I must have slept in the end, because the next thing I knew the window was grey and the other side of the bolster was empty. Ling Xiao stood at the basin in a fresh white robe, tying back his hair. When he saw my eyes open he said, “Get up. If we’re late, they’ll say it was my fault, and they’ll be right.”

The arena was already full when we came down the steps. The mages sat where they’d sat the afternoon before, in their block on the left, with Fu ZiLin a little apart at the end of a bench. I turned towards them out of habit. A hand settled on my shoulder and turned me back.

“Same as yesterday,” said Ling Xiao.

Nobody had to make room this time. The front bench of the Central Lineage had a gap in it the width of one small mage, beside the Da Shixiong’s place, and the whole row was looking anywhere but at it. I sat in it and kept my hands in my lap. Behind me the word lap went along the benches and stopped.

Elder Jiang drew the first two slips out of the box at dawn, unfolded them, and read them out in a voice that carried to the back of the benches.

“Zhou Peng. Lin Xiao.”

The arena erupted. The first bout of all, and it was the Da Shixiong against his own right hand. On the benches around us, people were already laying bets. Beside me Ling Xiao didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. He sat with one arm along the back of the bench, smiling the warm, princely smile he wore in public, while along the row a cluster of Heaven Peak girls watched him with their hands pressed to their mouths.

I didn’t understand what girls saw in that smile. I’d seen what was under it.

Zhou Peng went up first. On the arena floor he looked even bigger than he had in the courtyard: well over six feet, shoulders like a door, and a two-handed sword on his back so broad that I could have used it as a table. He didn’t draw it. He stood in the middle of the floor, put his fist into his palm and bowed towards our bench.

“I never thought my first fight would be with Da Shixiong,” he said, loud and cheerful. “I’m glad of it; I don’t get to cross swords with him often. But I know my own strength, and today it isn’t enough.”

A murmur ran along the benches. Elder Jiang’s square grey face darkened. “Zhou Peng. Even if you can’t win, there’s value in trying. One bout would show you how far you have to go.”

“Thank you for the advice, Elder.” Zhou Peng grinned. “But the day before yesterday Da Shixiong gave me some pointers, and something in me has started to shift. I’m close to a breakthrough. I mean to go into seclusion today, before it goes off the boil.”

At the elders’ table, the Grand Master smiled. It was only a small smile, but I saw several elders glance at it and then nod as if they’d meant to nod all along. “Then step down,” said Tang Fan.

Elder Jiang declared the bout to Lin Xiao. The applause was enormous. The loudest of it came from Tang YunQi, two benches over in the mages’ block, clapping with her whole arms and her face flushed pink. I clapped twice, politely, then put my hands back in my lap.

Ling Xiao leaned over as the second pair went up.

“There was one in my bottle yesterday,” he said, not looking at me, “that wasn’t green.”

I kept my eyes on the arena. “Was there? I must have miscounted.”

“You never miscount.”

I didn’t answer that. He didn’t press it. But when I glanced at him a moment later, the corner of his mouth was up, and it wasn’t the public smile.

Practitioners had their own ladder, Ling Xiao told me, while the first bout went on below us. Twelve rungs, as mages had twelve levels; only theirs had names. Man, Earth, Sky. Sun, Moon, Star. Celestial, Spiritual, Imperial. Emperor, Divine, Sacred. Each rung was split into seven steps they called stars, so that a man could be a One-star Moon or a Seven-star Moon, and the difference between them was a beating. Most of the disciples on the platform were Earth or Sky. The elders judging them were Sun and Moon.

“And Star?” I said.

“Star is where the stories start.” He watched a sword go spinning off the edge of the platform. “Celestial, you could count on your fingers on this continent. Past that, nobody’s counting.”

“And you?”

“I’m the Da Shixiong of the Central Lineage,” said Ling Xiao. “I’m exactly as strong as I need to be.”

The second bout was a young man against a young woman from the top twenty of the lineage. It went on for half an hour of flashing blades before she went off the edge of the platform. He bowed to her and said Shijie, you let me win, which she clearly hadn’t. The third was two men. I watched them leap and strike and land as lightly as cats, and my chest went tight and sour.

I’d never been good at anything with my body. In my old life I couldn’t catch a ball. I’d failed the high jump in school three years running, at a height a cat could step over. I’d told myself that was fine, that my talents lay in my head. That had been true. But I’d woken up in a world where a girl could be thrown five yards by a flick of a man’s sleeve, and a mage was a girl with nobody to protect her unless she paid for it.

“What is it?” said Ling Xiao.

I hadn’t realised my face was doing anything. “Nothing. Only that mages can’t fight.”

“No.” He watched the fight a moment. “But warriors can’t refine. Heaven gives with one hand and takes with the other. Your kind and mine need each other; that’s why the sects hold together.”

“For a while,” I said. “Then the mage gets old and dies, and the warrior goes and finds another.”

He turned his head and looked at me as if I’d said a thing of extraordinary stupidity.

“Who told you mages die young?”

“Nobody told me. It’s obvious.” I frowned at him. “Warriors live a long time because they cultivate. Everyone knows that. Mages don’t cultivate. We refine.”

He raised one hand and rapped his knuckles on the top of my head. Not hard. Hard enough.

“Idiot,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing every time you sit down at that cauldron? What do you think the Scripture is for?” He shook his head. “Didn’t your Shifu tell you? Your Da Shixiong?”

I rubbed my head. They hadn’t. It hadn’t been in any book I’d borrowed, either. Everyone on the mountain had known it all their lives, as everyone in my old life had known that the sky was blue. Nobody had thought it worth telling me.

“It isn’t only the pills,” I said slowly. “It’s the soul force.” I lowered my voice. “The Scripture—”

“Nobody can hear us.” He made a small, careless movement of his fingers. “Anyone who looks this way sees two people watching the fight, terribly seriously. Go on.”

I looked round. A disciple on the next bench was gazing straight at us, and his eyes slid over us as if we were a pillar.

“The soul force comes from the soul,” I said. “Every time I refine, I draw on it. Every time I draw on it, the body is—cleaned. Strengthened.” It was like my physio and the bad knee: use it until it’s tired, and it grows back stronger. “And the soul is the root of the body. So as long as the soul is strong—”

“The body lasts,” said Ling Xiao. “Yes. A mage and a warrior of the same level live about as long as each other. Longer, often, for the mage. Mages don’t go mad from their own techniques or burn out their meridians. You lot sit safe in your back rooms.”

“How long?”

He shrugged. “It depends on the level. A low-level mage, a hundred years or so, and she keeps her looks for most of them. Middling, two or three hundred. High-level mages—” He tilted his hand. “Longer. Much longer. And once the soul is strong enough, it can be used to strike, not just to refine. Get the Scripture to its fourth level and yours will start to change. Not more of the same. A different kind.”

I sat very still.

Two or three hundred years.

I did the sum before I could stop myself; it was what my head did. Two hundred years at a cauldron. At my current rate, rising as the soul force rose. Compound it. The Spring Pavilion manager would be dust in fifty years; his grandson would be buying from me. I could buy the Spring Pavilion. I could buy North Street. I could plant my pocket edge to edge and harvest it every month for two centuries, and at the end of it I’d still look like a girl in her twenties, and I’d own half of He Ping.

Then the other half of what he’d said caught up with me.

Middling, two or three hundred. High-level: much longer.

My soul was green. Green was a mid-level mage’s soul, at best. That was what the crystal had said on the day the original You XiaoMo cried herself sick in that bed. Two or three hundred years, if I worked hard and nothing went wrong. Not more. The high levels and the long centuries and the soul you could strike with were for other people.

I let my breath out slowly through my nose.

Two hundred years was still two hundred years. I’d had twenty-three, the first time, before a gas stove ended them. I wasn’t going to sulk over a mere two centuries. But I sat with my hands folded in my lap and felt the cap of it like a hand on top of my head. I minded.

Then a third thought came, slower and colder than the other two.

“Ling Xiao,” I said quietly. “How long have you been alive?”

He didn’t look away from the fight. For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me through his own barrier.

“Long enough,” he said, “to find most things boring.”

“That isn’t a number.”

“No.” He smiled at the arena. “It isn’t.”

I didn’t ask again. He wasn’t going to tell me, and every time I looked at him now I could feel the edge of a great depth just beyond where my feet were, like the drop at the end of a jetty in the dark.

By late afternoon, twenty-five bouts had been fought, and I’d stopped watching most of them. I was thinking about two hundred years when Ling Xiao rapped me on the head again and I looked up into a body flying straight at me.

I didn’t have time to scream. A hand closed on my collar and jerked me sideways. The body hit the bench where I’d been sitting, and the bench folded up under it with a crack like a tree going over.

I sat in the sawdust with my heart trying to leave through my throat and looked at the young man groaning in the wreckage of my seat. Then I looked up at the platform.

A man stood at its edge, looking down at us. He was the biggest human being I had ever seen. His shoulders were twice the width of mine; his bare arms were roped with muscle like the hawsers on a ship. He had a square, heavy face and eyebrows as thick and black as if someone had painted them on with a brush loaded with ink. He was looking at Ling Xiao. There was nothing in his face at all.

“Lin Xiao,” he said, slowly. “I look forward to the day I fight you.”

Ling Xiao adjusted his sleeve. He looked up at the platform out of the corner of his eye. “Lei-shidi,” he said pleasantly. “Then I hope you last that long. It would be a shame if somebody else pushed you off first.”

The big man smiled, a thick, cold smile. “And I hope nobody crosses you out early.”

Then Elder Jiang called the end of the day’s bouts. The big man walked down off the platform and away, and everyone began to breathe again.

“Who is he?” I said, as Ling Xiao pulled me to my feet.

“Lei Ju. The best fighter in the Central Lineage,” said Ling Xiao, “after me. He has been for years. He doesn’t enjoy it.” He brushed sawdust off my shoulder with two fingers. “Don’t sit in the front row any more.”

On the walk back to the quarters, the Central Lineage disciples peeled off one by one, bowing to their Da Shixiong, until there was nobody left on the gallery but Ling Xiao, Fu ZiLin and me. Zhou Peng, Ling Xiao said when I asked, had gone straight into seclusion after his bout and wouldn’t come out until the breakthrough came.

I stopped walking. “Then Second Shixiong has a room to himself.”

I didn’t say the rest. I didn’t have to.

“Don’t,” said Ling Xiao.

“Why not? He’s my own senior. It would be perfectly proper—”

“Because your Second Shixiong won’t share a room with you,” said Ling Xiao, “or with anybody.”

A little way ahead of us, a door banged shut with a single, flat, final sound. Fu ZiLin had gone into his room without a word.

I looked at the door. Ling Xiao looked at me, pleasantly.

Or with anybody. I turned it over, and it wasn’t true. Fu ZiLin talked to nobody but Fang ChenYue. He’d gone down the passage at Capital Peak silent at Fang ChenYue’s shoulder. He’d stepped into the West Side gateway the moment Fang ChenYue stopped to tell me something, and whatever it was had never been said. And the first time he saw me, he’d given me one measuring look, as if I were a jar with the wrong label on it, and I’d spent four days wondering what he’d sensed. He hadn’t sensed anything. He’d read the label. New shimei. Bone-Knitting Pill. Held her hand.

I’d been somebody’s rival for weeks, and nobody had told me.

I glanced sideways at Ling Xiao, who had spent those same weeks jealous of a man who was spoken for, and didn’t know it either.

It would have been kind to tell him. It would also have been the end of that muscle in his jaw, and I’d grown fond of it.

“Ten gold a night,” I said, and walked on.

Nobody had needed me all day. A few warriors had come off the platform with cuts and bruises, but the Heaven Peak and Flying Peak mages had been on them before I could stand up, every one of them hungry to be noticed. I went back to our rooms with nothing to show for the day but a lump on the top of my head and a new sum I didn’t like. I’d eaten one of my own Breatharian Pills that morning, so I didn’t need dinner, and Ling Xiao, as far as I could tell, never needed dinner at all.

He sat down on the bed in the inner room, crossed his legs, put his hands on his knees and closed his eyes.

I watched him for a while. He didn’t move. His breathing went long and slow. I didn’t know what he was doing, but it looked like the meditation the warriors did, and it looked as if it would take a while. So I went into the pocket.

I bathed in the lake for the first time in two days, harvested a bed of Spiritual Energy herbs that had come in on their dilution and racked them to dry. When I came out, an hour later, he hadn’t moved. I took out my cauldron, set it on the tea table in the outer room and brought thirty stalks of the Himalayan Paris, Fragrant Fruit and Dried Leaf out of the pocket by thought.

Ten pills. Top grade, from the pocket’s herbs, for the morning bottle and the one after. The Spiritual Energy Pill was harder work than the Breatharian; it ate soul force like a furnace, and top grade ate twice what the Hall’s herbs did. I could manage three on a full vessel, if I pushed, and a cup of lake water would fill it again. I’d see how far the vessel had grown.

I sank into the work.

When I came up out of the first pill, the room was full of its smell, rich and clean, and Ling Xiao was sitting across the tea table from me with his chin on his hand.

I nearly dropped the pill. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough.” He looked at the stalks, and at me. “You’re refining top grade, on a tea table, in the middle of the Central Lineage. Every elder on this peak can smell a good pill at a hundred paces. Did you think of that?”

I hadn’t. My face went cold.

“I put a barrier up,” he said, “while you were busy. Nothing gets out of it. Not the smell, not the light, not the sound.” He held out his hand, palm up. I put the pill in it, because I didn’t know what else to do. He turned it over, sniffed it and ate it. His eyes half closed. “And now,” he said, opening them again, “there’s someone outside the window.”

I looked. There was nothing at the window but darkness and the white wood frame.

“Who?”

“Elder Jiang.” He said it as if he were remarking on the weather. “The one who judges the bouts. He’s standing under the eaves, quite still, trying to hear through my barrier. He can’t. All he’ll know is that the Da Shixiong and his little shimei went to bed early.” He licked the corner of his mouth. “Shall I kill him?”

I stared at him. He looked back at me, mildly, and I couldn’t tell whether he was joking. I didn’t think he knew himself.

“No,” I said.

“It would save trouble later.”

“No.” I put my hands flat on the table. I’d spent four years learning to keep people alive, and a year at a counter doing it; I wasn’t going to sit at a tea table and nod a man to death because he was nosy. “He’s an elder of the sect. If he dies the night he stood outside your window, who do you think they’ll come asking? And besides.” I swallowed. “I don’t like killing.”

He watched me say it. Then he laughed, softly, and the strange, still edge went out of the room.

“Then he lives,” he said. “I wasn’t serious. Mostly.” He glanced at the window again. “But a quiet man doesn’t stand under a window in the middle of the night for no reason. Remember that.”

I remembered it. I sat for a while with my heart thudding and my hands on the table, and then, because I didn’t know what else to do, I reached for the ten Breatharian Pills in my bag and held out the bottle to him.

“Here,” I said. “These are done. Top grade. Have these tonight, and I’ll finish the others.”

He looked at the bottle without taking it. “What are those for?”

“For North Street. I need a better cauldron.” I tipped my head at the black pot on the table. “This one has a crack starting along the bottom; I felt it go a week ago. A good cauldron costs more than I’ve got, and top-grade Breatharians ought to fetch fifty or sixty a pill at auction. I was going to sell these. But you can have them, if you’re hungry. I’ll make more.”

Something went across his face, quick and offended.

“No,” he said. “Keep them. I’ll take tomorrow’s.” His mouth twisted. “Don’t think you can fob me off with your leftovers.”

I looked at him, open-mouthed. They were top-grade pills. He ate my Dispelling Pills by the handful. I couldn’t imagine what had stung him, and I didn’t have the soul force left to work it out. I put the bottle back in my bag and picked up the next three stalks.

I refined until eleven. When I had ten in the bottle and my soul force was scraped to the bottom, I wiped my face and held it out to him. He took it. He looked at it, and then at my face, which must have been grey.

“Next time,” he said, “you don’t have to rush.” And he got up and went into the inner room.

I sat at the tea table and wanted to throw the cauldron after him.

When I went in, he was taking off his outer robe. He stood by the bed in his white inner clothes with his back to me, and through the thin cloth I could see the long lines of his back and shoulders, and I stopped in the doorway.

He turned his head. “Coming to bed, little sister?”

“In a moment.”

I took my boots off and lay down on the left side of the bed, under my half of the coverlet, with my back to the bolster and my robe still on. I heard him lie down on the other side. The bed tilted slightly and settled. He turned on his side, away from me, and his breathing went long and even almost at once.

I lay in the dark and didn’t sleep.

The room was cold. The white wood breathed out its clean scent and a chill along with it, and the coverlet had been made for one, and my half of it was less than half. The bolster lay at my back like a wall.

Anything that comes over it is extra.

I’d made that rule to keep him on his side. I lay there and thought about it from the other side. The rule cut both ways; I’d written it that way on purpose, like a clause you mean to use. I’d sat on his lap in front of the whole Central Lineage and watched him go rigid. I’d opened my robe for him on Capital Peak and watched him look away first. Each time, he could have done anything. Each time, he hadn’t.

I wanted to know how far that went.

So I waited until my own breathing had gone slow and even, then a little longer, as if I’d drifted off. Then I turned over in my sleep, as people do. I pushed the bolster down towards the foot of the bed with my knees as I went, and rolled into the warm.

He was warm. Warmer than a man should be, as if there were a banked fire under his skin. I fitted myself along his back, put my arm over his waist and my knee over his thigh, tucked my face against his shoulder blade, and let out a small, contented, sleepy sigh. Then I lay perfectly still and breathed slow.

He didn’t move.

I felt him not move. I felt the whole long length of him go still under my arm, as it had gone still under me in the arena. His breathing didn’t change. That was how I knew he was awake. Nobody breathes that evenly asleep.

I waited for him to turn over. I waited for his hand to come back and take hold of my wrist, or my hip. I lay against his back with my heart beating hard and slow, in the dark, and waited for him to do what any man on Earth would have done with a warm girl wrapped round him in his own bed.

He didn’t do it.

He lay there. All night, as far as I could tell, he lay with his back to me and my arm round him and didn’t move a muscle. Once, late, I felt him draw a long, slow breath, and let it out even more slowly, the way a man does who is holding something heavy and has just been told to hold it a while longer. That was all.

Some time towards dawn, without meaning to, I really did fall asleep.

I woke because I was being looked at.

Grey light was coming through the window. I was lying on my back, and he was on his side, propped on one elbow over me, close. His face was a hand’s breadth from mine. He hadn’t slept. I could see it in the faint shadows under his eyes, which I had never seen there before. He was looking down at me with no smile at all.

My arm was still round him. One of my legs was hooked over his. And pressed against my thigh, through the thin cloth of our clothes, hard and hot and unmistakable, was his cock.

“Good morning,” he said. His voice was rough. “You crossed the bolster.”

I opened my mouth.

“Anything that comes over it,” he said softly, “is extra. Your words.”

He lowered his head and bit my cheek.

Not hard. His teeth closed on the round of my cheek just below the bone, firmly enough that I felt each one, and let go. It shocked me so completely that I lay there with my mouth still open and didn’t make a sound.

“Delicious,” said Ling Xiao. He licked his lower lip, slowly, looking at the place where he’d bitten me as if he were thinking of going back for more. “I’ve been wanting to do that for hours.”

I put my hand up to my cheek. There were small dents in it.

“You bit me.”

“You climbed on me. You lay wrapped round me all night and breathed on my neck and put your knee where you put your knee, and then you went to sleep.” He shifted his hips and pressed against my thigh. I felt the whole hard length of him move. “You owe me a night’s sleep, little sister. And you owe me for this.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I wasn’t an innocent. I was a twenty-three-year-old pharmacist with four years of anatomy, two boyfriends and a reasonable working knowledge of what a man wanted at six in the morning. My body was eighteen and had never been touched. It was shaking a little. It was also interested. My nipples had drawn up tight under my robe at the first press of him against my thigh; they ached against the cloth every time I breathed. Lower down I could feel myself going soft and slick, a slow heavy pulse between my legs that kept time with his.

But he didn’t know any of that. He only knew the girl in front of him: a mage six weeks on the mountain, who’d gone pink when he looked at her and stiff when he put his arm round her.

So I let him see her.

I let my eyes go wide. I let my lip tremble. I pulled my hand back from his waist as if it had burned me, and looked down, between us, at the tent his cock made in the white cloth, and then up at his face, and then away.

“I don’t—” I let my voice wobble. “I don’t know how. Nobody ever—I’ve never—”

He didn’t answer at once. He breathed in instead: one long, slow breath through his nose, with his face a hand’s breadth above mine. I watched his nostrils flare. I watched his eyes go dark and fixed while he did it, as a man’s eyes go when he’s tasting a wine and trying to place it.

I knew what he was smelling. I had stood at a counter for four years handing out creams for things that smell. I knew exactly what a woman smells like when she’s wet. I lay under him with my lip trembling and my eyes on his collar and knew that every breath he took gave me away a little more. I didn’t change my face. I wanted to see what he’d do with it.

He did nothing with it. That was the most frightening thing he had done so far.

“I’m going to take your hand,” he said, very low. “And I’m going to put it on me. If you pull it away, I’ll let you.”

I didn’t pull it away. He took my wrist, gently, drew my hand down between us and laid it on him through the cloth.

“Like that. Hold still. Just feel it.”

I felt it. Through two layers of thin cotton he was hot as a cup just off the stove. He jumped under my palm when it settled, as if my hand had a current in it.

“I’ll show you,” he said. His voice had gone down another step. “It isn’t hard to learn.”

“It’s hard now,” I said, in my smallest voice, and felt him jerk under my palm.

He pulled the ties of his inner trousers himself, with a quick, impatient hand, and pushed the cloth down. His cock came up out of it into the grey light and lay along his belly. I looked at it with all the wide-eyed alarm of a girl who had never seen one.

Privately, I looked at it the way I’d have looked at a root on a tray. It was a fine, healthy specimen. Long, longer than my spread hand from wrist to fingertip, and thick enough that I already knew my fingers wouldn’t meet round it. Dark with blood all down the shaft, and darker at the head, which had come up out of its sheath of skin full and smooth and shining like a plum. A vein ran up the underside of him from the root nearly to the tip, raised and branching, like the main rib of a leaf. At the root, the hair was black and coarse and smelled, when I breathed in, of him: pine and smoke and clean skin, and under them something dry and charged that I had never found in any other man and couldn’t have named in either world, like the air in the minute before a summer storm breaks. The girl would have been right to be alarmed. I was alarmed myself, in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the ache between my legs.

“I’m going to close your fingers round me now,” he said.

He did. They didn’t meet. The skin of him was softer than I’d remembered men were, loose and silky over a hardness like bone. It moved over the hardness when my hand moved. He was heavy in my palm. He was so hot.

“Like this,” he said, and moved my hand: down, slowly, the whole length, so that the loose skin slid down and the head of him pushed up bare out of my fist; then up again, so that it slid back over. “Not too tight. Not too gentle. Steady.”

I let him guide me twice. Three times. Then he let go of my wrist. I kept going, slowly, clumsily, just as he’d shown me and not one bit better. I made it uncertain. I made it gentle. I stopped every few strokes as if I’d lost my nerve, and looked up at his face for permission, and started again. Each time I stopped, his hips lifted after my hand. Each time I started, he let out a breath through his teeth.

I watched him as I’d watch a patient on a monitor.

He was controlled. That was the first thing I learned. He didn’t thrust; he didn’t grab. He’d rolled onto his back now, propped against the headboard, with his hands fisted in the sheet on either side of him and the white inner robe fallen open to his belly. He let me do it. But he couldn’t keep it out of his body, and his body read like a chart. His stomach went tight; I could count the muscles in it, each one standing out in the grey light, shifting every time my fist went down. His thighs went hard. A flush came up his chest, slowly, a dark stain under the pale skin that climbed from his breastbone to his collar to the underside of his jaw. The little flat nipples on his chest had drawn up as tight as mine. His breathing had gone from long to short to uneven. It hitched, every time, at the top of the stroke.

The tip of him went slick. A bead of clear fluid welled at the slit, swelled, and ran down over the head into the ridge under it. I watched it go. When it reached my knuckle I spread it round with my thumb, slowly, as if by accident, round and round the smooth head of him. He made a sound down in his chest, short and rough, like a man who has stepped on something sharp in the dark and doesn’t want anyone to know.

I took my hand away.

“Did I do it wrong?” I said anxiously.

He looked at me. His eyes had gone almost black. His cock lay on his belly where I’d left it, twitching, wet at the tip, darker than before.

“No,” he said, through his teeth. “Don’t stop.”

I put my hand back. Slowly. Too slowly. I ran one finger down the underside of him, along the vein, from the head to the root, light as a feather; then down further, to the heavy soft weight below, which drew up tight under my fingertip; and back up again, all the way to the tip. Then I stopped.

“Like that?”

“XiaoMo.”

“I’m only learning,” I said. “You said it was easy to learn.”

His jaw clenched. I wrapped my hand round him again and stroked him properly this time: firm and slow, a full stroke, root to tip and back, with my thumb riding over the wet head at the top of every one. Three. Four. His head went back against the board. His hips came off the bed. The sheet in his right hand made a small tearing sound. On the fifth I stopped dead with my hand closed loosely round the base of him, perfectly still, and didn’t move again.

He breathed. Hard. The whole bed moved with it.

I could feel my own pulse in my fingertips, and his inside them, the two not quite matched. Between my legs I was so wet that my thighs slid when I shifted on the mattress. He could smell it. I knew he could smell it. He knew I knew, and he lay there with his fists in the sheet and his eyes on mine and still did nothing about it.

I decided I’d had enough of being the frightened girl.

“Ask,” I said softly.

I didn’t sound like her any more. I didn’t care.

He opened his eyes all the way and looked at me. I saw him understand. All of it: the trembling lip, the I don’t know how, the stopping, the smell of me he’d been breathing in for a quarter of an hour that had never once been the smell of fear. For one long moment he looked at me as he’d looked at me on the first night in the Najia, with his hand on my throat: as if I were a thing he hadn’t expected to find, and might break, and might keep.

“Please,” said Ling Xiao.

I moved my hand. Once. The whole length, slow, and stop.

“Please,” he said again, rougher. “XiaoMo. Please.”

It went through me like heat. It went straight down through my belly and settled between my legs and throbbed there. I’d had men say please to me before. Not like that. Not men who could have folded me in half with one hand and were lying on their backs with their fists in the sheets instead, holding themselves down, saying please.

I wanted to hear it again.

“Again,” I said. “Properly. All of it.”

He wet his lips. “Please. Put your hand on me and don’t stop.”

So I gave him three strokes, firm and slow, then stopped and watched him strain after my hand. His hips came up off the bed, an inch, two inches, following my fist; I let my hand go up with them so that he got nothing. I gave him two more and stopped. He said, “Please,” in a voice that sounded scraped. I gave him one, slowly, with a twist of my wrist at the top, so that my palm turned right round the slippery head of him. His whole body bowed off the bed. He swore, one short hard word with a lot of teeth in it.

I thought, not yet.

I’d judged it a dozen times by then. His breathing, his belly, the flush, the swelling at the head, the heavy weight below drawn up tight against the root of him. I thought I had him to the minute. I thought I had at least one more round.

I wanted the last word to be mine.

I didn’t let go of him. I came up on my knees on the bed and leaned over him: one knee between his thighs, the other half over his hip, my weight on one hand by his shoulder. My hair came down round his face like a curtain and shut out the room, so that there was nothing in the world but the grey light through my hair and his eyes and his breath. My breasts hung an inch above his chest; through my robe I could feel the heat coming off him on my nipples. It was nearly unbearable. My other hand stayed where it was, loose round the head of him, my thumb resting in the wet at the tip. I put my mouth to his ear.

“I like it when you stop pretending,” I whispered.

And I drew my thumbnail, lightly, once, across the tip of him.

He made a sound low in his chest, like something breaking. His whole body jerked under me. His hand flew up off the sheet and caught my hip and held it, hard, his fingers driving in through the cloth to the bone. And under my hand he came. I felt it before I saw it: a pulse right down the length of him against my palm, and another, and then the heat of it, thick and hot and spilling over my fingers in long jerks, onto his own belly and up his chest and onto the white front of his open robe. It smelled of salt and something green, like a stem snapped in the sun. I hung over him on my knees with my hand still round his cock and my mouth at his ear, and felt every shudder go through him into me. I didn’t let go until he’d stopped. I kept my hand moving, slow, gentle now, all the way through, because I knew how. He made one last sound into my hair that was nearly my name.

Then it was over. He lay under me, breathing like a man who’d run up the whole of WuShuang Mountain, with his eyes shut and his hand still clamped on my hip.

I stayed where I was without moving. I’d miscalculated; I’d misread his tells. I’d thought I had another minute and hadn’t had one second. One whisper and one stroke of a thumbnail, and a quarter of an hour of careful work had gone over the edge without my permission.

I couldn’t decide if I’d lost, or won very badly.

He opened his eyes. He looked up at me through my hair. He knew exactly what had happened. He could see that I knew he knew. Then, slowly, he began to laugh. It shook all through him, and through me, where I knelt over him.

“You miscalculated,” he said.

“I liked the way you begged,” I said.

He stopped laughing. He looked at me for a long time, close, in the grey light.

Then he breathed in again, slowly, as he had at the beginning. His eyes went down, past my face, past my breasts, to where my robe had ridden up over my knees on the sheet, and came back up.

“You’re wet,” he said. Not teasing. Stating it, as I’d have stated a dose. “You have been since before you put your hand on me. I could smell it the whole time, little sister.”

My face went hot. Everything else had been hot for a quarter of an hour, so it hardly mattered.

He could have rolled me over. I knew it then as certainly as I’d ever known anything. He could have rolled me under him with one arm and done whatever he liked. I wasn’t sure I’d have stopped him. He knew that too. I could see him know it. His hand was still on my hip. His fingers tightened, once. His thumb moved, a quarter of an inch, along the crease where my thigh met my body, through the cloth, and stopped there. I nearly made a sound of my own.

Then he let go.

“Your turn,” he said quietly. “If you like. I’ll tell you everything I’m going to do before I do it. I’d be glad to teach you something.”

I sat back on my heels, out of reach. My whole body was humming like a struck bell. My nipples ached. Between my legs I was swollen and slippery and so tender that sitting back on my heels was its own small torment. I wanted it. I wanted it so badly my thighs ached.

“Not today,” I said.

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, as if I’d named a price he’d expected and found fair.

“Not today,” he agreed.

I got off the bed. My legs weren’t quite steady. I went to the washstand, poured water into the basin and washed my hands, carefully, wrist to fingertips, as I’d been taught to scrub in. I didn’t look round. Behind me I heard him get up, then the rustle of cloth as he pulled off the ruined inner robe and dropped it on the floor.

“You’re clean,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I looked down at myself. Not a mark on my robe. Every drop of it had gone on him, and my hand.

“I was careful,” I said, with enormous dignity.

He laughed again, short and helpless, and went to the wardrobe. I heard him take out fresh clothes and dress. Then he came up behind me at the washstand. I watched him in the bronze mirror on the wall. He was in white again, immaculate, as though nothing had happened, except that his eyes were still dark and there was colour along his cheekbones. He held out his closed hand and opened it.

It was the jade from his belt, the pale green pendant that had swung at his waist when he walked into the ring of people on East Street. A flat disc of jade the size of my palm, carved with a beast I didn’t recognise, hung on a cord of black and gold silk.

“Wear this,” he said.

I turned round. “Why?”

“Because I want to see it on you.” He said it simply, without a smile. Then, as I opened my mouth: “Because everyone on this mountain knows that jade. Lin Xiao has worn it since he was sixteen. It was a gift from his Shifu. Anyone who sees it at your waist will know that whoever lays a finger on you answers to me.” He held it out. “It’s protection. It’s in the contract.”

I looked at it. It was beautiful, and it was a brand.

“It’s a loan,” I said.

“It’s a loan,” he agreed.

“And I’m charging you for wearing it.”

He smiled, at last. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

He knelt, without being asked, and tied it to my sash himself, on the left side, where it would show. His fingers were quick and sure. When he’d done, he stayed there a moment on one knee in front of me, looking at the jade against the plain blue of my robe. Then he stood up.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re late.”

We were. The arena was full when we came in, and every head on every bench turned to look at the Da Shixiong arriving late, and then at the mage beside him, and then, one after another, they found the jade.

I heard it go along the rows. Not a murmur this time. A silence, spreading outward from wherever people were sitting closest, like a stain.

On the mages’ bench, Tang YunQi had gone white to the lips.

We were walking past the elders’ table when the Grand Master opened his eyes.

I hadn’t realised they were closed. Tang Fan had been sitting back in his carved chair with his hands folded, apparently dozing. Now he looked at me, and I felt it like a cold hand laid flat on my breastbone, over the mark. His eyes were kind and lined and heavy-lidded. Behind them there was nothing whatsoever I could read. I felt as though he were turning me over like a coin, both faces, and setting me down again exactly as he’d found me.

His gaze went down to the jade at my waist and stayed there.

My knees went. Not all the way; Ling Xiao’s hand was under my elbow before they could, light and firm, holding me up as if he’d merely put out a hand to guide me.

“So,” said Tang Fan. His voice was mild and pleasant and carried no further than the three of us. “You’re Kong Wen’s seventh disciple. You XiaoMo.”

“Yes, Grand Master.” My voice came out small.

“Your Lin-shixiong is a fine young man.” His eyes rested on the jade a moment longer. “If you have any trouble while you’re here, you should go to him.”

“Yes, Grand Master.”

“Shifu needn’t worry.” Ling Xiao bowed, his hand still under my elbow. His smile was warm and frank and full of a pupil’s respect. “I’ll take good care of XiaoMo-shimei.”

“Good,” said Tang Fan. “Good. Go and sit down.”

We went. I didn’t breathe until I was on the bench, two rows back, as far from the front as I could get. My hands were shaking. I put them in my lap and held one with the other.

“He’s terrifying,” I whispered.

“He’s an old fox,” said Ling Xiao, “with an old fox’s nose. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” He watched the elders’ table for a moment. Then, still smiling, so softly that it barely reached me, he said, “He’s talking to Elder Jiang.”

I looked. Tang Fan had leaned a little towards the square grey elder at his side and was speaking without moving his lips much.

“He’s asking what Jiang thinks of you and me,” Ling Xiao murmured. “Jiang says he thinks it’s very good. That Lin Xiao has never shown such interest in anyone. That when he went past on his rounds last night, we’d gone to bed early and there was nothing unusual to see.” A pause. “He didn’t say he was standing under our window for an hour.”

I swallowed. “And Tang Fan?”

“Tang Fan says that his Xiao-Er has changed a good deal since he came back from that trip down the mountain.” Ling Xiao’s smile didn’t move by a hair. “He’s begun to wonder.”

The first bout began. I watched it without seeing it. Under my hand, the jade at my waist was cool and smooth and heavy, and I could feel every eye in the arena that came to rest on it and went away again, and came back.

Lei Ju fought that morning, and won so quickly it was hardly a fight; Luo Xia went off the platform with his sword in two pieces and blood on his mouth. I got to him before the Heaven Peak mages did, for once, and put a pill in his hand. He looked at me, and at the jade, and took it. That was the only work I did all day.

That night we didn’t talk about the morning. I lay on my side of the bolster and he lay on his, and the bolster stayed exactly where it was, all night. I knew, lying there, that neither of us was asleep for a long time.

The next evening, a little after sunset, someone knocked at the door of Lin Xiao’s rooms. Ling Xiao was out; the elders had sent for him. I opened it expecting a message.

A young man stood on the gallery in the fine robe of an inner-courtyard disciple, smiling at me. He was good-looking in a smooth, easy way, with a blue aura I could almost feel and two shallow dimples in his cheeks.

“XiaoMo,” said Jiang Liu warmly. “It’s been weeks. Don’t you remember me? I said I’d come and visit.”