“Leave,” the stranger said coolly, turning away with a swish of his robes. “Or it will be your body that is thrown into the water next.”
The man blanched, then—cursing under his breath the entire time, his crooked nose still dripping red—staggered to his feet and fled, disappearing behind the copse of elms without a glance back. Once his footsteps had faded into the distance, the stranger finally faced me. Up close, he was even more striking than I’d realized, his beauty so sharp as to be unsettling, his gaze of such a clear, black-eyed intensity I could not look away.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. His voice was gentler than it had been when he spoke to the Wu man, but no warmer.
I drew myself up to full height—though even then, my head only came up to his shoulders—and scanned my body for any signs of pain. There were none, other than the faint stinging in my palms from where I’d gripped the stone. Even the ache in my chest was gone, as if it had never been there at all.
“No,” I replied slowly, smoothing out my veil. Then I remembered his sword. It had planted itself into the dirt, but much of the blade was still a shiny, polished silver, with a diamond pattern repeating down the front and back and little jade fragments embedded in the hilt. There were words engraved into the blade too.I read them as I tugged the sword free:The mind destroys; the heart devours.They stirred something inside me, like the slow pluck of a guqin string, but I could not name why.
“Thank you for—everything,” I said, passing the sword to him rather awkwardly on two outstretched hands. I did not know if this was the right way to do it. He was clearly from some sort of noble background, with robes that alone were worth more than a dozen of our best water buffalo.
He sheathed his sword in one silver, fluid motion. “It was nothing.” He did not sound like he was being polite, but rather stating the truth.
“I should repay you,” I insisted, standing straighter. “I owe you a life debt.”
His lips quirked, as if wondering what I could possibly give that he did not already have. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “It is satisfying enough to humble a man from Wu.” He paused, tilting his head. “Were you the one who broke his nose?”
I briefly considered lying, to act the part of the wide-eyed, innocent maiden, as most people expected from me. But something compelled me to nod.
Now his lips curved higher into some semblance of a smile. “Impressive.” Then his gaze slid over to the little girl, who was still lying where she’d fallen, her mouth hanging agape in shock. “Is she a relative?”
I felt an ache inside me. How I wished she was. How I wished I could still point to someone and call themsibling.
“I don’t know who she is,” I admitted, walking over to her, the stranger following behind me. “She just looked like she needed help.”
“Yet you saved her,” he said with a touch of surprise. Something told me he was rarely surprised, and a strange pride bloomed beneath my breastbone, knowing I had done the unexpected.
“You saved me,” I pointed out. “And we don’t know each other.”
“Yes, but I was certain I would be in no danger. Protecting your interests could not have harmed mine.” He glanced at me sidelong, though I pretended not to see it. “It is quite a different thing to help someone when it puts yourself at risk.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but the little girl spoke up first.
“Is—is the bad man really gone?”
“He is. But don’t get up just yet,” I added hastily, seeing her struggle to rise onto her elbows. I crouched and inspected her wounds. The bruises were a terrible purple-blue shade, like an overripe plum, and she had grazed her skin open in multiple places when she’d stumbled. It was difficult to tell how many of the dark splotches in her tunic were blood or mud. Then I drew my attention down to her small hands and recoiled. All her nails had been torn clean off, leaving only little semicircles of raw, uneven flesh. These injuries were older. And they did not look like accidents. “What… happened to you?” I breathed, swallowing the bile in my mouth. “Where are your parents?”
“They’re dead.” She said it in a listless way, as if reciting a poem that had long lost its meaning.
“Dead?”
“Killed,” she amended, staring out at the glittering river.
“By who?”
“Who else? The monsters of Wu. I managed to escape while they were distracted by my mother’s screams. I didn’t want to,” she said, almost defensive, as if she thought we might judge her for surviving. “But I wasn’t going to wait around for them to cut my throat too. It was what my mother would have wished for.”
Good, I wanted to tell her, the ache deepening.You should have fled. You should have done whatever you needed to get away from them. Because if your mother had lived and you died, she would spend the rest of her days in unimaginable pain, weeping until her voice wenthoarse. She would drag herself around the house like someone had torn half her soul from her body. It is the cruelest fate for the gray-haired to bury the dark-haired.
I would know.
“You did the right thing,” the stranger spoke up. His features had tightened, and I thought I caught a flash of resentment beneath his icelike complexion. “What is your name?”
“Wuyuan,” she whispered.
“Wuyuan. I see.” He did not offer his name in return, nor lower himself to the ground as I did, but he retrieved a skin of water and a clean handkerchief from his robes, then turned to me. “Her injuries will likely grow infected if left unattended. Do you have any experience with cleaning wounds?”
“Some,” I said, taking the supplies from him. The handkerchief had been embroidered with an image of two fish circling each other in a lotus pond, and the silk was of the finest quality, wonderfully soft to the touch. It felt wrong to stain it with blood, but he did not seem to care. “This might sting,” I told Wuyuan as I smoothed out the handkerchief.
