, have you?” The same assassin that had told Zhou Zishu to shut up laughed, bear trap mouth metallic and loud in the night. “Skinny son of a bitch like you. You look like you were still pissing your bed yesterday. Ah, fuck, Duan Shouling is really caping for recruits now.”

“If you don’t—”

“Have you seen what they do at Feuds after the Prisoners are dead? You don’t know, do you, why the Blood Prisoners are afraid of Ice jade? It destroys their meridians from the inside out. They’re already damaged because of the unorthodox Ice Palm path that they take. Run them through with the han qi and yin of Ice jade, and it shatters what’s left of them.”

Another laugh, this one ringing. The bear trap was snapping shut on something soft.

“What happens to them?”

“First, they fall apart.”

Zhou Zishu shut his eyes.

“Then you burn them. Boiling blood smells like roasting meat gone bad. Like you’re so hungry that you’ll eat anything, even after the bugs have gotten to it, because you want to stay alive so bad, you’d eat your own leg—a whole field of that.”

The burning.

“You’re fucking with me,” said the skinny one. He was a thief-browed, mouse-eyed dribble of a boy.

“Of course I’m fucking with you. Mama looks like she squirted you out of her pussy yesterday, I’m going to fuck with you as I see fit. What are you going to do when you see a Prisoner on the field? Ask them nicely to leave us alone? No—you make them fall apart. And then you undo them.”

Adrenaline puddled in the back of Zhou Zishu’s neck. It grew colder as the wind blew.

“You talk about them like they’re animals.” The younger assassin was shifting on his feet now, too. “They’re martial practitioners like any other. Just unorthodox ones that have lost themselves.”

“Maybe once that might have been true.” A scoff. “When the old bastard leader the Tiger’s Tooth was still around. They were scared of him. There used to be more bloodbonded Prisoners then, and they moved more carefully, and Yujian Bang knew where to cut losses and where to strike. Not anymore. You won’t be saying that when you see them, when you face one. Then, all you know to do is hurt.”

Hurt made it real.

“What difference did it make?”

“Bloodbonded Blood Prisoners? Use your brain, bastard. When you have someone to lose, would you still be a monster?”

An echo of a shout rang abruptly through the fringe of the mountains, followed by a clash of metal, and then silence—far from the main vanguard of assassins that Zhou Zishu was stationed with. The two beside him shut up, nerves crackling, and for the first time in a year Zhou Zishu opened his eyes and saw the world without winking lights, or doubles, or fuzz. Everything had detail. He could see every flying drop of blood.

“Who’s down?” someone shouted in reply as the silence grew longer and tenser.

There was no answer. For a moment, Zhou Zishu strained his ears, trying to catch errant noise over the hushed northern wind and the heavy breaths of Yujian swordsmen around him. Panic made them skitter like spooked horses. It was his turn to want to tell everyone to stand still, that he couldn’t hear over their feet on the stones.

He sensed it before anyone else—the air changing, the smell of blood turning from stale and jellied into hot splashes—and he whirled where he stood to block the slash of twin daggers from a Blood Prisoner, who laughed at the flicker of shock across his face. Their teeth were already bloody, lined in black in the moonlight, and Zhou Zishu’s arm strained as they pushed their daggers closer to his face. Their resistance and strength was unprecedented.

Things are different now, Zhou Zishu.

He slanted his body until their blades slid away from each other, and arced low to kick out where their feet were—they were sluggish from feeding, but stronger for it, too, so they swayed when his legs cuffed their ankles, but they didn’t fall like they should have. Zhou Zishu ducked backward as they aimed a volley of stabs towards his neck, and felt someone else’s jade sword slash so close to the underside of his head that the tip scraped a line at the first cobble of his spine. He went leg over head, pivoting on one foot. Twice more. They missed, but only barely, each time.

Yujian assassins that had been stationed in trees or lookouts poured out in thick streams and ran up against the flood of Blood Prisoners. From a distance, Duan Pengju was shouting orders. Some of them were positions Zhou Zishu had told him to use. Others he came up with as blades crashed.

It didn’t matter. Already, the air was hot and gory.

Resonant pops broke the sounds of voices and weapons. Explosives—Zhou Zishu recognized some of them. Saltpeter bombs were filled with ground low-grade jade dust, and then ignited over large areas. Others snapped like hot oil, in series of firecrackers. Those had to belong to Blood Mountain, but they started low, snaking fires wherever they burned, until the ground was lined with concentric circles of embers. The wind picked up flakes of the fire and swept them airborne.

Zhou Zishu lunged again, throwing himself into a low aerial to dodge, and then brought his sword down in a long arc that cut a gash in the Prisoner’s neck. Their breath hitched as blood flooded their throat and wormed in dark, ropey lines from their mouth.

“It’s you,” they wheezed as they staggered, still clutching their daggers, looking for support and finding none. “The one that vanished—Tiger’s Tooth.”

Zhou Zishu looked wordlessly down at them as they crumpled. They were pretty, he registered vaguely, or might have been once. They drove their dagger into the dead body upon which they leaned their weight just to stay upright.

Then they laughed. “What are you going to do when you find who you’re looking for, Tiger’s Tooth? What does the highest law of Yujian Bang dictate? Your own is no longer your own the moment they become—”

A squelching throttle as Zhou Zishu drove Baiyi into their face through their mouth, and then they slumped over when he pulled out.

He shook. There was no time for shaking. There was no time for thinking—he turned and already four, five, half a dozen more Prisoners converged upon him. Their mouths were dripping. The blood had made them mad, blackening their arms up to their elbows. Several of them had dragged it down their cheeks, handprints standing out like false eyes in their faces, so that their entire heads looked like they were staring at him.

Zhou Zishu couldn’t let his mind wander, but it did. They encircled him, and he ducked beneath them so that they’d fall upon each other’s blades and teeth, then pull back hissing and lunging for him. One of them caught him around his arm, and another at his neck, and both shrieked when the jade burned them. The retreat was always messy enough for him to catch the opening and launch himself across their chests with Liu Yun Nine-Step Form.

He dragged his blade parallel to his leg, digging down hard enough that he heard metal on bone, and landed on both feet. Then he listened for the thud of bodies behind him.

The fighting lulled where he stood. There were more bodies than assassins or Prisoners around him, and Zhou Zishu blinked as he took another long, hard look into the melee by the cliffs. Blood sheeted down the face of the horrible bear trap of a man that had stood beside him during the guard, one eye swollen shut like a rotting fig, and he shouted as he slashed with his sword. It wasn’t his—that wasn’t his sword.

Perhaps Zhou Zishu didn’t recognize any of the others, but that sword had belonged to Jiuxiao. He’d know it anywhere. He’d buried him with it. What was it doing here, in what Han Ying thought would be the last Blood Feud?

Han Ying. Zhou Zishu scanned the night for him, and found his body hunched over in the tall grass with someone else’s body in his arms. He was sitting up, shaking them, and Zhou Zishu jogged over.

“Yi-xiong,” Han Ying cried. “Yi-xiong, don’t leave us, come on—”

Two gruesome, double-crescent bites were on both sides of his neck. Two Prisoners had gotten to him, and the sword in his chest was his own. Zhou Zishu stared down at him—saw Beiyuan, saw Jiuxiao, saw Shifu—

“Zhou Bangzhu,” Han Ying looked up, beseeching. His lip was split and bloodied. “Please—”

“Put him down, Ying-er. He’s gone. Let him go.”

He helped Han Ying to unsteady feet. “Where is Duan Pengju?” he demanded, holding him by the shoulders. “We’re going down. We should take who we have left and go back to the base where there’s enough jade to protect the survivors—otherwise the Feud will go on until every single one of us is dead.”

“Bangzhu, he was—” Han Ying began, but paused at the noise of rustling fabric and paper behind them, as if a town crier had alighted and unrolled a scroll that bounced away from them like a stray cat. “Bangzhu, where’s your sword—?”

In his hand, why?

Zhou Zishu turned to look over his shoulder to see someone standing a spitting distance behind him, on the sloping back of a recently slaughtered Yujian assassin. The body was covered in the spatter of the Prisoner they’d killed, flesh disintegrating where jade touched it. There was blood on his face, too, but only a thin trickle from the corner of his mouth and a dark smear over his neck like someone had kissed him, then bitten down so he'd remember them. If the rest of him was bloody, Zhou Zishu couldn’t tell—his robes were red all the way down to his shoes, as if he’d gotten lost on the way to his own wedding.

He stood with his hands clasped behind him, meeting their gazes with bland curiosity, like a drifting spectator that had strolled into the wrong theater. Zhou Zishu wondered what absurd, violent story they told. He turned to face him, pushing Han Ying behind him.

Control scared him. It was easier to cut down something that was snapping at his throat. Zhou Zishu didn’t like anything that knew to hide its hands around him.

The Prisoner started towards them, and when Zhou Zishu backed away, a shadow of hurt fell over the Prisoner’s face. As if they were supposed to be waltzing, and Zhou Zishu was taking all the wrong steps.

“Bangzhu—”

“Shh,” Zhou Zishu hissed.

It could have only been a heartbeat. It could have been a full, moonburnt night. They stared at each other long enough that Zhou Zishu could imagine blood seeping from the corners of the Prisoner’s eyes.

Then the Prisoner began walking again, and this time Zhou Zishu coiled all of his body to strike—but he simply brought his hands into the light and nudged Zhou Zishu’s blade aside with the tip of a folded fan. His eyes were sliding past them, like he’d seen bigger prey, and Zhou Zishu wasn’t even quite worth his time. In the next moment, he’d been swallowed by bodies again, by jade, green lacing the night with its acid.

Zhou Zishu glanced back at Han Ying, and then nodded. They began to run. Han Ying dodged the growing piles of bodies thick as a forest root system with horrible, sure footing.

“I’m going to find Duan Pengju. We have to retreat. Amass as many other assassins as you can.”

“Leave it to me, Bangzhu. We’ll go back. And then—” Zhou Zishu could only see his eyes widen because they went huge and blue in the night, sclera milky with rivers of fine vein-red, and he shouted, “Bangzhu, move!”

A saltpeter bomb large as a bull ignited like an arrowhead to the sun between them. One moment, they were both standing. Then Han Ying’s body met his like a barrel full of bricks, and the sky fell.

Zhou Zishu woke up alive again. His cheeks, his head, his arms all throbbed out of tune with each other like misplaced chambers of his heart. A leaden weight was crushing him into the dirt beneath him. His mouth tasted of hot iron.

He tried moving and found that he still could. So he tried listening, and found that he heard nothing. Overhead, the night had shifted from dark cobalt to unforgiving black ink, with wind chilling the smell of blood. What tiny fires had been burning were ghostly motes of smoke among bodies.

So he lay where he’d fallen, listening to the silence.

The silence after death was always different. Heavier, like all the souls from fallen bodies were floating up out of open mouths to make the air damp and humid. The silence that had blanketed him after the massacre at Four Seasons Villa was so thick that Zhou Zishu could still recall the tightening of his lungs, the asphyxiation at the smell—if he breathed in that air, it’d solidify inside him. So he’d run, feeling souls part around him, until he got far enough to throw up.

He couldn’t throw up now, even as he peeled the weight from his back to sit up. Han Ying. Poor, broken Han Ying, whose chest was a tubular mess of guts, congealed like boiled marrow—Zhou Zishu knew if he wanted, he could put his entire arm through the hole in Han Ying’s chest, hold him up by the shoulders and peer through him like a looking glass. His face was grey from how much blood had oozed out of his body.

Zhou Zishu tugged his gloves off his fingers, skin singing with the jade burn when the bangles touched his bare wrists, and then passed his palms over Han Ying’s eyes to close them. Then he staggered to his feet, knees knocking like a fawn in spring.

Son of a bitch coward. You were the Tiger’s Tooth once. Now you fold like a water-blooded fool.

Blood Feud. It meant that the Blood Prisoners had come down the mountain with the intent to feed via ambush. They’d been few and far between before Zhou Zishu had left because the risks outweighed their gains.

The heel of his boot ground a stray entrail into the mud, and with a tiny squeal it bulged and broke. A fine spray of bile freckled a nearby arm.

He scanned the bodies for Duan Pengju. Some of them hung precariously from the edge of the ravine drop, though the rocks by the edge didn’t look as though they’d been disturbed. There hadn’t been a struggle, and he didn’t think even a Prisoner could survive a fall that far.

Zhou Zishu extended a leg to kick over the body of the bear trap assassin, whose jaw had been wrenched open so wide it hung off his face at an unnatural angle—pulled out of its sockets, probably, though not torn off his face. Blood stained him down to his belly in a black oil slick. A Prisoner had torn out his tongue and drank from the flood of gore, and then he’d drowned in the backflow of his own blood. Zhou Zishu had seen it before, and Jiuxiao had come up with a crass name for it: Face of Pleasure.

Found two more with Faces of Pleasure, Shixiong. It’s the work of Prisoners for sure.

I’ve told you that isn’t funny.

Of course not, it’s not funny, Shixiong. What would you have me do? Lament every Prisoner victim as though they were our own? If I don’t laugh, then I’ll go mad. If you’re not careful, you will too.

He knelt where the man had dropped his sword, the blade trapped between fallen bodies. The metal sliced through cooling, bruised flesh when he extracted it. The moon hit the blade and light shone through the center, where Jiuxiao had jade inlaid to make up the main shaft before wrapping it in polished iron.

Yujian Bang assassins were buried with every cut of jade they’d earned. The excess, the swords that all the current disciples were too weak to carry, the hunger for blood—the crumble of law. They would have had to rob the graves of the dead for so much jade that it would clack when they walked.

From whose wrists had they twisted the bangles that Zhou Zishu wore now? The belt was his, but the guan that protected his head?

He ignored the sear when he went for his wrists with his bare fingers. A desperate, unthinking noise of anger rose in the back of his throat when his fingers reddened under the stone—the first time, he’d smashed them off by stomping on his own wrists, then washed the blood away in a stream. Yujian Bang as you knew it is gone. A leaching, sour thought started at the back of his brain. He could break his thumbs to get the bangles off, maybe.

A whimper like a dying animal cut through the silence, and Zhou Zishu’s head shot up.

It hadn’t been a call or a cry for help, just a noise, and he strained his ears. The wind brought him hoarse giggles and mumbling. He rose back to unsteady feet, woozy and still sucking in the soupy soul-heavy air, and followed the sound. It had to be at least two, maybe three people talking—not quite to each other. There was a drooly trickle of a stream that cascaded over the edge of the cliffs to become a blue mist, and it splashed thick when his foot landed in it. It ran red with blood.

Then Zhou Zishu rounded a sagging arch of rock and found three assassins, hunched over and still snickering, like they were sharing secrets over candle light, backs shaking like cockroach shells. The churning squelch of flesh cut between them, and then that horrible, cut-off moan again.

A pair of feet stuck out from between them. Red boots. Red soles, where the Prisoner had stepped in brains and blood. One of the assassins was the scrawny mouse-eyed boy that had never even seen a Blood Feud before, holding a jade dagger that was stained up to the hilt.

On the ground lay the Prisoner that had stared at Zhou Zishu and Han Ying, then did nothing as he glided past. His sleeves were pushed up to his shoulders and his arms were carved in lacy lines—and Zhou Zishu’s nausea began to burn in his nose when he realized they were words. Leech son of a bitch leech this is for Yu Yongfei this was the work of Yujian Bang leech leech leech. They had pulled his collars open, too, had begun carving repulsive renderings of sex across his chest. What I did to your women, one of them was slashing into the space beneath his ribs. The blade caught on muscle fiber, and the assassin grunted before yanking it through. He sighed at the dark pearl of blood that gushed to the surface.

The broken hilt of a jade sword had been stuffed into the Prisoner’s mouth like a gag. Blood burbled out of both corners of his mouth in steady streams where it burned him, and his eyes were half-closed. If he hadn’t made any noise, Zhou Zishu would have passed right over him. Even to the trained eye, he looked dead.

“What are you doing?” Zhou Zishu demanded, voice grainy from the saltpeter and jade dust, and the three of them whirled to look at him. One of them had a Face of Pleasure, and he was swaying drunkenly from the shock, his laughter muffled and terrible as blood oozed out of his hanging jaw.

“Killing,” said one of them, the one that couldn’t stop giggling. Streaks of white ran in handfuls through his hair; the energy of Ice jade was overloading his meridians. Around his waist was a belt so thick with stones that it had to have belonged to someone from Zhou Zishu’s inner circle. “No. Hurting, hurting so they remember. Hurting so they don’t come back. Like what we did? Don’t interrupt us, we were having fun. If you join,” he held out his sword, which he’d been using to slice patterns into the skin around the Prisoner’s diaphragm, “you could start on the rest. Piss here, we were thinking—”

Zhou Zishu swiped for the blade, and the assassin swung it out of his way, waxen face darkening. “Now what’s gotten into you, new brat?” he said. “You want to die for this leech?”

“Kill him and be done with it. There’s no need for extended torture.”

The one with the Face of Pleasure began to black out in earnest, crumpling where he stood. Neither of the other two—the one with the sword, or the mouse-eyed boy—budged to even look. Zhou Zishu eyed him where he lay, eyes wide and glassy in the night. Soon they’d sink into his skull, then cloud over like a fish’s. That was how you figured how fresh a dead thing was.

“Cocky bitch new boy wants to try to tell me how to kill a Prisoner now, huh?” He sized Zhou Zishu up. “What, are you going to stop me? Put on a little bit of the Tiger’s Tooth jade and you think you know shit? It’ll sooner kill you.” He laughed in Zhou Zishu’s face, then turned to the Prisoner on the ground. For a moment, his eyelids fluttered, moths in the night.

“San-ge,” said the mouse-eyed boy. “Let’s just go.”

San-ge. Someone’s son, Zhou Zishu thought. Whose? Third brother. He sneered at him, without knowing how close the Tiger’s Tooth really stood. The one called San-ge leaned in and gave a kick to the Prisoner’s head so that it skidded against the rocks, and he moaned. His scleras were red where the veins had burst in his eyes from jade poisoning. The third brother pinned his boot on his cheek so that the Prisoner’s face was ground into the dirt at an angle, facing Zhou Zishu. The tendon in his neck stood out, taut as a bowstring.

“Leeches killed my entire sect,” he said. “I have no pity for them. I have no pity for those who pity them. If I want to hurt them, then I will. They don’t know anything until they hurt.”

Zhou Zishu’s gaze flickered down to the ground again. The Prisoner had opened his eyes, and he was staring up at him. Zhou Zishu expected to see something in his face—pleading, disgust, hatred, a mix of all three, or, or even something feral, but.

There was nothing. All moonlight ended where it touched him. The Prisoner looked at him the same way a ghost watched a coffin carrying their own body away did.

“Kill him or I will.”

The Prisoner’s eyes shut again, blood foaming out of his mouth. The jade gag was still caught in his teeth.

“No,” said the third brother, shifting his foot to the shoulder, flicking open more of the Prisoner’s clothes to bare skin—clear, uncarved skin, unused canvas. “I’m not done playing. We’re not done hurting.”

The third brother laughed as he dug the tip of his sword into the Prisoner’s belly, then scowled when the body beneath them didn’t even squirm or flinch. Pain had become meaningless. Blood welled to the surface of his skin and pooled, blooming over him like a spider lily.

“Come on, leech,” he spat. “I want to see you beg.”

The mouse-eyed boy aimed a kick at his head again. The noise was damp and sick, like they were passing a rotting durian back and forth.

Zhou Zishu didn’t think. He reached out as they started to write—piss, the boy had really meant it, and grabbed the blade of the jade sword in his palm. The burn came first, then the hot slice of pain when the edges cut through his flesh and blood gushed from his hand.

“You—! What’s wrong with you?” he shouted.

“Kill him and be done,” Zhou Zishu said, ignoring the sear when the boy tried yanking it out of his grip, the blade cutting deeper. Blood ran in rivulets down the shaft, to the tip, and speckled over the Prisoner’s mangled skin. “Don’t make me say it again.”

He squeezed, harder, and the jade bangles hummed around his wrists before a dark green pulse ran through Zhou Zishu’s knuckles, through his fingers, along the sword and shocked the boy’s hand off the handle. A deep valley of red was scorched into the topography of his palm, and he grabbed his wrist with the other hand before rounding on Zhou Zishu again.

“You—you’re the—”

“Go,” said Zhou Zishu. “Don’t return.”

They were swallowed by the soft-spun night as they ran. They’d made off with too much jade, but it didn’t matter to him. Zhou Zishu wasn’t the Tiger’s Tooth anymore.

The Prisoner had a dark, dirty boot print on his cheek where they’d pinned his face into the earth. Zhou Zishu turned to face him, shifting his grip to the handle of the jade sword, then hissed where the stone dug into his raw muscle. He was bleeding enough that it was sliding in dark black trails past the hilt, staining the blade, into the Prisoner’s open wounds.

He raised the sword.

Shixiong! Please, Shixiong, please, there must be a way—

You were bitten in two places on your neck and on both wrists, Jiuxiao. You know the laws of Yujian Bang better than most. You helped draft the new codes. I can’t—I can’t.

I can help this way, Shixiong. No, please, wait! Listen!

His eyes had started turning red even as he spoke. The jade had begun to burn him everywhere it touched, where once Jiuxiao could have worn half the armory’s worth of jade and not flinched under the energy.

It’s already killing you, Jiuxiao.

Let me become a Prisoner. Let me live, and let me try to find Beiyuan. After that—after that, if we meet again, then I’ll die by your hand, Shixiong.

The Prisoner below him was still breathing.

The nausea couldn’t be swallowed this time.

Beiyuan is long gone, Jiuxiao.

Shixiong—no, Shixiong!

The jade sword clattered against stone and scabbard when Zhou Zishu dropped it. He was thankful for the state of his hand, for the pain to ground him, for the real immediate things—when he sank to his knees to pull the collars of the Prisoner’s robe closed, the caking blood in his fingers felt like a glove all on its own. Then he tugged him upright, and the Prisoner’s head flopped forward to rest on his chest.

Up close, with his eyes closed in earnest, he looked younger than Zhou Zishu had expected. The dark fan of his eyelashes cast spiky lines down his cheekbones, as if he’d been crying blood. Wrench his eyelids open and his scleras would be red into the tear ducts.

If Zhou Zishu wanted to keep this one alive long enough to question him about Jing Beiyuan and his rumored whereabouts, he had to move fast.

The base wasn’t too far. He prised the Blood Prisoner’s jaw open and extracted the bloodied jade gag, then planted his feet beneath him, shuffled until the Prisoner was positioned over his shoulder, and hoisted them both into a standing position. Sweet, warm blood spilled down his sleeve when Zhou Zishu’s shoulder dug into the carved muscle of his abdomen, and he reached down for Baiyi where he’d dropped it before setting off across the field of bodies.

There would be no burning tonight. Briefly, Zhou Zishu pictured himself in the night—once, he’d been tasked with ridding a particularly virulent colony of ants that would spring up every summer outside the gates of Four Seasons Villa. Every time they’d smoked the ants out of the soil, he’d see several of them carrying their little injured brethren on their backs, climbing over their dead in a bid for life. He’d watch to see how far they’d get, and then he’d stomp on them if they didn’t die fast enough.

He kept walking. Nothing—no storm, no foot, no force—materialized to crush them into their own muddied carnage. At his back, the Prisoner’s arms swung as twin pendulums with the gait of his walk.

Zhou Zishu’s skin pulsed, like his blood no longer belonged to him.

Come morning, it didn’t.

...though it is well-documented otherwise. Furthermore, past scholars have noted and observed a phenomenon most commonly found in Xuefan Pai, the Blood Prisoner Sect, which presently occupies Scarlet Peak of Blood Mountain. Members of this sect have the ability to establish “bonds” with other martial practitioners of their sect. The details of the ritual needed to create this bond are unclear. Between intel collected from mercenary workers of Yujian Bang and spies of the region, it can be understood that a Prisoner blood bond requires:

一, No more than two participants, at least one of whom practices the Ice Palm path,
二, The mixing of the blood of the participants,
三, A binding Ice jade agent

It should be noted that there have been no recorded accounts of blood bonds between Prisoners and martial practitioners of the orthodox arts or non-practitioners, most likely due to the violent and unrestrained nature of a Prisoner in the presence of blood. However, no evidence suggests that these bonds are impossible.

Once the bond has been established, the bondmates will no longer be able to depend on outside sources and instead must rely on each other for sustenance; therefore, it is not in the interest of either bondmate to harm the other, even if the bond was created with ulterior self-serving or malicious motives. As such, the bond manifests in physical and psychological ways—flattened hostile behaviors, increased production of blood, and increased sensitivity to phantom pains if one or both are injured. This list is inexhaustive.

A ballad from Northern Zhou, initially dismissed as a popular children’s nursery rhyme warning against straying from home after dark, is now believed to portray the flattening of hostility that a bond will have on bonded Prisoners:

I met a vengeful tiger on a moonless night,
and I begged him not to eat me.
He opened his spider lily mouth and showed me his teeth.
And only one fang sat among his gums.
‘Tiger, tiger,’ I asked him, shaking,
‘what happened to your fangs?’
He laughed and said ‘I’ve only one,’ so I smiled under my lantern.
I was safe, for what can one tiger’s tooth do?
But I was a fool. There should always be two.
Two meant there was no reason for vengeance, two was safe,
and I was one.

The author of this ballad is unknown.

When winter passed in Four Seasons Villa, a new snow would blanket the grounds—the flecks of millions of blossoms from the plum and pear trees. The air always took on a sweet, muddy pungence that Zhou Zishu would grow up to laugh at. The winds would blow and they’d smell like the dark fragrance of someone’s parted thighs. Train outside all day in the right places, and you’d come in smelling of sex.

“Don’t be long,” Qin Huaizhang had said that morning, adjusting the hemp straps of Zhou Zishu’s carrying canteen. The basket was massive and had been lined with bundles of heavy linen, silks, and even packed with lamb’s wool. It’d been secure enough to carry an infant across plains and deserts. When Zhou Zishu had asked what he’d be bringing back, his master had shaken his head. It was safer for him not to know. “And do not attract any attention. Speak only to those who know why you’re on your way. Understand, Zishu?”

“Yes, Shifu.”

“Tell Shifu you understand.”

“This disciple understands.”

“You remember what to say for the exchange, correct?”

“‘There’s a wind coming.’”

“Good.” Qin Huaizhang had extended a hand, squeezed him at his shoulder. They were nearly eye-to-eye now after Zhou Zishu’s recent growth spurt that had given him the gangly, somewhat unhealthy look of someone who’d grown too much in too short a time. “Be safe and return well.”

He hadn’t thought he’d receive an answer, but Zhou Zishu asked anyway—“Shifu, what does it mean? That a wind is coming?”

Qin Huaizhang had looked at him for a long time—so long that Zhou Zishu had almost ducked his head, saluted and apologized for his impertinence, and gone on his way. Then his shifu said, “It means that change is coming, and that we must brace for it as the world does: by bending. Rigidity ends in fracture. We must choose where to give. And we must choose where to drop our leaves and flowers.”

Zhou Zishu had nodded, not understanding a word, but Qin Huaizhang had nodded in return to mean that their conversation was over.

“Ah, Zishu, one last thing. I nearly forgot.”

“Shifu, if you have further requests, please speak directly.”

“If there are visitors at the gates, be sure to let them in on my word, with your pass,” Qin Huaizhang advised. “We’re expecting them.”

All the trees that day, fruiting and heavy as they were, had smelled of blood.

He woke in a tub of tinted water, pink as a slapped cheek.

Zhou Zishu jerked upright, the cold bath sloshing like an empty stomach around him when he did, and gripped both sides of the tub when the world spun. He was naked. His skin had pruned and paled where it had been submerged underwater all night, though his wounded hand had dangled over the lip of the tub. Blood had formed a dark ring like a bruised eye on the floor beside him. Closing his hand meant listening to the crackle of drying scabs.

Malaise sat inside him, perched on the edge of his throat in the shape of a retch. Opening his mouth to cough did nothing but tell him he had a headache—one unlike an opium withdrawal headache, the familiar pound behind his eyes. This was an itch, a deep bruise. He pictured his head knotted with tunnels. Things that hated light scurried through him on a thousand feet. When he turned his face to the morning, it hurt.

A dark purple groove, patterned with wood grain, was creased into his skin where the bend of his arm had rested on the edge of the tub. Zhou Zishu rubbed his fingers over it—over the reddened skin, over the faint raised crescent scars. No one was left alive to see them, but his hand jumped to cover them anyway.

Dawn. The cicadas had already begun to scream. More distantly here, in the north, but still the air rattled with their noise. A slice of sunrise fell in a blistered line through the tent. Zhou Zishu sat motionless in his own bloody bathwater, trying to remember the night that had passed.

The Blood Feud. Han Ying. The Prisoner, the jade in his mouth, his torn skin. The long walk. Zhou Zishu had gone through the motions of rescue without any of the urgency, without knowing why—he wanted answers about Jing Beiyuan, he’d told himself. A Prisoner from Blood Mountain was the best place he was going to get them. Never mind that he’d never had any trouble wresting answers out of Prisoners under the threat of death or torture in the past. Never mind that he knew, logically, there were other places he could look. Never mind that he could ascend Scarlet Peak himself to see if the spies had just made a wishful mistake.

The outline of everything had been streaky, as if his entire world was damp ink, and he’d just dragged his hand across the scroll.

He’d worked in silence. Zhou Zishu had swept the paper and inkpots off a table to clear space for a body, then set the Prisoner down and stared at him.

How he’d still been alive was a mystery. When Zhou Zishu had pried his eyelids open to examine his scleras, a dark red film had pooled over his corneas. As expected, his tear ducts had begun leaking blood. How long had he been holding the jade in his mouth? It was a miracle his brain hadn’t liquefied and melted out of his ears. How much blood had he lost? Enough to kill any normal human. The infirmary was on the other side of the base, and Zhou Zishu had trudged to and back, only pausing to rip a long strand of jade beads from the perimeter.

The night had passed slowly, gawking over his shoulder to point out all his ugly stitches. The Prisoner had been bloody down to the tops of his thighs, blood crusting the fabric until it was starchy and stiff as old dumpling wrappers—it was a funny, sick process, trying to stitch all that raw meat back into its skin. Zhou Zishu had extended the Prisoner’s arm to read the words they’d left. Sodomizer. Leech. The one with the Face of Pleasure must have had been educated as a scholar at some point, leaving behind the proverb Blood debts will always be paid with blood.

He’d sewn up the words until they were fragments, and then until they said nothing, finishing by tying the Prisoner’s limbs down with jade.

There should have been anger in Zhou Zishu’s belly. There should have been more hatred. There should have been more anything, and it should have tasted like the muddy pear trees, or too-sweet Nanjiang pastry, or the opium that he wished would shoot another hole through his brain.

Instead, he’d looked down at the Prisoner that was neither dead nor sleeping, and he’d been tired.

Even at dawn, the sun began to bake the damp ends of his hair crisp when Zhou Zishu stumbled outside, skin and blood still smarting from being underwater for so long. The base was as quiet as he’d left it the night before, and the wind brought alternating breaths of warmth and sudden, sharp chills; the itching in his brain shifted into something stiffer, weepy, like a mosquito bite that had made his elbow swell like a grapefruit.

Opium. It didn’t matter if this was the last stage of withdrawal, or something entirely new. Killing himself where he stood was no longer an option, not unless he went back to the war room and undid his work. Last night, when he’d been moving without thinking, he hadn’t thought to check, but the infirmary had to have opium.

The sharp, medicinal tang of incense and herbs wreathed around him when Zhou Zishu ducked inside the tent. Cots lined each side, most unmade, some sporting dark stains like aging liver spots. A table barnacled with an assortment of vials and canisters stood at the far end. The air was hot and sleepy.

Zhou Zishu went for the drawers first—they wouldn’t have left opium lying out where anyone could have grabbed it. Parcels of portioned sleep aids, pain killers, fever breakers, and blood coagulators fell into his lap. He ignored the shake of dust over his clothes, hands starting to tremble when he smelled the ever-present sweet of lavender floating up towards him. The gashes in his right palm opened and wept clear, pearly lymph with the blood, staining whatever he touched.

His skin stung. Zhou Zishu pressed his fingers against his unbruised wrist and hissed at the dull ache that striated the length of his arm. Pain like this hadn’t been invited.

“Come on…”

One of the drawers fell open to an armful of sketches and scrolls with detailed diagrams mapping out a body’s meridians, and Zhou Zishu nearly slammed it shut in frustration before he caught a familiar name in the corner of yellowed parchment. His belly did something sick and familiar. The low swoop, the sudden twist.

Jing Beiyuan.

Zhou Zishu tugged out the scrap of parchment, taking care not to let it tear. He hadn’t even had a chance to give it a cursory glance when he caught a glimpse of a folded letter at the bottom of the drawer, stamped with the imperial seal upon its cover.

OPIUM ORDER FOR YU GUANYIN

Trade document confirming the sale of opium to the imperially sanctioned Yu Guanyin for usage upon its members. Intended effects include temporarily strengthened internal energy and resistance to the effects of Ice jade upon meridians in order to forgo necessary time periods of skillset training in order to wield Ice jade.

Adjacent trading with Yujian Bang authorized and encouraged by the crown.

As hot as the infirmary tent was, that familiar spit-and-tongue chill appeared at the back of Zhou Zishu’s neck again. He rifled the papers for the one that had Jing Beiyuan’s name across the bottom. It had been addressed to him.

Zhou Zishu had never seen this letter before.

Bangzhu,

I will meet you in Luoyang immediately. Do not bring anyone with you, not even Jiuxiao.

Jing Beiyuan

Zhou Zishu reread the words, moving so quickly that the words smeared on the page. They were in Beiyuan’s hand, with his usual tiny flourish on the last stroke in the third character of his name.

Was it at the Blood Feud of Luoyang that you saw Jing Beiyuan for the last time?

Who had known? Why had this letter never reached him? Why was it sitting here, with bizarre documents detailing opium trade to Yujian Bang, suggesting that jade—

He heard the approach between the throbs of his heartbeat in his temples, had only a moment to react before the impact nearly slammed Zhou Zishu nose-first into the table. A dark red blur clipped into his side, barreling into him with the force of a battering ram, and his body arced down upon the table hard enough to crush it when he steeled himself against the blow. A shower of vials rained down upon him, ceramic and clay shattering, crunching when he rolled out of the way of another strike.

“What—”

He vaulted back to his feet, shards clinging to him in pinpricks like tree burrs and nettles. The infirmary, naturally, was stocked with no proper weapons, but the force of the attack had thrown the cabinets open and an array of medicinal jade totems carved with tigers had rattled to the floor. Zhou Zishu snatched one. His boots crunched when he whirled.

Zhou Zishu had been an assassin for years—he’d seen more than his fair share of Blood Prisoners, and had gotten good enough to pick them out from a crowd of orthodox martial practitioners, even though they didn’t look at all different until they opened their mouths. He’d met Prisoners with hair the silver of polished iron and eyes blued with cataracts, with slouchy mouths and hands like winter-plucked trees. He’d met Prisoners that reminded him of himself—angry and tired. He’d met children, and those were the worst of all, looking up at him with their bloody mouths and dirtied hands, asking if they were in trouble.

He’d met one on the road, a lost, dying jade runner, and he had the scars to prove it. He’d never had to prove it.

This one—this one.

He was tall, taller than Zhou Zishu, and imposing. Corpse-pale from blood loss, hair so black that Zhou Zishu imagined touching it and pulling away with ink-stained fingers. Nothing the morning sun did made him look more alive. He gripped the folds of his robes, hands flexing in and out of the fabric, wheezing like a hunted animal. Zhou Zishu watched him. His words dragged like blade on flesh when he spoke.

“What did you do?”

Save a monster and it will wake up thinking you hurt it first. Zhou Zishu said nothing, letters still clutched in one hand, jade in the other. Round burns lined the Prisoner’s skin, a constellation of coin-sized marks across his neck and wrists. His ankles. It should have been impossible for him to break out of the bonds.

“What did you do!” the Prisoner shouted, and then he was moving again—and Zhou Zishu was sluggish from pain, the opium fog that lingered. The Prisoner was faster than he was, a fevered red slash like the sudden, hushed spurt of blood after a decapitation. They both went down. The Prisoner bared his teeth and hissed, snapping his jaws shut barely an arm’s length away from Zhou Zishu’s face. His teeth clicked. Stick your finger between them when they closed, and they’d take them off cleanly at the knuckle.

He was starving. Of course he was. The assassins had bled him dry as game fowl.

“I saved your life!” Zhou Zishu shouted. He could barely restrain him. The Prisoner’s scleras were paler than they were last night, but his eyes had begun to weep red, jagged trails down his cheeks as he opened his jaws and snapped at Zhou Zishu’s wrist. He needed Baiyi, but then the Prisoner’s fangs came so close to the jut of his wrist bones that he could feel the wet, heavy puff of breath upon his skin.

He jammed the bar of tiger jade as hard as he could into the Prisoner’s open mouth, violent enough to force it halfway down his throat. The body on top of him convulsed with a gag, and Zhou Zishu wriggled out from beneath it. Like an elk that had just gored through the eye of a bear.

The Prisoner pulled back, choking. A wet thud, like he’d hacked up part of a lung, or crumbs of liver, or one of the arteries that tunneled into his heart, and spat at Zhou Zishu’s feet. The jade rolled like a head. His mouth was bleeding again. Even from where he stood, laughing, his fanged canines were visible. The back of his hand came away smeared cinnabar-red when he dragged it over his mouth.

Zhou Zishu thought he was going to say something, words teetering at the cliff’s edge of his lip, and the hesitation cost him.

He dodged when the Prisoner launched himself towards him again. If he’d been ready, he would’ve gotten away—but the Prisoner’s hand clamped down upon Zhou Zishu’s ankle until the joint groaned like a bridge caught in high gusts, flattened by the pressure. One sharp yank and his chest met floor hard enough for the wind to rush out from his body. When the Prisoner dragged him back, still dizzied, Zhou Zishu made to dig his nails into the wood.

“You damned me,” the Prisoner said, punctuating his words with three blows to Zhou Zishu’s shoulder until he felt his shoulder buckling under the force. “A Bonded Prisoner is nothing but a weak son of a bitch, and you’ve damned me. Why? What do you want?”

Bonded?

“What are you talking about?”

Zhou Zishu tried to land another strike and heard only his shoulder protesting when he missed. The angle was wrong. The foreign ache that had made its home in him rendered him slow and clumsy, but his thoughts had begun to race, tripping over themselves in mismatched scraps. Bonded. The two of them? How? There hadn’t been a ritual.

Not that it mattered. This was how Zhou Zishu was going to die: facedown, undignified, belly to splintering wood. Someone might find him if they came looking; he wondered if they’d recognize him by then. The Prisoner jammed his elbow as if to stake Zhou Zishu through his body and keep him in place, and then he felt it in his shoulder, where robe met skin—the burning pierce of teeth.

He shut his eyes, heaving once, before swinging his arm backward behind him so violently it popped in its socket, and it met the side of the Prisoner’s face hard enough that his cheekbone should have buckled. It was not so difficult. The human face was more solid than it looked, all that armor shielding the grey jelly of the brain, but it caved at the right angle. More than one Yujian assassin in Zhou Zishu’s time had lived with a sunken cheek and blocked sinuses until they died.

The Prisoner rolled off him again. His form was all animal. Zhou Zishu finally pinned him down with a stronger grip than he’d use on any normal opponent, crushing his throat into the floor. It wasn’t any use—the Prisoner wrenched his head so hard that Zhou Zishu’s wrist bloomed with pain, and then clamped his teeth once more upon his arm.

Blood spurted from Zhou Zishu’s arm like juice from bursting plums.

He hissed. He watched. Zhou Zishu never looked away—not after the massacre, never during Feuds, not in the burning. When he closed his eyes, the images still lingered on the backs of his eyelids. Zhou Zishu was the death registry of everyone more easily forgotten. If he fell from high up, if his body cracked in a lovely glistening splash over marble and stone, nothing but memory would be left behind where he landed.

The Prisoner’s eyes stayed open, unblinking, nearly glowing as he sucked greedily at Zhou Zishu’s blood. He’d bitten through skin with his fangs and his blunt front teeth, and rivulets streamed down the length of Zhou Zishu’s exposed forearm onto the Prisoner’s chest. Puddled in the dip of his throat, in the tiny well where his clavicles almost kissed, the blood almost looked clean.

It always seemed wrong that, when he was cut open, Zhou Zishu bled red like any other living thing. Fine red blood belonged to those who didn’t deserve to bleed. If anyone did what he’d done, their blood should turn black. Or they shouldn’t bleed at all. Blood sang no songs and told no stories; kill a child or save it, the color behind your eyes would be the same.

Impossibly, the dull, full-bodied thrum of pain that Zhou Zishu had woken up with began to fade. The silence began where the Prisoner’s mouth was attached to his arm, a sinking, perfect calm like clear blue water. It streaked along his meridians toward his temples.

Zhou Zishu tore his arm from the Prisoner’s mouth when he felt the world swim. His arm buzzed like he’d slept on it; the scar flashed like eyes in the night. You’re being tailed. You’re being hunted. How much had the Prisoner drank? He couldn’t tell, but the sudden absence of pain disoriented him. If he slashed his own limb off now, would he even bleed?

He was still perched upon the Prisoner’s ribcage, weight bearing down on the expanse of skin that had been ribboned flesh hours before. The two of them stared at each other. Haze clouded Zhou Zishu as the Prisoner heaved for breath. The rabid expression began to fade from his eyes.

A twinge of pain where he’d been bitten, and the reality of a Prisoner’s bite surged through him.

When he stumbled upright, he heard footsteps following him out of the infirmary, into the blazing camp. Zhou Zishu needed to stop the poison before it reached his brain. That poor, unfamiliar boy had known to do it last night, his own blade jutting out of his chest like a flag. Jiuxiao hadn’t had a choice. Zhou Zishu could not allow himself to have one either.

Baiyi lay where he’d left it last night, in the war room where Zhou Zishu had operated on the Prisoner. The silvered blade pierced the morning. It was the only thing left real where he stood, and he stumbled towards it, found the jaded handle until its Ice energy rushed into his meridians, lifted the blade over his arm where the bite wounds were, and—

“Why did you do it?”

The question was calm and quiet now, like it belonged to dusk and not sunrise.

Zhou Zishu turned, Baiyi poised over his limb. His heart churned in his ribcage. He had no time—one downswing and it’d be over, but dawning realization stayed his hand, began at the crown of his head to trickle in cold strings down his grooved spine. Bonded, the Prisoner had spat the same way he’d spat the jade. Still, Zhou Zishu said, “I don’t understand,” with the same defiance of someone who needed to hear that their beloved had died from another mouth before it was real.

The Prisoner laughed humorlessly. “You Bonded us.” He rubbed his thumb over his cheek where a streak of Zhou Zishu’s blood curved towards his ear and gave one side of his mouth the impression of being stuck in a smile. “I’m not sure how you did, but you did. What is it you want? You know, most people start with asking before demanding. It’s good manners.”

“You’re lying.”

A minnow-flicker of doubt in the Prisoner’s face. “It benefits me far less to lie about this,” the Prisoner pointed out. He sounded less assured now, tilted by Zhou Zishu’s confusion and denial. “It was obvious to me the moment I woke upon that table. Did you not feel it?” No answer, and the Prisoner clicked his tongue. “Was it you who tied me down with all that jade? Try harder next time; you have to weigh me down with more than a few pebbles.”

“We couldn’t have Bonded,” Zhou Zishu said. But—the malaise. The unknown pain, the blood itches. The ache that radiated from the core of his brain like a solar flare. It hadn’t been opium withdrawal, and Zhou Zishu had put his bare mouth against pain and violence. It had been entirely new, and then it had vanished when the Prisoner drank from him. “We couldn’t. There wasn’t a ritual. There wasn’t any—”

“Did our blood mix?”

“Both of us had been cut open when I saved you. It was inevitable.”

“Was there a binding Ice jade agent?” The Prisoner’s eyes slid to Baiyi. “One that might have been a weapon familiar to your meridians?”

“There was no ritual.”

“My honorable gongzi, that is the ritual,” the Prisoner said. “That’s all it takes. Two people, blood, and jade. What did you think needed to happen? That it would only take hold on nights of the waning moons? In the eyes of another Prisoner? That it required a coupling?” He paused. “You don’t mean to say it was an accident, do you?”

Again, they stared at each other.

“And if it was?”

The Prisoner tilted his head toward Baiyi in acknowledgment this time. “Whether it was an accident or not,” he said, “do you really plan on slicing your arm off? A Bond is a Bond, it does not care about the intent for which it was created. My Ice Venom cannot touch you, not anymore.”

An accident.

Without uncoiling the tension in his muscles, Zhou Zishu lowered his sword. He pressed his lips together, then straightened, ignoring the sharp twinges of pain in his arm. Blood dripped at his feet. “What’s your name?” he demanded in lieu of answering.

“Wen,” said the Blood Prisoner without hesitating. He busied himself with tying his robes shut, pulling up his sleeves to check the stitched gashes in his arms, and made a face like he was simply leering at an inconvenient blister instead of the handiwork of three assassins that had intended to torture him until he’d died. “Wen Kexing.”

Accidents happened to people who could afford them. Zhou Zishu hadn’t been able to since Four Seasons Villa.

“Is that your real name?” Wen Kexing—it wasn’t familiar. It certainly hadn’t been on the lists of prominent Prisoners that Zhou Zishu once kept as the leader of Yujian Bang.

“It’s the one you’re getting.” He shook his sleeves over his wrists again. “Ah, my fan’s gone. What, you don’t like that name? I haven’t even judged yours yet. What should I call you, noble master?”

“Zhou Xu,” Zhou Zishu said.

“And I’m to assume that’s not your real name either?”

“Assume what you want.”

A flaking smear of blood was drying in the corner of Wen Kexing’s mouth. He pushed his tongue into the red scoop of his lip, licking it away as he studied Zhou Zishu in silence, and said, “It’s not often I meet a peerless beauty with the wit to match.” Then he nodded to Zhou Zishu’s sword, and crossed his arms behind himself, the same way he had when Zhou Zishu had first encountered him. “And one who knows his arts.”

“And if this martial beauty were to kill you now, what would happen?”

Wen Kexing snorted. “You won’t.”

“You do not know me.”

“We’re Bonded, Zhou daxia,” he said, as if this explained everything. “You might as well have tied our wedding sash to the rafters in the shape of a noose. Where you move, I move. Where I hurt, you hurt. If I die, if you die, we, well.” He shrugged.

“So, then, to break a Bond…”

“One of us has to shatter his meridians with Ice Jade,” Wen Kexing said. “I don’t suppose you’re too keen on doing that.”

A blistering silence that could burst if bitten into. Wen Kexing wandered through the war tent with the lazy assuredness of someone that knew they were the most dangerous thing in the room. Without turning his back to Zhou Zishu, he flicked open a box lined with jade stones that should have sank him to his knees, but he only hissed through his teeth as he flipped the lid open. There was nothing inside of importance—just Yujian Bang ink seals.

He made a show of shutting the lid, never taking his eyes off the carved jade seal, yet Zhou Zishu felt watched all the same.

“You say it was an accident,” he went on, when Zhou Zishu went too long without replying. He glanced out of the corner of his eyes, from under the dark fringes of his lashes. “And you insist that you saved my life, yet you’re a Yujian assassin. Your life and your blood is promised to you so long as you deliver our heads to the crown, so you must have had a reason to spare this Prisoner’s pitiful dog life. So what do you want, Zhou daxia?” He turned and smiled. The light of it didn’t reach his eyes. A dark smother of doubt had crossed his face. “Is that too cold? Shall I call you A-Xu—and then you’ll share your secrets?”

“You have information I want.”

“Oh, I like this. Such as what?”

“Where is—”

“Hang on now, A-Xu. We have to negotiate terms of payment first. What do I get if I help you?”

Bright rings of blood patterned the wood beneath their feet. The world tilted on buckling ankles. Zhou Zishu grasped at the edges of his own consciousness as the faceless black began to tug it away. The bloodletting had stopped the pain, but bleeding was bleeding.

“I’ll break the Bond,” Zhou Zishu said. “You can go back to being a monster of your choosing. I don’t care if it kills me. I don’t care, in fact, what you do even now, so long as you give me what I need.”

Wen Kexing stared. “Is that all?”

“What, you want more?”

“Not me. Don’t you?” Wen Kexing’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a steep price you’re willing to pay. Bond breaking isn’t promise breaking, A-Xu. What do you need—a hit on someone? I’m not an assassin.”

“I can perform my own hits,” Zhou Zishu said. “Who said I was offering to shatter my own meridians? Bastard.”

Despite himself, Wen Kexing laughed. “Fine. So what is your price?”

“I need information on the status and whereabouts of someone that vanished into your territory. There have been reports that he’s still alive, but he’s never made contact with us—so he must be held hostage.”

“The name?”

Zhou Zishu hesitated. Wen Kexing was scrutinizing him, apprehension paling his cheeks slowly. His demeanor unsettled him—none of Wen Kexing’s emotion lived in his face, and instead congealed in thick tangles around his body—the shifting ridges of his knuckles, the tightness of his walk, the slant of his body like he spun on his own axis.

But if they were Bondmates now, then he posed less danger to Zhou Zishu than anyone else, and he had vested interest to get out of this Bond.

“Jing Beiyuan. Where is he?”

There was no smoke flare of recognition in Wen Kexing’s face.

“I have never heard of a Jing Beiyuan.”

“Lie and the Bond stays.”

A shadow sticky as a membrane fell over his expression. Thicker than doubt. Angrier than apprehension. Wen Kexing had stopped smiling. “Lie? You wound me, A-Xu. The first act of being my Bondmate, and it’s to accuse me of deceit—truly, laozi invites a cruel fate. It benefits me more to lie to you, to get you cleanly out of my way, and yet I don’t. Does that not strike you as odd?”

Zhou Zishu swallowed. His throat hurt from the battering, where Wen Kexing had ground him into the floor. The pain of handling Ice jade intensified in his meridians the longer he held his sword. He’d stood in it so long he wondered if pain, too, had its own smell.

“Then what do you propose?”

“I don’t know who Jing Beiyuan is,” says Wen Kexing. “But I can find him. I’ll find him, and you break this Bond, and—and,” he added, when Zhou Zishu began to open his mouth again, “you get me in front of Jin Wang.”

Zhou Zishu blinked. “What makes you think—”

“You’re a Yujian assassin,” said Wen Kexing. “The operating assassin organization under the control of the imperial crown. Of course you know how to demand his audience. I don’t care what you have to do to get there—send him the head of his concubine, send him the tongue of Duan Pengju, which I can help with, if you like—get me in front of him, and I’ll tear the earth from its bedrock to find your…” He paused, like a sour cherry was caught in his molars. “Friend.”

The choices were meager at best. Ignore what Wen Kexing said, walk away from this deal and the Blood Bond. He didn’t need to feed, after all, and Wen Kexing was right. He stood to lose more than Zhou Zishu did. Or he could go along with Wen Kexing’s proposal, and trust that he wasn’t lying, against all better judgment. Zhou Zishu had spent over a decade of his life with his arms red up to the elbows. He trusted himself as far as he could see in the night.

Either way, he’d been waiting to die. “Then we have a deal,” he says.

Wen Kexing’s face split in a smile, a budding sprig crooked across his face. For a brief moment, Zhou Zishu thought he caught a glimpse of the human pulp beneath the stitches and the Ice venom—the quilted remains of someone that once was before their claws had hardened.

“Then it’s—”

“Zhuren!”

The voice pierced the red hush inside the camp, and Zhou Zishu frowned, lifting Baiyi again, but Wen Kexing only sighed. He waved his sleeve, the wide mouth of it gulping air; in the brief moment where his skin showed, his wounds had already begun to drip with milky lymph and pus ooze. “No matter,” he said. “It’s just my handmaid.”

“Zhuren, are you here? If any one of you sons of bitches have my Zhuren, I’ll flay you ear to ear!”

“Loyal handmaid,” Zhou Zishu said dryly. He tailed Wen Kexing out of the tent, feeling oddly like he’d just made an illicit opium trade, or smuggled jade out of the Armory and spat on the front steps of the royal city.

In the sunlight, a patch of crusting blood stood out in fine webs at the back of Wen Kexing’s head—matted, ugly, like a clod of dirt that had been ripped up with a weed. His head had been smashed against stone, too, and Zhou Zishu had missed it during his haphazard stitching. The sun turned Wen Kexing’s hair tawny owl brown. It was nothing like the black streak Zhou Zishu had seen inside the infirmary, so dark that time could have fallen headfirst through it. Maybe it was just the light. Maybe it was the belly full of blood.

“A-Xiang, if you yell any louder, I’ll rip your tongue out of your head myself,” said Wen Kexing. “As you can see, I’m not dead. It’ll take more than a couple of raw, unshucked assassin children to do your master in.”

“Zhuren!” The girl was tiny, thin-boned, dressed in harsh migraine violet. Pick her up by the arms and throw her, and you’d expect her to float before she crashed. “Zhuren, what did they do to you? I’ll kill them. I’ll cut off their testicles first, and then feed them to them raw as I—” She caught sight of Zhou Zishu, then, and raised her dagger with her elbow angled to strike. “Was it you?”

“Hands down, chou yatou,” Wen Kexing said. “Goodness. Who taught you to talk like that in front of new people? Certainly not me.”

“Who’re you?” she demanded.

“Zhou Xu.”

“Gu Xiang,” said Wen Kexing, flicking her on the temple. “Still so impolite. Quickly, greet your master’s Bondmate.”

She stared at him, then at Wen Kexing, and then slid her gaze back to Zhou Zishu as if she were judging a particularly rangy horse he’d just bought. “Were you dying?”

Zhou Zishu couldn’t help the laughter that leapt from his mouth.

“Not anymore. I’m not so easily killed, yatou.”

“But you—”

“Zhou Xu and I have an accord to help each other. It’s not one that I’ve told you about. He can’t hurt me, and I need him. It would do you well not to antagonize him before we’re finished with our work here,” said Wen Kexing.

Gu Xiang crossed her arms. “I didn’t bring you any clothes,” she said, finally.

“No worries about that.”

“There’s a stream you can dip in. I’ll wash the ones you’re wearing there.”

“There are baths in the camp,” Zhou Zishu said.

“I trust whatever lives in the murk of a river more than what you assassins build your tubs from,” Wen Kexing said. “But thank you for your hospitality, A-Xu. That’s far more like it.”

He smiled once more before leaving. The closer he drew to the gates, the more Zhou Zishu expected his gait to slow and crumble, but it never did. Wen Kexing drew up towards the jade beads that lined the knockers and the gates without so much as wincing, and then he became part of the mountain.

Zhou Zishu had met Blood Prisoners before. He had never known one; he couldn’t know them. First, they were faceless threats. Then they were bodies. The moment something became anything more than animal—the moment an animal was anything more than dirt, and dirt anything more than ash, it became impossible to kill and stay alive at the same time. Killing as a trade required a death of the mind, death of the heart. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to live.

“What did you promise my master that he didn’t strike you down where you stood?” Gu Xiang finally asked. Up close, she looked even younger than her voice sounded—a teenager, barely old enough to be married. Her teeth were blunt and human when she spoke. “He doesn’t usually show Yujian assassins any mercy.”

“He needs a favor that I can provide,” said Zhou Zishu, still staring at the slice of gateway that opened to northern sky. “And in turn, he promised he’d help me find someone that I think he knows.”

“Huh,” Gu Xiang said. She’d gathered a handful of her robes and was wiping down the blade of her dagger. A thick viscous glow glinted off the sharp edge, like she’d cut into honeycomb. “He ripped you off.”

“And why’s that?”

“Well, unless the favor you promised him is something as simple as buying him dinner, or telling him where the next best watering hole is. Which I am certain is not. Either way, he played you. You should have waited for me to get here to negotiate with him, I’m much better at it.”

Zhou Zishu blinked. “So you’re saying what he offered me isn’t worth what I offered him?”

“No. Yes. Depends on what you offered him, right? But it doesn’t matter, because he can find anyone. He likes it. It’s what he’s good at. He never meets anyone by accident.”

“We were an accident.”

Gu Xiang, with a face like an open daisy and a laugh like a skull fracture, snorted. “Maybe. But you don’t know that.”

“Zhou Bangzhu has met—and inadvertently bonded with—the current Blood Keeper. It looks like they’re on their way to Kun zhou, though I’m not sure why.”

“On their way to Kun zhou?” Silence, incense flicker, tea on glazed celadon. “They can’t be thinking of confronting Wangye. There are new gangs that do not even recognize him, never mind answer to him. But if he’s Bonded, then he should be safe so long as Wen Zongzhu remains alive…”

“Would you like to send another letter, or a message? I can locate Han Ying to deliver it again.”

“Letters can be intercepted. People can be killed. Han Ying is dead—may he go well.” A sigh. “The winds are here, Ping An, and they are cruel.”

一, At the cost of your life, guard integrity and morality.
二, Command jade with dignity and virtue.
三, Slaughter no innocent.
四, Spare no Prisoner.
五, Make no exception.

—The Amended Principles of Yujian Bang

The rain came down in mouthfuls. The night was swollen with it—this formless tongue-ooze from the sky.

Every step forward brought up an arcing, filthy splash of runoff. Zhou Zishu had given up looking where he put his feet and simply hoped that he wouldn’t hear the crunch of a rat’s skull or skid in the ruffled skirt growths of yellow-ear fungus. The rain had flooded the forest path and turned it into a narrow, slow-moving column of water sloughing off the top layer of sediment. Some of it rushed around their ankles in its haste. Some of it pooled in the pockmarked dirt. Water, as constant as it was, was always so pressed for time—always on its way elsewhere. Out of the sky, out of the banks that held it. Out of a body in the sun.

Zhou Zishu made the mistake of lowering his lantern a few times to check that they were still on the path. Tiny bloated bodies of tree rats had drifted past, the same brown in death as opium vomit.

“Zhuren, don’t walk so fast, my arms are tired and my legs are short,” Gu Xiang said, some ten paces behind him. She was holding an umbrella over Wen Kexing’s head, herself drenched to the marrow, and just barely keeping him out of the rain. “Zhuren, tell him to slow down! He’s going to walk us right off the edge of a cliff, I know it.”

It had been years since Zhou Zishu was last caught in a storm so heavy. Rain and snow were familiar accompaniments of night work, especially in the north and along the coasts, but city rain was always broken by towers and street signs, pavilion buildings with curving dragon-snout roofs. Rain provided cover, if only you knew how to use it—but this was splashing in it. Waiting for the drowning.

The last time he’d been drenched like this, Zhou Zishu hadn’t yet learned how to hide in rain. His wide-brimmed straw hat had been oiled, but streams of stormwater had wormed between the seal of the hat and his hairline to trail in jagged lines down his face. He’d had a lantern. He’d had one pebble of jade in his sword the size of his thumbnail. If he’d run, the sound of his footsteps would have sounded like tail slaps on the ocean.

He’d gotten lost after leaving the palace. He’d been seventeen and the eyes of an entire band of royal mercenaries had been turned to him, and he’d been lost in the woods in a storm without a fire. Even without light, Zhou Zishu had known that there were Prisoners on his tail, and they’d be able to smell his fear in the rainfall like a smoke flare.

Then he’d tripped over a dead deer, went facedown into the mud. The force of it had knocked his hat from the crown of his head. The ties had softened in the rain.

Noiselessly, the deer had shifted, and Zhou Zishu had startled away from it until his back hit tree, and so it turned out that the body hadn’t been a body, hadn’t been a deer at all—even in the black night, Zhou Zishu had peered into the darkness and seen a face in the mud, pale as a sliced-open mushroom. A basket with its lid sewn shut had still been strapped to their back. A boy, he’d guessed, barely older than him.

The air around him had been thrumming with the monstrous chill of Ice jade. Zhou Zishu had considered, briefly, sitting up and running. A jade runner dying in flooded forest wasn’t his burden. Wasn’t it? They weren’t in his orbit until they showed up with a sword and a willingness to die. What he needed to do was get back to his feet, get to where he was going, get back to where he came from. All things had invariable, fixed positions of existence, and his wasn’t here, caring about this.

But then they’d opened their eyes, scleras red as mosquito dawn, and—

“A-Xu! There’s a cave here, A-Xiang found it by falling in. Let’s duck inside and wait for the worst to pass. We won’t make any meaningful ground mucking through the wet like this.”

A blanket of bramble and vine hid the mouth of the cave from view. Gu Xiang still held the umbrella over Wen Kexing’s head as he parted the undergrowth to peer inside. “It looks empty, we wouldn’t be sharing the space with bats. Come on, A-Xu. I have to look at my stupid girl’s ankle.”

The inside of the cave was dusty, air thick and curdled after so long without visitors to pump it through their lungs, but it was dry. There was nowhere to sit but the floor. A dark pile of used kindling littered the corner. Zhou Zishu kicked it into the semicircle their bodies created sitting down, then set his lantern on the floor of the cave to work on lighting it.

“How do you keep your lantern lit in a storm like this?” Wen Kexing asked as Gu Xiang kicked her boot off with the grace of a hoodlum. It flew off her foot and hit the opposite side of the cave where Zhou Zishu was sitting, then landed with a wet slap in the dirt. “A-Xiang, you’re losing face for your Zhuren. Go retrieve your shoe.”

“But Zhuren, my ankle—”

“Hurry up.”

She stuck her lower lip out, struggling to stand with all of her weight balanced on her other scrawny leg. “If he’s your Bondmate, then how’s there any losing face? He’s our person already,” she groused. Mostly to herself, but Zhou Zishu nearly laughed again, and hid it behind a phlegmy cough instead.

“Here,” Zhou Zishu said, tossing her wet shoe back to her, the sides caked with mud. Wen Kexing glanced at him. Gu Xiang stared squarely at him. “How’s your ankle?”

She stuck her leg out just as some of the kindling ate the flames that Zhou Zishu was feeding out of his lantern. There wasn’t any swelling, not yet, at least. A good sign.

“Ah, A-Xiang is okay! I’ve lived through worse. Once, I nearly had my leg cut off at the knee by the former—”

Wen Kexing cleared his throat loud enough to match the thunder.

“Just hungry,” she finished, withdrawing her damp leg and curling her arms around her knees.

“I’ll go hunt for some food. I am, too.”

“I’m also hungry,” Wen Kexing added, then swept his gaze over Zhou Zishu pointedly.

“You can drink from whatever I find,” Zhou Zishu said. “If you drain me any drier than you already have, I’ll die before we even get within signal distance of the capital.”

“But—”

“You get to drink when I say you can,” said Zhou Zishu. “When that headache comes back, and the drain of blood is the only thing that seems to relieve it, then I’ll tell you. You can eat regular food, I’ve been around Blood Prisoners for long enough to know.”

The fire shapeshifted Wen Kexing’s face. If his expression was hard, or cold, or angry, Zhou Zishu couldn’t tell when the light flickered. For a moment he thought he almost looked afraid. It was so silly, and inconceivable, that fear still found a Blood Prisoner like Wen Kexing. Fear was for soft, miserable things.

Then Wen Kexing smiled, the contours of his face softening, and he said, “Good luck finding anything in that storm, A-Xu. Everything’s got its nose in its tail in burrows.”

Zhou Zishu stepped back into the sheeting rain. He didn’t need someone to teach him how to find food in the rain—he had long since known how to find it even when rain seemed to halt all movement around him, the world holding its breath as the dirt was salted by the clouds. More than once had he found nests and burrows and pulled screaming prey out by the legs. A quick flash and a sudden silence.

He returned with two rabbits and a fat, speckled pigeon. Gu Xiang was stoking the fire with a long branch, having shed her drenched outer robe, and Wen Kexing sat beside her with his eyes closed and his hands curled over his knees. A curtain of drying clothing had been strung up on a makeshift frame, throwing the inside of the cave into heartbeat color.

“See! See, Zhuren, I told you he’s our person already. He found the squab you like.”

“You can adjust your internal energy after you eat,” Zhou Zishu drew Baiyi and sliced the pigeon’s head clean from its body and held out the dripping sack of feathers to Wen Kexing. “Here.”

Behind them, Gu Xiang busied herself with building a spit to spear the rabbits on. She looked and dressed like a daughter of a nobleman’s family, with hair done and ribbons tied, even if they were soaked through—but she was surprisingly quick with a knife. The rabbits were stunned, not quite yet dead, and she killed them both without blinking and began skinning them with the practiced familiarity of a hunter, a butcher. When she brushed a wisp of hair out of her face, her hand left a smear of blood across her cheek.

“Thank you,” said Wen Kexing, taking the pigeon gingerly. As if Zhou Zishu had just handed him a human newborn, limbs still barely fused together. He held it in his lap and didn’t drink.

“Zhufu, take off your drenched robes and hang them up to dry. You look like a wet cat.”

“Did you just call me a housekeeper?”

“No, I called you master’s husband—Bondmate, husband, what difference does it make! I’m not going to call you Zhou gongzi, that’s ridiculous. Hurry up, you’re going to drip on the fire and put it out.”

Wen Kexing was still holding his pigeon and contemplating it silently. He stared into the fire, eyes glassy as marbles. Zhou Zishu didn’t think he’d heard a word of their conversation.

There was just enough room for him to remove his outermost robe, and Zhou Zishu made sure to shake his inner layers over his scarred arm so the ridges wouldn’t show up in the damp fabric. Gu Xiang had begun chattering again, her voice and thoughts becoming one with the rainsong. Just as the rabbits had begun to brown, skin crackling like gold leaf, he handed the pigeon to her without so much as raising it to his mouth.

“You don’t want it, Zhuren? Aren’t you hungry?”

“Not for animal blood. You eat it, Yatou. I need you full-bellied for something else.” He wiped his hands on the lap of his robes, uncaring for the stains they left behind, and then propped his chin against the heel of his hand. “And I have some questions for you.”

“I probably won’t answer them.”

“Not even if they’re about Jing Beiyuan? I ought to know a few things about the man you’ve contracted me to find, A-Xu.”

Fair. Unfortunately, Wen Kexing had a point. “Ask,” he said, as the smell of cooked meat began to fill their cave.

What does he look like? Tall, regal, princely. Taller than me, perhaps your height. More handsome than I am, at least, and with a more pleasant affect. I’d draw him if I knew how to draw, but I don’t. More handsome than you? I find that so hard to believe! Am I looking for the most beautiful living person on earth? Kiss-ass. Next question.

When and where was the last time you saw him? He left a martial base that we had established in southern Shu, on the way to the royal capital. He vanished without a trace. There was blood found on a remote mountain path towards Luoyang that had traces of his internal energy signature left upon it. I thought I saw him at the Blood Feud in Luoyang, but who knows what I saw there. Oh, I wasn’t there for that one. But it wasn’t me. Do you believe me? No, not really. But what choice do I have?

How do you know him? I met him when we were teenagers. We had grown up together since then. We’re best friends. Soulmates? No. Just best friends. Is there a difference? I don’t know and I don’t care. I think there is. Think what you want, I said I don’t care.

So he was an assassin like you. Yeah. He was. He was too good for that line of work. If he got out, then I wouldn’t want him to come back. But you’re still looking for him. If freedom is what you want for him, then you’d leave him alone, wouldn’t you? If I were a better person, then I would. He’s the only person left, from…

A clatter of twigs broke the white noise of rainfall. Gu Xiang had lifted the rabbit off the spit and was shaving thin rounds of meat into her bare palm, ignoring the raw blood that had gotten onto her hands when she’d gutted the animals. When she caught Zhou Zishu’s unmoving gaze over the fire, she made a beckoning noise around her full mouth and held out the branch.

“Eat, Zhufu,” she said.

“Left from what?” Wen Kexing asked, uncharacteristically quiet.

“From before Yujian Bang.”

“You said he was an—”

“I know what I said,” Zhou Zishu interrupted. “And I was the reason he became an assassin at all. When you’re being hunted, there’s no safer place to be than to become the hunter yourself—that’s what I told him. I wish I had been right. Before that, on the road, we’d found each other after our sects and families had been destroyed. We didn’t have anything. He owes his life to me, but sometimes I feel like I owe mine to him. So I—”

He’d said too much. The silence had grown eyes, and it was watching him. Gu Xiang had stopped chewing to listen. Wen Kexing was still enough for prey to wander into his hands.

“You were right,” Wen Kexing said, after too many beats of silence.

“About what.”

“When you’re hunted,” Wen Kexing said, casting his gaze back into the fire, “you make them regret hunting you.”

Zhou Zishu blinked at him. Wen Kexing looked like he was about to say something more—I know how that feels. Or, That’s what I did. Maybe, We’re more alike than I thought, A-Xu, isn’t that what we call fate?

But then he set his jaw. Only for a moment, a shadow of movement. Then the lines of his body loosened again as he smiled. “Last question. How far are you willing to go for this Jing Beiyuan?”

Zhou Zishu considered. “I’d kill for him.” He’d done it before, he’d do it again.

“Ah,” said Wen Kexing, as if this had been the answer he’d been hoping for. “But you wouldn’t live for him.”

A nerve spasmed in Zhou Zishu’s cheek. “And so?”

“And so he’s not a lover. Just a friend.”

Killing and dying were easy. Zhou Zishu had been doing so his whole life, and he’d gotten good at both. “That’s what I said.”

“People lie.” Wen Kexing held his hand out for Gu Xiang to tip some sliced rabbit leg into his palm. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, A-Xu. I know you trust me about as far as you can spit. You can’t blame me for making sure you’re telling me the truth.”

Zhou Zishu took an offered handful of rabbit meat. “Hurry up, I need to make room to roast the pigeon,” Gu Xiang said, and Zhou Zishu drew his legs up to his chest to make room for her to patter around the cave, looking for a fresh branch to tie the half-plucked bird to. Something crinkled against his skin.

“What do you have there?”

The documents from the infirmary. He’d wrapped them in a leather traveling roll, and the rain had soaked some of the edges, but most of the ink had remained intact. “The things I found before you almost broke my face.” Zhou Zishu handed them to Wen Kexing. “Do you know anything about these?”

Pigeon down floated around them in large, grey dust motes, the heat lifting the air, lifting the feathers. Some of them settled in Wen Kexing’s hair. Zhou Zishu watched as he unrolled the fine paper, eyes running across the messages. He frowned at the opium trade document addressed to Yu Guanyin first, then pulled out Jing Beiyuan’s letter and ran his fingers over the words. Seeking the warmth of the hand that had once passed this page.

“Bangzhu,” Wen Kexing murmured. “I’m assuming he meant the one that came before that stinking dog Duan Pengju.”

“Presumably,” said Zhou Zishu, whose voice didn’t waver. A moment more passed, and then Wen Kexing folded the letter from Jing Beiyuan, a quiet vigil of three lines. He handed the booklet to Gu Xiang.

“Zhuren, what do you want me to do with this?” She unfolded it again, holding it upside-down, and pretended to read. “Is it a secret message?”

“I need you to do something for me, A-Xiang,” said Wen Kexing.

“Ooh! What does Zhuren command?”

“I need you to return to Blood Mountain. Back to Scarlet Peak, in particular. A-Xu here said that his people found evidence of Jing Beiyuan residing there. Have you ever heard of a Jing Beiyuan in Blood Mountain? On either side of Scarlet Peak?”

She shook her head.

“So maybe they lied, or they were mistaken, but I don’t like risks. I like plans and checking every maggot under every log,” said Wen Kexing. “He might not be named Jing Beiyuan anymore, or he might not remember who he is. There’s a disconnect. A-Xu says we have him. I’ve never heard of him. He’s hiding in that dead space between.” He nodded to the letter as Gu Xiang folded it with greasy fingers. “Take that letter as proof that you’re not an assassin or a danger to him or his acquaintances. Use it as a bargaining chip. Don’t tell them anything about A-Xu either, at least not until it’s obvious that they don’t care for information regarding his whereabouts.”

“What could anyone want to know about him?” Gu Xiang said. “He’s just some Yujian assassin.”

Wen Kexing made a face, like the answer tasted bad in his own mouth.

“What do you know?” Zhou Zishu asked. Give him any more space and Wen Kexing might change the topic. His gaze flicked to Zhou Zishu like he’d been caught.

“Not much,” he admitted. Readily, to Zhou Zishu’s surprise. “I know less than you might think, A-Xu. I don’t know the names and the faces of everyone in Blood Mountain. But Yu Guanyin…” He shook his head. “How much do you know about Yujian Bang? You don’t look like those scrawny new recruits they were so fond of in their last months. Did you ever know the Tiger’s Tooth?”

Zhou Zishu barely withheld his sputter. He blinked. For him, that was already too much of a slip. “What about them?”

“Yu Guanyin, if I’m to understand it correctly, is run directly out of the capital by Jin Wang himself. The head coward, Duan Pengju, just carries out his orders. He’s nothing but a figurehead. It gives the people under him some semblance of autonomy, but they have none of it.” Wen Kexing tossed his last shred of rabbit meat into the fire, and the oily pops of frying meat broke the hum of rain. “They massacred anyone in Yujian Bang still faithful to the former Tiger’s Tooth, and then they rebuilt.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, those who didn’t turn, at least. Plenty didn’t. Some were taken for intelligence—you can’t kill everyone, you need prisoners to explain their knowledge before you slaughter them. Yujian Bang knew better than anyone what it took to kill a Blood Prisoner or any practitioner of the Ice palm path. At first they thought the Tiger’s Tooth vanished to become a Blood Prisoner, too. The crown would have done anything to get its hands on him.”

Hunger had turned into wriggling sickness in Zhou Zishu’s stomach. “So it’s like that.”

Wen Kexing cast confusion towards him. “You must have been with the Yujian Bang when this happened. You carry far too much jade with all of it in control to be one of their green recruits.”

“The Tiger’s Tooth went missing,” said Zhou Zishu. “And I ran away, because I was a coward, too.”

All in all, it wasn’t much of a lie.

“The Tiger’s Tooth was a coward, but he fought with the honor of a martial practitioner. That much we all, as Prisoners, knew.” Wen Kexing folded the documents back into the dry leather roll. “It’s a shame he’s gone. Dead or alive, coward or hero, he was the only Yujian assassin that I would have spared.”

Zhou Zishu looked up. “What do you—?”

But Wen Kexing had already started to chuckle, and nudged Zhou Zishu’s knee with the tip of his boot. “Well, until your meddling hands got into my business,” he said. “Now we’re stuck whether we like it or not, right, A-Xu?”

Zhou Zishu’s belly rumbled as an answer. Gu Xiang tucked the letter into her drying robes, uncaring that she was nearly down to her underclothes around two grown men, and jumped back up to carving up the grilled rabbit.

“I get it,” said Wen Kexing, busying himself with plucking bits of pigeon down out of his hair. Zhou Zishu hadn’t responded. “If there was anyone left in this world who knew me, then I’d die for them too.”

“I know you, Zhuren,” Gu Xiang pointed out.

“You know bull, yatou,” he said. She shrank back, laughing, when he flicked her forehead between the eyebrows.

“What would it take for you to live, then, Lao Wen? If you say killing or dying are the easy things to do,” Zhou Zishu asked. He didn’t know why he’d asked, or where the nickname had come from. Lao Wen. Lao pengyou. Take care on the road. It seemed like the right thing to say.

Wen Kexing looked thoughtful.

“I don’t know,” he said, and Zhou Zishu knew he meant it. “I guess if there were anyone left in this world who wanted me to.”

By morning, the rain had turned to mist, the mist to fog, and fog was something alive. It leaned against the trees like a drunkard lost on their way home, sunrise making them sleepy.

“Awake?”

Zhou Zishu found Gu Xiang at the mouth of their cave, folding Wen Kexing’s robes into a neat pile of red squares. She worked without looking, with the practiced hands of someone who worked every hour of the day. Morning light slatted through the trees. A tumbling distance from their cave ran a river, the burble of which had been lost to the rain last night, too dark and wet to be visible. Wen Kexing stood in the center of the lazy current. With his hair looped up in a bun at the crown of his head, his neck and shoulders just barely breaking the surface, he was a salt-and-moss crusted stone rising above the waterline.

“How’s your ankle?”

“Better. Like I said, I’ve known worse,” said Gu Xiang. She pointed at an oily spread of pigeon on a damp leaf. “Breakfast.”

It was too heavy to eat first thing in the morning, but Zhou Zishu ate anyway. His stomach twisted, unaccustomed to anything but steamed buns and opium. He ought to take a dip in the stream, too. He still smelled of dirt and blood himself.

“Where are you going, after this?” he asked as Gu Xiang yawned. She didn’t bother covering her mouth, and then shrugged.

“Home first, I guess.”

“And then Scarlet Peak?”

She gave him a funny look. “Yeah, home,” she said, slowly. “What about you two?”

“Toward the capital. Southeast. Your zhuren wants me to demand an audience with the crown for him.”

“Is that where your home is?”

“Don’t have a home.”

Gu Xiang nodded, like this made perfect sense. Strangely, she seemed to understand. “If I find out you do anything to harm Zhuren, I’ll find you. I’ll find you in the night, and cut your genitals off, and feed them to you until you choke on them.”

“Laotianye. Do you always talk like that?”

“Do you have a problem with it?”

Zhou Zishu snorted. “As if I could harm your Zhuren. He almost turned my face into a bowl when he woke up.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a Yujian assassin? You’re all supposed to be ruthless in your killing and keen in your tracking. Why’d you spare Zhuren before you knew what he could do for you?”

Zhou Zishu ate his greasy pigeon, thought vaguely of being lost in black forest with a jade runner, and had no answer.

They bade Gu Xiang goodbye and safe travels on the main path of the forest, with her retracing their steps back to Blood Mountain and Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing heading southeast towards Jiankang. Rainwater had settled into footprints and root wells, with the bases of some trees looking like beds of shattered brass.

Wen Kexing walked close enough beside Zhou Zishu that they could hold hands, or strangle each other, without much warning. Zhou Zishu still wore all the jade that he’d put on for the Blood Feud, save for the bangles—his belt still the one studded with jade, Baiyi still curled around his waist, his guan holding his hair in a half-ponytail now. He’d taken off the jade bangles in the bath and had kept them off.

A higher jade tolerance than most other Prisoners.

He studied Wen Kexing without looking at him, listening to his breaths, watching his gait. Letting the flashes of red brocade tell the story. Wen Kexing had no labored breathing, like he was doing it against the scrape of pain, nor did his steps falter with any ache that came with effects of Ice jade. At most, the only discomfort he showed was how he shook his sleeves over his hands, the same way someone did if their fingers were cold.

For all it was worth, he didn’t seem to notice, as immune as any other Yujian assassin that had been wearing and fighting with jade for years.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” asked Zhou Zishu, finally.

“What do you mean?”

“To walk so close to me.”

“Hmm. No. Why, does it bother you? I’m not going to bend you over and drink from your delicate jugulars in broad daylight.”

Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes and quickened his pace. “Unbearable.”

“No, no, why would it bother me?” Wen Kexing jogged to keep up. Not that he needed to; Zhou Zishu felt like he did it just to look pitiful. “If you think I’m worried about losing face, I’m the most shameless Blood Prisoner you’ll ever know, A-Xu. Perhaps the most shameless man, though that’s not a title I make work of checking.”

“The jade,” Zhou Zishu said. “How does it not bother you?”

“Oh.” Wen Kexing blinked. “And here I was thinking you meant something exciting. I feel it, of course. Don’t we all? But it’s bearable. You don’t wear very much.”

“This isn’t very much?”

“No. No, not at all. I have been around far more than a sword and a belt, A-Xu. You’ll have to try much harder to chase me away.”

“But how—”

“Aiya, enough questions. You never answer any of mine. I’m cold and hungry, and if I’m hungry, that means you have to eat. I need to feed my blood bank,” Wen Kexing said. “Can you hear the next village? Those are cattle bells. Any town with farming or mining will have food, come on!”

They only made it some twenty paces into a village called Taishan, just a day’s walk from the sprawl of the much larger Taiyuan, when Zhou Zishu noticed everyone was staring at them—and to no fault of theirs, considering. Wen Kexing was still wearing his Blood Prisoner robes, draped shoulder to toe in red silk and brocade, and while Zhou Zishu was in more muted black and green, the cut of his clothes were not something any civilian would wear. The jade of his belt and guan caught the light with every movement.

“We need to blend in,” Zhou Zishu said, turning to Wen Kexing. He wasn’t paying attention, studying the offerings a vendor had for hand fans. “Hey, Lao Wen, are you listening?”

“I’m always listening. Why, do you think we’ll be here long?”

“Not here, just.” Every passing moment, Zhou Zishu became more aware of the eyes on them, heavy and sore as open wounds. “The closer we get to the capital, the more likely it’ll be someone will recognize us, or there’ll be eyes that won’t know us, but ears that do. We need to look nondescript.”

He turned. The afternoon sun slanted at an angle into Wen Kexing’s eyes and lit them up like river stones. Under light, it was hard to imagine him as anything but human, but he’d laugh, and his teeth would have all the evidence. The words blood bank floated, errant, across the front of Zhou Zishu’s mind. So what—it gave him purpose, to keep another living being alive by the sheer simplicity of existence. If it meant living for a monster, that was another day well-lived.

“Fair enough. You have the ideas, and I have the money. What kind of people shall we become?”

Lovers.

“Are you crazy?”

“You’re right, that would never work. You hate me, and I’m too mean to you,” said Wen Kexing. The first tailor they visited specialized in wedding clothes, their shop small and perfumed with magnolia, lanterns hung so low that all the light that filtered in through the street was fed through the red glow.

Friends.

“Are we very friendly?” asked Zhou Zishu. A street vendor stopped them, and Wen Kexing actually slowed down to listen. They sold hairpins and fans, and had an array of jade combs encrusted with pearl flowers. The fans were delicate, thin as silk when held to the sun, and Wen Kexing made a regretful noise in the back of his throat when he set them back down on their trays.

Master and servant.

“No.” That was the end of that conversation.

Martial siblings.

“Of what sect?”

Wen Kexing tilted his chin triumphantly when Zhou Zishu asked, and just because he was so smug, Zhou Zishu nearly frowned and said that wouldn’t work, either—their fighting styles were too different, it wasn’t in their nature to speak to each other with any modicum of respect, and most importantly, neither of them could agree on who would be shidi.

“But we could match,” Wen Kexing said, as if this were an excellent argument. “I’ve never matched with a martial sibling!”

“Then from who did you learn your martial style?” Zhou Zishu asked, but Wen Kexing was turning away from him again, not hearing him, or ignoring him completely. This tailor served everyone—from the most rangy teenager, to the roundest babies, to noblemen and martial warriors. In the doorway was a ribboned handful of girls stroking their fingers through the luxurious silk of a peach robe, pale as milk and dawn. They shuffled back when Wen Kexing passed through, so luridly bright in red that his color bounced off the polished wood bearings.

“What color should we get?” he asked.

“We?” said Zhou Zishu. “I haven’t agreed.”

“Okay, my good Zhou Daren,” said Wen Kexing. He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows, and Zhou Zishu felt very suddenly as if he were the one throwing a tantrum in the middle of a tailory. The thought made him want to spit. “Let me hear your grand plan. Not lovers, not friends, not master and servant, and not martial siblings? What’s left?”

Behind Wen Kexing’s elbow, the girls—all teenagers—stole glances at both of them through the sheer sleeves of the robes they’d been admiring.

Zhou Zishu’s eyelid twitched. Wen Kexing’s smile grew smugger with each second he was silent.

“Oh—hello, both of you daxias, thank you for visiting our tailory!” A man with an armful of silk trotted out from behind the towering shelves hung with swatches of brocade. “Heavens, you both are dressed so reputably. You must be from upstanding martial sects?”

“We—”

“Yes, the Xueyu Pai,” said Zhou Zishu, before Wen Kexing could say anything they couldn’t dig themselves out of. “From...the far north.”

Wen Kexing mouthed Xueyu Pai silently to himself. Zhou Zishu ignored his expression of disbelief when he realized. Laotianye, A-Xu, he could hear him saying. You can’t be this bad at lying. You’re an assassin. Did you even think that one through?

“Xue as in blood? Or snow?”

“...Snow.”

“Mmm,” the tailor nodded, shifting his load to a wheeled cart. “Of course, for the north. I’ve never heard of or had visitors from that sect. You both are certainly dressed more heavily than anyone from the Nanjiang region, so you must be here for lighter summer robes!”

“Yes,” Zhou Zishu said, relieved that the tailor was doing all the logic legwork without needing any help. “But as we’re traveling, my shidi and I—” Wen Kexing’s eyebrows joined his hairline when Zhou Zishu glanced at him, “—were wondering if there was anything that would fit us ready-made.”

“Shidi?” Wen Kexing said in a furious whisper when the tailor pointed them to the other side of the shop. “Talk about stuff we didn’t agree on!”

“Tough,” was all Zhou Zishu said, and then snorted with laughter when Wen Kexing made a noise like a shoved cat.

There was a variety of ready-made sets, though not nearly as many as those for girls and women. To Zhou Zishu, there was more than an abundance to choose from—he rounded the corner where the men’s robes were pinned against their frames and pointed at the first set he saw. “That works.”

“No, that color is hideous,” said Wen Kexing, brushing past a cascade of dark, midnight blue fabric. “You should wear something lighter, A-Xu. Lighter colors for summer. Not as miserable and sweaty.”

“Darker colors are easier to hide in the night. Easier to hide blood in, too.”

“I’m not a messy eater! You were just squirming so much the first time. And you have me, why are you still worried about hiding in the night?” Wen Kexing said, feigning insult. He tutted. “Still not our family’s person. Blood Bond and all, they still want dowries or it doesn’t count…”

“That’s not—never mind. Stop talking nonsense,” Zhou Zishu said. “What color, then?”

“These light green ones for you. And this dark green set for me.”

“I said no to lovers.”

“The line between martial siblings and lovers is thin enough to bite through,” Wen Kexing said with an eyeroll. He lifted the sleeves of the robe out until the arms were raised, a great misshapen vulture with its engulfing wingspan. “Besides, this set looks like the only one long enough to fit me.”

They waited for the girls ahead of them to finish their fittings before they could duck behind the privacy screen to ensure that their robes wouldn’t be so short their ankles would be exposed to the elements. Zhou Zishu’s thoughts wandered as he watched the shadows of bodies dance across the screen—too thick to make out lashes, thin enough for limbs and legs to have their own inky forms. Once, he’d snuck into a barn and killed hens to feed his assassins, and her eggs had been incubating long enough that when he brought them back, they could hold them over the fire and see the silent squirming of half-formed life through the eggshells. He’d wondered, vaguely, if something so close still to the netherworld could sense that they were about to be sent right back, if they panicked inside their tiny, fragile prisons when they cooked the eggs over the fire.

Then he’d bitten down on the meaty yolk, teeth coated with cream and salt, and he hadn’t wondered at all.

“You first, A-Xu,” said Wen Kexing, gesturing towards the screen. Zhou Zishu paused, for just too long, because he added, “Do you need my help?”

“Who needs your help,” said Zhou Zishu, hefting the bundle of robes and disappearing behind the screen. He nearly expected Wen Kexing to follow him, but he didn’t, and he started working on undoing all the ties of his clothes—after being rained on, then dried in, the leather of his arm braces had stiffened.

Unfortunately, Zhou Zishu had to admit that lighter robes were more pleasant to move in. The sleeves, especially. Even when he’d been an opium bum—the memory of which sent an uncomfortable throb of longing for that sickly sweet inhale of smoke—his clothing had been whatever had the semblance of a drape with sleeves. He hadn’t dressed like this since—

Well, since the day he returned to Four Seasons Villa with a basketful of jade strapped to his shoulders and slipped in a puddle of his shifu’s blood.

“See? Good, right?” Wen Kexing said when he stepped back around the screen. “And it matches your guan and belt so much better, no one will notice.”

“It’s fine.” It was bigger in the waist than Zhou Zishu was accustomed to, but he readjusted the belt where it sat on his hips and folded the silk over the jade so the stones wouldn’t catch light so easily. “Stop gawking and go put yours on, you attract too much attention.”

Wen Kexing was tall enough for his head to peek over the top of the screen as he disrobed, tossing his red clothing over the rim as he wrapped himself in bamboo green linen and silk. Every toss of fabric brought a chilled breeze, as if winter was pouring out from Wen Kexing’s seams and stitches. Zhou Zishu reached out, surreptitiously enough so that Wen Kexing wouldn’t notice, to run his hands across the red brocade. He frowned when it was icy to the touch—as though Wen Kexing had been rolling around in snow just moments before.

It was midsummer. All of Zhou Zishu’s assassin clothes were damp with sweat.

“A-Xu, help me tie this?” Wen Kexing called. “It hurts to twist in that direction.”

“What are you trying to do, contortionism? You’re fine.”

“Have some pity on me.” Wen Kexing’s eyes appeared over the rim of the screen. “It was your xiongdis that did this to me, the least you could do is see to my robe ties.”

Zhou Zishu sighed. If he did as begged, then Wen Kexing would shut up and they’d be out of here faster, so he rounded the screen. At least Wen Kexing was mostly clothed, with his inner robe tied shut, and the layering robe still loosely draped over his shoulders, white-socked toes peeking out beneath the hems like new sprouts. Zhou Zishu stepped in closer to him. “Well, lift your arms, then. What ties?”

“Here, these.” Wen Kexing turned and swept his curtain of hair over one shoulder so it was out of the way, holding one of the red-embroidered collars where the ties were supposed to fasten under his arm and waist. Even if he was being lascivious, Zhou Zishu remembered the shredded flesh of Wen Kexing’s chest. Movement really must be excruciating.

“Okay. Hold still.”

Zhou Zishu made it through one set of ribbons before he saw it. He was distracted, at first, by how cold Wen Kexing’s skin was, even through some three layers of linen. It wasn’t dead body cold—not exactly, though it was the same sort of uncanny, but a conscious, living cold. One that could burn if touched, almost as ugly as Ice jade. He’d never been this close to a living Blood Prisoner for so long. Maybe it was the mark of one most powerful— the cultivation level of the Blood Keeper would, by nature, far surpass any other Prisoner that Zhou Zishu had encountered before. Maybe his jade really did bother Wen Kexing, and his ease was all a front.

The thought was halfway up his throat when Zhou Zishu saw the raised, crisscrossing scar on the back of Wen Kexing’s neck.

Hold still. Who did this to you? You’re only a jade runner.

I don’t know. I didn’t see their face. Why does it matter, aren’t you one of those Jade Sword hunters? Just finish what they started. Be quick about it, please. Just do it now.

Dark forest. Midnight rain. Mud spatter on skin like black stars on falling sky. Jade, storm, blood.

The raised, double-crescent bite scar in the shape of teeth throbbed in Zhou Zishu’s arm in answer. The sensation was so acute and sudden that he startled, as if his limb didn’t belong to him, and Wen Kexing looked over his shoulder.

“Something wrong, A-Xu?”

“Where did you get that?” Zhou Zishu asked. “The scar on your neck.”

Wen Kexing’s eyes were goldfish startled in their bowls, darting as if to glance at it. Don’t know. Didn’t see their face. But then he smiled, the red afternoon turning his eyes into hard cherries, and he said, “Emperors wear crowns, thieves wear masks, children wear amulets, and martial warriors wear scars. Ask them where they’re going, but never ask from where they came.” A non-answer: you can ask me as many times as you want, in as many ways, but I won’t tell you. “A-Xu, what are you doing looking at my neck? My ties are at my waist. You were the one in a rush to leave.”

His smile stopped reaching his eyes. There was always something behind someone’s laughter—mirth, or malice, or regret. Anything, really. There was nothing behind Wen Kexing’s eyes, like a flame stamped out for fear of being discovered. Reach behind his face and your hand would fall right through, like lunging into the belly of an open grave.

Martial warriors wore scars, of course; what martial warrior made it through life without the evidence of their travels and deeds? When he saw himself in polished brass, Zhou Zishu had thought that he wore more scars than skin. Burns, stabs, flesh-eating poisons, needles punctures. Bites, one bite. Everyone had scars.

But who else carried a scar so singular as a jagged cross on the back of their neck?

He’d used his dagger to cut through the inner lining of his robes for a bandage. Jade, storm, blood. Rain had wormed its way down Zhou Zishu’s back. Jade, storm, blood. Gore had wept from the gaping wound from which this scar was born, so thick and dark it had looked like curtains of hair. Hold still, hold still. Jadestormblood. His own bare arm in the night, pale as the neck of a dying swan, pulse fluttering in the bend of his elbow.

“No reason,” said Zhou Zishu, doing the last of his ties in a tight looped knot. If nothing else, he could lie about his past without wavering. He would have to ask later, where there were fewer eyes. “You’re right. I did want to go.”

Zhou Zishu gathered up their discarded clothing—if the tailor noticed the bloodstains that hadn’t washed out, he made no comment—as Wen Kexing finished pulling the rest of his robes on. Out of his tattered robes, he was far less harsh on the eyes. More approachable, and softer, less like the remnants of a kill and more like the algal bloom of summer.

Not that Zhou Zishu was looking. He figured changing out of his filthy assassin’s clothes had the same transformative effect on him.

“Both daxias, I’m so glad those sets could work for you,” the tailor said. “Let me see, for both of those…”

Zhou Zishu’s attention was drawn towards the street—he never liked having his back to an open door, and he watched the villagers pass by as Wen Kexing counted out the money to pay for their robes. A hunched boy with a basketful of tanghulu strapped to his back, skewers glinting like red porcupine quills, squeezed past a noisy oxcart full of caged chickens. A mother at a bun seller that reminded Zhou Zishu of the one that used to share his miserable opium pipe turned to show one baby strapped to her front and another to her back, both red-faced in sleep.

In the mouth of a winehouse stood a young woman with huadian and mianye, dangling a tassel of hawk feathers from a string and a stick as a stray cat leapt to paw at it, and she stared right back when Zhou Zishu’s eyes slid past her.

“Hurry up,” he said.

“Thank you both, daxia,” the tailor clutched the money that Wen Kexing had counted out and raised his fists in salute. “May the paths you tread in Jianghu be prosperous and smooth.”

“There’s someone watching us,” Zhou Zishu said, steering Wen Kexing out of the tailory by the elbow. His arm, too, was hard and cold through his sleeve. “Don’t do anything to attract attention.”

“A-Xu, I could wear a veil over my face and cover every recognizable part of myself, and the bloom of your face would still turn every head in the square,” said Wen Kexing, dodging instinctively when Zhou Zishu turned his most incensed expression upon him. “Do you disagree? You should wear a disguise. I don’t like everyone staring at my lifesource. Speaking of which, we need to get you food—”

Zhou Zishu glanced behind them. The woman had followed them, though she had her back turned to them, as if she’d been standing at the produce stall they’d just passed all this time. The speed with which she moved unnerved him.

“Not here. We’ll just have to make it to the next village, we’re already being followed.”

“A-Xu,” said Wen Kexing.

“Shut up and walk. I don’t know how she recognized us, but she must be from—”

“A-Xu, listen—”

“—no, not the capital. Even undercover, they didn’t dress like that. Yu Guanyin, maybe.”

“A-Xu.” Wen Kexing finally wrested his elbow out of Zhou Zishu’s grip. The corners of his mouth were pink with laughter. “Since I let you have your fun, can you stop racing me away from my informant?”

Zhou Zishu blinked. He turned, watched in fascinated silence as the young woman approached them wordlessly and without preamble. She glanced at Zhou Zishu long enough to see his face, and then turned to Wen Kexing with a slight incline of her head. “Zongzhu.”

“Did A-Xiang send you?”

“No, but I received word from her as well. She has investigated the city side of Scarlet Peak with no success. There is no trace of the person you seek. As we speak, she’s combing the caldera. The eyes and ears posted along trade routes leading out of Luoyang have found nothing. There have been spikes of violence between hunters and independent Ice palm factions all over the country.”

Wen Kexing regarded her. The skirts of the sun were still spilling unforgivingly over the city, but Wen Kexing was shuttered now, his face swallowing all light. “You did not come for me,” he concluded, after a beat of silence.

“No, Zongzhu.”

Zhou Zishu glanced at him. Then she was—

She reached into her collars, and Zhou Zishu’s hand jumped to Baiyi at his waist, but she unearthed a letter and handed it to him. Without another word, she saluted Wen Kexing once more, dipped her head, and let herself be sucked back into the tapestry of the village.

“Someone knows to use my runners to reach you,” Wen Kexing said, as if he were simply commenting on the appearance of a particularly ugly animal. “I like this game.”

Zhou Zishu unrolled the letter. There were only two lines in spidery black ink, as if someone had written it in darkness.

Stay downwind, or they will smell you coming.

They made it to Taiyuan by nightfall, late enough that the summer sun had finished its horizon dance. All the light that remained sat in a thin gold chain upon the hills.

“Imagine if we’d stayed back in Taishan. There wouldn’t nearly have been so many restaurants to choose from,” said Wen Kexing, as an attendant of an inn led them to the lofted floor of their dining area. “A-Xu, you’ve been in this region before, haven’t you? Have you ever eaten daoxiao noodles? It’s incomparable anywhere else.”

The inn was filled with the smell of frying duck, stewing mutton, and buckwheat noodles steeped in aged vinegar. Coming in, they had to dodge a cook charging out of the kitchen with a steaming claypot of mutton and bamboo soup, steam dewing his shining cheeks. Zhou Zishu figured that the last time he’d been in a restaurant, he’d been in the city to kill Blood Prisoners. Naturally, all the food would have tasted of nothing.

“It smells good,” Zhou Zishu conceded when their orders arrived at their table. He offered Wen Kexing a pair of chopsticks, tapped the ends of his own on the table to straighten them, and flicked his chin. “Eat something. It’ll at least be filling.”

Wen Kexing studied him. They’d been traveling all day, and his lips had paled, but he smiled. “It does smell good,” he said, and took the chopsticks. Their fingers brushed, and Zhou Zishu tried not to startle at how cold Wen Kexing’s fingers were. “But you smell better, A-Xu.”

“Shut up and eat your food.” Zhou Zishu picked up his bowl of rice. If Wen Kexing wasn’t going to eat, he was starting without him.

“You smell like,” Wen Kexing went on, resting his chin on his knuckles pensively. “Hmm.”

“Like blood. I know.”

“No, not at all. You smell...sweet and mean, like wine.”

Zhou Zishu looked at him over the lip of his bowl. Wen Kexing was still smiling, the raw seam of a smile still hanging onto his mouth.

“If you’re not going to eat,” said Zhou Zishu, leaning forward across the table. “Then I have some questions for you.”

Without another word, Wen Kexing raised his bowl to his lips and began shoveling rice and soup into his mouth.

Wine. They’d ordered two jugs of it, and Wen Kexing forwent pouring into his shallow wine dish to drink directly from the spout. Zhou Zishu served himself, then passed it under his nose; it did smell warm. Sharp and cloying, if he breathed in deep, with the eye-watering heat of midday and dodging buzzards.

Better than blood, he decided, and downed it without tasting.

“I do want to know what you were going to ask,” Wen Kexing said. They’d cleared off half their food, and their chopsticks had slowed to start picking at the choicest parts of their dishes; the bed of onions that their fish was served upon had softened in the oil-flecked meat sauce. “Against my better judgment.”

Zhou Zishu grunted. “You wouldn’t answer it, anyway. I only knew it would get you to shut up and eat.”

“Oh?” Wen Kexing rested his chopsticks over his bowl. “Well, now I’m curious, A-Xu. I like a challenge.”

“I know.”

“There’s very little I would hide from you. It doesn’t do me well to keep secrets from a Bondmate.”

Zhou Zishu tapped his chopsticks against the empty bottom of his bowl, staring into the soupy dregs. Then he looked at Wen Kexing, who tilted his head expectantly.

“The scar on your neck,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“In an attack,” Wen Kexing answered without hesitation. “I think you can understand that my ilk have never been in favor of jianghu or of the crown. Or people such as yourself.”

That was too easy. That was on Zhou Zishu for not asking the right question, and he shook himself. “How old were you? It doesn’t look recent. Why would anyone attack a child?”

Wen Kexing stayed smiling, but there it was again—the tightening of the rest of his body, the sinewed flex of his knuckles, the jump of cords in his neck. The air around him hardened; reach out to touch him and your fingers would ossify.

Elsewhere, Zhou Zishu would keep pressing. Inside a war tent, or a cave, he would have waited for Wen Kexing to give him a non-answer, then dug again. In this inn, though, they were surrounded, and for the first time he felt that he’d lifted some rotten log in Wen Kexing’s soul and wasn’t sure he wanted to make out what had been chewing away the wood beneath.

“Never mind,” said Zhou Zishu. “Pretend I didn’t ask at—”

“When you’re a Blood Prisoner, it doesn’t matter if you’re a baby, a child, or an adult,” said Wen Kexing. His eyes were fixed on the middle of their food spread, at the bright splash of chili oil across the wood where their meat had dripped. “Have you ever looked at centipede larvae without burning their nests? Have you ever looked at newborn kraits and thought, ‘Oh, no, I’ll spare them, on account of the fact they only just left their eggs’? Have you ever kicked juvenile wolves and thought, ‘There’ll be no danger to me, for they’re just a child’? No. You kill or you run.”

Zhou Zishu already knew the answer. “Did you see who did it?”

“Would it matter? They found out who I was—the only survivor of the Shenyi Gu. The crown sent Ice palm practitioners to wipe us out indiscriminately and without mercy when we went against their commands. Decades of a sect—gone. Centuries of knowledge—immortalized only in books. Overnight, memory became the only evidence we ever existed. We’re born drowning in our mother’s bellies and I woke up, this death traitor, the last alive, drowning in my mother’s blood.”

“You were the only one left?”

Wen Kexing had picked up his chopsticks again, held the tips against the table like a knife. “I was lucky. Or unlucky. It changes.”

Zhou Zishu swallowed, thought of tripping over the anthill outside the gates of Four Seasons Villa, of hiding until his legs were needles and sand. “I know it does,” he said.

“But that’s how it goes, doesn’t it? When you sit on a throne, people aren’t people anymore. They’re just centipedes. They’re just kraits. They’re just wolves. When they found out one survived and had secretly been working for the palace for years, chewing my way inside, they came after me with their knives and poisons. What do you do when you find out the centipede has been eating your worms? When the krait has been eating your eggs? When the wolf has been killing your chickens?”

A crunch. The chopsticks had splintered in Wen Kexing’s hands.

“And then you ran,” Zhou Zishu murmured, almost to himself.

“I ran. Like any child would have. They wanted my head,” said Wen Kexing. He opened his palm, the fractured bits of chopsticks clattering to the table. “But cut it off and I’ll still bite.”

The restaurant hummed on around them, plate clatters like cricket chirps, waiters howling orders in the kitchen.

“How many years after that did it take you to become the Blood Keeper, after that?”

Zhou Zishu could guess—ten or so, if he used the marks of his own life. He didn’t need the answer, but it was enough to break the thick, glazed way that Wen Kexing always seemed to get when anyone shook loose parts of himself that he’d carefully packed away. He blinked, bodyline loosening, and stared at Zhou Zishu.

“You think I didn’t know?” Zhou Zishu poured himself more wine and reached for another piece of fried duck. “It doesn’t take a prodigy to put it together. You are not a subtle man.”

Wen Kexing was silent, and for a moment Zhou Zishu wondered if he’d been genuinely stunned. “How long have you known?”

He shrugged, and drank his wine.

“And you saved my life anyway?” asked Wen Kexing, so quietly that his voice was nearly lost in the body-warmed din.

“Hey, hey,” Zhou Zishu grimaced as the wine went down burning. He’d started speaking before he’d swallowed. “Don’t forget, I didn’t do it for free, out of the goodwill of my heart.”

Didn’t he?

Spare no Prisoner.

“Of course not! I haven’t forgotten why A-Xu spared me,” Wen Kexing said. His laugh came easily now, without any bleeding edges. “What are we but two stonehearted vagrants whose paths are painted in blood? Nothing escapes our A-Xu’s notice. But now I want to know, what else has he noticed with his unerring, keen observation?”

Zhou Zishu poured himself more wine. The scarred bend of his elbow smarted in the muggy air. The more you talk, the more that’s on your mind. You’re not a centipede, or a krait, or a wolf; those are all the things you wished you were. Both of us have been dead since that night in the rain.

Jade, storm, blood.

He spared a Prisoner, once.

“You’re out of alcohol,” said Zhou Zishu, jerking his chin at Wen Kexing’s empty jug. “How about ordering another?”

Jade.

“Hold still. Who did this to you? You’re only a jade runner.”

Zhou Zishu didn’t know his name. He didn’t know if he could ask, or if the boy would answer if he did, or if he’d tell the truth if he answered at all. He didn’t know why he was here, trying to help him, peering through the darkness to see the black ooze of blood turning the back of the boy’s neck into black sky and inkfall. The wound was a clean, angry cross. Someone had slashed, hard, in an attempt to take off his head.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see their face. Why does it matter, aren’t you one of those Jade Sword hunters? Just finish what they started. Be quick about it, please. Just do it now.”

It was wet, but it had to do. Zhou Zishu held the length of fabric he’d torn out of his inner robe lining against the boy’s neck, blood spreading in soft mothwing eyes across the silk as soon as it landed on the torn flesh, and began wrapping. Tight enough to hold the blood in, loose enough that it wasn’t a noose around his throat. The boy held still, as if he were just waiting for Zhou Zishu to grip the ends of the silk on both sides and tighten until he died.

“I’m not here to kill you.”

“No? You’re dressed like one of them.” When the boy turned his eyes had begun to weep dark crimson tears. “The jade hunters. The ones that are putting sport mercenaries out of work.”

“I,” said Zhou Zishu. He was nameless now. It didn’t matter who he was. One of them, the boy said, and Zhou Zishu startled to realize that them stood for Yujian Bang now, and not Four Seasons Villa. Recently, Yujian Bang had started to call Zhou Zishu Tiger’s Tooth, from the ballad that warned children of the dangers of one—something that was alone had nothing to lose. A leader that had risen out of blood screaming. “It doesn’t matter who I am, either.”

The boy turned away. “I suppose you’re right about that.”

Zhou Zishu tucked the ends of his makeshift bandage into itself until it held, then sat back on his ankles in the mud.

Storm.

“Why are you a jade runner if you’re a Blood Prisoner?” he asked. “It will kill you. You’re dying already, I can see it in your eyes. I felt the energy of the Ice jade before I could find your face in the dirt. It’s a miracle you haven’t died already.”

“Sometimes, to survive is to die,” said the boy. He tried to stand, then staggered and gripped his basket full of jade for support. “Over, and over, and over again.”

“Don’t do it like this,” Zhou Zishu said. “I don’t care what you do, but a jade death like this is gruesome and unforgiving. If you die out here, no one will find you.” Or what’s left of you.

“And so? There’s no one left who will think to look.”

And so—Zhou Zishu had buried himself long before now, or so he thought. When he met Beiyuan, he’d told himself that every part of his life before that was over. He told himself that again when they found Jiuxiao. Now he sat alone in this forest, rain undoing his braids and his bun like a sticky lover would, with someone else who said dying was the only way to live.

Who was he?

Just someone making sure that his neighbor’s grave was well-dug.

“Don’t die here,” he repeated, undoing the brace guard at his forearm. “If it so happens that we meet one day under the sun blade to jade, then let us duel until one of us is victor, but don’t die here.”

The boy stared, bewildered and then shocked, when Zhou Zishu tugged his sleeve up his arm, his leather-creased skin the white belly of a krait in the night. His eyes were so red and dark that his irises had nearly drowned in them.

“Who are you?” asked the boy.

Without thinking, Zhou Zishu said, “The Tiger’s Tooth.” He angled his arm until the rain hit the thundering pulse inside his elbow. “You run our jade. I don’t care where you’re from, or where you’re going, but don’t die here. Drink. Then run, and don’t come back.”

Blood.

Zhou Zishu winced when the boy held his arm still, brought it to his lips, and sank his teeth into his arm. Four stings, and a blunter, throbbing pain where his human teeth broke skin. A warm, sticky flood of gore ran down his skin to pool in his palm lines, and Zhou Zishu winced before turning his head away. He could feel the boy starting to suck, eyes huge and glassy, and the sensation was stranger than the pain.

He couldn’t tell how long he fed, but his brain started to buzz, head full of wasps, and he tugged on his arm until the boy’s mouth dislodged from his elbow. His mouth was smeared with blood down to his chin, and he swayed when Zhou Zishu pulled away, nearly toppling into the dirt.

But then he righted himself and turned his face to Zhou Zishu, who jumped, limbs flying to scoot himself away, because that was Wen Kexing’s face—Wen Kexing as he knew him now, angry, blood-polished, shiny with anger.

“A-Xu,” said Wen Kexing. Blood dripped in strings from his mouth, like he’d done more than just drink blood, like he’d eaten something alive. “Would you have killed me then, if you’d known?”

Zhou Zishu woke up to nausea sitting on his chest and the phantom hands of cold sweat all over his body. It had been ages since nightmares touched him in his sleep, and longer still since he woke up to one still stretched, uninvited, over him. That was what the opium was for.

He sat up. A rain had started up in the night, devoid of thunder—summer storms without distant rolls of thunder always felt lopsided, incomplete, like a nap cut short. Zhou Zishu’s heart vibrated in his neck. A headache had taken root behind his eyes, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the fog of sleep or the need to bleed.

Wen Kexing. They’d known each other, once, if a dark, rainsoaked exchange of jade and blood witnessed by no one except themselves counted as knowing. Zhou Zishu had no idea if Wen Kexing had put it together yet.

Dead or alive, coward or hero, he was the only Yujian assassin that I would have spared.

The crown would have done anything to get its hands on him.

Zhou Zishu was in motion before he registered his feet moving—tugging on his boots, pulling his outer robes over his nightclothes. The inn breathed, as buildings did in the dark, when he opened his doors. The eatery some three floors below lay silent.

Wen Kexing’s room was on the other side of the floor, and Zhou Zishu walked along the hall and listened—to the sounds of sleep, of drunken weiqi games, of hushed-up sex that wasn’t supposed to be had. The thought of Wen Kexing being asleep was almost silly, though Zhou Zishu figured he had to sleep, sometimes—but he never saw him do it, always awake as Zhou Zishu drifted off on the road, and awake long before the sun roused Zhou Zishu from slumber.

Through the panels of his doors, Zhou Zishu could see the candles still lit in Wen Kexing’s room. Burnt low, like he hadn’t stood up for fresh ones in a few hours. It was late; they’d be tiny ponds of beeswax by now.

He knocked. There was no answer. Zhou Zishu didn’t expect one, but there wasn’t any noise, either. Wen Kexing adjusted his internal energy for long, silent spells each night, but he could usually be startled out of any session if Zhou Zishu so much as breathed a little harder than he usually did.

“Lao Wen,” he called. “Are you awake?”

What was he going to say? Do you remember, years ago, a stranger saving your life in the forest? And if Wen Kexing did, so what? What did Zhou Zishu want from him—certainly not the acknowledgement, or the thanks. The thought made his skin crawl. To warn him, perhaps. Your Bondmate is wanted by the crown. No more than you are, I suppose. You were right about us being stonehearted vagrants, but maybe my ransom price is higher than yours.

“Lao Wen. Open up or I’m coming in.”

Zhou Zishu waited a moment longer. There was no shadow dance on the other side to indicate anyone was moving in the room. He pushed the doors open.

Wen Kexing was awake. Upright, sitting at the table with a three-tiered clay candle holder burning low. His back was to the entrance.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” Zhou Zishu hissed, shutting the doors behind him with squeaks like sore throats. “If you’re still awake at this hour, the least you could do is answer when I knock.”

He rounded the table. Wen Kexing’s eyes were shut, hands resting on his knees. His lips were so pale that, if not for the jagged streak of his mouth, he could have passed for a ghost. All that sat still was never completely motionless—living things were always fidgeting, shoulders slumping, bellies gurgling, throats rippling with the slow bobs of swallowing.

But.

“Wen Kexing,” said Zhou Zishu. “Are you listening?”

And Wen Kexing made no sign he knew Zhou Zishu stood within arm’s reach at all.

Zhou Zishu lowered himself onto his knees beside Wen Kexing, face tipped forward, eyelashes stone-still against his cheeks. “Wen Kexing,” he said, reaching out for his shoulder to shake. For all he knew, Zhou Zishu’s hand closed around a fistful of ice, his body was so cold, and he gritted his teeth and shook. “Wen Kexing!”

Wen Kexing bent like a reed in wind. Then his body sagged, soul pooling with the realization its owner wasn’t home, and he slumped to the floor with a muted thud. His head rattled, like it was empty. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and landed on the floor in dark red buttons.

“What—?”

He’d been laughing at dinner. He’d been talking and drinking. Zhou Zishu knelt beside him, rolling Wen Kexing onto his back, and groped for the pulse points in his wrists. Both his heartbeat and internal energy was so weak that he could barely feel either, and Wen Kexing’s skin was cold enough to sting.

It had only been a few days. Blood Prisoners could go weeks without so much as thinking about blood, so long as they kept on eating yang human food.

“Lao Wen,” Zhou Zishu said, hauling Wen Kexing’s body into the cradle of his legs. “Hey, wake up. Wake up, you need to drink. Weakling, you can’t go a few hours without blood?”

Baiyi was still in his room—Zhou Zishu cursed. He was no longer accustomed to traveling with weapons, was eager not to, and had nothing sharp. His eyes landed on the candle holder at the center of the table.

The smash of it was loud enough to reverberate in the silence, and all the way down the hall he heard giggles and gasping halt. The silence raised its head, scenting. Zhou Zishu didn’t waste any more time, and hoped that an establishment this big had the funds to cover a forgettable candle holder as he balanced Wen Kexing’s head between the crook of his thigh and his chest. He raised his arm, found a blade-edged shard of clay that had broken in the shape of a tiger’s tooth, and sliced into his skin.

The blood welled up immediately, rich and dark. Zhou Zishu scrambled to cradle the back of Wen Kexing’s head, tip him until his mouth opened naturally, and fitted the curve of his arm into the shallow valley of Wen Kexing’s lips. Blood ran messily down both of his cheeks, like he’d dove facefirst into melonfruit, sticky and indulgent.

He didn’t know why he thought this would work. Who was to say that blood would make it into Wen Kexing’s stomach, if he weren’t awake to swallow? But—they were Bondmates, now, and it had to count for something. Against all odds, or rules, or whatever arbitrary scruples that Zhou Zishu lived by, Wen Kexing lived as Zhou Zishu did. Miserably, or vibrantly. Unforgivingly.

It was a good change.

The rain lightened to an uncertain drizzle, then a mist, and Wen Kexing choked when he came to—it could have been moments, or long enough for a stick of incense to burn down to its quick, but his eyelids flickered and opened. He blinked, unseeing, up at Zhou Zishu’s face, then shut them again. The rest of the candles gave only enough light that his eyes were gleaming slits.

Waking meant the simple press of arm to mouth turned to muscle caught in teeth, the warm flat of Wen Kexing’s tongue lapping at the spill of blood into his mouth. It stung, only for a moment. Then the pain ebbed.

This wasn’t sleep. It wasn’t an argument. It wasn’t sex. Somehow it was all three—the silence of slumber, the blood-tang of anger, the unspoken hum of mouth to skin and soft tug of sex. Everyone else in this inn had to choose one. Zhou Zishu sat and let him drink until Wen Kexing’s blinks became more rhythmic and his jaw began to move against his arm.

“Don’t be greedy,” he said, as the familiar haze of losing too much blood at once returned, world sinking around him like dune sand. He wrenched his arm gently out of Wen Kexing’s mouth, and expected some sharp quip in return as soon as his mouth was free, but.

Wen Kexing only looked at him. Blood drunk, eyes opening and closing in slow tidal pulls, breathing hard like he’d been falling.

Blood had run down his chin and settled into his collars. Red always turned into ugly handprints of brown in green silk. Unthinkingly, Zhou Zishu shook the sleeve of his nightclothes over his hand and brought it up to Wen Kexing’s face, dabbing away the worst of it.

“Not a messy eater, my ass,” he grunted, as Wen Kexing continued to stare at him. “What are you looking at? The appropriate response is ‘Thank you Zhou Daxia.’” He hadn’t stopped wiping Wen Kexing’s mouth, sleeve petaled in red.

The wound that Wen Kexing’s bite had left behind was clotting already, as if the the gashes were a few hours old, and not fresh. His head was still supported in the curve of Zhou Zishu’s arm, so he shook the sleeve of his bitten one up until he could study the scabbing, and Wen Kexing reached out with shaking fingers to bring the oozing wounds back to his mouth.

At first Zhou Zishu thought he was going to drink again, almost pulled away, until Wen Kexing parted his lips without baring his teeth and sealed his mouth over the wound. His throat didn’t bob, he wasn’t drinking, he only—dragged the wet, soft tip of his tongue over the jagged bite wounds, licking the blood away to expose the raw edges of skin.

“What are you doing?”

“My spit.” Speaking seemed to hurt, like words were clawing themselves out of Wen Kexing’s chest. “It closes wounds faster.”

Zhou Zishu let him work at the wounds until the blood stopped trickling and all that was left was a dark, geodic trench where his flesh had valleyed under Wen Kexing’s teeth. He didn’t have to—heal him, that was, unless Wen Kexing was just doing it for the last drops of blood. Zhou Zishu pushed the thought aside. He had more pressing questions to ask.

“What happened?” Zhou Zishu demanded. “I thought you were—you didn’t look alive. Blood Prisoners can go weeks without blood if they’re eating food at regular intervals, what’s the deal with you? Why the dramatics?”

“Hungry,” said Wen Kexing. He released Zhou Zishu’s arm, then sat up, shaking but whole. “Not dramatics.”

“You looked fine at dinner.”

Wen Kexing shivered on his exhale as he began adjusting his internal energy. Zhou Zishu sat down behind him, exasperated, and channeled his own into his palms before pressing his hands to Wen Kexing’s shoulder blades. Already, he was warmer under his clothes.

“I wasn’t kicking my heels together, either,” Wen Kexing said. “When a Prisoner is bonded, everything changes. You’re right to claim that we can go weeks without blood as long as we eat yang foods—red meat, wine, peppercorns, garlic and ginger, wild cherries. But,” he coughed, the sound wet and churning. “After a Bond is created, nothing fills. Nothing keeps the Ice venom from running rampant through our meridians except the Bondmate’s blood.”

Zhou Zishu wanted to punch him, and substituted it with readjusting his own energy, then slamming his palms back into Wen Kexing’s shoulders with more force than necessary. “Bastard, why didn’t you say anything?”

“You negotiated as such, A-Xu.”

“As if that stopped you from almost turning my head into brain mash in the infirmary? Why didn’t you just use force?”

Wen Kexing snorted. “You’d hate me forever.”

“So what? You’re supposed to live first. Who cares what I think about you?”

“For some reason, I do. I don’t want you to hate me.”

He said it so simply. It didn’t sound like something he should have said at all, because the silence was stunned even for Wen Kexing, and his arms twitched as if he were mentally lunging through the air around him and stuffing the words back under his tongue.

“I wouldn’t have hated you,” said Zhou Zishu, as the silence began to hold water. I didn’t hate you then, and I wouldn’t hate you now. “I would have fought you, certainly, but I would’ve understood.”

The silence remained, swelling. Then Wen Kexing’s shoulders jumped with noiseless laughter. “You’re a better person than I am, A-Xu.”

“That’s not saying much.”

Zhou Zishu drew his hands away, reigning his internal energy back into his own meridians. Movement pained Wen Kexing as he shifted gingerly, crossing his legs when he turned to face Zhou Zishu, and winced. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“If it happens again, tell me,” says Zhou Zishu. Wen Kexing arched one eyebrow. “Yes, even if I don’t feel the headaches.”

“Those come from your body overproducing blood,” Wen Kexing said. “That’s the effect the Bond has on you—your systems overcompensate for how much you lose by making more than you need. First, you get the headaches. Then the itches, then the sweats. After too long, your vision goes. All that if you don’t bleed.”

Zhou Zishu exhaled. Their knees touched—the discs of two star systems burning in each other’s orbits. The chaotic, patchy warming of Wen Kexing’s body channeled into Zhou Zishu, reaching for more of him. “It’s obvious you can’t afford to wait that long, so you have to tell me when you need blood. Don’t spring on me unwarned, and I’ll know if you’re lying. If I start blacking out when you’re drinking, I’m going to tell you to stop, and you have to stop.”

To his surprise, Wen Kexing nodded and said nothing but, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Zhou Zishu prompted. “That’s it?”

“You want to duel about it?”

“No. I just lost at least a jug of blood, that’s the last thing I want to do.”

“I’m very reasonable, A-Xu! Whatever my Bondmate commands.”

“It’s not—I’m not going to let you die. Likewise, don’t kill me.”

“I would never! Not when I need you, A-Xu.”

Zhou Zishu shot him a wry look. “Someone like you would have no trouble getting into the capital yourself. What’s stopping you from slaughtering your way in? You don’t need me at all.”

Wen Kexing waved his pale, careless hand, but he smiled again at Zhou Zishu. The center of his mouth was the brittle red of cracked sea urchins, blooming into the white paste of his face. Zhou Zishu thought he was about to say something—something to refute him, an objection on the cusp of his lips, though Zhou Zishu couldn’t imagine what Wen Kexing had to argue.

Abruptly, he recognized the tune of this silence. The same mist, the same pungence of humming dawn—all he was missing was a wrapped leaf of roast pigeon.

Aren’t you supposed to be a Yujian assassin? You’re all supposed to be ruthless in your killing and keen in your tracking. Why’d you spare Zhuren before you knew what he could do for you?

And Wen Kexing said nothing.

Stay downwind, or they will smell you coming.

“Someone knows where we’re moving. And why, maybe.”

“Hmm. Yes, it does seem so.”

Zhou Zishu watched as Wen Kexing put down what had to be the tenth fan he’d picked up and examined with pathological interest, holding the fabric up to the sun, then running his fingers along the spokes. Most were made of wood, but a few were of iron, and he’d tutted at a few that were sturdy but patterned with ink paintings of mountains.

“I don’t want to see mountains every time I open up my fan,” Wen Kexing had explained when Zhou Zishu had questioned his dislike for them. “I live on one.”

And—to anyone else, this wouldn’t make any sense, for every mountain sect at their home peaks painted and hung everywhere in their villas, but when that mountain stood for both home and destruction, Zhou Zishu knew it would be hard to see them everywhere you went. A reminder that not even jianghu had room for you.

“What was wrong with that one?” he asked. “There weren’t any mountains. It was sturdy.”

“Too small. Thank you,” said Wen Kexing to the vendor, who watched crestfallen as they left. They’d probably been hoping to make good money off two well-dressed martial masters.

“Wait, they weren’t an informant?”

“What? No. Except for the one in Taiyuan, I don’t have any runners until at least Hongdao. I sent most of them farther south.”

“Then why did we stand there long enough for you to look at ten fans?”

Wen Kexing sighed deeply. “It is truly a misfortune fit for me that my Bondmate has the romantic instincts of a dry chicken breast,” he lamented, and Zhou Zishu scoffed with indignation. “I’m not buying a fan just to look pretty, A-Xu, though that’s important too. It’s an extension of my arm. Would you just buy any old sword to replace Baiyi?”

No, but he wouldn’t lose Baiyi to begin with. Zhou Zishu answered with an eyeroll.

“Anyway, the letter that my runner in Taiyuan handed you—would you like to know my guess as to who sent it?”

“I think we have the same guess.” Zhou Zishu paused, turning to Wen Kexing as they wormed their way through a fringe village outside Hongdao, halfway between Taiyuan and Daming. “Beiyuan.”

“What I want to know,” Wen Kexing nodded at two passing maidens, who ducked their faces into their silk sleeves and giggled as they passed. He didn’t appear the least bit surprised by this idea. “Is why he’s helping, and without naming himself. Have you started thinking about that?”

Zhou Zishu had. He didn’t like the implications of it. “Say he knows what we’re on our way to do,” he said. “That I’m looking for him, that you want me to get you into the capital unnoticed. He’s giving us enough so that we know it’s him, which is partly what I want—to find him alive. And…”

“He wants me to seek audience with Jin Wang, because though my end goal is almost certainly bloodier than his, he also has a score to settle with Jin Wang.” Wen Kexing ducked, paused, just to smell the rising curls of steam from a sweet niangao seller. “You have to admit it’s brilliant of him, A-Xu, for him to get us to do his legwork all over the kingdom.”

“We were mercenaries for that crown,” Zhou Zishu said. “It took years for me to denounce the work I’d done. What happened to him?”He wasn’t quite asking—he knew Wen Kexing wouldn’t know.

“Aren’t you worried I won’t hold up my end of the deal, if you know he’s alive?” he offered as rejoinder.

“No,” said Zhou Zishu. “Because you haven’t delivered him alive to me, and for all we know, it might not be him at all.”

Beside him, Wen Kexing shrugged. “You said that his blood was found on a remote path going into Luoyang. Who’s to say he wasn’t ambushed by the crown’s men?”

“But we were the crown’s men.”

“Not if he knew something he shouldn’t have.”

Zhou Zishu squinted in the setting evening sun at Wen Kexing, picturesque ease burnished gold in the light. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Wen Kexing. “That’s what we’re really looking for, though, aren’t we?”

The question pulsed like an extra heart uncomfortably inside Zhou Zishu all throughout dinner, which they bought and decided to bring out onto the road. The inns were crowded, and Wen Kexing agreed that small villages were too difficult to go unnoticed in, especially in agricultural ones where two martial practitioners stood out shrill and fevered against the dust and lumber.

“Are you hungry?” Zhou Zishu asked, after a particularly long stretch of silence. Wen Kexing hadn’t said anything in a while, and silence was unnatural now with Wen Kexing beside him. He’d become uncomfortably aware of his own breathing.

“No, just thinking.” The night washed both of them lake green. In the early evening, the cicadas had quieted for the crickets to sing. “Trying to estimate where that yatou is, based on time and what I know she’d go for first.”

Zhou Zishu sidestepped some underbrush, flowerfuls of seeds scattering when his robes brushed the blooms. “Has she been your handmaid all her life?”

Wen Kexing shrugged. Dead foliage and twigs rustled as they passed, seasons—entire generations—of a single forest shedding itself upon its old bones. “She’s not really a handmaid.”

“She calls you Zhuren.”

“She’s,” Wen Kexing thought, then laughed to himself. “A little tail.”

“She’s human, right? Is she a feeder, or something?”

“Yeah, she’s all human.” He raised his hand to push a greenstem branch away from his face, the leaves snapping back into place as they passed. “And no, not a feeder. I found her when I was—young, and she was a baby. Her village once sat on a massive deposit of jade that the empire wanted to mine. They refused to budge, so.” Wen Kexing shrugged. “You know what happens.”

“And you just—decided to raise her?”

“The original plan was to use her as a feeder,” said Wen Kexing. “I’ll admit that much. But I looked at this baby who had nothing left, who too lost everything because of the crown’s greed, and I couldn’t do it.”

“A daughter,” Zhou Zishu concluded.

“A fiend. You’ve met the beast.”

“Good kid,” Zhou Zishu said. “Nosy and obnoxious, but her heart’s in the right place. If you’d intended to breed a monster, I daresay you’ve failed.”

Wen Kexing was going to say something—the moon glinted off his teeth when his smile started before he spoke, his whole face splitting sweetly like a stone fruit—when a fearful, high-pitched cry pierced the deep wood. It was distinctly human, beating-swollen lips forming around words, and belonged to someone young.

They exchanged looks, then followed each other off the path and into the trees.

“Where do you think you’re going with all that stolen contraband? Tiny dogfucking bastard, thinks because he looks like his mama pushed him out of her pussy yesterday, we wouldn’t be suspicious?”

Zhou Zishu huddled down beside Wen Kexing, taking care not to step on the skirts of his robes. It was a tight squeeze behind what looked like a bush studded with field thistles.

“Listen to him. He sounds like a eunuch. Cry harder, little boy!”

“Maybe he really didn’t know—”

“Shut up! Look at that smirk on his face. He knew. He knows. Listen, little bastard—”

Wen Kexing lay a hand on Zhou Zishu’s arm when he started for the brambled clearing, barely large enough to contain what looked like a half dozen armed bandits surrounding a papery-thin teenage boy curled up on the ground. A basket was strapped to his back, lid sewn shut with leather twine, and even in the darkness they could see the purpling bruises on his face.

“What?” Zhou Zishu snapped. “You’re just going to let them rough up this kid?”

“No, I’m saying to let me speak first,” said Wen Kexing.

“Don’t say anything stupid—”

“To all the daxias I’ve gathered here tonight, thank you for arriving early,” Wen Kexing said, strolling past Zhou Zishu and out of the shadows. “And shame on me for being late. Impolite of me, considering you brought a banquet offering!”

Zhou Zishu crouched lower in the bushes and buried his face in his palm.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Did one of you bastards call him here?”

“No!”

“Who do you think you are?” barked one of the bandits. “This is our business, shove out. You look like one of those righteous prissy martial masters from arrogant jianghu sects. Go back to where you came from.”

The teenager sat up, shaking like a fawn and wisped with blades of grass, curling his legs in on himself like he hoped to disappear. Wen Kexing paused before him, the front of his clothes filthy from the beating, and glanced down at him.

With a start, Zhou Zishu sensed it—the unmistakable hum of Ice jade. Not enough to fill that basket. There must be something else inside, and that close, he knew Wen Kexing could feel it too. This child had to be even younger than he and Wen Kexing were when they’d first met.

Disgust soured behind his ears and he pictured Jin Wang lining up teenagers—children—to run jade.

“I’ll go, I’ll go,” Wen Kexing said, raising his hands. “I’m taking this child with me, and we can go bloodlessly. I go back to the pompous noble sects that you think I hail from, and you guys go back into the grimy underground where you all will inevitably kill each other one day for higher cuts. How’s that sound?”

Several of the bandits had lowered their blades. Others traded looks, taking a few steps back from Wen Kexing, who’d never stopped moving. Zhou Zishu recognized the tactic: his slow stalk around his opponents, studying them as their bodies pumped them full and stupid with adrenaline. He’d done the same thing in the war tent, when Zhou Zishu had stood with Baiyi pointed at him. All his words were flat, eerie, though he was smiling. The evening breeze had lowered to a dark hum just to tiptoe around him.

“Leave with him?” The first bandit who’d challenged Wen Kexing spat. “Pei! Like hell you will. That bastard has an entire sect’s worth of jade and opium strapped to his shoulders, and you think we’re just going to hand him over to you?”

Opium.

The trade document flashed through Zhou Zishu’s mind. So not only was this kid running jade, but opium at the same time. For Yu Guanyin, surely, and if he was on the same path as they were, was he running towards the capital? Or to one of the martial bases?

“Zhanglao, let’s just go,” said one of the younger bandits, casting frightened eyes between Wen Kexing and the leader. “There’s something wrong with him, just let him have the damn kid and let’s get out of here.”

“No. I’m done with martial heroes trying to push us around, thinking they’re above us. If he wants a fight, then we’ll give him one!”

They’d drawn their weapons. They’d sunk to their knees. Wen Kexing was still standing with his hands clasped leisurely behind him, as if he were studying a particularly riveting piece of art, and now that the attention was on him, the teenager scrambled backwards out of the fray. There was going to be a fight, and Wen Kexing would undoubtedly kill them all.

Then the wind gusted, hard, and Zhou Zishu smelled the trace of it—the throaty, hot stink of blood. Not fresh, the just-spilled tang of duel carnage, but the smell that came off the skin of someone who lived and died in it.

He darted out of the trees, drawing Baiyi, and Wen Kexing only glanced at him once in his surprise to see him before he stared back into the yawn of the woods.

“Who is this?”

“Who are you? Another one of you martial masters?”

“Shut up,” Zhou Zishu said, and something in his voice shut the lead bandit’s mouth without another word. To Wen Kexing, he asked, “You smelled it, didn’t you?”

“Surprised you did, too. You’re like a bloodhound, A-Xu.”

“It’s Ice palm practitioners,” said Zhou Zishu. “Anything else, I know nothing of—flowers, incense, tea. But I know blood.”

“Let’s go,” the bandits said. This time, their leader set his mouth, abandoned his pride, and they scurried into the safety of the trees.

“They’re not going to make it to the city,” Wen Kexing said cheerfully. “Hey, kid. Thank us later, okay? What’s your name?”

“Zhang Chengling. But, daxia, why—why later—?”

“Because you need to get out of the way if you want to keep your head, but don’t go into the trees. If they find you before we deal with them, it won’t be nearly as pleasant. Hai, I wish I had my fan, but hands will have to make do.”

The night took shape, then distorted, as Ice Palm practitioners spilled from the forest into the thorny clearing. They reared back in alarm at the sight of a jade sword in their faces, but Zhou Zishu leapt into motion, seizing that heartbeat of surprise. Beside him, Wen Kexing blurred in the darkness, green against the spidery blue of the evening.

They were young, and clearly inexperienced, but high on anger and adrenaline. Zhou Zishu took care not to land any killing strikes, avoiding their necks and eyes, but he jammed his elbows into noses when he felt their mouths lunge for his arms. Wen Kexing whisked around them, dealing even lighter blows.

The words were already at Zhou Zishu’s mouth—Stop fooling around, and fight like I know you can!—when he realized that Wen Kexing was sweeping around them and driving them into a tighter, claustrophobic ring around Zhou Zishu. A few more jabs and kicks and they’d be close enough for him to use qinggong and stun them by running across the planes of their chests using Liu Yun Nine-Step Form. In a clearing this small, it’d be easy to take them all out at once without them scattering into empty space.

He tried meeting Wen Kexing’s eyes, to—nod at him, or see if he’d give any indication he would be stepping back, when one of the practitioners cried, “Stop! Stop, it’s the Blood Keeper!”

“What?”

“The Keeper?”

“The Blood Keeper, cease at once! On your knees!”

The halting of the duel was so sudden that Zhou Zishu nearly misbalanced, weight thrown to one side, and Wen Kexing materialized beside him from the other side of the clearing to steady him. He’d just been smashing the tip of his boot hard into the tendon of a practitioner’s heel so that their knees buckled with the pain.

“Shame,” said Wen Kexing, chuckling when Zhou Zishu smacked his hand off the curve of his waist. “I wanted to see you use Liu Yun Nine-Step Form again. It’s really a remarkable technique.” He turned to the motley band of practitioners, who had sunk to their knees and raised fisted salutes. “Now. This is a turn of events! If you’re apologizing for trying to attack the Keeper’s Bondmate, then please rise, there are no hard feelings.”

They peeked at each other, without daring to look at Zhou Zishu, but none of them budged.

“Bl—Blood Keeper,” said the one kneeling at the head of their group. “This humble one is named Bi Xingming. We are an independent faction of Ice Palm followers who are on our way to Blood Mountain in order to beg for asylum from the Blood Keeper. We never once imagined we would run into you in these remote lands. Please forgive us for our oversight!”

“I was just starting to think I’ve never seen you before,” Wen Kexing said, crossing his arms. “You would not be the first to seek Blood Mountain’s protection, to become Blood Prisoners. But why the hurry?”

“We’ve been pursued, Keeper,” said Bi Xingming. “Word has spread that you’ve taken—a Bondmate, and hunting parties have cracked down all over the country on independent factions that might be suspected to be part of Blood Mountain, or that have any information about your whereabouts. We’ve only just lost them.”

“Lost who?” Zhou Zishu spoke up, knowing, and not wanting to hear, the answer. News traveled faster than he hoped it might. “The crown’s men?”

Bi Xingming swallowed, nodding at the stringbean teenager cowered behind them. “The ones who’ve employed kids like him,” he said. “Yu Guanyin.”