as the stars in their constellations

“I wished to set forth my thoughts and explain my actions:
I little dreamed that this would be held a crime.
That I was unjustly treated is clear as daylight,
Plain as the stars above in their constellations.
To harness swift steeds and go out coursing
And, without bit or rein, try to keep oneself in a chariot;
Or on a raft to drift downstream with the current
And, without boat-sweep, try to keep afloat -
When you turn your back on all sanctions and let your sole heart rule,
In comparison it is just like this.
I would gladly die straight away and meet dissolution,
If I did not fear that a greater ill might follow.
With my words unsaid I could plunge into the waters,
But for thought of my blinded lord and his lack of understanding.”

Qu Yuan, translation by David Hawkes (from The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems By Qu Yuan And Other Poets)

----

Lan Qiren is not a bad man. Jing Yufei has to remind herself of this as he speaks, has to force herself to keep her hands crossed gracefully in her lap instead of clenching them into fists, has to expend every effort to keep her face smooth no matter the storm that is raging inside her. He is a scholarly man, she reminds herself, preferring his own company and that of his books, given to long hours of meditation and solitude and reflection. He was meant for those things, and the position he has been forced to take—sect leader in all but name—was never anything he would have asked for. He suffers it only out of a bone-deep sense of duty, and the role sits as uncomfortably on his shoulders as captivity does on her own. They are both captives, though Jing Yufei is not so humble as to believe their imprisonments are equal in their cruelty.

But he is doing his best by her boys, and there is no one in this cold and heartless place who could do better. If he is not everything she would ask for in the man who is raising her children—if he is as stunted by his upbringing as a tree trying to grow without enough sunlight—well, A-Huan and A-Zhan are still lucky to have him. He, at least, loves them. She does not doubt that.

It’s more than can be said of their father.

“Xiao shu zi,” she says, her voice smooth and cool as jade. She has worked for years to have the control to maintain this even tone. She has had the time to perfect it. “Please tell me if I have understood correctly.” An inclination of his head invites her to continue. “My sons, who currently visit me only once a month, will now be allowed to see me only once every other month. And then, after a cycle of this, it will be only once per season. And then after that, I presume, I will see them only once a year.” Or not at all. That is no doubt the ultimate aim. Not at all.

To his credit, there is something that might be shame in Lan Qiren’s eyes as he answers her. “The elders believe this to be the wisest course of action.”

Jing Yufei has managed to cling to shreds of respect for her brother-in-law despite everything, but can’t say the same for the elders. She can barely remember a time before she lost that sense of respect. It feels like it belonged to someone else, the innocence of her first visit to Gusu. A seventeen-year-old girl, overawed as only the disciple of a rogue cultivator could be at the venerability of the Lan name and heritage. The name had conjured up visions of clouds descending softly, flawless layers of pale silk, unswerving righteousness. She had never expected to set foot inside Cloud Recesses, had thought of it almost as the palace of the Jade Emperor himself. Now, more than a decade later, she would wish she had never come to Gusu at all, were it not for her sons. And sometimes, even her love for them is not enough to stop her from imagining what her life would have been had she made any other choice.

She keeps her hands loose and still somehow. But her feet, hidden under the folds of her robes—white, always, even if the elders insist on blue and silver embroidery breaking the funeral starkness—clench with all the desperation she feels.

“Xiao shu zi.” She usually uses this title with the same dispassion she had once called him Lan-er-gongzi, but he will hear the subtle emphasis she puts on it now. A reminder, not just a title. “Is this decision unalterable?”

She never asks for anything, never even asks questions. This is the most vulnerable she’s allowed herself to be in front of a Lan in years—at least since they took A-Zhan away from her. She had begged then, on her knees, forehead pressed to the dirt, breasts hard with milk. It had done her no good.

For the first time since Lan Qiren entered the Jingshi, he meets her eyes. “The elders will hear no arguments on this topic. No matter who they come from.”

It’s the way he holds her gaze that tells her that he had spoken on her behalf. Perhaps not well—he is not an eloquent man. Perhaps he had not argued when they dismissed his request.

It’s more than any other Lan has ever given her, but she cannot bring herself to be grateful. For the first time in all these years, she is the first one to look away.

The gentians are in bloom, vivid through the open window. She had loved gentians once.

She hears the soft hiss of silk as Lan Qiren shifts, clears his throat. “I humbly ask that you accept this decree, sao zi.” He always calls her this, though even now, after saying it a thousand times, he still sounds as though forming the word causes him pain. She had thought, at the beginning, that the pain was in granting that title to one he believed unworthy of it. Now she is beginning to suspect the pain has a different source.

The title doesn’t stifle the flare of anger she feels at his words. “What mother could abide by such a decree?” The question comes out harsher than she intended, harsher than she allows herself anymore. Her sharpness has always been her weakness, here in Gusu. Never once has it protected anything she valued.

But she can’t help it now. After everything they have taken from her—and they have taken everything—they must take this too. The disdain is thick in her voice when she says, “But I am not a mother in their eyes. I am only a murderer.”

Lan Qiren’s gaze is on the floorboards now, his shoulders stiff. His silence infuriates her, but at least he doesn’t quote one of the stone-bound rules at her, though she knows he is thinking of them.

“It has never mattered to them why.” They knew no mercy, not even for a seventeen-year-old girl in a torn hanfu, weeping and bruised and stained with blood that was not her own. She had truly believed that they would understand, once she explained. Surely these wise ones, so renowned for their uprightness, would see that she had only been trying to protect herself. That she had been scared, and alone, and he had been so strong.

But none of that had mattered to them. One of their own—one of their most respected, most valued, most renowned—had a sword through his chest. They had looked at her and had not seen the torn hanfu or the bruises or the tears. They had seen only the blood.

A decade past, but every time she remembers, she’s there again, staggering when she understands that the reason doesn’t matter to them. The desperation wells up inside her, runs over like a cup filled to the brim and past. “Xiao shu zi. You know what he was.”

She is ashamed of it, the hint of a plea in her own voice. But it matters to her, that this man acknowledge it; none of the others ever will, not even the man she calls husband. But this man, the one who will raise her sons—she has to know that he can at least see this truth.

A long moment passes, her fury and pain pulsing in her throat, and then he drags his eyes back up to hers. They stay there only for the briefest moment, and his Adam’s apple jerks before he whispers, “Yes, sao zi.”

And then he’s gone, without even a word of farewell, rude as no Lan ever is. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is her boys, her beautiful babies who aren’t even babies anymore. A-Huan has grown so tall, and A-Zhan will be seven years old soon. She can count the exact number of times she’s seen him in all those years. What mother could abide it?

Lan Qiren is still visible through the window, and so she sees his shoulders tense at the sound of porcelain shattering. His footsteps falter, then he continues down the path that leads back to the main buildings. This is not the first time the Jingshi’s tea set has been replaced.

Jing Yufei stares down at the shards of pearly porcelain scattered across the dark floorboards. For one dizzy moment, it could be the day they locked her here, years and years ago. Or when they took A-Huan from her. She had destroyed things then, too, not just tea sets but the wall hangings, the bed, the writing set, the incense burner. It helped nothing, of course, but it had soothed one tiny corner of her battered soul to see the room reflecting the chaos inside her.

Would this prison have been less stifling if it was less beautiful, less pristine? The orderly grace of the Jingshi—of Cloud Recesses itself—infuriates her. Like the most gorgeous silk shroud swaddling a rotting corpse.

She realizes that she is trembling and sinks to the ground. It takes effort to arrange her legs in lotus position, to pull her shoulders back and lift her chin. She forces herself to listen to the rhythm of her own heartbeat, the pulse of blood through her veins, the bellows of her lungs dragging in air and pushing it back out again. It takes time for her muscles to relax, the shaking finally stopped, but what does she have except time? Meditation centers her eventually, pulls her back into awareness of her own body and its hereness. Most days, it is the only peace she can find.

She has had to make her peace with her body, rebuild a relationship with it that had been shattered that day in the library when she had spilt blood. For such a long time after—through the trial, the wedding, the wedding night, even her first pregnancy—she had felt barely tethered to it, watching it dispassionately from above. Even the pain of labor and the warmth of a tiny form tucked next to her own had not brought her back into her body.

It was not until after the second time her husband visited her that she began the work of taking back her body. She had listened, cold as ice, staring at nothing, as he explained himself to her. He had an heir now (no mention of how that heir came to be, the way she had nurtured him in her own body and then brought him into the world through fire and blood), but life was precarious, even for cultivators, and a second was needed. She had let him do what he would, and afterwards, as he pulled on his clothes and straightened his forehead ribbon, she had remembered the day in the library with this man’s teacher, and she said, “Never again.”

She didn’t have a sword—that had been the very first thing they took away from her. But he must have understood her somehow: that next time he tried to touch her, she would wrap her hands around his throat and kill him with her bare hands. He never came to her again.

She spent the months of A-Zhan’s gestation pulling herself back into her body. With A-Huan, her body had done what it would automatically, though she had barely been aware of it. He had been born healthy and strong nonetheless, but this time, this last time, she was determined to experience motherhood herself. It was something she had wanted, in the time before she met the Lans, and even if this was the last way she ever would have wanted it, she was determined to make it hers.

The sickness of the first few months had been a misery, but it was her misery, and it signaled the growth of another child. Later, the bone-deep weariness and then the frequency with which she had to relieve her bladder was nearly as frustrating. But it was not all suffering. She had examined her own body for the first time since Lan-Laoshi attacked her, watching the changes, the thickening, the roundening. When A-Zhan stirred for the first time, she wept with joy. When he kicked and she could see the evidence of his little feet pressing against her womb, she felt swollen with wonder.

Labor was longer the second time, and even more painful. But afterwards, after she had recovered, she had fought hard for her body. It had nourished her children, her beautiful boys, and once upon a time it had protected her when she needed it to. She would be grateful to it and show compassion for all the pain it had suffered.

For almost seven years, she has taught herself to be present in her body, and it pays off in this moment. Her heart still wails in response to the elders’ order, but her body, at least, steadies her.

Tomorrow is A-Zhan’s day. How cruel they are, to tell her this right before her baby comes to her. Each month, she has two days of joy lasting from sunrise to sunset. Those two days are worth everything. She must not let the elders’ malice—or indifference, perhaps, and she doesn’t know which is worse—mar the best thing in her life. Both of her boys are sensitive, but A-Zhan is even more so than A-Huan. If he suspects that she is in more pain than usual, he will reflect that same pain, owning it as much as the moon makes the sun’s light its own. She will not allow that to happen.

She spends the night in meditation. She is not able to sleep, not after Lan Qiren’s news, but then she rarely does before one of her sons comes to her. Both of them are used to the shadows under her eyes.

When A-Zhan arrives right after breakfast, she is as composed as she ever is.

He doesn’t run up the steps anymore, not like he used to, the sound of his little drumming feet waking joy in her heart. They had put a stop to that when he was four years old, and for almost three years now, he has walked carefully up the stairs in steps as measured as his uncle’s. He works so hard, her sweet boy, to maintain the control they demand of him. She misses the enthusiasm of his toddlerhood, but even now, when the doors open, his eyes light up, brighter than sunlight, warmer than flame.

She sees him knot his little hands into fists, the only evidence of how hard he is working to keep himself from running to her as he walks steadily across the floor. But when he reaches her, he falls into her arms with the same heartrending sigh, and he rubs his face against the silk of her clothes like he did as a baby. She pulls him close, buries her face in the silk and scent of his hair, and holds him until the clearing of a throat makes her loosen her arms.

She is never allowed to be alone with her children; there’s always someone watching them. Today it’s the sour-faced lady with the streaks of grey in her hair standing just inside the door—it’s always her these days. In times past, it was sometimes a short, round old lady whose face was always blank but whose eyes were sad when they looked at her. But someone besides Jing Yufei must have noticed, for they don’t let that woman chaperone anymore. Now it is always one of the women whose expressions make it clear they see her as a murderer, not a mother. It dampens the joy her sons bring her, but she has learned to ignore it.

There is so little time, her treacherous mind reminds her, and she immediately shoves the thought away. She will not think about that. She will treat this day like she does every day she spends with her sons: she will live in each singular moment, as precious as a pearl on a string.

She releases A-Zhan, lets him take a step back and holds his shoulders to look him over. As always, he’s immaculately turned out as she had never believed a child could be. Her younger cousins—and all of the children in all the villages she visited after she left home—had always been covered with mud or crumbs, sticky or grubby, barefoot and wrinkled, children. A-Zhan, like all the Lan children, looks like a tiny adult, and though it is undeniably adorable, it also makes her heart ache.

She focuses instead on his round little cheeks, the pout of his mouth. Every time one of her sons visits her, they look a little different than the memory of them in her mind, and she has never been able to decide whether this is because they truly are changing so quickly or whether it is her memory failing her. She hopes desperately that it’s the former.

“Ah, my good boy.” I missed you, she doesn’t say. Heavens above, how I missed you. And how I will miss you more. “The very best boy in the world.” Have you been good? she never asks. Not ever. He is good, no matter how the Lans might scold him for his streaks of stubbornness or defiance. Here, at least, within the walls of the Jingshi, he will know that he is already everything he needs to be. “What have you been learning?”

This is a good way to ask what she has missed in his life for the past month, for A-Zhan dearly loves to learn. He is always excited to tell her about his lessons and, these days, what he has been reading on his own. With A-Huan, she asks what he has been up to, because while he is a dutiful student, it’s news of his friends or sparring adventures or visits to Caiyi that make him light up like a lantern. But A-Zhan is a worryingly solitary boy, and only what he has learned stirs that same excitement in him.

Sure enough, mobility lights his face as he answers, “We are reading the precepts of Lan Yi!”

“Aha! And what did that esteemed lady write?” She has always had a soft spot for Lan Yi, whose poetry and musical compositions were as beautiful as her chord assassination was deadly. Perhaps she retains that soft spot only because Lan Yi’s writings have never been used to condemn her.

“Respect all living things! The strong must use their strength to help the weak! Justice must be tempered by mercy! Beauty must be appreciated wherever it is found!”

The words said in his little piping voice smite something in Jing Yufei. They aren’t so very different from the best of the thousand rules on the Wall of Discipline (discipline. Not virtue or integrity. Discipline). But no, their phrasing has never been used to condemn her. Perhaps that is why they are so sweet to hear and kindle such a longing in her heart. Or perhaps it is only that they are being spoken in A-Zhan’s voice.

How much of them does he understand? He’s so young yet, but he speaks with conviction, with...passion. As though he believes them, and not as though they were learned by rote. A-Huan’s best qualities shine when he tells her about his relationships, but Jing Yufei is beginning to understand that A-Zhan’s are perhaps most rooted in his principles.

If only she could be certain that these principles will continue to shine so purely in his heart. If only she could be certain that they will not be warped or stunted or made brittle by life in Cloud Recesses. Till now, she has let herself believe that these monthly visits will be enough for her to build a protective wall around the best parts of her sons, to shore it up and ensure that they will grow to be the men she knows they can be. But if she doesn’t get to see them—

No. She will not think about that now. After sunset tonight, there will be two whole months in which to think about nothing else. For now, she is with A-Zhan.

“Fine words! True words!” she says instead, making her voice hearty. “Words to live by! The esteemed Lan Yi was blessed with a talent for words as well as a warrior’s skills. Did you know that she wrote poetry too?” At A-Zhan’s fierce shaking of his head, she smiles. “Come. I have a copy here.”

She fetches the slim volume down from the shelf and settles back down with A-Zhan in her lap to read it. A-Huan has reached an age where he thinks himself much too old and dignified to sit in Mama’s lap, though he still hugs her without self-consciousness when he arrives and leaves. But A-Zhan loves to be cuddled, and she spends as much of their time together holding him as she can.

She finds a few of the shorter pieces, love poems and odes to nature, and prompts A-Zhan to read them aloud—he no longer even needs help with the trickier characters, her clever boy. He reads solemnly and with care, though the contrast between his innocent voice and the mature words makes her smile.

After all, there is something a little ridiculous in hearing a six-year-old read the words, For you, my love, my only one / I would brave all the depths of death, all the terrors of life. / Together or apart, my every heartbeat belongs to you alone.

By the time she read these words for the first time, her innocent faith in romance and companionship had been shattered. But when she reads them as a vow to her sons, they speak to the depths of her heart.

Lan Yi had no children, and no one knows who her great love had been, for she never married. Still, Jing Yufei likes to imagine that this lady, the ancestress of her sons, would not mind having the words speak to a mother’s heart. All the other Lan writings, no matter how noble, are tarnished for Jing Yufei. But no Lan she has ever met could write the other words Lan Yi wrote: The voices of women laughing, / that is the sound I praise most of all... or Often the words most truly spoken are spoken by those who are never heard…. If she could write lines like that, surely she would not have banished Jing Yufei to such misery?

It’s a foolish thought, and Jing Yufei dismisses it. What use in thinking of an imagined ally, centuries dead? Besides, A-Zhan has turned to one of the poems praising the pleasures of the bedchamber, and she hurriedly takes the volume from him. That is not yet for him.

“You read the words most worthily,” Jing Yufei announces, and A-Zhan doesn’t even squirm with pleasure anymore, though she can tell he still wants to. That must have been ground out of him too. She misses it, but there is still the pink flush of his ears to tell him how pleased he is with the praise. “And of course Lan Yi also wrote so many pieces for guqin. Shall we learn some together?”

A-Zhan is even more excited about the music than he was about the poetry, though he still touches her guqin with the most careful of hands. He has the musician’s touch. A-Huan had not taken to the guqin, though she delights at his skill with the dizi. But A-Zhan has her hands, her innate understanding of how to touch the strings. He will surpass her as a musician, perhaps. The thought glows like an ember of hope in her chest.

She watches his small hands move across the strings. There are still so many pieces he is not yet capable of playing, but there is so much he will learn as his hands grow to their destined size. She reminds him of that, when he can’t reach the correct strings and he sulks and pouts, and the reminder comforts him. A-Zhan dearly loves to learn.

“Mama,” he says later, after their meal, after he’s poured her tea with his precious solemnity. “Why don’t you have a ribbon?”

Her eyes fly to his forehead ribbon against her will. She never looks at her son’s ribbons, always pretending that they aren’t there. The ribbons symbolize restraint, which is a good virtue when practiced in balance with others, but to her, they look like a mark of ownership. A mark that says that they belong to the Lans, and not to her.

A-Zhan has asked this before, a few times over the past two or three years. The question hurts, not because she desires a ribbon, but because he has so seldom seen anyone without one.

She can’t explain to him the truth of why she has no ribbon when every other who marries into the Lan clan is given one. She can’t explain how the ribbon would allow her to move freely through the Cloud Recesses—to leave it and come back, if she so wished. The ribbon is freedom of movement as much as it is anything else; visitors can only enter by invitation or the accompaniment of a Lan member with a token, and there are places they cannot approach. If Jing Yufei had a ribbon, she could walk right through the Cloud Recesses, through the gates and out into the wide world that is just a faded memory to her.

“Why do I need a ribbon, my sweet boy? I do not leave the Jingshi.”

He gives her the same doubtful look he has always given to this answer. But instead of pushing, he says, “I would like to tie your ribbon for you, Mama.”

Oh, this boy. Always fighting to offer her love in any way he can. “Would you?” Her voice cracks.

“Yes. Xiongzhan says only parents, spouses, and children may touch the ribbons. I am your child, so I can touch yours.”

She can’t stop herself from cupping his face in her hands. His cheeks are not as full as they were when he was smaller; he grows so quickly. “If I had a ribbon, only A-Zhan and A-Huan would tie mine.”

He considers this carefully, as he is apt to do. Then, “Will you tie mine?”

There is no reason for her to untie and retie his ribbon in the middle of the day, and she would rather touch a venomous snake than that thing that binds her son. She doesn’t have to look at the sour woman to know she is glaring. But Jing Yufei understands, and so she smiles as she says, “I would be honored,” and she keeps that smile in place as fulfills his request.

Afterwards, he looks pleased, his ears pinking again, and his own hand darts up to brush against the metal cloud at the center of his forehead. “I will get you a ribbon, Mama, and then Xiongzhan and I can tie it.”

The words hit her like a slap, but she keeps her smile in place. “I don’t need a ribbon,” she says, voice creaking. “Just my A-Zhan and my A-Huan.” When she sees him droop, she adds, “But I am thankful for my boys’ generous hearts. I would treasure anything A-Zhan gave me.”

She does. She has a carved wooden box in which she keeps dried gentians that A-Huan brings her, the piece of paper on which A-Zhan wrote the characters of his name for her for the first time, a blanket she wrapped both of them in. Treasures.

“What do you want me to bring you, Mama?”

If A-Huan had asked the question, she would say, Just bring yourself, my treasure, and he would smile and hug her, content. But A-Zhan will not be satisfied with such an answer, so she says, “Learn me another song before you come again.” She does not tell him that he will have a longer time to master it this time. “Don’t tell me what it is. Find one that speaks to your heart, learn it well, and then when you come again, you will play it for me.”

A-Zhan considers this before nodding in agreement. “I will bring you the most beautiful song in the world.”

“I do not doubt it, my precious.”

He asks her for a story after that, and she tells him some of the folk tales that she learned in her own village from her grandmother. The old lady’s lap had been soft, and she had smelled of mint, her voice creaking like the trees during a winter storm. She had died when Jing Yufei was ten years old, about the time that her teacher had come to their village for the first time. But Jing Yufei likes to think that the old lady would be pleased to know that her tales were being passed on to her great-grandchildren.

The sun sets red as blood and with the same cruelty, and their chaperone steps forward to take A-Zhan away. He doesn’t cry, not anymore, but his eyelashes are damp when she embraces him, and his arms cling when she pulls back.

Even after so many partings, she still has not discovered the right words to speak. She spends hours pondering what to say—words that will warm her sons’ hearts, that they can carry with them as a token of her love. But words that will not put pressure on them or make them confront her own agony. She has never arrived at words that will satisfy.

So she says, as she said to A-Huan last week, “You are my heart,” and smiles so that he won’t see the way her heart breaks as he walks down the steps, pausing at the bottom to look back at her as he always does.

As she watches him walk away in the crimson light, such a small figure with a guard walking behind him, she comes to a decision.

When she was seventeen, the thought of letting that man touch her had been more than she could abide, and so she did not abide it. Now she is twenty-eight, and the thought of letting these men take her sons from her is more than she can abide.

What mother could abide by such a decree?

Well. She will not abide by it, then.

There is no resentful energy in the Cloud Recesses. Any that might have the audacity to develop cannot bud before it is dispatched by the efforts of dozens of righteous Lans. The atmosphere is as spic and span as the austere rooms the sect inhabits, with nothing for anger or bitterness to sink its teeth into. Jing Yufei knows, because she’s tried.

They took away her sword. For all these lonely years, she has spent hours each day meditating, but there is only so far a cultivator can advance without a sword or some other spiritual weapon. Even her guqin is replaced every other year so that it cannot take on any spiritual qualities. She has only her own qi to rely on.

The idea of reaching for resentment had sprung up in her mind like the first shoots of spring during the days after her husband’s first visit. Then, and in the years after, she had never truly considered it, though. No matter what she had gone through, it was unthinkable. Imagining her master’s face if she found out her beloved disciple had walked that path…no. Unthinkable. This was the one thing about which she and the Lan agreed.

But in her despair and then the long years of rage that came after, the thought has budded time and again, and each time, she has nipped it. But now she considers it, holding it in her mind as she might cup a bloom in her hands.

There is no resentful energy in the Cloud Recesses, but there is so much resentment in her heart. Most days it ebbs and flows within her, inexorable as the tide, but sometimes it howls like a storm or crashes over her like a tsunami. She never allows it to rage for long, knowing she could be swept away by it, taking her away from her boys. When the tempest seems most uncontainable, she thinks of A-Huan’s bright smile, of A-Zhan’s solemn little face, and she fights it back, forces it down until it only rolls through her like an ocean wave on a calm day.

Now, she lets it out. The pain, the grief, the fury that she’s been feeling since her brother-in-law’s visit is loosed, and it builds and builds inside of her. For once, she uses the thought of her sons not to hold it back but to stoke it, building the fire of her resentment higher and higher.

Real resentful energy arises from the thwarted desires of the dead. Tonight she allows herself this thought: she has been dead since the moment the elders refused to listen to her story, since they dragged her to the Jingshi. Each month, she resurrects for two brief days, like an insect emerging from the ground. The rest of the time, she might as well be dead. No corpse could swell with as much resentment as Jing Yufei holds within her—it would burst. Only her persistently living flesh can expand to contain it all.

Surely, surely this amount of resentment must have some effect on the world. Surely, surely it is powerful enough to reach beyond her.

So she tries. All through the long hours of the day, she tries. Till she’s sweating and panting and bleary with exhaustion, she tries. Tries to force her feelings into something substantial, something like the thick spiritual smoke that she had once battled and banished during her night hunts.

It does not work.

There are moments when she thinks she feels something flicker. Her breath catches as, for a heartbeat, she thinks she has accomplished something. But the moment always passes, fizzling out as though it had never been. Where there is life, there is hope, and that hope acts as a counterbalance to her resentment. This is why resentment must come from the dead: because only in death is all hope truly extinguished, and only in the absence of all hope can resentment kindle.

It is out of hope, as much as despair, that she has broken her vows to her master and reached for darkness. And that very hope defeats her in the end.

When night falls, when her mind and body can take no more, she collapses into the deepest sleep.

Jing Yufei has never had a dream like this before.

Her dreams are always hazy, nonsensical, disjointed. Sometimes she knows she’s in the Jingshi or back in her master’s house near Yiling, but they never look as they do in reality. Sometimes there are people who she loves or hates but does not know in the real world. There are colors, sensations, flashes of emotions as sharp and vivid as any in the world of the waking. But everything else is seen as through a translucent curtain, and even when her boys or her husband or her master or the man she murdered are there, their faces are never clear and she never remembers upon waking what words were spoken.

In this dream, though, she is standing knee-deep in ice-cold water, all the exhaustion gone from her body. She is in a cave, white stone and ice melting into each other until it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Far off, there is the sound of water trickling, like a river in the earliest spring when the ice first melts. The light is tinged blue as the heart of an iceberg, and the air smells of both earth and snow.

On a ledge of white stone in front of her, a woman is seated behind a table that looks like an altar, a guqin lying upon it. She is wearing Lan robes of blue and white and silver, the white ribbon across her forehead. She is small and beautiful and her eyes—light as A-Zhan’s—flash with fierce intelligence.

Those eyes are looking right at Jing Yufei.

The line of the woman’s lips tightens, and Jing Yufei does not have dreams this crystalline in detail.

The woman’s voice, when she speaks, is like the plucking of guqin strings. “You should not be here. You have no forehead ribbon.”

Jing Yufei’s short, bitter laugh echoes through the cave, bouncing off of stalactites just as sharp. “You will have to take that up with my husband. And the elders.”

The woman’s eyes narrow, her gaze resting on the shu bi in Jing Yufei’s hair. It is small and surprisingly unshowy, but exquisitely wrought out of silver pale as moonlight, studded with sapphires and diamonds, and it is the only aspect of her appearance that tells of her station. Jing Yufei hates it, but she’s always been grateful that it is not ostentatious.

“You are the wife of a sect leader.”

Jing Yufei tilts her head. “I am.”

“Why are you dabbling with resentful energy?”

Jing Yufei’s eyes widen before she can stop them. She had not expected this. And that word—dabble. Like a child in a puddle. Just confirmation that her attempts had led to nothing at all.

The sneer the woman gives her is a smaller, less infuriating version of the one Jing Yufei had seen on the face of the man she had murdered. “Do you think that anyone can reach for such darkness in the Cloud Recesses without my knowing it? This is my place. I built it, and I still know it better than anyone.”

Jing Yufei had suspected, but now she knows who this is. “You are Lan Yi.”

“Of course. Will you not greet your husband’s ancestress?”

Jing Yufei hates to bow to any Lan. But she has read Lan Yi’s writings—her poetry, her wisdom. She has taught her own son Lan Yi’s compositions. Lan Yi may have founded a sect that has turned to ice-stone as cold as the walls of this cave, but she brought beauty into the world as well. Jing Yufei walks forward, up onto a dry spot, and bows.

“Your name? Sect?” Lan Yi asks as Jing Yufei rises.

“Jing Yufei. I have no sect. My master was a rogue cultivator of little reputation.” Little reputation but great generosity and great integrity. She had taught Jing Yufei to hunger for righteousness and protect the innocent. She had raised Jing Yufei to be like her: living quietly and simply in a rough corner of the world, protecting the humble people there as best she could. Her master had been beloved by those who lived nearby, but no one outside the area had ever heard of her.

“A rogue cultivator married into the Lan and using resentful energy? My sect has changed much from my day.”

Jing Yufei tilts her head in acknowledgment.

“Why do you have no ribbon?”

“I was given none.”

A rabbit, of all things, hops up into Lan Yi’s lap, and when Jing Yufei understands what she’s seeing twinkling on the rabbit’s forehead, she wants to burst into hysterical, bitter laughter. She presses her lips together to hold it in.

“Why not?”

Jing Yufei studies Lan Yi, and the other woman holds her gaze. She’s stroking the white fur of the rabbit in her lap, but all the intelligence in her fierce eyes is directed at Jing Yufei.

Since she ran her sword through the chest of the man who had attacked her, Jing Yufei has never been asked why. She has never had one opportunity to explain herself, to defend her actions, no matter how she begged. This may be only a dream, but she will speak now.

She sketches it in a few words, sharp and true: she will make herself understood. The words come easily—of course they do. She realizes as she speaks that she has been rehearsing them for all those lonely years, testing each one, rejecting one, selecting another, until each is as exact as she can make it. No words could ever convey the extent of what she has suffered, but these are the ones that come closest.

This is what she tells:

The force of a gaze across the market in Caiyi. The young man was beautiful, but Jing Yufei had barely noticed, distracted by the color of his robes and the ribbon across his forehead. The weight of his eyes on her had made her uncomfortable, but when he invited her to Cloud Recesses, she had leapt at the chance. How excited she had been in her innocence, seeing only a gracious offer and an opportunity to learn from the most revered sect.

He introduced himself as Lan Miao, courtesy name Lan Haozhi, but the people had already started to call him Qingheng-jun by the people. He had spoken kindly to her and offered the hospitality of the Lan as the sect heir. She wasn’t certain she liked him—the intensity of his gaze was unrelenting; he made her feel like a cricket a child has trapped between his hands—but she was grateful to him. He showed her the library, introduced her to his friends and his younger brother. And then to his teacher, the greatest scholar of his age.

Jing Yufei had been in the Cloud Recesses for four days when Lan-laoshi had found her in the library. He had inquired about the text she was reading, flattered her by asking her thoughts. She had thought him kind, for bothering to discuss musical cultivation with a barely-grown rogue cultivator. But then he had touched her hand, and when she jerked back, his eyes had not been kind at all.

She had not been allowed to scream—he’d used the Silence Spell on her. What choice had she had, but to reach for her sword? He was so much stronger than she was.

She remembers all that as clearly as she is experiencing this dream. What followed is a blur. The elders, the wedding, the Jingshi. Everything had been a haze of misery and rage and disbelief for months. The world had only become clear again when she realized she was carrying A-Huan. For a few months, she had almost been happy. They had not told her they would take him away from her as soon as he was born.

The long, dreary years punctuated only by the sunshine of visits with her sons. The way their personalities emerged from the fog of infancy: A-Huan’s careful kindness, A-Zahn’s solemn passions. Her beautiful boys.

She speaks it all aloud for the first time, and through it all, Lan Yi’s eyes do not leave her face. Her regard is heavy, just as Lan-laoshi’s had been, just as Qingheng-jun’s had been, but it doesn’t make her feel trapped. It makes her feel seen.

When she has run out of words, when she has set forth her thoughts and explained her actions as she has never, ever been allowed to do, Lan Yi is silent. Then she stands, abrupt, her sleeves flying out behind her, and though she doesn’t touch the guqin, a discordant jangle bursts from its strings.

“No. This is not the Lan way, the way my grandfather set forth.” Lan Yi’s voice is staccato sharp as she paces the length of the ledge. “Heaven knows I made mistakes of my own—my regrets are deeper than I can speak—but my motives were pure though my arrogance made me stumble. This, though, is too much.” Fury sparks off of her, blue shining in the dim light.

She walks down the steps to the lower stone Jing Yufei is standing on, and it is only then that Jing Yufei realizes how small Lan Yi is. She has to look down to meet her eyes. When Lan Yi takes her hands, they are small and warm.

“If there is anything I have learned in the centuries I have seen, it is that a wrong unrighted festers until it destroys anything that might have been good. I will not see my sect destroyed in this way. I will help you.”

It’s been years since Jing Yufei cried, but tears burn in her eyes now like the deepest cold. “Why?”

Lan Yi tightens her warm hands around Jing Yufei’s. “My child, I was a woman in a world of men. Do you think I never had to reach for my sword to protect myself? If I never killed any of them, it was only because I did not have to.”

It’s a balm on her soul, hearing those words. Jing Yufei’s tears freeze on her cheeks like chips of diamonds.

“I did not have children, but I had one I would have done anything for,” Lan Yi says. “Your sons. You said they are good?”

“They are so good, Popo.” Jing Yufei never met her mother-in-law, who had died long before Jing Yufei came to Gusu, but this moment feels like what she had hoped as a girl that her relationship with her mother-in-law might be like. “So good.”

“All children are good until adults ruin them,” Lan Yi says. “That must not happen to your sons. To my heirs. They must be raised in a place and among cultivators who will nurture their goodness.” Lan Yi’s expression goes wistful, then yearning. “It has been centuries since I have seen my love, but she will take you in. You must go to her. Listen, and I will tell you how.”

When Jing Yufei wakes, she is holding a pendant of jade in one hand and a ribbon of white in the other.

Perhaps she should wait until tomorrow, or even longer. Take time to plan. But there is hope surging inside her for the first time in many years, and it carries her forward. Besides, not much of the night has passed. Perhaps midnight has not yet arrived. There will be time.

She dresses in the light of a lamp, tying back her hair and pulling on her warmest cloak. She doesn’t have a qiankun pouch, of course, so she shapes a silk coverlet into a kind of sling and knots it. In it she puts a change of clothes and the box where she stores her treasures. That is all that she takes. That is all that she has.

In her hand, she holds the pendant of jade and the ribbon of white.

At the door, she steps out of her slippers. They will do her no good, but she doesn’t have a pair of outdoor shoes to put on in their place. Instead she crosses the wood of the porch barefoot; it is cool in the late spring air, but not uncomfortably so. Cool, too, is the grass below her feet when she steps down onto it, avoiding the gravel of the path that would bite into her soles. It is the first time in over ten years that she has stood on anything but the floorboards of the Jingshi. The springiness of the grass and the give of the ground below– the scent of earth and gentian blossoms filling the night air– the silver of the moonlight. She could fall to her knees and rejoice but she does not have time.

The Cloud Recesses is large, crisscrossed by twisting paths between boulders and trees, and it has been ten years since she was dragged to Jingshi: she does not remember the way. She wastes a great deal of time going down the wrong paths, stumbling across the cold springs she has heard of but never seen, ending up at sparring grounds and solitary meditation pavilions.

When she finally reaches the boys’ dormitories, long and white in the moonlight, she realizes she does not know which rooms her sons will be in. And they will not be alone. They each have roommates—she knows the names of all of A-Huan’s as well as their personalities and habits. A-Zhan doesn’t speak of his, except now and then to complain of one who is untidy or another who borrowed one of his brushes without asking. Could she possibly locate the right rooms, wake her boys, and prepare them without disturbing any of the other children?

She curses herself for not having considered this; as much as her heart screams in fury at the thought, she will have to go back to the Jingshi. She will have to plan, and almost certainly she will not be able to proceed until she’s spoken to the boys. Two months from now. Two months before she can see them again.
She stands there in the wet grass, shoulders shaking, breath hitching, trying to stop herself from sobbing—from screaming. To retreat back into her cage, after she has tasted freedom as heady and heartening as wine…it is more than she can bear.

A flash of white snags the edge of her gaze, and she freezes. Of course. Of course a guard will discover her, and she will be dragged back. They will take the ribbon and the pendant—her precious keys to freedom—from her and she will live out the rest of her days in that beautiful, sterile house, seeing her boys only a few times more before they are lost to her forever.

No. She will not be dragged to her prison again. If she must be sucked back into that black pit of despair, she will walk there on her own two feet.

She is ready to spin, to go back the way she came—to run, if need be—but she chances on glance over her shoulder and—

Again, she has to fight to keep from weeping, this time in relief as sharp as pain. Coming towards her through the moonlight is the little, round old lady who used to act as chaperone before her sympathy was noticed. Though no woman should be in this male half of the Cloud Recesses, she is moving as briskly as she can.

And beside her are Jing Yufei’s sons.

Jing Yufei’s heart turns over. A-Haun’s lovely face is narrowed in confusion, but he is following the lady with dutiful obedience, and he is holding A-Zhan’s hand. A-Zhan seems content to go wherever his xiongzhan is going, hurrying to keep up with his brother’s longer legs. Even in the middle of the night, both boys are perfectly dressed, their ribbons straight across their foreheads.

And they are together. It is the first time Jing Yufei has ever seen her sons side by side.

She had imagined this, over and over, what they would be like together. How A-Huan would watch over his little brother while A-Zhan looks up at him with adoring eyes. A-Haun would be gentle with A-Zhan’s sensitive heart, but A-Zhan would be secure enough in his love that he would endure a little teasing. It was so easy to imagine how they would interact—they talked about each other constantly—but to actually see them together…it is not something she had known her heart had longed for.

A-Haun has his eyes on the ground, careful of his way, so it is A-Zhan who sees her first. His eyes light up, as they always do, his face transformed with bright joy. And then he trips and almost falls, and it is only A-Haun’s hand that keeps him upright. A-Haun looks concerned, steadying his brother, but then he follows A-Zhan’s gaze and freezes.

Jing Yufei stands there in the endless night, the sound of wind and nightbirds wrapped around her, nothing between her and her boys but moonlight. They stare back at her in wonder.

And then A-Zhan starts to run towards, dragging his brother along by the hand, and a bubble of giddy laughter rises in her throat—is this the first time he has ever broken the no running rule? A-Huan hangs back for a moment as though he, at least, is going to try to walk with dignity, but then he gives it up for lost and both of her boys are running into her arms.

It is different, to hold them both, together. Different, and so much. Her heart has never been so full.

When she finally looks up, tears wet on her face, the old woman is standing at her elbow. Through the whole encounter, they have all been silent, but now Jing Yufei whispers to the woman, softer than the night wind, “How—?”

“Lan Yi came to me.”

Jing Yufei has never known such gratitude. “And you listened,” she says with wonder. “Popo, thank you—thank—”

“None of that.” The lady reaches out and pats her shoulder. “It was wrong, what they did. I am ashamed it took me so long.”

It heals something in Jing Yufei to hear another Lan acknowledge that wrongness, but she does not want this lady to be ashamed. What could she have done before? Without Lan Yi’s help? And even still—

“You will be punished,” she says, heartsick at the thought.

“They will not know. The other children slept deeply.”

Lan Yi. Jing Yufei’s soul is soaring—with gratitude, with hope, with love for these Lans who are worthy of their reputation for righteousness. Her sons, Lan Huan and Lan Zhan. Lan Yi. And—

“Your name?” she asks. She has to know.

The lady’s already wrinkled face folds into a smile. “Lan Yan, my child.”

Jing Yufei isn’t certain if the sound she lets out is a laugh or a sob. She has never seen a face so kind. She will honor it till her dying day.

“Mama?” A-Huan has raised his face from where it was buried against her chest. He hasn’t called her that in years, long having made the transition to Mǔ qīn. Hearing it again, in his less childish voice, is so sweet. “What’s going on?”

Lan Zhan is still wrapped around her legs, rubbing his face against the silk of her skirts, but at his brother’s question, he stills, listening.

There is so little time—it must be only a few hours till nao hour—but she refuses to take them from their home without their knowledge. After what was done to her—

She removes A-Zhan’s clinging hands from her skirts and leads them behind a copse so that no one who passes by will see them. The Lan Yan follows.

Jing Yufei crouches down; like this, A-Huan’s head is higher than her own, A-Zhan’s face at eye level. “Yesterday,” she says, “Your uncle told me that the elders have decided that they will not allow you to see me once a month. He and I both believe that their intention is eventually to ensure that you do not see me at all.”

A-Huan looks stricken, A-Zhan furious. She has never seen her youngest with anger blazing in his eyes.

“They can’t stop me from seeing Mama!” A-Zhan says, and the stubborn set of his jaw is at odds with the roundness of his face. Precious boy.

“Yes, my darling, they can. Just as they kept me in the Jingshi.” At the cresting sorrow on A-Zhan’s face, she hurries on. “But they can keep me no longer. Tonight, I will leave this place.”

“Lan Yi came to Mǔ qīn too?” A-Huan asks, her clever boy.

“Yes. She gave me this.” She opens her hand, letting them see the ribbon and the pendant. She’s been holding the objects so closely for so long that they are warm and damp from her hand. A-Zhan reaches out a finger and touches the cloud embroidery on the ribbon. “But I must go now, before anyone finds that I have them or they will stop me. Nothing would make me happier than for you both to go with me.”

“I’ll go with Mama,” says A-Zhan, excited and staunch at the same time—and not quite as quietly as he should. Jing Yufei presses a finger to his mouth to remind him, then a kiss to his forehead.

When she then turns to her other son, A-Huan looks troubled. She had known he would; he has a strong sense of duty, of his role as the Lan heir. And he’s older, and has friends. He fits in a way that A-Zhan doesn’t yet. A-Huan’s personality and skills are such that he will be accepted and valued anywhere. It is no surprise to her that he has a place here, one that he does not want to leave.

“Mǔ qīn,” he says, voice so distressed that it breaks her heart. “What is the right thing to do?”

That he asks that question heartens her. She had told Lan Yi that her sons were good, and they are. They are, and they will be no matter where they grow up.

But if they stay here, their edges will be rounded off. Sooner or later, they will be forced by the strictures of the cultivation world to compromise, to set sect before their own sense of principles. Perhaps it will be a small thing. She believes that they will grow to be good men, regardless. But less good than they could be.

Still, she must be honest with A-Huan. “There is no right thing, my treasure.” Both boys give her identical looks that mingle disbelief and disapproval. In other circumstances, she would laugh. “It is a difficult lesson to learn, but sometimes in life, there are two paths you can take. Both are good paths. But they are leading in different directions. Sometimes, if you decide one path is not to your liking, you can go back and take the other. But not always. Sometimes, you simply have to make a choice.”

This does not seem to soothe A-Huan at all. In fact, he looks like he’s about to cry.

“Listen,” she says. “If you go with me now, and you decide this was the wrong path for you—if you decide to return to Cloud Recesses—you will be free to do so.” It hurts to say that, but she has been too long a prisoner to ever make prisoners of her children. She will not bind them to her, not even with her love.

“I’ll be punished.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Lan Yan says suddenly. Jing Yufei had almost forgotten she was here. Her mouth twists, wry, as she says, “They will not believe you left of our own accord. And if need be, I will lie to them and tell them you were kidnapped.”

A-Huan stares at her, horrified. “Popo!”

“Over on the women’s side, we’ve always known that sometimes—only sometimes, very, very occasionally—a lie must be spoken in order to protect the innocent. I would not hesitate to lie for you, child.”

A-Huan looks half-touched, half-disturbed. A-Zhan is frowning in that way he does when he is thinking very deeply about something. She knows both of them will spend a great deal of time pondering this new idea.

“So you can come back,” Jing Yufei says. There is no time for moral dilemmas now. “But, darling, if you do not come with me now, you will never be allowed to leave. I do not know if you will ever see me or A-Zhan again.”

It is cruel to put this on a boy who is barely ten years old. Terribly cruel, and part of her hates herself for it. But would it not be worse to refuse him a choice at all?

The Lan will always take their heirs back. But if A-Huan does not leave now, Jing Yufei knows she will never see him again.

“You come too, xiongzhang,” A-Zhan says, tugging at A-Huan’s hand. “You have to come.”

“Where will we go?” A-Huan whispers, voice tiny.

“We are going to a friend of Lan Yi’s.” No, that isn’t the truth. “Lan Yi’s great love,” she corrects herself. “You have heard of Baoshan Sanren?”

They both nod, their eyes round.

“She is waiting for us. We will live with her, and you will continue your cultivation training with her.” And perhaps Jing Yufei will pick up her cultivation training as well. She had not considered it before, and she knows that after all the years stolen from her, she will never be able to make up the ground she lost. But it would be good to hold a sword again.

“That’s what this is for?” A-Huan asks, pointing at the green jade mountain in Jing Yufei’s hand.

“Yes. We will go down from here and we will call her.”

The battle within him is plain on A-Huan’s face. He’s grown so skilled in the past few years at keeping an always-pleasant expression on his face, even when their time has come to an end and he’s led away from her. But right now, she can see the conflict stamped on his face.

“I can come back? Later? If I want to?” he whispers.

“Yes,” Jing Yufei vows. She will make it so.

He takes a shuddering breath and lifts his chin. “Then I will go.”

The relief she feels is so strong that she almost staggers under it. She manages to straighten and stand upright and then turn to Lan Yan.

“Popo.” She considers words of gratitude, but they will never, ever be enough. “Be safe and well,” she says instead. “Be happy.”

“You, too, my child,” the old lady says, reaching out to pat Jing Yufei’s cheek. “Now go. Mao hour grows close.”

Jing Yufei turns to lead them towards the entrance, but A-Zhan pulls on her arm. “Mama, your ribbon! Can I tie it?”

It is a waste of time, but she cannot deny him. “You may. And A-Huan will take it off for me when we go through the gate.” The first and last time Jing Yufei will wear the symbol of Lan belonging that was denied to her for over a decade. She will burn it, perhaps, once they’ve reached Baoshan Sanren. But just this once, her boys will tie and untie their mother’s forehead ribbon.

She crouches down again and A-Zhan takes it in his small hands. Jing Yufei has to stop herself from sucking in a breath when the cooling metal of the cloud presses against her forehead. But she holds it in place as A-Zhan moves behind her and then as he ties the ribbon as carefully as he does everything.

It doesn’t feel as much like a fetter as she had imagined it would. Perhaps knowing that it will be removed by A-Huan’s hands in just a short time is enough to make the difference.

And then with a nod and a quiet word to Lan Yan, they are going. Though they keep to the grass, here and there are roots and stones, and they are harsh on the soles of Jing Yufei’s feet. But she would walk across a path of burning embers if it led where this way leads. The boys are silent beside her, and she squeezes their hands as they go. Once outside the gates, they will slow. But for now, she is running through the Cloud Recesses, long after hai hour. Her soul is laughing.

The gates are in sight when another flash of movement jerks Jing Yufei to a halt, with the abrupt, total stillness of a prey animal.The boys stumble, then steady themselves. She does not let go of their hands.

Lan Qiren is standing by the gate. He looks recently roused from sleep, wrapped in a simple robe, less put-together than she has ever seen him. He is staring at her, at the boys, shock written all over his face, and again she thinks, Of course.

They stand there staring at each other, as she had once stood staring at a deer she chanced upon in the woods. Like that long ago sun-dappled day when she had been a half-grown girl, the moment seems to last for eternity—there is no way to end it without shattering it completely.

Lan Qiren opens his mouth, and then stops. Closes it. His eyes are on the ribbon across Jing Yufei’s forehead.

His expression twists, and Jing Yufei has never seen him this way. He looks at the boys, and there is a heartbreak there that moves even Jing Yufei to sympathy.

And then his face smoothes out, he lifts his chin, and he turns and walks away.

A-Huan lets out a breath beside her, and Jing Yufei feels like her heart has just started beating again.

“Come,” she says, and hands clasped, Jing Yufei and her sons pass through the gates, running.