He would not let the physician see the wound.
Not his own — his own he let old Doctor Ping bind and cluck over, the sword-cut on the forearm, the leg wrenched again on the ice. Mine he took himself, in the cold study that smelled of ink and ash, by the light of one lamp, after he had sent even Zhou Yan away.
"Your hand," he said, and held out his own, palm up, and waited.
I put my hand in it. It is a strange thing to give your hand to a man who now knows it can kill him. He turned it to the light, the cut across the pad below my thumb where the silver pin had turned, and he cleaned it with wine that stung, and I did not flinch, because flinching is a thing you decide to let a face do and I had no face on, and he noticed that too, he noticed everything.
"You don't feel it," he said.
"I feel it. I was taught not to answer it."
His hands were very careful. Soldier's hands, scarred, the crooked finger, and they wrapped the linen around my palm with a slowness that had nothing to do with the size of the wound. "Who taught you," he said. Not a question. A door held open.
And because it was late, and the wine stung, and his head was bent over my hand in the lamplight, I went through the door.
I told him about the Loom. Not all of it, not that first night, but the shape of it — the embroidery house that was a school for needles, the orphans grown into knives, the matron who was the only mother I could remember. I told him I had been raised on the story of Qinghe, on the field order, on the wickedness of the Ash General, until hating him was a language I dreamed in. I told him I had come into his house to kill him, dressed as fate, before the solstice, and that I had taken the poison out of my hair on the third night and hidden it, and that I did not entirely know why, only that his seal was cut in the wrong reign and a man who forges his own guilt does not build an altar to the dead in the dark.
He listened the way he did everything, without moving, and when I was done he was quiet for a long time, still holding my bound hand in both of his as though he had forgotten it was a weapon, or had decided it did not matter that it was.
"The child at the well," he said at last. "Sang Sui. I wrote her among the lost. I light her a stick every winter." He looked up, and the lamplight was in his eyes, and there was that terrible young thing behind them, hope, which is the cruelest gift to give a man who has spent fifteen years teaching himself not to have it. "I could never find her. She was the one I could never find."
"They made sure you couldn't," I said. My voice was not steady. I let it not be. "I'm the one you couldn't find."
He did not embrace me. I have thought since that if he had, I would have startled like a struck horse and the whole fragile night would have shattered, and he knew it, the way he knew everything about me that I had never told him. He did not reach for me at all.
He got up, favoring the leg, and went to the brazier, and took from the warm ashes at its edge a folded paper cone he had set there to keep, and he put it in my two hands, the bound one and the whole one, and it was warm, and inside were chestnuts, the shells split, from the vendor at the east gate who roasts them too long.
"You were cold on the road," he said, gruffly, not looking at me. "And after. Your hands go cold when you're deciding something. I've been counting too."
I sat with the warm cone in my two hands and I did not eat for a long time. Outside the snow had started again, and the house was quiet, and somewhere in it a little maid named for the harvest was sleeping, and somewhere across the city an old woman with clever hands was waiting for a report that would not come, and here in this room was a man who had learned me the way I learn everyone, patiently, in the dark, by counting — and who had chosen, knowing exactly what I was, to warm my hands instead of raising his own.
"I wasn't cold," I told him, which was a stupid thing to say, and untrue, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it. "My hands were only full."
"Then keep them full," he said, and something in my chest that the Loom had spent twelve years flattening got up off the floor and would not lie back down.
Sixteen days. That was the night the letter came, folded into cloth, the stitches tighter than before, the cranes' necks bent hard.
Sixteen days. You go slowly. You have never gone slowly. The old woman who raised you is asking why her best girl has grown a hesitation. I saw your face at his table. So did the Grand Preceptor. Do not make me explain to him what I think I saw. Confirm the death, or I will confirm it for you.
She signed it, as she always did, with a single stitch of red thread. This came from your mother's hand. I held it to the brazier and watched the cranes burn, and I understood that the woman who taught me to find the mark under the blossom had been, my whole life, the mark under my own — and that she had seen, at that table, the same thing my husband had seen, and read it correctly, because she had made the eyes that read it.
I had until the solstice before she stopped writing letters and started sending needles. I had begun, though I would not yet say it even to myself, to want far more days than that.
