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Panic skittered down Junyi’s spine like a spooked animal. He had been here for half a day already—that was half a year in the Mortal Realm. When he’d left the cottage, he had told Ziyan that he would be gone for only a month. What if something had happened to her? What if she’d tried to find him? What if old customers from the brothel had come looking for her? But his father’s gaze pinned him to the seat with all the weight of the Yuelin Mountains. He couldn’t excuse himself now, or he would only be confirming the Celestial Emperor’s suspicions, and he could not let them discover her.

“Another match,” he agreed with a smile, his chest tightening. “I would be honored.”

It was the longest match of his life. He was convinced that the Celestial Emperor dragged out every move on purpose. He tried not to squirm on the cushions. His palms sweated silently, turning uncomfortably hot, even though his fingertips felt frozen numb. With every moment that ticked by, he calculated how much time had passed down in the Mortal Realm, until his mind was filled with only numbers, imagined scenes of her waiting by a dark, empty road, wondering where he was. Another day, gone. Another week. Maybe he was overestimating his importance, and she didn’t even want to see him as much as he wanted to see her. But just say that she did. Just say that she was in danger, and he was too late. The stones quivered in his hands, and he had to clench down on his teeth to stop them from chattering.

After he lost the second time, he managed to bow to his father, to retreat without haste, measuring each step on his way out of the palace, his heart beating so fast in his stomach he felt nauseous. Then, as soon as he turned the corner, he vanished in a flicker of gold.

He’d barely had time to close the gates behind him when she rushed out of the house, skidding to a stop seconds before they crashed into each other. She was safe. Whole. He could have wept with relief.

“Where were you?” she demanded, glaring up at him. “You said a month. I waited for you. I waited and—I didn’t know where you went. I didn’t know if you were even alive, or—”

“I’m really sorry,” he said, and hated himself for it. What good were his apologies? It had been autumn when he left, white smoke billowing from the kitchen, leaves of burnt red and brown crunching underfoot, dried ginger set on the windowsills, the sunlight gentle and welcome and millet-yellow. Now, the yard was alive with signs of summer, wildflowers blooming in the grass, petals in her hair, the windows left wide open. “I had to go somewhere far away, but I tried to come back as soon as I could. That’s not an excuse by any means, but I—I wanted you to know that it wasn’t for lack of wanting. Every second that I was gone, I wanted to be here.” His tongue felt clumsy, foreign in his mouth, different from what he had used to so easily charm all the gods. “I wanted to be . . . with you.”

Her expression softened by a few degrees, though her brows remained furrowed. “How far is far away?”

He couldn’t confess the truth, but he couldn’t bear to lie. “Beyond the borders. Beyond the mountains, and the rivers, and the clouds.”

She was silent. And then, as if the two things were unrelated, the conversation forgotten, she remarked, “You never seem to age.”

Junyi froze.

“All these years,” she said, her fingers tracing out his immortal features, her touch as warm as the light spilling overhead and as soft as goose feathers, “and you’ve stayed exactly the same.”

This, he had no way of denying anymore. He had grown numb to the stagnant, eternal beauty of the gods, those faces that could have been carved from marble, forever fixed in the year that they chose. But each time he returned to Ziyan, something about her had changed. Her hair was longer, or her nose was sharper, or the freckles on her cheeks were more prominent. It was a beauty like the shifting colors of the sky, a canvas that collected its history rather than a blank slate.

“Does it bother you?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“No,” she replied without hesitation, and a smile crept up her lips. “You will never be more beautiful than I am.”

“That’s true,” he told her, earnest. “But—if it is too strange for you . . . If this arrangement brings you more trouble than it is worth, and you’d prefer I stay away for good, I won’t blame you.” In his mind, he saw the board, the black stones slowly encroaching upon the white, his father’s shadow looming over it. “I will always come back to you, but I cannot promise that I won’t leave again.”

She nodded, as if expecting as much. “To the same place beyond the mountains?”

“Yes.”

“Are you . . .” She pursed her mouth, then seemed to choose her next words with great care. “Are things difficult for you there?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“You always look exhausted when you come back.”

He’d thought he had done a better job of hiding it. But then, Ziyan had always been more perceptive than most. “It’s not difficult, but there are many people who pay attention to me,” he said slowly. “Sometimes too much attention, so much that it becomes suffocating. I know how ungrateful that sounds. I just— It can feel heavy.”

“I think I can understand that,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do. Or I can try. And if you must leave again, I will survive it.” She paused. “You know I am independent, right?”

“Of course,” he said. It was just one of the many things he adored about her. Nothing had the power to control her, because she never relinquished that power. Even gods did not live as she did.

“Nothing makes me sicker than the idea of tying my own happiness to somebody or something else,” she went on. “I learned from a very young age that you cannot rely on anyone, and if you must rely on them financially, for the pure purposes of survival, you cannot rely on them with your heart. It’s what I’ve done in the past, and I thought I could do the same with you. But, Junyi . . . I missed you.” She said it a little resentfully, grabbing him by the collar with the force of someone latching on to something they didn’t know whether or not belonged to them.

He did. He did, and he needed her to know it.

So when they went inside, he unraveled the ribbon in his hair, and held it out to her as though in supplication, the gold spilling across his opened palms. Both his wrists were extended, his sleeves falling back, the bared sliver of his skin as intimate as the glimpse of a dancer’s ankles, the blue shimmer of a heron’s underwings. In the diminishing candlelight, she cast him the same look she’d given him their first night in the chambers of the brothel, when he had offered her his cloak.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want to,” he promised. “But you can do anything. If you’d like.”