The door hit the wall so hard the screen jumped.

I came up out of sleep with my heart going and my hands already up. A man was in the room. He was broad and swarthy, with a black beard cut square and a face like a fist. He crossed the floor in three strides, took hold of the front of my sleeping robe and lifted. I came off the mattress onto my knees. The collar bit into the back of my neck, exactly where the two cold fingers had been the night before. For one terrible moment I thought I was back at the fork.

“You XiaoMo?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t breathe. I nodded.

“Where were you last night, from the first bell after sunset until midnight? Who were you with?”

“Elder,” I said, or tried to. It came out as a croak. “I can’t…”

He looked at my face going red and let go with a snort, as if he’d been handed a dirty rag. I sat down hard on the mattress with both hands at my throat. The other side of the bolster was empty, the cover thrown back, cold. Ling Xiao had gone. I hadn’t heard him go.

“Get dressed,” said the man. “The Grand Master wants you.” He stood there with his arms folded and his back to the door he’d broken, and watched me do it.

I got dressed. I turned my back on him, pulled the blue robe on over my sleeping things and did up the ties with fingers that wouldn’t work properly. While I did it I counted. Not the ties. The facts. He was an elder; the grey-and-black robe and the elder’s tablet at his belt said so, and so did his manner of coming in. He was here for me and not for Ling Xiao, which meant Ling Xiao had already been taken somewhere and asked a question, and had answered it with my name. And he’d asked about the hours after sunset. Not the afternoon. The evening.

Somebody had found the tablet.

“Elder Xiao,” said a voice from the gallery, mild and amused. “You’ve broken the Da Shixiong’s door.”

“Then the Da Shixiong can send me the bill, Du-shixiong.” The swarthy man jerked his head at me. “Come.”

The Great Hall of the Central Lineage was full of grey robes and silence. I hadn’t been inside it before. In the early morning, with the lamps still lit and the windows grey, it looked like a room in which a matter was about to be decided. The elders sat along both sides. The Grand Master sat at the end, on a dais, with his hands folded on his knee. Below him, on the right, in the first seat, in white, sat Ling Xiao.

He looked up when I came in. His face did nothing at all. He wore the public face, the warm, pleasant, slightly attentive face of a young man who has been called to a meeting early and is being patient about it. But his eyes went to my throat, to where the collar had dragged. They stayed there for the space of a breath. Then they went to Elder Xiao.

I looked at the floor. I knelt where I was shown and put my hands together.

“You XiaoMo.” Tang Fan’s voice was the voice from the arena: soft, unhurried, and carrying to every corner without being raised. “You’re not in any trouble. I’m told you were out late last night. I’d like to hear about it from you.”

I’d thought about this on the walk. Not much; Elder Xiao had walked fast, and I’d had to trot. But enough.

“I went for a walk, Grand Master. After sunset. A friend from my village came to visit me. We walked together for a while.”

“Your friend’s name?”

“Jiang Liu, Grand Master. Of Heaven Peak.”

Somebody moved, on the far side of the hall. I didn’t look. I knew where he’d be. On the way in I’d seen him without seeing him, sitting on a stool at the end of the row of elders, behind the big shoulders of a man in black. Lei Ju. And next to Lei Ju, bolt upright, with his eyes on his knees and his dimples nowhere at all, the boy who’d wiped his face like an actor at the bend in the path.

“And then?”

“We talked about home. He showed me some of the paths. We went further than I meant to; I don’t know the Central Lineage, and it was getting dark.” I kept my voice small. I didn’t have to try hard. “At a fork in the path we said goodnight. He had somewhere to be. I meant to go back the way we’d come, but I took a wrong turning in the dark, then another one, and then I didn’t know where I was. I’m sorry, Grand Master. That was foolish. I waited for someone to come.”

“And someone came.”

“Lin-shixiong came, Grand Master. He’d found the note I left him. He found me and brought me back.”

“At what hour?”

“I don’t know exactly. After the second bell, Grand Master. I heard it ring while I was still lost.”

There was a little pause. Tang Fan looked at me with his kind, lined face. I looked at the boards in front of his feet and let him look. I’d learned a little about the Grand Master in two days. He wasn’t a man you lied to by looking him in the eye. He was a man you lied to by being small and frightened and a little stupid, so that he’d have to bend down to find the lie, and might not think it worth the stoop.

“Jiang Liu,” said Tang Fan. “Is this true?”

Jiang Liu stood up. He’d gone the colour of tallow.

He was in a corner. I watched him see it. He’d been called here to swear he was in his room last night when Lei Ju came back to it. He’d sworn it. Now he had to say he’d been out walking with me in the dark at the back of the mountain, and every word would have to fit around both stories at once. If he said I was lying, he’d have to say where he’d really taken me, and why, and for whom. He looked at me across the hall. I looked back at him, with my small, frightened, slightly stupid face. I let him see that I knew exactly which fork it had been.

“It’s true, Grand Master,” he said. “We walked. I left her at the fork. I had to get back.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry, XiaoMo. I should have taken you home.”

“You should,” said Ling Xiao pleasantly, from the first seat.

Jiang Liu sat down as if his strings had been cut. Beside him, Lei Ju turned his heavy head and looked at him for a moment with no expression whatsoever. I didn’t look at either of them. I’d done the sum already. Jiang Liu had been at my door a little after sunset and at the fork perhaps half an hour after that. Lei Ju said Jiang Liu had been in their room when he came back from talking with his shidis. It would fit. Just. If Jiang Liu had run.

I kept the sum where it was. You don’t spend a thing like that on a morning when nobody’s buying.

“Thank you, You XiaoMo,” said Tang Fan. “You can go back to your quarters. In future, when you walk, walk with someone who’ll bring you home.”

“Yes, Grand Master.”

On my way out I passed the elders’ benches. Elder Xiao was sitting with his arms folded, watching Ling Xiao with a face like a shut gate. Beside him a round, comfortable old man with a tuft of grey beard and eyes that had creased themselves almost shut with smiling gave me a small nod as I went by. That was Elder Du, then, who’d told him he’d broken the door. I liked him for it, a little. I kept walking.

I didn’t hear the rest. Ling Xiao told me later, in pieces, and I put them together.

Elder Jiang had left the Central Lineage the afternoon before, by the west gate, on sect business that nobody could now quite remember giving him. In the small hours a patrol had found his jade tablet at the edge of a cliff a long way west of the fork. The ground there was trampled, with the marks of a fight in it and a great deal of blood that might have been anybody’s. Tang Fan didn’t say dead. He said missing, and grave fears, and whoever could match Elder Jiang’s sword must be sitting in this hall. Then the round old man, Du YunCai, said that among the disciples only two might, and named them. Elder Xiao went purple.

Lei Ju had been with his shidis until the first bell, then in his room, meditating, with Jiang Liu to swear to it. Lin Xiao had been with the elders themselves until he’d walked out in the middle of a sentence. After that he’d been seen by half the patrols on the mountain, going from path to path with a lamp, asking after his shimei. Nobody could make either of them a murderer. Tang Fan closed the meeting. The bouts would go on. Elder Xiao would draw the lots.

“Did you say anything to him?” I asked, when Ling Xiao told me this. “Elder Xiao. About my door.”

“No,” he said. “Why would I say anything?”

He was smiling. I found I didn’t like the smile.

The fourth day’s bouts began an hour late. The arena was full and humming. Whatever Tang Fan had said about keeping it quiet, half the mountain knew by then that an elder had gone missing, and that the Da Shixiong and Lei Ju had been questioned at dawn. The other half had been told before the first pair went up. I sat in my gap on the front bench. Nobody whispered lap this time. Nobody whispered anything. Every eye on the benches went from the Da Shixiong to Lei Ju and back.

Elder Xiao stood at the box. He drew two slips, unfolded them, and his heavy face went still.

“Lin Xiao,” he said. “Lei Ju.”

The benches went up like a struck hive.

I looked at Ling Xiao. He was already standing, unhurried, taking a sword from Luo Xia’s hands. I hadn’t seen him hold a sword before. In the cave he hadn’t needed one. It sat in his hand as though it had been made for it. It had been: it was Lin Xiao’s own, plain-hilted and long. Luo Xia must have brought it down from the rooms.

I caught his sleeve. I didn’t decide to. My hand did it.

“Be careful,” I said. “He’s very big.”

He looked down at my hand on his sleeve. A look went across his face, quick, gone. “I don’t need to be careful,” he said. “It’s only Lei Ju.” Then, lower, so nobody else could hear: “Watch his waist.”

Lei Ju was waiting on the platform with a club over his shoulder, a horrible thing, iron-bound, as thick as my thigh and studded down its length with teeth like a wolf’s. He hadn’t used it all week. He’d brought it today.

“Lin Xiao,” he said, in a voice like rocks in a sack. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

“Then I hope it’s worth the wait,” said Ling Xiao, and smiled at him.

Lei Ju came at him like a bull through a gate. The club went round in a blurring arc that I felt in my teeth from the front bench. A hot gust of air went over us all; people on either side of me flinched back. Ling Xiao put his sword in the way of it. The clash was enormous. I saw his arm give, saw his sword hand shake as the blow went through it. My heart came up into my mouth. Then Lei Ju stepped back two long paces with his eyes narrowed, and I saw from his face that he’d seen the shake too, and believed it.

He came again. Ling Xiao met the club with the flat of his blade, high, so that Lei Ju had to lift both arms to drive through it. And with both arms up, with the club locked on the sword above his head, Lei Ju’s whole right side stood open from armpit to hip, like a door somebody had forgotten to shut.

Ling Xiao kicked him in the waist.

It didn’t look like much. It was quick and short and almost lazy. But Lei Ju went sideways off his feet as if a horse had kicked him. When he got his balance again, with one hand clamped to his side and his face gone grey under the brown, the point of Ling Xiao’s sword was resting between his eyebrows.

The whole bout had taken less time than it takes to pour tea.

The arena was dead silent. On the elders’ bench, Elder Xiao half rose and sat down again, hard. Lei Ju stood with the sword point at his forehead and his eyes going wide and then wider. I saw it happen in his face: recognition. Fury. A memory coming up out of a year ago, or two, the same kick, the same blade, the same insolent point between the same two eyes.

“The bout to Lin Xiao,” said Elder Xiao, fast, before anything else could happen.

Ling Xiao lowered his sword. He bowed to Lei Ju, beautifully, a disciple’s bow to a respected shidi.

“Thank you, Lei-shidi,” he said, in his warm, carrying, public voice. “Now I know exactly how strong you are.”

I put my hands over my face.

He came back to the bench through a noise like surf. I took my hands down. He sat beside me, handed the sword back to Luo Xia and folded his hands on his knee.

“That was the same as last time,” I said, low. “Wasn’t it. That kick. That’s how Lin Xiao beat him the last time they fought.”

“To the inch.”

“So nobody can say you fought like someone else.”

“And Lei Ju will be hearing that sentence in his sleep for a year.” He smiled at the arena. “Two birds.”

“Three,” I said.

He turned his head and looked at me.

“His master put his hand on me,” I said. “This morning. You were in the hall. You saw the mark, and you sat there and smiled at him.”

For a moment he didn’t say anything. Then he reached across and turned down the edge of my collar with one finger, openly, in front of the front bench and everyone behind it. He looked at the red line the cloth had left on my neck.

“His master put his hand on you,” he agreed. “I can’t break an elder in front of Tang Fan. Not this year.” He let the collar go. “I can break his disciple.”

Down on the floor, at the edge of the platform, Lei Ju had sat down on the step with his robe open to the waist. Jiang Liu was kneeling beside him with a pot of salve. Lei Ju’s whole right side, from his ribs to his hip bone, had gone the colour of a plum. Jiang Liu was touching it with two fingers as if it might go off.

I looked at it for a while. Then I looked at the man beside me, who was watching the next pair go up with every sign of polite interest.

I thought: I should mind that.

I waited to mind it. It didn’t come.

He won, of course. By the afternoon there was nobody left for him to fight who wanted to. The elders gave him the bye and let the others knock each other down for the lower places. The third prize went to a slim, quiet girl from the top twenty in a white dress, who’d lost her semi-final and then won her last bout with a single move that nobody, including her opponent, had seen coming. She stood up on the platform afterwards next to Ling Xiao to take her pills from Tang Fan. She glanced at him sideways the whole time. He didn’t notice.

Tang Fan gave him three level-six pills in a white jade bottle, a pat on the shoulder and a little speech about modesty that Ling Xiao answered so modestly that Tang Fan laughed. “And because you’ve won,” Tang Fan said, “you may go to Ye-shidi’s garden and choose three herbs of level six or below. They’re yours. Keep them, or give them where you like.”

The crowd broke over him the moment Tang Fan stepped down. I was on the edge of it, at the bottom of the platform steps, and the edge was as far as I got. Shoulders closed in front of me, elbows, the backs of a great many heads, all of them taller than mine. I could hear his voice somewhere in the middle, pleasant and unhurried, saying thank you, thank you, thank you. I hadn’t said it. I’d meant to say it first. It annoyed me how much I’d meant to.

“Xiao-ge.”

The crowd thinned on one side to let her through. Tang YunQi, in pale pink, with her chin up and her eyes too bright. She stopped a pace from him and put her hands together at her waist.

“Xiao-ge. Last year you gave me two of your herbs.” Her voice was steady. Keeping it steady cost her; I could see what. “Will you give me two this year?”

The people around them went quiet in the way people do when they’re pretending not to listen.

“Tang-shimei,” said Ling Xiao gently. “We’ll see.”

Tang-shimei. I saw it land. Last year he’d called her shimei, and the year before, and every year since she was a child. Now she had a surname, like anyone. Her eyes filled. She didn’t let them spill. I very nearly admired her for it.

Then he turned his back on her, looked straight over the heads of the crowd at me, and held out his hand.

“XiaoMo-shimei,” he said. “Come here. It’s time we went home.”

The crowd parted like water. I stood at the bottom of the steps with every face on the platform turned towards me. His hand was out, palm up, in front of the Grand Master and the elders and Tang YunQi. For a moment I thought clearly about walking away.

Then I saw Tang YunQi’s face, and I went up the steps and put my hand in his.

His fingers closed round it. Behind me, I heard someone draw a breath like a hiss. I didn’t turn round. I walked down off the platform at his side, with my hand in his, through the middle of the crowd, all the way across the arena to the gallery steps. I didn’t let go until we were out of sight. I counted the steps. Two hundred and twelve.

Public hand-holding, Grand Master present, Tang YunQi present: one walk, two hundred and twelve paces. Price on application.

“You enjoyed that,” he said, when we were on the gallery.

“I enjoyed her face.” I took my hand back. “Congratulations, Ling Xiao. On first place.”

He’d been looking out over the arena. He turned, leaned his back against the rail and looked at me instead. I didn’t like what his mouth was doing.

“Thank you,” he said. “But I’ve had congratulations all afternoon. I’m full of them. Has my shimei got something a little more substantive to give me?”

“More substantive than what?”

“Than words.”

“You’ve just been given three level-six pills and the pick of Ye-shishu’s garden.”

“I have.” He smiled. “And I’d like more. From you.”

I knew what he meant. Of course I knew. I’d been over him on a bed two mornings ago with my hand on him and my knee between his thighs. I knew exactly what something more substantive meant on that face. And I looked at him with my eyes perfectly round and said, “Pills?”

His smile didn’t move. “You’ll find out tonight,” he said, and pushed himself off the rail and went inside.

I laid them out on the table after dinner, while he watched from the bed.

Ten Spiritual Energy Pills. Top grade, from the pocket herbs, three passes, so clean they shone. I’d made them for his morning bottle. I set them out in two rows of five on a white cloth, as I’d have laid out a prescription on the counter for a patient to check, then folded my hands and looked at him.

“Something substantive,” I said.

He looked at the pills. He looked at me. He got up off the bed and came to stand on the other side of the table. He picked up one of the pills and ate it, slowly, then another one. Then he put both hands flat on the cloth, among the rest, and leaned over them.

“Not pills,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Then what?” I said. “Say it.”

He was quiet. He looked at me across the table with his hands on either side of my two neat rows. I looked back. I didn’t help him. I wasn’t going to help him. I’d said it to him with my mouth at his ear: I like it when you stop pretending. He could stop.

“I want to kiss you,” said Ling Xiao.

It was plain. It came out of him without any of the usual decoration on it, no little sister, no smile, nothing to hide behind. My stomach turned over. I hadn’t expected it to sound like that. I’d expected him to make a joke of it, so that I could make a joke back.

“One,” I said. My voice was all right. Just. “One kiss. And it stops when I say.”

“When you say,” he agreed.

He came round the table. He didn’t hurry. He put one hand at the side of my face, his thumb along my cheekbone, and tipped my head back. He looked at me for long enough that I nearly spoke, said anything at all, to make him stop looking. Then he bent his head and kissed me.

I’d been kissed before. Twice in my old life, by two men, both of them nice, neither of them memorable; I’d thought of it, both times, as a pleasant thing to do with a mouth. This wasn’t that. His mouth was warm and certain and in no hurry at all. He kissed me as though he’d been thinking about how to do it for a long time and meant to get every part of it right. He coaxed my mouth open and I let him. His tongue touched mine. My hands, which had been at my sides, went up and took hold of the front of his robe and held on. Somewhere in it there was a small sharp sting at my lower lip, the edge of a tooth, and the taste of copper, warm and bright. His or mine, I couldn’t tell. He didn’t stop. I didn’t care. The copper went down my throat with the rest.

And then a second thing went down with it.

I felt it go. A point of warmth, very small, sliding down behind my breastbone and lodging there, a little to the left of the place where the teardrop lay. Like swallowing a seed. It sat there and glowed, quietly, like a coal in a banked fire.

I forgot to say stop.

When he lifted his head, I was holding his robe in both fists and breathing as if I’d run up the gallery steps. He was breathing too. His eyes had gone dark. His thumb moved on my cheekbone, once. His mouth was red.

“That was one,” I said.

“That was one,” he agreed, and kissed me again.

The second one wasn’t careful. It was deeper and harder. His other hand came round the back of my waist and pulled me in against him, all of me against all of him, and I made a sound into his mouth that I’d never made in my life. My back hit the edge of the table. The cloth slid. Pills went everywhere; I heard them go, a little scatter of clicks on the boards. The cold clear part of me that never stops counting thought eight top grade, fifty gold at auction. The rest of me didn’t care at all.

He lifted his head an inch. I could feel him smiling against my mouth.

“Two,” he murmured, and went for a third.

I bit him.

I didn’t think about it. I caught his lower lip between my teeth as it came down to mine and bit, hard, as you’d bite through a thread. It didn’t give. It was like biting a leather strap left out in the frost: my teeth sank a little way and stopped, and went no further however hard I bit. He’d told me so, weeks ago, when I’d headbutted him in the dark. Every part of him was harder than my forehead.

He went absolutely still.

I let go. He straightened up, slowly, and touched his lip with a fingertip. There was nothing on it. Not a drop; barely a dent. He looked at his clean fingertip for a moment as though it had told him something. Then he looked at me.

“I said one,” I said. My voice shook. I didn’t care about that either. “One, Ling Xiao.”

“You said it stops when you say.” His voice wasn’t steady at all. “You didn’t say.”

That was true. I hated that it was true. I’d had two chances to say it and spent both of them hanging on to his robe.

“I’m saying it now.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he took his hand away from my waist, finger by finger, and stepped back one pace, so that there was air between us. I could still feel the shape of his hand on my back. I could feel where all of him had been.

“Then it stops,” he said.

He ran his tongue once along his lip, where my teeth had been. Then he went down on one knee, there on the boards, and began to pick up the pills.

I stood against the table and watched him do it. He found all eight. He found the one that had rolled under the chest and the one that had gone into the crack by the hearthstone. He wiped each one on his sleeve and put them back on the cloth in two rows, the way I’d laid them out. Then he stood up and went to the bed and lay down on his side of the bolster with his back to me.

I blew out the lamp, got into bed on my side, and lay on my back looking at the dark.

My mouth hurt. My lip was swollen where his tooth had caught it; I could feel it with my tongue, a small tight place, already closing. I could taste him still, and the copper. On the other side of the bolster his breathing was slow and even. He was no more asleep than I was.

And under my breastbone, a little to the left of the teardrop, a small warm point sat in the dark and glowed.

I put my hand flat over it. Still there. It didn’t move. It wasn’t the pocket; the pocket was where it always was, a give behind a thought, cool and green. This was new: warm, and small, and it had not been there this morning.

Onset: during the first kiss. Site: retrosternal, left of the mark. Character: warm, constant, not painful. Associated: blood, his or mine, swallowed. Duration: so far, an hour.

I lay there and took its history as if it belonged to somebody who’d come to the counter, because that was the only way I knew to stop my heart going, and somewhere past midnight I heard his breathing change at last into real sleep. I didn’t sleep. I lay with my hand on my chest and the taste of copper in my mouth and counted it, the small warm thing, over and over, until the window went grey.