Chapter 2: A Very Thorough Village

Mo Ji woke up under a quilt that smelled of camphor, with her left wrist wrapped in white linen and her whole body aching as if the river had chewed her and spat her back out.

Which, to be fair, it had.

She lay still and took inventory. Ceiling: low, sooty, a crack shaped like a heron. Window: shutters half open, gray morning light, the sound of carts. Bed: an inn bed, which meant the Sword Warden of Cloudpine, who reputedly considered inns a moral weakness, had carried a half-drowned herb-seller up a flight of stairs and paid for a room.

Mo Ji filed that away under interesting and lifted the edge of the bandage with one fingernail.

The walnut stain was gone. The moon was right there, white and smug, curled on its back beside a scab.

She put the bandage down very gently.

All right, she thought. All right. Think.

If Lu Qingyan had seen the mark, Mo Ji would have woken up in chains. Or in a cage. Or in two neat pieces, like the corpse-puppet at Red Sand Pass. She was in none of those things. She was in a camphor quilt, with her wrist dressed so tidily it looked like a present.

Ergo, Lu Qingyan had not seen it.

Ergo, it had been dark, and the famous Sword Warden had been looking at the grit and not the skin, and Mo Ji's luck, which had abandoned her briefly in the middle of a river, had come back with its hat in its hands to apologize.

She let out a long breath and grinned at the heron-shaped crack.

There was one small, irritating fact she did not let herself look at directly: the rescue had been supposed to be fake, and it hadn't been. She actually owed this woman her life. It was a humiliating thing to owe anyone, and she had no intention of thinking about it before breakfast.

"You're awake."

Mo Ji sat up so fast the quilt fell off.

Lu Qingyan was sitting on the floor under the window, cross-legged, with the wrapped sword across her knees. She had not been there a moment ago. Or she had, and she had been so still that Mo Ji's eyes had slid right over her the way they slid over a chest of drawers.

"Benefactor!" Mo Ji clutched the quilt to her chest. "You stayed!"

"Yes."

"All night?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Your bandits might come back."

Old Bao, Mo Ji thought, is currently crying into a bowl of noodles twenty miles south of here, and Little Fen is still looking for his trousers.

"How brave you are," she said, and let her lip tremble. "I don't even know how to thank you."

"Don't."

Lu stood. It was one motion, floor to feet, no hands. She tucked the sword under her arm and went to the door, and Mo Ji understood with sudden horror that this was it. This was the whole goodbye. A don't, and a back, and a door.

"Wait!"

Lu waited, one hand on the latch, which in her seemed to be a kind of courtesy.

Mo Ji scrambled out of bed. Her braid had dried into a kinked rope, and the strip of red rag that had tied it off was still knotted at the end. She tugged it loose. She was barefoot and her hip hurt and she did not care.

"In my village," she said, "when someone saves your life, you can't just let them walk off. It's terrible luck. The gods get offended. There's a custom." She held up the rag. "May I?"

Lu looked at the rag. Then at her.

"It's very short," Mo Ji promised. "It's only a little knot. My grandmother would come back from the dead and slap me if I didn't."

The latch clicked as Lu let it go.

She held out her right wrist.

· · ·

It was a strip of cheap dyed cotton, frayed at both ends. The herb-seller wrapped one end around Lu's wrist and the other around her own bandaged left, so that the two of them stood joined by a hand's length of red, and then she began to tie knots in the middle of it. Small ones. Quick ones. Her fingers knew exactly what they were doing.

"One for every night of the moon," she said, not looking up. "That's how long the gods keep watch. My grandmother said."

Twenty knots. Twenty-five. Thirty.

Then she put her thumb on the last knot and said, in a singsong, "Breath given, breath owed, till the moon comes round."

Something hooked under Lu Qingyan's ribs and pulled.

It was not painful. It was precise, which was worse: a single fine thread drawn out of her core, through the channels of her arm, out through the skin of her wrist and into the red cotton, like a fishhook drawing line off a reel. She felt it settle. She felt the rag go from cotton to something that was not quite cotton.

She knew what it was.

She had read about it at nineteen in Cloudpine's sealed archive, by a lamp she wasn't supposed to have, in the third volume of the Waning Moon's binding arts. The Owed-Breath Knot. It used no qi of the binder's own; it drank from the one who had done the saving. A life given back, the text said, for a life taken out of the water. And beside it, in the margin, in her teacher's small, hard handwriting: DO NOT.

Ten paces. Thirty days. Rescuer and rescued, held together until the moon turned.

It could be cut. She could cut it now, with one stroke and some effort. It would cost her a year of cultivation. And it would cost the one on the other end a great deal more. Through the cotton, now, Lu could feel what she had only suspected on the riverbank: seven cold pinpricks along the herb-seller's channels, seven silver needles locking her qi down where it couldn't cushion anything.

Lu looked down at the top of the herb-seller's head. There was river mud still drying in her parting.

"There," the herb-seller said brightly, and stepped back. "Now the gods are happy."

"Your village," Lu said, "is very thorough."

"We're a thorough people."

Lu turned and opened the door. She walked out into the corridor, past a maid with a bucket, to the head of the stairs, and down. One. Two. She counted, because she was curious, and because she wanted to know exactly how much of this to believe. Seven. Eight. Nine.

On the tenth stair, something tugged at her right wrist.

On the eleventh, she stopped, because behind her and above her there was a shriek and a heavy thump and the sound of a woman being dragged bodily across a floorboard.

She went back up.

The herb-seller was lying in the doorway, tangled in the quilt she'd apparently grabbed on the way down, with her bandaged arm stretched out in front of her toward the stairs like someone reaching for a dropped coin. The maid with the bucket was staring.

"Benefactor," the herb-seller said from the floor, in a voice of tremendous wonder. "I don't think that was supposed to happen."

Lu looked at her.

"How far," she said.

"I don't know. It's never… it's just a custom! It's never actually done anything before! Oh, the gods must really like you."

Lu Qingyan:

…

"Get up," she said. "We need to buy you sandals."

· · ·

Mo Ji walked north out of the town that morning in new straw sandals that the most feared sword cultivator in the Southern Marches had bought her from a stall without saying a word, while the stall-keeper's wife stared at them both, and the red rag swung between their wrists like a tiny festival banner.

Ten paces. She'd chosen ten paces. She was a genius.

It was going even better than the original plan. In the original plan, she'd have had to keep finding reasons to stay close: a twisted ankle, a fear of wolves, a convenient faint. Now the gods themselves had done it. Lu Qingyan couldn't go more than ten paces from her for thirty days, and the Sword Warden had a sect to report to, and that sect sat on top of a mountain, and on that mountain, behind that gate, there was a lamp.

All she had to do was be sweet. And harmless. And chatty.

Chatty was no effort at all.

"I never told you my name," she said, skipping to catch up. "It's Mo Ji. Mo like ink. Ji like nothing in particular. My mother wasn't very imaginative."

It was her real name. Outside the Waning Moon, nobody had ever heard it; to the rest of the world she was only the young mistress, a title with a rumor attached. Saying it to the Sword Warden's face felt like stealing a peach off a judge's desk.

"Miss Mo."

"You can say Mo Ji. Everyone does."

"Miss Mo."

Oh, we'll see, Mo Ji thought. "Where are we going, Benefactor?"

"North."

"What's north?"

"More road."

"Are you always this talkative or is it something about me?"

Lu Qingyan walked. She had a long, unhurried stride that ate the road, and Mo Ji had to put in a little skip every fifth step to keep the rag from pulling tight. The Sword Warden's eyes were on the tree line, the ditches, the hills. They were never on Mo Ji. It was almost insulting.

"Are you looking for someone?" Mo Ji tried. "Everyone at the Crooked Willow said Cloudpine had sent you after somebody."

Three steps of nothing.

"Yes."

"Who?"

"A woman. Twenty-seven."

"Oh, the demon girl." Mo Ji pressed a hand to her chest. "The one with the moon. The seven-foot one."

"She's not seven feet."

Mo Ji's foot came down on the road a little harder than she meant it to.

"How do you know?"

Lu Qingyan didn't break stride. She looked at the hills.

"Nobody is seven feet," she said.

Fair, Mo Ji thought, and let her heart climb back down out of her throat. Fair. Very fair. Good.

· · ·

The waystation at Three Mile Halt had one room left, and the innkeeper looked at the red rag and the sword and the herb-seller and very wisely asked no questions at all.

The room had one bed. Lu took the floor.

She did it the way she'd done it the night before: cross-legged under the window, sword across her knees, hands resting palm-up on her thighs. Mo Ji lay on the bed with the rag stretched across the gap between them and watched her through her eyelashes.

So this was cultivation. Mo Ji had done it herself every night since she was six, but she'd never watched a Cloudpine sword cultivator do it. Lu breathed in slowly, and the air in the room seemed to lean very slightly toward her. She breathed out, and it settled. Her face in the lamplight looked carved and calm and somehow younger.

There was a scar across the palm of her right hand. A thick one, old, white, straight through the life line. Mo Ji had not noticed it before. It didn't look like a sword cut. It looked like someone had closed their hand around a blade and held on.

She wanted, very much, to ask.

Instead, since the needles itched and the bed was lumpy and she was a schemer of some ambition, she sighed loudly in her sleep, rolled over, and fell off the bed.

She hit the floor with a thump, made a small, drowsy, pitiful noise, and wriggled, still very much asleep, toward the warm body under the window. The floor was cold. Lu Qingyan was not. Mo Ji arrived, curled up against her side, and let her head drop onto the Sword Warden's shoulder with a soft, satisfied mumble.

There, she thought. Let's see you sit through that, Immortal.

Lu Qingyan's breathing did not change.

For a while nothing happened. The lamp guttered. Somebody downstairs dropped a pot. Mo Ji kept her eyes shut and her mouth soft and her breath slow, and counted her own heartbeats, and lost count, and started again.

Then fingers touched her face.

Just the edge of it. Lu's hand came up and moved a strand of hair away from Mo Ji's eyes, slowly, and tucked it behind her ear, and the back of a knuckle brushed down the line of her cheek on the way back. The scarred palm was rough. The knuckle was warm.

Something in Mo Ji's chest missed a step.

It was the most ridiculous thing. She had planned this. She had planned exactly this, and she was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had once negotiated a truce with three bandit kings at the same table, and now her ear was going hot because somebody had touched her hair.

The hand went away.

"You're not asleep," Lu Qingyan said.

Mo Ji didn't move. "I'm a very light sleeper."

"You drool."

"I do not—" She sat up, outraged, wiping her mouth, and found nothing there at all, and looked up to see the Sword Warden looking down at her with a face that could have been carved out of a winter morning except for the very corner of the mouth, which was not quite as straight as usual.

Mo Ji stared at it.

It went straight again.

"Go back to bed," Lu said. "Or stay. The floor is the same either way."

Mo Ji stayed. Out of pride, she told herself. She lay down on her side with her back to the wall and her face turned away and her ear burning, and pretended, this time, to be asleep properly, and eventually forgot she was pretending.

· · ·

At midnight, the rag moved.

Lu felt it before she saw it: a small give at her wrist, a slackening, like a held line paid out half an inch. She opened her eyes.

In the gap between her and the sleeping herb-seller, the red cotton lay across the floorboards in the lamplight. One of the knots in the middle of it was untying itself. Slowly, with no hand near it, the little loop of cloth loosened and opened and lay flat, and the rag was a fraction longer than it had been.

Lu Qingyan looked at the sleeping face beside her. The mud in the parting. The bandage on the wrist, over the moon.

She had orders. They were in her sleeve. She did not need to take them out to know what they said.

She counted the knots that were left.

Twenty-nine.