The bonesetter at the Najia was a small, bald, cheerful man who smelled of camphor. He felt along my shin with two fingers, told me the break was clean and that I was lucky, and set it with one quick pull that made me see white. Then he bound it between two lengths of bamboo, wrapped the whole thing in linen as tight as a drum and told me not to put weight on it for six weeks.

Six weeks. I lay on the bed in Ling Xiao’s room with my leg propped on a bolster, watching the lamplight on the ceiling, and did the sum. Forty-two days of being carried. Forty-two days of not walking down to the Hall of Magic Herbs, of not walking anywhere, while a cup of lake water sat in my bag and could have had me dancing by morning.

The door opened. I didn’t need to look. Nobody else on this continent came into a room as though it had been waiting for him.

“How is Chen-shidi?” I said, pouring him tea from the pot on the stand beside the bed. It gave my hands a job.

Ling Xiao took the cup and raised an eyebrow at me over it. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t. I’m being polite.”

“Both legs. He’ll live. He’ll be insufferable about it.” He sat down in the chair by the bed and stretched out his legs. “Ask me something you care about.”

“Luo Shan.”

“Dead.”

I stared at him. “It’s been an hour.”

“I don’t send a sword out to come back hungry.” He drank his tea, unhurried. “It found him somewhere north of the river. He won’t be making anyone his cattle.”

I believed him. I found I didn’t even want to argue with it. I lay back against the bolster and listened to the sounds of the rest house below: a door, a voice, a tray set down. My shin throbbed in time with my pulse.

Ling Xiao set his cup on the stand. Then he reached past me, without any hurry at all, and put a second thing down beside it.

It was a stoppered cup, wrapped in a twist of cloth. My cup. From my bag.

I hadn’t felt him take it. I hadn’t felt anything. My bag was still tied under my robe, exactly where it had been all day, and the knot hadn’t been touched.

“Pour it on your leg,” said Ling Xiao pleasantly. “Or shall I?”

I looked at the cup. I didn’t look at him.

Lie, said a voice in my head, quick and frightened: a tonic, a cordial from home, water from the boiling house. I had a dozen lies ready, and they were all no use. He hadn’t asked me what it was. He’d told me what to do with it. You don’t tell someone to pour a cordial on a broken shin.

I thought about Madam Su, in her plum gown with the sleeves pinned back, saying Nobody asks. I thought about the Spring Pavilion manager at his door, giving away more than he meant to because he wanted the pills so badly. A secret was only worth what someone would pay to keep it, or to learn it. This one had stopped being worth anything to keep the moment he’d put that cup on the table. Its price was what he’d pay to hear it.

So I would sell it to him. Before he could take it for nothing.

“What will you give me,” I said, “to tell you?”

He laughed. I’d known he would. But he didn’t say your life, which was what I’d been braced for. That was worth noting.

“You think it’s a secret?” he said. “Little sister. A probationer with a green soul and no training refines over a hundred pills a day, every day, and never cracks one. She shuts herself up for four days and burns through twelve hundred stalks. Then she walks out into the sun looking like that.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Do you know how mages of your level look after four days alone with a cauldron? Grey. Hollow-eyed. Like something left too long in a cellar. I’ve seen your seniors come out of a three-day stint unable to hold a cup. Which mage your level comes out of seclusion glowing?”

He put out his hand and touched my cheek.

He did it slowly, with the backs of two fingers, from my cheekbone down to my jaw. It was the gesture of a merchant testing silk. His fingers were cool. I felt them go all the way down, and my face, which had been warm already, went hot.

“Too rosy,” he said softly. “Far too rosy for a girl who doesn’t sleep.”

He sat back. My cheek kept the cool line where his fingers had been.

And then, while he watched me and I didn’t move, I saw it.

It came all at once, like a word you’ve misspelt a hundred times and suddenly see. The girl in the mirror on my first morning, with her lips so pale that I’d checked her nail beds before anything else. My lips weren’t pale now. I hadn’t looked at them properly in weeks, but I knew it: they’d been pink in the basin water this morning, and I hadn’t thought anything of it. My nail beds flushed the instant I pressed them. There had been a pale nick at the corner of my jaw, the original’s, an old childhood mark; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt it under my fingers when I washed. My hair, which had been dull and dry and snapped in the comb, had been sliding through the teeth like water for days. And I hadn’t been tired. Not once since I’d first gone into the lake. I’d worked from before dawn until after dark, refined until my soul force ran dry, and drunk a cup of water and got up again, and I’d never once woken heavy.

I’d logged the soul force. I’d logged wounds, doses, recovery times, growth rates, every bed and every seed. I hadn’t logged myself. I’d been so busy measuring what the water did to the herbs that I’d never noticed what it was doing to the body drinking it.

A first-year would have caught it. Any of my old lecturers would have marked me down. Observed effects on the subject, Miss You? None, sir. The subject didn’t think to look at herself.

I was so angry I almost forgot to be frightened.

Then the anger went out of me as fast as it had come, because behind it came a second thought, and the second thought was money.

Madam Su had wanted more evidence than one bruise. I’d been planning to give her a balm that was remarkably good: a bruise gone in three days instead of seven, a scar a little paler at the end of a month. A good product. An honest one. But this wasn’t remarkably good. This was visible. A man who had never once looked at my face with anything but amusement had looked at it after four days and seen that it was wrong. Wrong in the right direction.

Dilute it, I thought. One part in fifty, in the premium line. One in twenty for a few rich women who never asked questions. Not enough to work miracles. Enough that a husband looked twice at his wife across the dinner table and couldn’t say why.

“How noticeable is it?” I said.

Ling Xiao blinked.

“To a man who isn’t looking for it,” I said. “Not you. An ordinary man. Would he see it across a room? Or only up close?”

For a long moment he only looked at me. Then he began to laugh, and this time he didn’t stop for a while. He laughed until he had to put his hand over his eyes.

“You’ve broken your leg,” he said at last, “and been caught out by the one person you were most afraid of. And you’re thinking about customers.”

“You haven’t answered.”

“Across a room,” he said, still smiling, “if he’s a man with eyes. Up close, if he’s a fool.” He took his hand from his eyes. “Now. You were telling me what you wanted.”

I had my terms ready by then. I’d been making them while he laughed.

“You already know most of it,” I said. “You’ve guessed. I can show you the rest, all of it, and answer every question you ask about it. In return, you protect it. You protect me. You don’t tell a soul. Not Tang Fan, not Zhou Peng, not anybody. If anyone comes looking, you’re in their way. That’s the deal.”

“And I get?”

“Pills. The thirty a day go on as before. But from now on they’re made from what I grow, not what I’m given in the Hall.” I held his eyes. “You’ve eaten my pills from the sect’s herbs. You’ve never eaten the other kind.”

His nostrils flared, just slightly. I’d known they would.

“How long?” he said.

“Until my probation exam. Five months from now. Then we sit down again and see if we both still want it.”

He tilted his head. “Five months.”

“A debt you can’t pay off is a leash,” I said. “A contract you can’t get out of is a cage. I don’t sign either.”

“You signed thirty dinners without an end.”

“I was in a hurry.” I lifted my chin. “This time I’m not. And this time it’s written down, in a hand we can both read.”

He looked at me for a long moment with that expression I still couldn’t name. Then he got up, went to the door and called down the stairs for paper and ink.

They came. He brought them to the bed and set the inkstone on the stand beside the two cups. I wrote it out first, sitting up against the bolster with the board across my knees, in my beetles, which one night’s practice had taught to stand a little straighter, in the plainest words I knew. Then I turned the board round, held out the brush and said, “Now you.”

He took the brush. He copied it out underneath, line by line, in his drowned black tadpoles, faster than I’d have believed of a man who hadn’t written in a long time. When he’d finished, he read his copy aloud to me, word for word. It matched mine.

At least, it matched what he read out. I looked at the tadpoles for a moment. I couldn’t read a single one of them.

He was watching me do it, with his chin on his hand.

I let it go. I had my own copy, in my own hand, and a promise said aloud. It was more than I’d had that morning, and much more than I’d had in a room at the Najia on the night we met, with his hand round my throat. I signed. He signed. He folded his copy into his robe beside, I supposed, my invoice. I folded mine into my log.

Protection and secrecy, for pills of the pocket’s own growing, said mine, in the end. Thirty a day as before. Until the probation exam. Then renegotiate. And, in the margin, in smaller beetles, because I’d learned: The pocket is mine. Entry by invitation only.

He’d raised an eyebrow at that one. He hadn’t argued.

“Well?” he said. “I’ve paid. Show me.”

I picked up the stoppered cup and held it out to him. “It comes from a lake. This is the water from it. A cup brings my soul force back from nothing in the time it takes to boil a kettle. It heals cuts while you watch. And it grows things.” I took a breath. “A week’s growth in a night. More, if you water them neat.”

He unstopped the cup and put his nose to it. For a while he didn’t say anything. His face didn’t change, but his eyes half closed, the way they did over a good pill, and stayed closed a moment longer than they had for any pill of mine.

“Where’s the lake?” he said.

I put my hand flat to my chest.

He looked at my hand. Then he looked at my face.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

I’d known it was coming. He’d expected me, I suspected, to clutch my collar, or blush, or tell him to turn round. He’d have enjoyed any of those. I could see him waiting for them.

Instead I put the board aside and untied my sash.

I’d stood at a dispensary counter for a year with my placement badge on, while strangers showed me rashes and ulcers and things they hadn’t shown their own husbands. I knew how it was done. You made it ordinary. You looked at the problem and not at the person, and you kept your voice level, and the person felt safe enough to let you look. I used my own voice now: level, a little bored. I opened my robe at the front and folded it back, and folded back the under-robe beneath it, down to just below my breastbone, and held them there.

The teardrop sat in the hollow between my breasts, the size of my thumbnail, bright blue against skin that I saw now, under the lamp, had gone fine and pale and even. It glowed a little, faintly, as it always did when I paid attention to it.

“There,” I said. “That’s the door. I used to have to touch it. Now I only have to want to.”

He looked.

He looked at the teardrop, as I’d meant him to. He studied it for a long time, with his head bent and his face absorbed, as he’d once studied my pills by the light of a rest-house lamp. Then his eyes moved. Not far. Only a little way, to one side of the blue mark, along the curve of skin it sat against, and stayed there.

I didn’t move. I didn’t pull my robe closed. I kept my hands exactly where they were and my breathing exactly as it was, and I watched him look.

He looked away first.

He did it abruptly, turning his head towards the lamp as though the flame had caught his attention. There was nothing there. A muscle moved in his jaw, the same muscle I’d watched the day before, when I said tea. He reached for his cup and found it was empty and put it down again.

I let the moment sit for one breath longer than it needed to. I enjoyed every bit of it.

Then I folded my robe closed and retied the sash.

“That was a viewing,” I said. “Viewings are extra. I’ll put it on your account.”

He turned his head back and looked at me. Whatever he’d been about to say, he didn’t say it. He laughed instead, low and a little unsteady, and shook his head.

“Little sister,” he said. “You are going to cost me a great deal.”

“Yes,” I said. “Give me your hand.”

I took him into the pocket.

I’d never taken anyone before. I hadn’t been sure I could. But when I held his wrist and wanted, the room tipped and the lamplight went out like a breath, and then there was the sunless light and the silence and the soft give of grass under me. I was sitting on the shore with my splinted leg stuck out in front of me. Ling Xiao was standing beside me, looking round.

I watched his face. I wanted to see it change. I’d stood in this place on my first night, naked and shaking, and thought I was mad. I wanted him to feel the floor drop out from under him the way it had under me.

It didn’t. He looked at the still lake with its faint jade tint, the unmoving clouds, the blurred edges where the world ran out. He looked at the beds by the water, waist-high now, every one of them smoking white. He looked at my cabinet with its eighty little drawers, my chests, my rakes leaning together, the stool where I sat to sort seed. His face was interested, attentive, entirely calm. It was the face of a man being shown round a neighbour’s garden.

“What?” he said, catching me at it.

“Nothing.”

He smiled, a warm, slow smile I trusted even less than his sulking. Then he walked over to my stool, sat down on it as though it had been made for him, arranged his robe over his knees and said, “Well? Tell it from the beginning.”

I told him. Not everything; I’d never meant to tell him everything. I told him about the bath in my first week on the mountain, and the blue mark that had come up on my skin, and falling into the lake. I told him about the splinter that healed while I watched, about the three beds and the doses, about the seeds that came up in minutes. I told him how much water I drank and how much I diluted and how much went on the herbs. Facts, measured and in order, as I’d have handed over a patient at the end of a shift. He listened without interrupting.

“The mark,” he said, when I’d finished. “It came up in the bath. Not before? You’d have seen it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t look before.”

That was true. It was also the edge of a thing I wasn’t going to give him. I didn’t know whether the mark had been on the original You XiaoMo’s skin when she died crying in that bed, or whether it had come with me, from wherever I’d come from. Either answer led to a question I’d never answer for anyone.

He watched me say it. I kept my face as still as I could, and I didn’t think it was still enough. But after a moment he let it go, and looked away over the lake.

“Rules,” he said.

“What rules?”

“Mine. Since you’ve made me your bodyguard.” He held up a finger. “Nobody sees that mark. Nobody. Not a bath attendant, not a healer, not a friend. If you’re bleeding to death, you bleed to death with your robe done up.” A second finger. “Take herbs out of here a few at a time. Never a field at once. Somebody in that Hall keeps count of every stalk, and some day somebody else will think to check it against what you hand in.” A third. “You refine too fast. A girl with your soul doesn’t make a hundred pills a day. Make them if you like, but hold them back. Hand them in a day late, two days late. Let people think you’re slow.”

They were good rules. I knew it. I’d been breaking every one of them for weeks out of sheer greed, and he’d seen me do it.

“And the water,” I said. “May I still drink it?”

“Drink what you like. Nobody can see inside you.” He glanced at my splints. “But not on that.”

“It’s a clean break,” I said. “Half a cup would knit it overnight. I could limp for a few days, for show, on a stick.”

“No.”

“Six weeks, Ling Xiao. Six weeks I can’t walk to the Hall. Six weeks of lost refining, lost herbs, lost—”

“Everyone in He Ping saw that leg go. Chen GaoYang saw it. Tang YunQi will have told the whole of Heaven Peak by now. And a bonesetter set it tonight and told you six weeks.” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “If you come down that path in four days, every one of them will ask how. You keep the splints until a bonesetter on your own peak takes them off. You stay in your room and grow things. That’s what I’m protecting you from. Mostly, you.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it again. He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I couldn’t find a single gap in it to put a finger through.

Lost: one argument, I thought, sourly.

He looked out across the meadow. Most of it was still grass: the same short, dense, stubborn grass that had broken my nails the first week, with roots like a wire mat. I’d cleared perhaps a tenth of it, with a rake and my two hands, a strip at a time, in whatever hours I could steal from the cauldron.

“Are you going to dig all this by hand?” he asked.

“I was. It’s slow.”

“At your pace, you’ll finish in about a year.” He stood up. “Consider this the first instalment.”

He walked a little way out onto the grass, raised one hand and turned it over, palm up, as if he were offering the air a gift.

The air took it.

A small wind came out of nowhere. Not a breeze. A spinning column the height of a man, grey with dust, turning faster and faster on the spot where his palm had been. Then there were two of them, then five, then more than I could count, each one no wider than a cartwheel and every one of them whirling. They went across the meadow in lines, in a slow, steady, purposeful dance. Wherever they passed, the grass went up into them roots and all, clods and blades and wiry mats of root, torn out and spun up and flung away into the blur at the edges of the world.

There had never been a wind in this place. Not one breath. Now the pocket roared with it. The lake surface, which nothing I’d done had ever ruffled, stayed as flat as glass. My beds, and the little square where I sat, stayed perfectly still. Everywhere else the ground was being turned over like a blanket shaken out of a window.

I sat on the shore with my splinted leg and my mouth open and watched it happen.

It took less than an hour. When the last of the winds spun down and vanished, the meadow was gone. In its place lay earth: dark, loose, raw earth, from the lake to the edges, turned and broken and ready. It would have taken me a year. It would have taken me all my life.

Wind, I thought. Calls wind. A lot of it. The list had stopped being a list. It was becoming a book.

Ling Xiao dusted his hands, though there was no dust on them, and came back to sit on my stool.

“Well,” he said. “That’s my side begun.”

I looked at the earth. I looked at him. I thought about the pills of the pocket’s own growing and how many of them this ground would give me, and the knot in my chest that had been tight since the cup came out of my bag went loose all at once. Five months of protection, an end date in writing, the pocket mine by the margin, and a year’s labour done for nothing in an hour. Whatever he’d meant to take from me tonight, I’d come out ahead.

I was sure of that.

“Ling Xiao,” I said. “You didn’t take it.”

He looked at me.

“The pocket,” I said. “You could have. A thing like this, people would kill for it. The sect would kill for it. You could have had my neck in your hand the moment you saw it.” I didn’t say You still could. We both heard it.

“I could,” he agreed. “I have something better.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer. He sat looking at me with his elbows on his knees, quietly, in the sunless light.

“Someone gave you this,” he said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“A place like this isn’t born. Somebody made it, or found it, and put it on you.” He nodded at my chest, where the mark lay under my robe. “Somebody close to you. Nobody puts a thing like this on a stranger. It was set to stay shut until the time was right, and then to open.” His mouth curved. “The time seems to have come.”

I sat very still.

Somebody close to you.

The original You XiaoMo’s mother had died when her daughter was seven. I knew nothing else about her. Not her name, not her face, not where she’d gone or what she’d been. I’d never thought of her except as a line in He Fei’s gossip, a reason nobody would come to visit.

And my own mother, in my own world, who had sat at a kitchen table twenty-three years ago and chosen my name. You XiaoMo. The same name, character for character, as the girl whose body I’d woken up in.

I had never once let myself think about that. I’d put it away the first morning, with everything else I couldn’t afford.

I put my hand flat over the mark. It was warm under my palm, as it always was.

Ling Xiao watched me do it. He didn’t say anything else. Around us, the new earth lay dark and open and ready, all the way to the edges of the world, waiting for whatever I meant to put in it.