He was standing on the steps of the Hall of Magic Herbs, in white, with the dust of the road still on his boots. Behind him the morning was bright and busy. All round us, the steps had gone quiet.

“Lin-shixiong,” I said. “You’re back.”

“So I am.”

He looked at me. Then he looked past me, at Fang ChenYue, with no expression at all.

Fang ChenYue didn’t seem to notice there was anything to notice. He came forward with his easy smile and bowed, as one senior disciple bows to another. “Lin-shixiong. We’ve never been introduced, though of course I know you by reputation. Fang ChenYue.”

“Fang-shixiong.” Ling Xiao bowed back. When he straightened, the face he wore was the warmest I’d seen on him in public, open and earnest, a young man meeting a senior he’d long admired. “I’ve heard a great deal about you from XiaoMo-shimei. And from others, before her. A level-four mage at your age. Capital Peak is lucky.”

“You’re too kind. The whole sect knows who the Warrior Division’s first disciple is. I should be the one admiring you.”

“Not at all. A sword is a blunt thing beside a cauldron.”

“A cauldron’s nothing much without someone to guard the road it stands by.”

I stood between them with my two bottles in my hands and watched them do it. Neither would give an inch. Every compliment came back across the space between them a little larger than it had gone out, like a coin raised at an auction, until I began to wonder which of them would run out of nice things to say first. Fang ChenYue gave way first. He said he had a pot on the stand that wouldn’t mind itself, smiled at us both and went off down the path.

Ling Xiao watched him go. Then he turned his head and looked at me, a cold, flat look with nothing behind it. He made a small sound through his nose. He walked off down the steps without a word.

I stood there a moment longer, holding the bottles. Then I went after him.

He didn’t slow down. He went up the long path to the disciples’ quarter with his hands behind his back and his robe snapping at his heels. I had to half run to keep him in sight. When I reached my door, it stood open. He was inside, sitting in my only chair with his arms folded, looking at the wall.

I shut the door behind me.

“Ling Xiao.” I went round in front of him. His face was as dark as a storm cloud. “Did the sect business go badly?”

He made the sound through his nose again. “Is there anything I can’t do, when I put my mind to it?”

“Then what’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer. I looked at him, sitting there black-faced in my chair, and the answer came to me all at once: I was late with the pills. Of course. He’d been gone five days. The first thing he’d seen when he came back wasn’t his tribute but me standing in a doorway chatting.

“Here.” I put the bottles in his hands. “Five days. Thirty a day, distilled, all of them. Count them, if you like.”

“You XiaoMo.”

He said it quietly. I found I’d straightened up as if a teacher had called the roll. “Yes?”

His mouth twitched. For a moment I thought he’d laugh. Then he looked at the bottles in his hands, and whatever had been about to happen went out of his face. He looked up at me with a small, pleasant smile that I didn’t like at all.

“You seem very friendly with that Fang ChenYue,” he said. “Standing there grinning at him like a fool. Do you think you need the practice?”

I opened my mouth to say that I hadn’t been grinning, and that Fang ChenYue was my senior, and that it was polite to smile at your senior when he told you you looked well.

Then I shut it again.

He wasn’t looking at the bottles. He hadn’t opened them. He hadn’t even sniffed them, and this was a man who sniffed everything. He was holding them in his lap as though he’d forgotten what they were and looking at me, waiting, with that pleasant smile stuck on over the top of something else.

Oh, I thought.

It was so unlikely that I almost laughed. A thing that could walk through bolted doors and lift a girl by the throat with one hand was sitting in my chair, sulking because I’d smiled at another man. It was absurd. It was also, I realised, worth money. I didn’t know yet what currency it would pay out in, but I could feel the weight of it in my hand, like a coin I’d found in the lining of an old coat.

I didn’t say it. Saying it would have spent it.

“He’s my Da Shixiong now,” I said instead, mildly. “Kong-shifu announced me as his disciple at his lecture. The day you left. So Fang ChenYue’s the eldest of our line, and I’m the youngest.” I let a little warmth into my voice. “He’s been very kind. He saved me a cushion at the lecture, right in the front row. And he brings me tea.”

There was a very small pause.

“Tea,” said Ling Xiao.

“Good tea. From Kong-shifu’s own garden.”

A muscle moved in his jaw. That was all. I watched it the way I’d once watched a patient’s pulse in her throat. I learned exactly as much as I’d hoped to. I sat down on the edge of the bed, folded my hands and did my best to look like a girl who had no idea what she’d just done.

“Kong Wen,” he said, after a moment. His voice had gone smooth again. “The head of your peak. Fang ChenYue is his eldest; I know that much.” He set the bottles on the table beside him. “You shouldn’t get too close to them, little sister. Your talent’s nothing to look at. You’re green. If Kong Wen took you as his disciple, it’s because he wants something.”

“Of course he wants something,” I said.

He looked at me.

“He read Zhao-shishu’s ledger,” I said. “Ninety pills from ninety bundles, on my second day, and a pile more every day since. He wants my pills to go through his hall, and he wants the credit when I pass my exam. I want his name, his library and his herbs. It’s a fair trade.” I smoothed my robe over my knees. “Everyone who wants me has a motive, Ling Xiao. You eat thirty a day.”

For a moment he didn’t say anything. Then he laughed, short and surprised, as if it had been shaken out of him.

“Thirty a day,” he agreed. He picked up one of the bottles, unstopped it at last and sniffed. His eyes half closed. “And worth every one.”

“By the way, your shidi came,” I said. “Xie Yun. With your message.”

“He warned you off me.” It wasn’t a question.

“He did. Very sincerely.”

“He does that.” Ling Xiao tipped three pills into his palm and threw them back. “It’s good advice. Don’t take it.”

He stayed until the bottle was half empty, and that evening he took me to the canteen for the third dinner of thirty. He chose bitter melon fried with egg. I ate every piece and smiled at him across the table the whole time, sweetly, until he looked away first.

I’d meant to ask Wu Yan for a pass down the mountain that morning, before Ling Xiao came and took the morning over. I found him in the Hall that afternoon. Disciples were allowed down twice a month; I’d used one of mine on my first trip. The month would turn in a few days and take the other with it. Wu Yan heard me out with his short nod and wrote the pass without a single question. Being Kong Wen’s youngest had never saved me any trouble before. I enjoyed it.

When Ling Xiao came the next morning, I told him I was going to He Ping the day after.

I regretted it at once. He didn’t ask what for; he only smiled.

“What a coincidence,” he said. “So am I. We’ll go together.”

“You’ve only just come back.”

“That was sect business.” He sat down in my chair as if it were his. “Every month the Warrior Division sends its juniors out to be useful, and someone has to keep them from being killed in the first two days. As Da Shixiong I’m expected to go along and look after them. I wouldn’t have bothered, except that it would look strange if I didn’t.” He looked up at me pleasantly. “But perhaps you’d rather not go with me?”

There was something under the pleasantness. I knew by now not to step on it.

“No,” I said. “Not at all. You’re imagining things.”

“Good.” He poured himself tea from my pot. “We’ll eat at the Najia tomorrow night. Their duck is better than anything your canteen can do.”

“That won’t count.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“The canteen,” I said. “Thirty dinners together in the Capital Peak canteen. Those were the terms.”

“I don’t remember the word canteen.”

“I wrote it down.”

“In beetles.” He drank his tea. “I couldn’t read a word.”

“It still counts as written.”

He looked at me for a long moment over the rim of the cup, with an expression I couldn’t read. Then he laughed. “Then I’ll eat twice with you in the canteen the day after,” he said. “Breakfast and dinner.”

“That isn’t how—”

“I choose what you eat,” he reminded me gently, “and I choose when.”

I made a note to myself never again to sign anything with him that didn’t have its terms in the margin, in a hand we could both read. Which meant, I realised, that one of us was going to have to learn to write, and it wasn’t going to be him.

He asked, a little later, whether my Mage Division would send me out on training like his juniors. I told him not for a long while. I’d been in the sect less than a month. What I had to think about was the exam in five months, when every probationer had to refine a level-two pill or be sent home.

“I can refine,” I said. “I’m not worried about refining.” That was true. “But a level-two pill needs a level-two mage, and my soul force is what it is.” I didn’t say the rest of it: that if Kong Wen’s youngest disciple failed her probation, the whole of Capital Peak would laugh at him for picking her, and he’d take his name back, and his library with it.

Ling Xiao crossed one leg over the other. He did it the way he did everything, lazily, as if the chair had been made for him. “You’re underestimating the Scripture,” he said. “It isn’t one of those rough techniques the sects hand round. It’s a great deal older and a great deal better. Practise it properly and you’ll be level two long before your five months are out.”

“Truly?”

“I don’t lie about things that don’t matter.”

I looked at him. He’d already looked away, out of the window at the mist on the far peaks, and was drinking his tea as if he’d said nothing worth hearing.

I let the weight come off my chest a little. Not all of it. I’d been too long in a world where people told you kind things because it was easier than the truth. But he wasn’t a man who said kind things because they were easy. I wasn’t sure he said them at all.

That night, after he’d gone, I sat at my table with a brush, a saucer of ink and the backs of three old seed packets, and copied the character for canteen forty times, until it stopped looking like a beetle and started looking like a beetle that had been taught to stand up straight.

He came for me in the grey before dawn, as he’d said he would. He wasn’t alone.

Tang YunQi walked half a pace behind him in rose-pink silk, so beautiful in the half-light that it was almost an insult. Her hair was dressed high and pinned with pearls. Her face was a perfect oval, her eyes large and dark. When she saw who was waiting for them at the bottom of the Capital Peak path, every line of that lovely face set hard.

“Why is it you again?”

Behind her was a young man I knew. Broad, handsome, pink. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been getting up out of the dirt of the outpost square, beating at his robe and looking for whoever had tripped him. He looked at me now as if he’d like to peel the skin off me in strips and hang it up to dry.

“Tang-shimei and Chen-shidi have business in town,” Ling Xiao said, before I could ask. “The Grand Master asked me, as a personal favour, to take them with me and keep an eye on them.” The corner of his mouth went up as he said it. He sounded perfectly cheerful. I looked at that small upward curl and decided that whatever mood he was in, it wasn’t a good one.

I didn’t answer Tang YunQi. I gave her a polite, empty little smile and let her decide what it meant.

There were only four of us, so Ling Xiao chose one of the small birds at the outpost square, the kind that carried five. Tang YunQi looked at it the way a cat looks at a bath.

“That one? Da Shixiong, I’ve never sat on a little bird in my life. There’s hardly room on it to breathe.”

“You’re right,” Ling Xiao said at once.

Her face cleared.

“Four is too many for a bird that size,” he went on, warmly. “If one of us fell off on the way, I’d never forgive myself. You and Chen-shidi take the next one. You’ll have more room.” He turned to the broad young man. “Chen-shidi, I’m trusting you with my shimei. Look after her.”

“Da Shixiong—”

“There, it’s settled.”

It was settled. Tang YunQi stamped her foot, which made her pearls shiver, and still looked lovely while she did it. Chen GaoYang said, “Yes, Da Shixiong,” with a face like thunder and a pair of eyes delighted at the thought of riding alone with her. They were led away to the second bird.

I climbed up behind Ling Xiao and settled myself on the padded bench. As the bird got its feet under it, I looked back. Tang YunQi was sitting rigid on the other saddle, staring at the back of his head. Then I looked at him. He was gazing out over the fields with his face as mild as spring.

He hadn’t thought of it until she’d complained. I was sure of that. She’d handed him the idea herself.

I faced forward and let the ground fall away.

He Ping was as noisy as I remembered and smelled of the same frying oil, but this time I knew my way. At the outpost square, Tang YunQi announced that she and Chen GaoYang had an errand on East Street, at the big tea shop that put aside the Grand Master’s tea for him each month, and that we could all meet afterwards at the Najia.

“I’ve some things to buy on North Street,” I said quickly. “I’ll go on my own and meet you there.”

That suited Tang YunQi so well that she nearly smiled at me. It lasted until Ling Xiao said he’d come with me to North Street. Her face shut. She looked at him, then at me, then at him. He looked back at her pleasantly. She turned on her heel and went off towards East Street with her fists clenched at her sides. Chen GaoYang trotted after her, looking back at me over his shoulder until the crowd closed behind him.

The Spring Pavilion had been painted.

It was the first thing I noticed. The sign was the same, but the green was fresh and the step had been scrubbed white. There was a new lacquered screen inside the door. The young assistant who’d brought me tea the first time saw me through the window and ran into the back shouting, “Master! She’s here! The young lady from the master!” A stool went over somewhere. The manager came out through the screen at a speed I wouldn’t have believed of a man past sixty.

“Miss! Miss. At last.” He seized my hands. “I’ve been watching that door for ten days. The pills your master sent went in two days. Two days! I’ve had men coming in from three towns asking for more.” He remembered himself, let go of my hands and lowered his voice, though there was nobody in the shop but us. “And nobody has heard a word from me about where they came from. Not a word.” His eye fell on Ling Xiao, who had come in behind me. He stopped. “And this gentleman…?”

He was looking at Ling Xiao’s white robe, and at the jade at his waist, and at the way he’d already sat down in the best chair in the shop without being asked.

“My master’s bodyguard,” I said.

Ling Xiao didn’t even look up. He took the cup of tea the assistant brought him and blew across it. The manager looked at him for one moment longer, decided he didn’t want to know, and turned back to me with his hands clasped.

I took out what I’d brought. Sixty distilled Accumulate Energy Pills, pale blue, made in the two days since my seclusion. A hundred ordinary pills of half a dozen kinds. And a little bottle of ten Breatharian Pills, set apart from the others.

He went through the distilled ones first, as he had before, rolling one in his palm and holding it up to the window. Then he named a price: eighteen gold a pill. Half as much again as last time, because that was what they were fetching on the street.

It was a fair price. It was also the price of a man who’d just painted his shop.

“Fresh paint,” I said. “A new screen. The step scrubbed white.” I looked round at it all, slowly, so that he could watch me do it. “Men from three towns, you said. My master’s pills have been good to the Spring Pavilion.”

The manager’s smile stayed exactly where it was. His eyes didn’t.

“And men from three towns,” I went on, “have pill shops in three towns of their own. Any one of them would be glad of first offer on half of everything my master makes.”

In the best chair, Ling Xiao set his cup down on its saucer with a small, clear click. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. A bodyguard in white silk who looks bored is a persuasive thing.

“Twenty,” said the manager, after a moment, with the air of a man having a tooth drawn. “Twenty a pill, and the same terms. And you’ll tell your master I said so.”

“I’ll tell him you were generous,” I said.

The Breatharian Pills he tasted, a sliver off the side of one with a little knife, and then sat holding the rest of it on his tongue with his eyes shut. When he opened them, he looked at me with naked greed. I knew that look. I’d worn it myself.

“How long?” he said.

“Half a month, near enough. My master tested them.”

“Half a month.” He breathed out. “Do you know who buys these? Men going into seclusion. Men going into the northern mountains, where you can’t light a fire. Twenty-five gold a pill, and I’ll take every one he ever makes.”

“Thirty,” I said.

“Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-eight, and I’ll tell him you were the first to ask.”

He laughed and held out his hand, palm up, and I put mine in it.

When the gold had been counted out onto the table and swept into my bag, it came to fifteen hundred and eighty. With what I had left from last time, I had more than seventeen hundred gold in my magic bag. I tried to make the number feel real and couldn’t. Here, a family could have lived on it for sixty years. That was more than most disciples on the mountain would see in five years, and I’d made it in three days at a cauldron.

The manager walked us to the door. He bowed me out. Then he bowed to Ling Xiao, a little uncertainly, as you might bow to a large dog you’d been told was friendly.

Ling Xiao stopped on the step.

“Her master will be pleased,” he said to the manager, in a voice like warm oil. “He hopes you’ll keep to the same terms. He’ll be sending her down again soon.”

The manager bowed lower. I walked away down North Street with my face burning. Ling Xiao fell in beside me with his hands behind his back.

“That was my lie,” I said, under my breath.

“And now it’s ours.” He sounded enormously pleased with himself. “A master needs a bodyguard. A bodyguard needs to know his master’s mind.”

“Where to now?” he asked, when we reached the end of the street.

I stopped. This was the part I’d been dreading.

“Lin-shixiong,” I said, “you have your own business in town. Don’t let me keep you from it.”

“There’s nothing to keep me from. It’s early yet.”

“I wouldn’t want to waste your time.”

“You aren’t.” He smiled down at me. “Where to?”

I looked at the sky. I looked at the cobbles. I looked at a man selling grilled sparrows on sticks at the corner. He was no help either. I had more than seventeen hundred gold in my bag and a pocket full of land that grew a week’s worth of herbs in a night, and I meant to buy seeds. A great many seeds. No new level-one mage had any reason to buy seeds by the thousand. The man beside me was clever enough to see that.

I could buy a few packets and come back next month. I thought about the money that would cost me: a month of herbs not grown, a month of pills not made, a month of gold not earned. I thought about it all the way to the corner.

Then I turned south.

The Orchid Pavilion was where I’d left it. The same polished young attendant was standing inside the door with the same fixed smile. When he saw me, his eyes went straight past me to Ling Xiao, to the white robe and the jade, and his smile grew a little warmer and a good deal more sincere. He bowed us both in. He brought out the new stock without being asked, sacks of it, fresh in from the south a few days before: level one, two and three, every seed fat and glossy.

I took a deep breath.

“All sixty-four kinds of level three,” I said. “A thousand of each. And the level twos, all eighty kinds. Two thousand of each.”

The attendant didn’t blink. He’d been trained not to. But he looked at Ling Xiao before he wrote it down, as though checking that the rich young lord didn’t object to his little companion spending his money. Ling Xiao was looking at a display of lacquered seed boxes on the wall, with every sign of interest.

It came to eight hundred and thirty-two gold. The attendant threw in a full set of level-one seeds, five hundred of each, and bowed me out as if I were royalty. When I stood in the street again with all of it in my bag, my money had shrunk by nearly half.

I waited.

Ling Xiao walked beside me with his hands behind his back and said nothing about seeds at all.

He didn’t ask why a mage with no garden needed more than two hundred thousand seeds. He didn’t ask where I meant to plant them. He commented on the sparrows on their sticks, and on the price of a jade comb in a window, and on the sky, which looked like rain later. He was easy and pleasant and entirely incurious. With every step I liked it less.

A question I could have answered. I’d had a story ready for days: I was learning to judge seed quality for Kong-shifu, I was building a stock for the day I had my own land, I meant to sell them on. A question would have told me what he knew. The silence told me nothing, except that he didn’t need to ask.

“Shall we go and see what Tang-shimei is up to,” I said brightly, “or wait for them at the rest house?”

He turned his head and looked at me. He went on looking, long enough for the back of my neck to prickle. Then he said, “The rest house. I brought them; if anything happens to them, the Grand Master will want an explanation.” He didn’t sound as if the prospect troubled him much.

We had just turned towards West Street when the noise started behind us. A crowd came pouring past, not running from anything but towards it, with the bright, hungry faces of people who’ve heard there’s a fight. They went streaming off east. Two stallholders at the corner were watching them go.

“East Street,” one said. “Again. It was West Street last time.”

“Same lot?”

“Must be. Who else would dare, this close to the sect? Somebody big is behind them. Nobody touches them.”

“My wife won’t let our girls out of the house.”

“Your girls?” The other one laughed. “I don’t think your girls are what they’re after.”

I stopped walking.

Tang YunQi was on East Street. She was the most beautiful girl in the sect, she was dressed in rose-pink silk and pearls, and she thought her father’s name was a wall around her. With anyone else I might have thought they’d keep their head down. With her, if trouble was there, she’d walk up to it and slap it.

It wasn’t my problem. I told myself so clearly. But if the Grand Master’s daughter came home hurt from a trip with Lin Xiao, it would land on Lin Xiao, and some of it would land on whoever had been walking around North Street with him instead.

“Lin-shixiong,” I said. “I think we should go to East Street first.”

He didn’t look pleased. He looked like a man asked to fetch a parcel he hadn’t ordered. But he looked east, and he must have weighed the same thing I had, because he took me by the back of my collar, as you’d pick up a kitten, and stepped sideways into the angle between two walls.

The world folded. There was no other word for it. The light went thin and bent, and my stomach went one way while the rest of me went another. When it all came back, we were standing in an alley mouth on East Street. I was clinging to his sleeve and trying not to be sick.

Walks through corners, I thought, while my head swam. I added it to the list.

Then a scream went through the street, high and shrill and furious, and I knew whose it was.

The crowd had made a ring in the middle of the road. Through the gaps between bodies I saw a broken stall, a scatter of tea leaves in the dust and Chen GaoYang lying on the ground beyond it, propped on his elbows. His legs were bent wrong under him. Then the crowd shifted, and I saw Tang YunQi.

The rose silk had been torn half off her. One whole side of the skirt was gone. The bodice had been ripped open at the front, and she was holding it together with both arms crossed over her chest, her face scarlet, her pearls hanging loose down one cheek. She was shaking. Not from fear, I thought. From rage.

In front of her stood a huge man. He had a heavy black beard and a chest like a barrel. His arms were bare to the shoulder, and he was licking his lips.

“Animal,” Tang YunQi spat at him. “When my father hears of this, he’ll have you cut into so many pieces they’ll need a sieve to find you.”

The bearded man laughed. “When your father hears of it, little flower, you’ll be mine. Be sweet, and maybe I’ll be gentle.”

“Our Da Shixiong is in this town,” Chen GaoYang shouted from the ground. “Touch her again and he’ll—”

“Your Da Shixiong?” The bearded man didn’t bother to look round. “Let him come. When I’ve finished with him—”

“Yes?” said Ling Xiao. “When you’ve finished with him, what?”

The ring of people opened for him without being asked. He walked into the middle of it in his white robe, unhurried, the green jade swinging at his waist. He looked like a young lord on his way to a poetry party who had taken a wrong turning. I stayed where I was, at the edge of the crowd. I wasn’t a fool. Anyone who could break a man’s legs like that could break mine.

“Da Shixiong!” Tang YunQi ran to him. She let go of her bodice to clutch at his arm and had to grab it again, and her eyes filled with tears that made her even lovelier. “Da Shixiong, look what he’s done to me! Avenge me!”

Ling Xiao glanced down at her. Then he frowned slightly, as if at a stain on his sleeve, and looked back at the bearded man.

My first thought was that it served her right.

I didn’t like the thought, but I had it. She’d have stood and watched while any of her admirers knocked me into the dirt. She’d have laughed. She had her Da Shixiong now, and her father’s name; she was in no danger at all any more. She wasn’t my problem.

Then I looked at the crowd.

The women at the front had their hands over their mouths, and a few of them were smiling behind their hands. The men weren’t smiling. They were staring. Every man in that ring of faces had his eyes on her, on the long bare leg and the torn silk and her arms crossed over herself, and none of them looked away. One old man near me had his mouth a little open. A boy no older than fifteen was craning on tiptoe to see past the shoulder in front of him.

I knew those faces. Not these men, but those faces. I’d seen them on a late train home from a placement, on the man three seats down who’d watched me all the way from one station to the next and smiled when I looked up. It had been nothing. He hadn’t touched me. I’d still got off two stops early and walked the rest of the way in the dark, rather than sit there one minute longer being looked at like that.

My hand was in my bag before I’d decided anything. My spare robe was folded at the top, plain blue, darned at one elbow. I pulled it out, pushed through the front of the crowd and threw it round her shoulders.

She went rigid. She looked down at the blue cloth, and then up at me, and I saw her face change as she understood who it had come from. Her eyes narrowed until they were almost shut.

She shrugged it off. It slid down her back and fell in the dust. Without taking her eyes off me, she put her hand into her own magic bag and drew out a robe of pale yellow silk, finer than anything I owned. She put it on and tied the sash with a jerk.

I looked at my robe lying in the road.

She’d had one in her bag the whole time. She’d stood there in rags in front of half of He Ping, screaming, with a silk robe in her bag. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to.

I bent down, picked my robe up and shook the dust out of it.

“Suit yourself,” I said. I folded it, put it away and went back to the edge of the crowd where I belonged. My face was hot. I was angry, and not with her. That was the last thing I’d ever give that woman for free.

The bearded man had been looking Ling Xiao up and down all this while. Whatever he’d expected the famous Da Shixiong to be, it wasn’t this slim, pale young man in white with a jade pendant. He laughed.

“So this is the great Da Shixiong? A pretty boy in a pretty robe. Go home, little boy. Leave the girl and go home, and maybe you’ll still be able to walk there.”

“I’ll go,” said Ling Xiao, “in a moment. First, may I ask your name?”

“Da Shixiong!” Tang YunQi stared at him, appalled.

The bearded man grinned, satisfied. “Luo Shan,” he said, swelling. “Cousin to Luo ShuHe of the Qing Cheng Sect. You’ll have heard of him.”

A murmur went round the crowd. Even I’d heard of Luo ShuHe. Every girl in the probationers’ quarters had heard of Luo ShuHe: the Qing Cheng Sect’s prodigy, the one they said was Lin Xiao’s only equal under heaven. And everyone knew that Qing Cheng had lately found a high-level mage who could refine level-nine pills, which put them at the same table as the Tian Xin Sect for the first time in a generation. A cousin of Luo ShuHe could do as he pleased in a market town, as long as nobody wanted a war.

“I’m the Grand Master’s daughter!” Tang YunQi cried. “Tang YunQi of the Tian Xin Sect! Do you think Qing Cheng will protect you from my father?”

The crowd drew in its breath. The Grand Master’s daughter and Luo ShuHe’s cousin, face to face in the street over a torn dress: it would be all over the continent by the end of the month. As she said it, a darkness flickered across Luo Shan’s eyes, there and gone too fast to be sure of.

“Luo Shan,” said Ling Xiao. He hadn’t raised his voice. It went through the noise like a cold draught under a door. “When you speak and act, do you speak and act for the Qing Cheng Sect?”

Luo Shan lifted his chin. “I am Qing Cheng. Of course I do.”

“Good,” said Ling Xiao, and smiled. “Good.”

He moved his sleeve.

That was all I saw. He moved his sleeve, as a man brushes off a fly, and Luo Shan was lifted off his feet and thrown backwards five yards across the street, like a sack flung off a cart. He hit the front of a shop and went down in a shower of splintered shutters. The noise he made wasn’t a man’s noise at all.

He got up.

His eyes were gone. Where they had been there were two holes of flat, perfect black, without white or iris, and when I looked into them, my thoughts went slow and thick, like honey in the cold.

“Demon!”

I didn’t know who screamed it first. It didn’t matter. The whole crowd screamed it after, and turned, and ran.

I’d been standing at the edge. When Tang YunQi had run to Ling Xiao, she’d pushed me aside with her elbow without looking, and I’d let her and stepped back. Now there was a wall of people between me and him. The wall was moving. Someone’s shoulder hit me in the chest. Someone else’s elbow. I was carried back three steps, four, five, my feet barely touching the ground. I grabbed at a sleeve and lost it. A heel came down on my foot. Then a man stumbled into me from the side, and my legs went out from under me, and I was on the ground in the dust with the crowd going over me.

I curled up and put my arms over my head. Something stepped on my shoulder. Something stepped on my hip. Then a foot came down on my right shin with the whole weight of a running man behind it.

I heard the bone go.

It was a small, dry sound, like a green stick snapping underfoot. The pain came half a breath later, white and enormous, and filled me up from the shin to the top of my skull. I didn’t scream. I didn’t have the breath for it. My eyes ran on their own.

Then a hand closed round my wrist and pulled.

I came up off the ground as if I weighed nothing and landed against something warm and solid, my face pressed into white silk that smelled of cold air. An arm came round my back and held me there while the crowd went past us on either side, like a river round a rock.

“Idiot,” said Ling Xiao above my head. “Who falls over standing still? How have you lived this long?”

I wanted to tell him exactly how I’d lived this long and what I thought of his question. I didn’t, because my leg was broken and he was holding me up. I clutched a fistful of his robe and shut my mouth on all of it.

Over his shoulder, I saw what Luo Shan had become.

He was taller by half a yard. His skin had gone the grey-black of old ash. His muscles had swollen until his clothes split open along the seams. His fingernails were black and as long as my hand. His eyes were still holes, but in the middle of each hole there was now a single point of red, small and bright as a coal.

He was walking towards us.

“What is that?” I said into Ling Xiao’s robe. I’d read about demons. Two lines in the back of a geography book: that they lived in the northern mountains, that they drank the life out of practitioners and left them as husks, that no sect would treat with them. I hadn’t really believed it. “Lin-shixiong. What is that?”

“A demon.” He turned, so that I was on his far side and he was between me and it. He didn’t let go of me. “Wearing a man.”

I felt his chest move as he said it, as if he’d found it funny.

Luo Shan stopped three paces away. Up close, I could smell him. Rot and something sweet under it, like meat left out in the sun.

“Who are you?” he said. His voice had gone deep and grinding. “What are you, that you can see what I am?”

“With that stink on you?” Ling Xiao sounded almost bored. “I didn’t need to see anything.” He tilted his head. “You told the whole street you speak for Qing Cheng. If Qing Cheng’s Grand Master has a demon for a nephew, I wonder what the rest of his family is.”

Luo Shan didn’t answer. He bared his teeth. Then he crouched and sprang straight up onto the roof of the nearest shop, as lightly as a cat onto a wall, and stood there against the sky with his arms flung wide.

“This continent will be ours,” he shouted down at the empty street. “Sooner than you think. And you’ll all be our cattle.”

He turned and ran across the roofs to the north. He went so fast that he seemed to pull a dark smear of air along with him, and in the space of two breaths he was a speck at the edge of the town.

Ling Xiao watched him go. Then he held out his free hand, and there was a sword in it.

It wasn’t there, and then it was. Short and plain, the colour of old copper, no hilt to speak of. He raised the blade to his mouth and breathed on it, once, softly, as you’d breathe on a window to write your name. Then he opened his hand.

The sword went. I didn’t see it go. One moment it lay across his palm, and the next there was a faint sound, like a silk thread snapped, and his palm was empty.

I looked at his empty hand, and then at the place on the horizon where the speck had been. There was nothing there now.

Swords that come out of nothing, I thought. Breathes on them. Throws them across a town without moving his arm. The list was getting long.

East Street had emptied as if someone had pulled a plug. Stalls stood abandoned with their awnings flapping. A cart lay overturned at the far end where nobody had come back for it. Somewhere a dog was barking, and somewhere further off a woman was calling a child’s name over and over.

Tang YunQi came picking her way back across the road in her yellow silk, white to the lips now that it was over. Chen GaoYang lay where he’d fallen and swore steadily at the sky.

“Da Shixiong,” she said. “We have to go home. Now. Father has to know.”

“He does,” Ling Xiao agreed. “Take the next bird and tell him. Chen-shidi can’t ride with his legs like that; I’ll have him carried to the Najia and see to him.” He paused. “XiaoMo-shimei’s hurt too. We’ll follow when they can travel.”

She looked at me, standing on one leg with my arm round his waist and his arm round mine. I watched her decide whether to argue. She’d seen what he could do. She went.

He stooped then, without asking, and picked me up.

One arm went under my knees and one round my back, and I was off the ground before I could object. My broken leg swung and jarred, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted salt.

“Hold still,” he said.

“I am holding still.”

“Then hold stiller.”

He walked. Two men from a shop that had kept its shutters half up came out, at a word from him, to carry Chen GaoYang on a door. Ling Xiao didn’t wait for them. He carried me down East Street through the wreckage of the stalls, past scattered tea leaves and a trampled hat, round the overturned cart, into the empty lanes towards West Street. His steps were long and even. He didn’t seem to feel my weight at all. I lay against his chest with my leg on fire and listened to his heart, which was beating slow and steady, as if nothing whatever had happened.

In my bag, wrapped in a cloth beside my spare robe, was a stoppered cup of lake water. Half of it on that shin and the bone would knit by morning. All of it, and I’d be walking by tonight.

I couldn’t touch it. Not with him there. Not when he’d just watched me buy two hundred thousand seeds and hadn’t asked a single question.

I lay still in his arms and went over everything instead. The corner he’d stepped into on one street and out of on another. The sword that came from nowhere and went where he sent it. That stink on you. A demon, he’d said, wearing a man; and he’d laughed. A demon twice his size had stood three paces from him and been afraid.

My leg throbbed with every step. I turned my face a little, so that I could see his.

He was looking down at me.

He wasn’t smiling. He was looking at me quietly, steadily, with his head a little to one side, as a man looks at a lock he means to open: in no hurry at all, because he already knew it would.