I learned, when I came back, that I had not been alone in the wards.
Xiao Yan had sent Jiang after me. Not into the district — the captain could not have passed the seal without questions neither of us could afford — but to the wall above it, night after night, a scarred soldier crouched on a rooftop in the dark keeping watch over a servant-woman he could not reach, ready to burn down a quarantine to pull me out if it came to it. I only found out because Jiang, gruff and furious with relief when I finally came back through the gate half-dead on my feet, let it slip that His Highness had not slept a full night the entire time I was gone, and had threatened to walk into a plague district himself, wound and all, if the captain did not go and watch the wall.
I went to him that night filthy and hollowed out and grieving a child I had held while she died, and I did not have my armor on, because I had left it in the wards along with a great deal else, and so when he looked at me and said, quietly, "You lost one," I did not do the thing I always do, which is carry it out of the room alone.
"A little girl," I said. "Four years old. I could have saved her at home with a needle and a bag of salt water and an hour. Here I had clean cloths and my own hands and nothing, and I knelt on the floor and watched her die of thirst while I held her, and I knew exactly what would have fixed it, and it will not exist for four hundred years." My voice was doing something I could not stop. "That's the thing I can't tell anyone here, because no one here can even imagine it. I don't just miss my world. I carry every person in this one I could save with it and can't. That's what I brought through the door with me. Not knowledge. A list of the dead I'm going to fail because I was born too early to help them."
He did not tell me it wasn't my fault. He did not tell me I had saved a district, which was true and did not matter. He crossed the room — moving well now, moving like the soldier he was, and I noted it even then, the physician in me never fully off — and he did the thing almost no one in my life had ever known to do with my grief, which was nothing at all except be near it. He put his arms around me. And I, who had built an entire self out of not needing anyone, stood in a dead prince's resurrected arms in a cold palace four hundred years from home and let myself, for the length of one held breath, be a person who had lost something, instead of a surgeon who had failed to prevent it.
"When my mother died," he said, into my hair, "I decided I would never again care for anything I could lose. It seemed like wisdom. It was only fear wearing wisdom's robes." His arms tightened. "You told me you had one foot in another world and would not let yourself want things here. And then you walked into a plague to hold a stranger's child because you could not do otherwise. You are the least careful person I have ever met about the things that matter, and the most careful about admitting it." He drew back just enough to look at me, and there was nothing guarded in his face at all, which frightened me more than any danger had. "I am done pretending I have not fallen. I will not ask you for anything you cannot give a woman with one foot elsewhere. But I will not lie to you either. It is the one vanity I find I cannot keep, around you."
We did not cross the line that night. I want that understood, because it mattered to me that the thing between us grew its roots in the dry hard hours and not only in the desperate ones — in a plague-grief and a shared list of the dead, in trust before touch. But something changed in the room and did not change back. I had told him the truest and most useless thing about me, the grief I carried that no one in this world could even parse, and he had not flinched, and he had not tried to fix it, and he had not made it his. He had simply stood in it with me. And a woman who has spent two lifetimes carrying her losses out of the room alone does not, it turns out, forget the first person who ever offered to help her hold the weight.
"I brought the foot home," I said, finally, very quietly. "In the wards. I stopped standing in the doorway. I don't know if I get to stay — I still don't know the rules of whatever this is. But I stopped living like a visitor." I looked up at him. "So when you say you won't ask me for anything I can't give — the arithmetic just changed. I'm not a woman with one foot elsewhere anymore. I'm just a woman who's afraid, like everyone else who has something to lose."
He went very still. And then he smiled — not the lethal one, not the strategist's — a smile I had not seen him wear, young and undefended, the boy who had existed before the arrow and the incense and the fifteen years.
"Then we are the same kind of afraid," he said. "Good. I have never trusted anyone who wasn't."
✳ ✳ ✳
Jiang started teaching me to hold a knife the week after the plague, and it is, of all the things that happened in that palace, one of the few I remember with something like joy.
It began as an argument. The danger was rising, and I moved through the palace alone, and Jiang did not like it. "You carry basins into rooms full of people who would drown you in one," he said flatly, cornering me one evening with the particular grim patience he used for things he had decided and would not be argued out of. "You will learn to keep yourself alive for the length of time it takes me to reach you. That is all. I am not making a soldier of a physician. I am making a physician who is harder to kill."
"I cut people open for a living," I told him. "I know where everything is. I could put a man on the floor faster than you'd think."
Jiang looked at me for a long moment, and then — and this is the thing, this is why I loved him — the corner of his scarred mouth moved, one degree, the closest that man came to a smile in the whole time I knew him. "Show me," he said, and handed me a blade, and I lasted about a second and a half before I was disarmed and turned and set very gently but very completely on the floor.
"You know where everything is," he agreed, standing over me, entirely deadpan. "You have never once had to stop a man from reaching it. Different trade. Get up. Again."
So he taught me, in the dead hours, in the antechamber, a stone soldier and a fallen surgeon, and it turned out we spoke the same language after all — not medicine and not war, but the body, which he read for its weaknesses the way I read it for its salvages, so that half his lessons landed on me as strange dark mirrors of my own knowledge. Here is where the blood runs shallow. Here is where a man cannot help but flinch. Here is the tendon that, cut, drops the whole hand. I knew every place he named. I had spent my life protecting them. He had spent his learning to end them. And in the overlap of those two knowledges we found, without either of us ever saying a sentimental word, a friendship — the kind that gets built out of bruises and dry insults and a man staying an hour past when he needed to, correcting my grip one more time.
He was funny, underneath. That was the secret of Jiang that the palace never got to see, because the palace only ever needed him to be a wall. He had a bone-dry wit he deployed at exactly the moments you didn't expect, usually at my expense, always so flatly you had to run it back a second time to be sure you'd been mocked. When I finally, after weeks, managed to put him on the floor — one time, with a trick he had not taught me, that I had frankly stolen from a self-defense course in a century he would never believe existed — he lay there for a moment looking up at the ceiling, and then he said, "His Highness is going to be insufferable when I tell him," and I laughed until my ribs hurt, and Jiang got up and dusted himself off and never told anyone, because it was ours.
I am telling you this now, and lingering on it, because I know what is coming for Jiang later in this story, and I want you to know him first. Not as the captain at the door. Not as the sword. But as the man who taught a grieving surgeon to keep herself alive out of nothing but stubborn love — and made her laugh doing it — and would not have called it either of those things if you had put him to the question. When it mattered, at the end, he stood where he always stood. But he was so much more than the standing. They all were. That was the thing this palace never learned, and the thing that got the best of them killed: it kept mistaking its most loyal people for furniture, right up until the moment it needed them, and then past it.
