He did not comfort me. I have been grateful for that since, in a strange way, because comfort I could not have borne, and what he gave me instead was the truest thing he had.
He looked at the red thread in the dead girl's hand, and he looked at me kneeling over her, and I watched the man who was courteous to his servants and patient with his enemies and gentle with a blade in his own bed — I watched that man's face come apart.
"You went to him alone." His voice was low, and it shook, and I had never once heard it shake. "You went to Wen Su alone. You went to the monk alone. You sent — " he could not say her name. "You sent a child, alone, after I asked you. After I asked you. You don't carry it alone — I said it to you last night, I said it with your head on my — and you got up this morning and you carried it alone straight into his hands, and now she's —"
"I was trying to save her," I said. "He named her. I was trying to get her out before —"
"You were trying to do it yourself!" It came out of him like something torn. He turned away, and turned back, and his hands were open and shaking at his sides, a soldier's hands with nothing to hold. "God help me, I know that hunger. I have had fifteen years of it. Trust no one, tell no one, carry it alone because alone is the only place it can't be taken from you — I invented that, Sui, I have lived inside it since before you could read, and do you know what it bought me? A hall full of dead I couldn't save and a name I couldn't clear and fifteen years of lighting sticks in the dark to children I let burn because I was too proud, too alone, to let anyone carry it with me!"
He was not shouting now. That was the worst of it. His voice had dropped to almost nothing, and there were tears standing in his eyes and not falling, held there by pure discipline, and I understood that I was not only being shouted at for A-Sui. I was being shown the far end of the road I was on, by the one man alive who had walked all the way to the end of it.
"I let you go to the shrine because I told myself you were right, you could go where my men couldn't. But that was a lie I let you tell me, because I have never once in my life known how to hold a person by anything but the wrist, and I let go, and now —" his voice finally cracked, all the way through, "— now there's a child in the east court, and I keep thinking, if I had been a man who knew how to say stay, if I had ever learned how to make someone let me carry it —"
"Stop," I said. "Please. Stop. You'll say the thing you can't take back, and I'll deserve it, and then we'll both have that too."
We stood over the small body in the cold, both of us shaking, two people built in the same wrong shape by two different fires, and something happened then that I have never been able to describe except to say that the fracture ran through both of us at once and, running through both, did not split us apart but somehow — the way a cracked bone knits denser than it was — ran us together.
He crossed the two feet of freezing air. He did not embrace me even then; he knew me too well. He put out his scarred hand, the crooked finger, and he waited, palm up, the way he had in the study, and he said, in a wrecked and steady voice:
"Then we carry her together. Starting now. You do not go to that man alone again. You do not go anywhere alone again. Not because I don't trust your hands — God knows your hands are better than mine — but because I have counted the cost of alone down to the last copper, and I will not watch you pay it. Give me the weight. Half of it. That's all I'm asking. Half."
I put my hand in his. It is a strange thing, to give your hand to a man you have wronged, over the body of a child you failed, and feel it close around yours not as a shackle but as a splint.
"Half," I said.
Ten days. We buried A-Sui in the plum court, under the tree where he had once brought me chestnuts, and we planted three more trees beside the one that marked her, though it was the wrong season and everyone said they would not take, and then we went inside, together, and I laid out every piece of the truth on the study floor, and for the first time in my life I built a plan with another pair of hands in it.
