Chapter 3: The Floor Is Uneven

The trouble with flying on a sword, Mo Ji discovered, was that there was nothing to hold on to except the woman flying it.

"Tighter," said Lu Qingyan.

"I am holding tighter."

"You're holding my belt."

"Your belt is a perfectly good thing to hold!"

The wind took the rest of it. They were a thousand feet above the pine forests of the north, and the world below was a rumpled green blanket with a silver thread of river stitched through it, and the sword under Mo Ji's new straw sandals was exactly as wide as a sword. Not one finger wider. She had flown before, of course, on her own blade, with her own qi humming under her feet like a cat on a windowsill. She had never flown with seven needles in her and nothing at all humming anywhere, standing behind somebody else, with her arms around their waist.

Around their waist. Yes. That was where her arms were now. Lu had reached back without looking, taken Mo Ji's wrists one at a time, and moved them off the belt and around her middle, and buckled them together in front with her own left hand, as if Mo Ji were a strap.

It was four days since the river. There were twenty-seven knots left in the red rag, and the rag was currently whipping in the wind between their joined wrists like a very small dragon.

This, Mo Ji told herself, is the plan.

It was. It was the plan exactly. That morning a paper crane had come gliding down out of a clear sky and landed on Lu's shoulder, and Lu had unfolded it and read it and burned it in her palm without a word. Then she had said, "We're flying," in the tone other people use for it might rain. And here they were, going north at the speed of a hawk, toward Cloudpine.

On a Cloudpine sword.

The gate on Cloudpine Mountain would turn any demonic cultivator back on her own two feet. Mo Ji's mother had tried it once, twenty years ago, and come home with her eyebrows burned off and no lamp. But a sword was not feet. A guest carried in on a Cloudpine disciple's own blade passed as part of the disciple. Mo Ji had found that line in a stolen copy of the gate's founding charter, written by a man who had obviously never imagined anyone would be carried in on purpose.

Tomorrow morning, she'd go through that gate with her arms around the Sword Warden's waist.

Which was the plan.

What was not in the plan was the waist itself. It was narrow and hard under the plain gray robe, and very warm, and every time Lu shifted her weight to bank, Mo Ji felt the muscles move against her forearms. What was not in the plan was the smell of her hair, which was pine resin and clean cold water and nothing else, no perfume at all. What was not in the plan was that Mo Ji's own cheek kept ending up against the back of Lu's shoulder, and that she kept leaving it there.

You are a schemer, she reminded herself. You are the young mistress of the Waning Moon. You negotiated with three bandit kings at once. Your hands are not sweating.

Her hands were sweating.

"We're going down," Lu said. "Keep your head low."

They dropped. The forest came up green and fast, and Lu took them in under the canopy where the pines grew tall and close, threading between trunks so near that Mo Ji could have touched the bark. It was beautiful and terrifying, and she shut her eyes and pressed her face into the gray robe.

A branch whipped past.

Mo Ji felt it as a sting on the side of her neck, just under her ear. She didn't make a sound. She was a helpless mortal, and helpless mortals squeaked, so she squeaked, a beat too late.

Lu's left hand tightened over her wrists.

· · ·

Lu Qingyan had flown this route two hundred times. She had never flown it this slowly.

She noted that. She did not examine it.

· · ·

Pinefall sat at the bottom of Cloudpine Mountain like a dropped bag of dice: inns and noodle stalls and talisman shops, all of it built for the endless traffic of cultivators going up and pilgrims coming down. With the Grand Sword Assembly a month away, the streets were thick with sect robes. Mo Ji counted six different colors of sash between the edge of town and the teahouse, and kept her head down and her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open, the way a river girl would.

The teahouse was crowded. Lu found a table. The tea, Mo Ji thought, sipping, was a great deal better than Auntie Rong's.

"Sword Warden Lu."

A young man had stopped beside their table. He was perhaps twenty-three, in a white robe with a gold sash and a gold bell hanging from the hilt of his sword, and he had the kind of handsome, well-fed face that had never been told no by anyone it couldn't have flogged.

Lu looked at him. "Fang Yu."

"I heard you were out hunting the Waning Moon's runaway." He smiled. His eyes slid to Mo Ji, to the straw sandals, to the red rag running from her wrist to Lu's. "And this is what you caught? Cloudpine's standards have slipped."

"She's a herb-seller."

"I can see that. What's the string? Is she a pet?" He laughed. Two friends behind him, gold sashes too, laughed with him. "You know, Sword Warden, the rest of us would just pay a girl like that. You don't have to tie them."

Lu said nothing.

"Here, let me help." He drew his sword an inch, the bell on the hilt chiming prettily. "I'll cut you loose."

Mo Ji knew what a blade through the Owed-Breath Knot would do to the one on the end with her qi sealed. She had read that chapter herself at fourteen, in her mother's library, where nobody had ever bothered to write warnings in the margins. It would not be a cut. It would be like having a cord pulled out of her chest by the root.

She stood up to get out of the way.

She tripped.

It was a very ordinary trip. Her sandal caught the leg of the bench, and she pitched sideways into Fang Yu with a little cry, and on the way her elbow happened to strike the inside of his sword wrist, two fingers below the joint, at the precise spot where three channels crossed.

No qi. She didn't need any. She'd learned that spot at eleven, from a woman who'd once disarmed a whole patrol with a teaspoon.

Fang Yu's hand sprang open like a trap.

His sword dropped and rang off the floor, bell and all. His arm swung down by his side, dead to the shoulder. He looked at it. Then he looked at Mo Ji, and all the well-fed color drained out of his face.

"That," he said. "That was the Hollow Pulse. That's a Waning Moon—"

"She tripped," said Lu Qingyan.

"She didn't trip, I felt it, she struck the—"

"The floor is uneven."

Lu had not stood up. She had not touched her sword. She was holding her teacup in her scarred right hand, and she looked at Fang Yu over the rim of it, and that was all she did.

The teahouse had gone quiet. Somewhere a ladle dripped.

Fang Yu's friends picked up his sword for him. Nobody said anything else. The three of them went out with the bell clinking softly and Fang Yu cradling his dead arm against his chest, and after a moment the noise of the teahouse came back up around the empty space where they'd been, like water closing over a stone.

Mo Ji sat down again. Slowly.

"Sorry," she said in her river voice. "I'm so clumsy. My grandmother always said I'd trip over my own shadow."

"Drink your tea."

She drank her tea. She didn't taste it.

She tripped, Lu had said. The floor is uneven. For the first time since the river, Mo Ji's lovely certainty had a crack in it, thin as a hair. Lu Qingyan had looked at a demonic strike in a crowded teahouse and called it a floor.

Because she believed it? Because she didn't care to argue with a boy with a bell on his sword?

Or because—

No. Mo Ji put the thought down, the way she'd put down the bandage that first morning, very gently, so it wouldn't go off.

· · ·

The inn room in Pinefall had a real mirror, a bronze one on a stand, and Mo Ji sat in front of it after supper and tilted her head to look at her neck. The branch had left a red line from just under her ear to the top of her collar, beaded with dried blood.

"Hold still."

Lu was behind her, a little clay jar open in one hand. She knelt so that their faces were level in the bronze, which put her very close.

"It's only a scratch, Benefactor."

"Pine sap gets into scratches. They fester."

"Do they really?"

"Hold still."

Mo Ji held still.

Lu dipped two fingers into the jar and touched them to the top of the scratch, under Mo Ji's ear. The salve was cold. Her fingers weren't. They moved down along the red line, slowly, the way she'd done everything Mo Ji had ever seen her do: as if there were no hurry anywhere in the world and never had been. Down the side of the throat. Past the pulse.

They stopped on the pulse.

In the mirror, Mo Ji watched Lu's face. It had no expression at all. It was looking at the side of Mo Ji's neck as if reading a page.

Under the two fingertips, Mo Ji's pulse was running like a deer.

Say something, she thought. Something charming. Something that makes this a joke. She had a dozen of them. She had an entire repertoire.

"If you keep touching my neck like that," she said, and it came out lower than she'd planned, "people will say we're married."

Lu's fingers didn't move.

"People," Lu said, "say a great many things."

"Lu Qingyan," Mo Ji said.

She didn't know she was going to say it until it was out. Not Benefactor. Not Immortal. Just the name, bare, in an inn room, to a face in a bronze mirror.

The fingers on her throat went still in a different way. Not resting. Stopped.

In the mirror, Lu Qingyan's eyes came up from Mo Ji's neck and met hers. It was the first time Lu had really looked at her since the river, straight on, without the hills or the tree line or a teacup in between, and Mo Ji found that she could not, for the life of her, look away.

"Mo Ji," Lu said.

Not Miss Mo. Mo Ji felt it go through her like a dropped stitch.

Lu took her hand away from Mo Ji's throat. She closed the clay jar. She missed the thread of the lid the first time and had to turn it back and try again, and Mo Ji, who had never once seen those hands do anything clumsily, watched it happen in the mirror and forgot to breathe.

"Before the gate tomorrow," Lu said quietly, "there's something you should know."

Twenty-seven knots on the rag. Ten paces. One small inn room, and Lu Qingyan kneeling behind her with her voice gone low and careful, as if what came next was heavy and she meant to set it down slowly.

Mo Ji's mouth was dry.

"What," she said.

Lu opened her mouth.

The door burst inward hard enough to crack the frame. Old Bao stood in it, soaked to the knees, chest heaving, his horsehair beard hanging off his chin by a single corner, with Little Fen peering white-faced over his shoulder. His eyes found Mo Ji in the mirror, and he filled his enormous lungs, and he bellowed, "Young Mistress—"