I woke because something was breathing on my face.

Not on my neck, not across the room: on my face, warm and slow and close. For a moment, still half asleep, I thought I was at home in my old flat with my neighbour’s cat on the pillow. Then I remembered I had no flat and no neighbour and no cat. I opened my eyes.

Ling Xiao’s face filled the whole of them. He was leaning over my bed with his hands braced on either side of my head, a hand’s breadth away, studying me with mild interest, as if I were an herb he hadn’t yet placed.

I sat up.

I didn’t decide to. My body did it on its own, all at once, as bodies do when they find a stranger’s face over them in the dark. My forehead hit his with a crack I felt in my back teeth.

He didn’t move. That was the first thing I noticed through the pain. I’d hit him as hard as I’d ever hit anything. His head hadn’t gone back so much as a finger’s width. It was like headbutting a wall. I fell back onto the pillow with both hands over my forehead and my eyes streaming. He straightened up, unhurried, and laughed.

“Good morning, XiaoMo-shimei.”

“What,” I said through my fingers, “is your head made of?”

“Better material than yours.” He sat down on the end of my bed, still laughing, and watched me press my palm to the lump that was already rising under my hairline. “You’re a mortal, little sister. This body’s only an illusion, but every part of it is harder than your forehead.”

I took my hand away from my face and looked at him.

He said it as he’d have said the tea was cold. This body’s only an illusion. As if it were a remark about the weather. He was already getting up and going to the table, where a pot and two cups had appeared from nowhere, and pouring himself tea as if he’d lived here for years.

I lay still with my forehead throbbing and let the words sink in, one by one, until they reached the bottom. Then I got up, washed my face in cold water and put on my robe with my back to him. I didn’t say anything at all, because I didn’t trust myself to.

When I turned round, he was holding up a sheaf of paper.

“Your translation,” he said. “The first three levels, written out fair.”

I’d bargained for this. I’d sat at that table and argued him down from ten kisses to thirty dinners. I’d eaten bitter melon in front of my whole peak for it, and here it was. I took the pages from him with both hands, as a disciple takes a gift from a senior, and looked down.

Then I looked at him. Then I looked down again.

The first page was covered in black. I could see that someone had meant it to be writing. There were strokes, and the strokes were grouped, and the groups ran in columns more or less from top to bottom. But the strokes wandered. They thickened for no reason and starved for no reason. They ran into each other. Here and there a character had a tail that went halfway down the column and curled at the end. In one place three of them seemed to have collided and fused into a single blot with legs.

They looked like tadpoles. A shoal of drowned black tadpoles, struggling down the page.

I turned to the second sheet. It was worse.

“Well?” he said.

I could have been tactful. I’d been tactful with pharmacists who couldn’t spell and doctors who couldn’t write. I’d been tactful with a charge nurse who made me cry in a stockroom. But that charge nurse hadn’t held my invoice up to the light and told me I wrote like a three-year-old with a stick.

“Mine are beetles,” I said. “Yours are tadpoles.”

His face went perfectly still.

“Between the two of us,” I said, “we could stock a pond.”

For a moment he didn’t move at all. Then he reached out and took the pages back. He did it gently, as you’d take a toy off a child who’d been told twice not to touch it, and folded them in half, and in half again.

“I haven’t written in a long time,” he said stiffly. “And the characters you know aren’t the ones I learned. If I’d known you were so particular about your penmanship, I’d have had it copied by a clerk.”

He was sulking. I stood in the middle of my own room with a lump on my forehead and watched the most dangerous creature I had ever met sulk because I’d been rude about his handwriting. It was the most purely satisfying thing that had happened to me since I woke up in this body. I had to look at the floor so that he wouldn’t see my face.

“Since you can’t read it,” he said, “I’ll read it to you.”

He sat down at my table, unfolded the tadpoles, and began.

He read the first level aloud that morning, a line at a time, and explained it as he went. It wasn’t long. It was strange and old and full of words that meant three things at once. I’d never have understood it on my own; I’d barely have understood it with a teacher who wasn’t so clever and so impatient. But he was both. He’d read a line, and look at me, and if I hadn’t understood, he’d say it again in other words, and then in plain ones, and then in rude ones, until I had.

The first level wasn’t a technique so much as a way of paying attention. The soul force, it said, was like water in a vessel; most mages poured it out and waited for the vessel to fill again, and that was the end of their thinking. The Scripture taught you to feel the vessel itself, the shape of it, the walls of it, and to press gently against those walls every time you drew on it, so that each time it filled again it filled a little further.

“Like a muscle,” I said, before I could stop myself.

He looked up from the page.

“You use it until it’s tired,” I said. “Not until it’s broken. Then you rest it. And it grows back stronger than it was.” I’d spent my second year of university with a bad knee and a physiotherapist who’d said much the same thing, every Tuesday, for three months. “Too much and you tear it. Too little and nothing happens.”

“Yes,” said Ling Xiao slowly. “Like a muscle.” He looked at me for a moment longer than he needed to. “Where did you hear that?”

“I worked it out,” I said, and he let it go. I wasn’t sure he believed me.

We worked through the morning. When the sun was high, he folded the tadpoles away into his sleeve, told me to practise on the herbs that afternoon and not to be clever, and left by the door. He didn’t take the pages with him, though. He left them on my table, folded in quarters, as if he’d forgotten.

I didn’t think he forgot anything.

I picked them up and slid them into a drawer, under the lining paper, beside my log. He had my invoice. I had his tadpoles. It seemed fair.

That afternoon I tried the first level on a cauldron of Dispelling herbs. It was harder than it sounded. Drawing the soul force out was the same as always, but pressing against the walls of the vessel at the same time, gently, steadily, without tearing anything, was like trying to pat my head and rub my stomach while reciting the dosage tables backwards. My first pill took as long as three. By sunset I’d made ten. I was soaked with sweat, and my hands were trembling so badly that I spilt half a cup of lake water down my front.

But when I drank the other half and felt my soul force come back up, it came back a hair higher than it had been. Just a hair. I could feel the difference, like one more step on a staircase in the dark.

I sat on my stool and grinned at the wall like a fool.

He took me to the canteen again that night, as agreed. It was the second dinner of thirty. He chose stewed bitter gourd this time, which was bitter melon by another name. He watched me eat every piece, then asked mildly what had happened to my forehead, in a voice loud enough for the three tables round us to hear.

“I walked into a wall,” I said.

“You should be more careful, XiaoMo-shimei,” he said, with every appearance of concern. “Walls are very hard.”

The table behind us stayed silent for a long time after that.

Kong Wen’s lecture was the next morning, in the Skylark Hall.

I hadn’t known the Skylark Hall existed. It turned out to be a long, high room at the back of the Hall of Magic Herbs, with tall shutters thrown open along one side to the morning, a low dais at one end and the whole floor covered in rows of rush cushions. Every cushion was taken. People were sitting on the floor between the rows and standing three deep along the back wall. The noise was like a market.

I stood in the doorway trying to work out where I was supposed to go.

“Xiao Shimei! Over here.”

Fang ChenYue was standing up in the front row, waving. Every head in the hall turned at his voice. Then every head turned the other way, to see who he was waving at, and found me.

The noise changed. It didn’t stop, but it dropped and sharpened. I heard my name go along the rows in a hiss, and with it, Lin Xiao, Lin Xiao, the canteen. I put my head down and walked the length of the hall to the front, between the cushions, and sat on the one he’d saved me with my back straight and my hands in my lap.

My seniors were all along the front row. Wu Yan, on the end, gave me a short nod, exactly as he had in the stone room. Zhao DaZhou looked at me sideways with an expression of polite suspicion, as if I were a pill he’d been told was good and hadn’t yet tasted. A tall young woman with a long, stern face and her hair in a severe knot, whom I guessed was NanGong Ying, looked me up and down once and then turned back to the dais.

Kong Wen came in. The room went silent.

He didn’t begin his lecture. He stood on the dais in his blue robe and his white jade pin, looked out over the hall with his small pale eyes, and said, in his dry, sour voice, “Before we begin. Since some of you have been asking. You XiaoMo is my seventh disciple, as of four days ago. That’s all.”

The room went off like a dropped pot.

“Seventh—”

“Kong-shifu took a green—”

“She was a probationer, she sat the—”

“It’s Lin Xiao. It must be. Who’d say no to—”

“Silence.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. The noise stopped as though he’d closed a lid on it.

Then he began to talk about the refining of mid-level pills, as if nothing at all had happened.

I tried to listen. For the first few minutes I could hear nothing but my own heartbeat and the weight of a hundred and fifty stares on the back of my neck. But Kong Wen was talking about how the third stage of blending went wrong more often than the first two together, and why. That was the kind of thing nobody wrote down in books. After a while I forgot the stares entirely.

At some point, turning a page of my notes, I glanced back along the rows.

Two rows behind me, a little to one side, sat Zhou and Ma, the neat green cousins from the south. Zhou was staring at the back of my head with his mouth slightly open, as though he’d been asked to solve a sum he couldn’t make come out. Ma wasn’t staring at me. He was staring at the floor in front of his cushion. The smirk he’d worn in the stone room, while my cauldron coughed and his didn’t, had gone sour on his face like milk left in the sun.

Three cushions along from them, He Fei caught my eye and beamed at me so widely that his freckles seemed to spread.

I turned back to the dais and didn’t let myself smile, though I wanted to badly.

The lecture went on for an hour. When it ended I didn’t notice, and Fang ChenYue had to say my name twice.

There was someone waiting outside my door when I got back.

He was a young man of perhaps twenty, in the black of the Warrior Division, standing with his back to the wall and his arms folded. He was handsome in a cold, clean-cut way, with a narrow face and straight black brows and an expression that suggested he’d been asked to stand there by someone he couldn’t refuse and was holding it against everyone else. When he saw me, he pushed himself off the wall.

“You XiaoMo?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Xie Yun. Lin Xiao’s shidi.” He didn’t bow. “He asked me to bring you a message. He’s been sent down the mountain on sect business. Five days, perhaps six. He says you’re not to worry.” His mouth thinned on the last word, as though it tasted sour. “And he says you’re to have his pills ready for every one of those days, so that he can collect them all at once when he comes back. He says you’re not to be lazy.”

I said nothing about the worrying. I didn’t trust myself to.

“Thank you for coming, Xie-shixiong,” I said. “I’ll have them ready.”

“Don’t thank me.” His eyes went over me with no warmth in them at all, from my lumpy forehead to my plain robe and back. “I didn’t come for you. I came because Da Shixiong asked.” He paused. “I don’t know what kind of arrangement you have with him. It’s not my business. But if you want my advice, you’ll keep away from him. Whatever he wants with you, it won’t do you any good.”

I looked at him. He looked back, stiff and cold and entirely sincere.

It was the first time since He Ping that anyone on this mountain had looked at me without wondering what I was getting out of Lin Xiao. Xie Yun wasn’t wondering. He’d decided I was a fool who was going to get hurt, and he’d come to tell me so, out of nothing but a kind of grim duty.

He was right, too, about almost all of it. I could have hugged him.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. “That’s good advice. I mean that.”

He blinked. Whatever he’d expected me to say, it wasn’t that. I watched him try to work out whether I was mocking him and fail to decide.

“Xie-shixiong,” I said, before he could go. “May I ask you something?”

He waited.

“Has he changed, lately?” I kept my voice light. “Lin-shixiong. I’ve only known him a few days, so I can’t tell. But people keep looking at him as though he has.”

Xie Yun was quiet for a moment. He looked past me, down the walkway, towards the far ridge where the warrior quarter was.

“He smiles now,” he said.

Then his eyes came back to my face, and stayed there, a beat longer than they should have.

“He never used to,” he said. “Not once, since he was twelve.” He said it flatly, like a fact in a ledger. But he didn’t take his eyes off me while he said it. I understood that he was adding a sum, and that I’d just given him one of the numbers.

“Thank you, Xie-shixiong,” I said.

He nodded once, curtly, and went away down the walkway without looking back. I stood at my door and watched until he’d gone round the corner, and wished, with all my heart, that I’d asked him a different question.

Then I went inside, bolted the door, and hardly came out again for four days.

I hadn’t meant it to be four. I’d meant to do a day’s work and go to the canteen in the evening, because the dinners were part of a contract and I kept my contracts. But Ling Xiao wasn’t there to eat dinner with, and by the middle of the first afternoon I realised that the dinners didn’t count without him. Thirty dinners together, I’d said; nobody had said thirty days. Every evening he was away added one to the end of the month.

I’d written a contract with no expiry date. I’d been in such a hurry to get the kisses off the table that I’d forgotten the most basic clause there was. I sat on my stool for a full minute with my head in my hands. Then I got up, went back to the cauldron and took it out on the herbs.

The first level of the Scripture got easier on the second day, and on the third day it got easy. By the fourth I could do it without thinking, like breathing, pressing on the walls of the vessel every time I drew, and resting, and pressing again. I’d been making ten good pills an hour. By the end I was making fifteen. I could feel the vessel was bigger. Not by much. By enough.

I made his pills first every morning, thirty and thirty and thirty and thirty, and bottled them in rows on my windowsill like a shop. Then I made pills for myself.

I tried, while I had the time, a level-one pill I’d only read about: the Breatharian Pill, which stopped hunger and thirst for a few days, the sort of thing a mage carried into a long seclusion so that she needn’t come out to eat. An ordinary one lasted five days. I distilled mine until I couldn’t distil them any more. I ate one on the second morning to test it and wasn’t hungry again until the fourth night. Half a month, perhaps, if I’d let it run. I made twenty and put them away. I didn’t like the idea of not eating; my stomach was used to three meals a day and a biscuit at four o’clock, in either world. But a pill that let you hide in a room for half a month without anyone wondering how you lived was worth twenty gold to the right buyer, and I knew a manager on North Street who’d want to see it.

And I made balm. Four pots of the new kind, essence stirred into fat, pale jade and so smooth it was almost wet; and two of the old, steeped kind, for comparison, because Madam Su wanted evidence and evidence needed a control. I put them all in the pocket, on the shelf beside my cabinet, where it was always the same cool temperature and nothing ever went off.

When I went to the Hall of Magic Herbs on the second day for more herbs, Zhao-shishu looked up from his ledger and smiled at me. Not his usual mild, distant expression. A real smile, warm and slightly conspiratorial, the kind you give a member of your own family across a crowded room. He gave me twelve hundred stalks without a word about quantity and asked after my health. I thought about his son, sitting on the front row in the Skylark Hall with his polite suspicion, and the family supper at which my name now came up as the little shimei, and I smiled back.

On the evening of the fourth day I sat on the edge of my bed with my log on my knee and did my accounts.

Day 22. End of seclusion.

Soul force: up. Est. +10–15% since Day 17. Scripture L1 now automatic. Speed: 10 → 15 good pills/hr. DON’T do 5 passes yet. (Promised.)

LX (away since Day 18): 5 × 30 bottled. Dinners: 2 of 30 done. Clock stops while he’s away. No end date. Idiot. Fix next contract.

Made: Breatharian ×20 (≈½ month each). Ordinary, misc. ×110 (own). Balm: essence ×4 pots, steeped ×2 (control). Need jars.

Money: ~167 g. Spring Pavilion half owed. Madam Su: trial ends ~Day 42.

Next He Ping: as soon as allowed. Sell: Breatharian (test price), AE (dark), balm to Su. Buy: jars, L1 seeds, barrels?

Xie Yun: “He smiles now.” Watching me. Careful.

Forehead: bump gone. “This body’s only an illusion.” ??

I looked at the last line for a long time. Then I closed the log and put it back under the lining paper in the drawer, beside the tadpoles.

On the fifth morning I unbolted my door and walked out into daylight.

It was dazzling. I stood on the walkway blinking like a mole come up out of a hole. Then I went down to the Hall of Magic Herbs with three bottles of pills for Zhao-shishu, my bag tied under my robe, and the sun on my face.

Fang ChenYue was just coming out as I went in. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me.

“Xiao Shimei,” he said. “Four days shut up in your room, and you come out looking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve been asleep in a garden for a week.” He laughed. “Pink-cheeked. Bright-eyed. Most people come out of a long seclusion looking like something the cat dragged in. You look as if you’ve been on holiday.”

I’d drunk a cup of lake water every morning and another every night, and bathed in the pocket twice. I’d forgotten that it showed. I rubbed the back of my head and laughed, rather stupidly, and muttered about good herbs and long sleeps. It wasn’t true and I hadn’t slept much. But Fang ChenYue was the kind of man who’d let you off a lie if he could see you didn’t want to tell the truth. He only smiled and shook his head.

“Well,” he said warmly, “whatever you’ve been doing, keep doing it. You look well. It suits you.”

“Thank you, Da Shixiong.”

“XiaoMo,” said a voice behind me. “You look as though you’ve been having a very pleasant time while I was away.”

I knew the voice before I turned round. I’d have known it in a crowd of a thousand.

It didn’t sound pleasant at all.