It took four days for word to come back from the Nine Lotus Palace, and when it did, it came in the shape of a Palace elder Tianyun had never met, arriving at Cloudmist’s gate on a spirit crane with a face like she hadn’t slept either.
Her name was Elder Situ.
She didn’t waste time on introductions.
“Describe him again,” she said, before she’d even sat down properly in Elder Bao’s study.
“The man on the platform.
Everything you remember.
Height, age, anything about his voice.” Lin Yueqing was the one who answered, careful, going slow like she was afraid of getting a detail wrong and having it matter.
“Younger than my master.
Maybe thirty.
He had a scar through one eyebrow, here–” she touched her own face to show it.
“He was trying to say something.
I couldn’t make it out.” Elder Situ closed her eyes for a second, and something in her expression went very still, the way a person’s face goes still right before it doesn’t stay still much longer.
“That’s Zhou Hai,” she said.
“One of ours.
Sent out three weeks ago to check on a supply route that stopped reporting in.
We assumed bandits.” Her hands, folded in her lap, had gone tight enough that her knuckles showed pale.
“He has a daughter.
Six years old.
She’s been asking every day when he’s coming home.” Nobody said anything for a while.
“I’m sorry,” Lin Yueqing finally said, quiet, useless, the only thing there was to say.
“Don’t be sorry.
Be exact.
Tell me everything again, in order, and don’t leave anything out because you think it doesn’t matter.
Small things matter.” Elder Situ’s voice had gone hard in the particular way of someone using anger to keep from doing something else with the feeling.
They told her again.
It took longer this time.
She asked questions nobody had thought to ask themselves — how many cultists total, whether any wore different markings than the others, whether the platform had faced a particular direction.
Tianyun didn’t have good answers for most of it.
He’d been too busy trying not to be seen.
“The Palace is moving up the expedition,” Elder Situ said, once they’d exhausted what they knew.
“Ten days, not thirty.
I fought for that number and I’m not sure I’ll get to keep it, so don’t repeat it outside this room until it’s confirmed.” She stood, robes settling, some of the hardness in her face giving way, just briefly, to something closer to exhaustion.
“Thank you.
For going as far as you did.
For coming back instead of dying trying to be heroes about it.” “It didn’t feel like the right choice at the time,” Chen Hao said.
“Still doesn’t, some hours.” “No,” Elder Situ agreed.
“It rarely does.
That doesn’t make it the wrong one.” She left within the hour, spirit crane lifting off from the courtyard in a rush of displaced air, and Cloudmist went back to whatever passed for normal, which today mostly meant everyone being quieter than usual and nobody quite admitting why.
The letter from home arrived that same afternoon, which felt like bad timing and good timing at once, in a way Tianyun didn’t examine too closely.
It was in his mother’s handwriting on the outside, though when he opened it there were two hands inside — hers, careful and even, and underneath it, messier, clearly added later without asking permission.
Your father says the herb garden is doing fine without you, which is his way of saying he misses having someone to complain to about the weeds, his mother had written.
Old Zhao asks about you at least once a day, usually while pretending he doesn’t care about the answer.
Eat properly.
I don’t trust that you are.
Below that, in Ah Rou’s messier hand: He’s lying, the garden is a disaster, he just won’t admit a boy who carves rabbits is better at weeding than he is.
Also I heard from a merchant that there was some kind of trouble near Red Maple.
Don’t tell me not to worry.
I’m going to worry regardless, so you might as well tell me the truth next time instead of whatever careful nothing you’re planning to write back.
He read it twice.
Then a third time, slower.
“Good news?” Feng Li asked, from across the mess hall table, not really prying, just noticing Tianyun’s face doing something it hadn’t done in a few days.
“Mixed,” Tianyun said.
“My mother thinks my father misses me.
Ah Rou thinks I’m going to lie to her about how dangerous things are here.” “Are you?” “…Probably a little.” “That tracks.” Feng Li didn’t push further, which Tianyun appreciated, and went back to arguing with Chen Hao about something unrelated, giving him room to sit with the letter a while longer without an audience for it.
He wrote back that night.
Started three different versions before he settled on one that didn’t lie outright but didn’t say I watched a man get drained of his life on an altar and couldn’t do anything about it either.
He told her about Chen Hao, about Feng Li’s cooking pot theory, about Lin Yueqing, a little, careful, not sure how much of that particular truth he was ready to put into ink yet.
There’s a girl, he wrote, and then sat there a long moment with the brush hovering, deciding how much further to go with it.
She’s a healer.
She’s steadier than I am about most things.
I think you’d like her, or you’d at least argue with her about something, which from you is basically the same as liking someone.
He didn’t reread that part before sealing the letter, mostly because he suspected if he did, he’d talk himself out of sending it.
Xuan Zhen found him afterward, sitting outside the dormitory with the empty ink-stone still in his lap, staring at nothing in particular.
“Writing home?” “Trying to.
Mostly failing to say the true thing without saying too much of it.” “That’s most letters home, in my experience.” Xuan Zhen sat down beside him, slower than usual, like the last week had cost him something he hadn’t fully recovered yet.
“I have to leave for a while.” Tianyun looked over sharply.
“Leave.
Now?” “Not far.
Not forever.” Xuan Zhen didn’t quite meet his eyes, which was unusual enough that Tianyun noticed it immediately.
“There are people I need to speak with, about what we saw in that vale.
People who won’t come here, and can’t be reached by letter, and who I’ve been putting off speaking to for longer than I probably should have.” “The hooded stranger.
Is that who you mean?” “Not exactly.
Related, maybe.
I don’t fully know yet, which is an uncomfortable thing for me to admit at my age.” He finally looked at Tianyun properly.
“You’ll be fine.
Elder Bao will keep training you.
Yueqing will keep an eye on the fragments.
Chen Hao and Feng Li will keep you from doing anything too stupid, probably, most of the time.” A faint, tired smile.
“I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t think that much was true.” “How long.” “I don’t know.
Weeks, probably.
Not longer than that, if I can help it.” Tianyun sat with that for a moment, turning the jade shard over between his fingers, three fragments sealed now, six still dark and waiting.
“You keep almost telling me things,” he said.
“And then you don’t.” “I know.” “Is that going to keep happening?” Xuan Zhen was quiet a while before he answered, and when he did, his voice had lost most of its usual dry edge.
“Probably some of it,” he admitted.
“Not because I enjoy it, and not because I don’t trust you.
Because some of what I know isn’t only mine to tell, and some of it I genuinely don’t know how to say without it landing wrong, on you, at a time when you can least afford for it to land wrong.” He reached out and, briefly, awkwardly, put a hand on Tianyun’s shoulder — not a gesture that came naturally to him, clearly, but one he made anyway.
“I’ll tell you more when I get back.
That’s the actual promise, not the vague kind.
More.
Not everything yet.
But more.” It wasn’t the answer Tianyun wanted.
It was, by now, close enough to the only kind of answer he ever seemed to get, and he was tired enough, and worried enough about other things, that he let it be enough for tonight.
Xuan Zhen left before dawn the next morning, without ceremony, the way he seemed to prefer doing most things.
Tianyun woke just early enough to see him going through the gate, wine gourd at his hip, staff in hand, and didn’t call out.
There didn’t seem to be anything left to say that hadn’t already been said, badly, the night before.
He went back to his letter instead, added one more line at the bottom before he sealed it properly this time.
Don’t worry too much, he wrote, knowing even as he wrote it that she wouldn’t listen, and that he probably wouldn’t have believed himself either, in her position.
I’ll tell you the truth next time.
I promise.
Just — not all of it yet.
I’m still figuring out how to say some of it myself.
To be continue….