I slept until the afternoon. When I woke, Ling Xiao was sitting at my table again, as if he’d never left, with my teapot and two cups and a face that said he’d been waiting some time and had enjoyed it.

“Get up,” he said. “We’re going to Yun Shui Peak.”

I lay there and looked at the ceiling. “Why?”

“To fetch my three herbs. Tang Fan said I could choose them from Ye-shishu’s garden.” He poured the second cup and held it out across the room, as though I could reach it from the bed. “And I’ve no use for three level-six herbs. So you’re going to choose them.”

I sat up. “Tang YunQi asked you for those in front of half the Central Lineage.”

“Tang YunQi asked Lin Xiao. Lin Xiao gave her two last year.” He smiled. “Lin Xiao’s had a change of heart.”

“If you give them to me, everyone on this mountain will know by dinner.”

“Yes,” he said, pleased. “Drink your tea.”

I knew about Yun Shui Peak the way everyone in the Mage Division knew about it: as a place you would never go. It sat behind the three great peaks, low and broad and green, like a fat cat asleep behind three thin ones. All the sect’s middle and high herbs grew there, under a barrier you couldn’t see and ten elders you’d never meet. Ye-shishu ran it. People said he was the best grower of herbs the Tian Xin Sect had ever had. They said he hadn’t said ten words to anyone outside his own estate in twenty years.

At the edge of the barrier, Ling Xiao put two fingers to the air and a ripple ran out from them, wide and slow, like the ring a fish leaves on a pond. We waited. Then a child stepped out of nothing in front of us.

He was seven or eight, in a plain blue robe, with his hair combed back hard from his forehead and a face as grave as a magistrate’s. He looked past me as though I were a bush and straight up at Ling Xiao.

“Lin Xiao-shizi.”

“I am Lin Xiao.” Ling Xiao bowed to him. He bowed properly, the full bow, to a child who came up to his belt.

“This way.” The child turned and walked back into the air. Ling Xiao took my hand and walked me in after him.

The air on the other side was thick. That was the first thing. It went into my lungs like broth instead of water, so rich with spiritual energy I could have bottled it. Under the richness was the smell of herbs, hundreds of them, thousands, layered and folded on one another like the smell of a great kitchen at noon. I stopped walking. I didn’t mean to. Ling Xiao towed me on by the hand. I let myself be towed with my mouth open.

There were fields. Terraces of them, stepping down and round the whole broad flank of the mountain, each one planted in rows as straight as a ruled ledger, each one a different green. A sign at the edge of the first said Level four. A sign at the edge of the next said Level five. Some of the plants I knew from the drawings I’d been staring at the day before. Most I didn’t. I wanted to stop at every one. I wanted to kneel down in the dirt and put my face in them.

“Close your mouth,” murmured Ling Xiao. “You’ll swallow a bee.”

The child left us at the door of a long, plain house of blue stone, without a word. He was gone the moment I looked away. Inside, a man stood at a table sorting seeds with a bone spatula. He was thin and dark and of no particular age, with a long, still face and hands stained to the wrist the colour of good earth. He didn’t look up when we came in. He finished the row he was sorting first.

“Ye-shishu,” said Ling Xiao. “I’ve come for this year’s prize.”

Ye Han looked up. His eyes went over Ling Xiao with mild surprise, as you’d look at a neighbour’s dog that had started to wag its tail after five years of growling. Then they came to me, and stayed.

I bowed. “Ye-shishu.”

He didn’t say anything to me. To Ling Xiao he said, “Congratulations. Three stalks, level six or below. The level six fields are in the middle. Choose, and tell me which, and I’ll lift them.”

The level-six fields were at the heart of the estate, ringed by all the rest like a jewel set in a brooch. Ling Xiao walked me there, let go of my hand and stood back with his arms folded. He meant me to choose by myself. He was going to watch me do it.

Before I started I looked back the way we’d come: ring outside ring, each a level lower than the one it held, all of them breathing inward. Nobody had told me that was how you did it. Nobody needed to. Steal that, I thought. It was the one thing on Yun Shui I could take without asking.

I walked the rows twice. Most of the plants were seedlings, some barely out of the ground; only a handful in each row were grown. I compared them in my head against the herbs on the grass by my lake, the three level-sixes I’d named and the nine I hadn’t. Five of the grown ones here were kinds I already had, from the ice. I knew them now. I’d looked at their drawings for a day.

I chose three I didn’t have.

I’d have chosen seedlings, if I could. Seedlings were the real prize. Seedlings, planted by my lake, would give me seed; seed would give me a field; a field would give me level-six herbs for as long as I lived. But a level-one mage of Capital Peak who turned down three grown level-six herbs for three green shoots would have the whole sect asking where she meant to plant them. So I chose grown ones, and stood over each in turn being sorry.

Then I got out my trowel.

It was my own, from the pocket, a narrow little blade I’d bought in He Ping for half a silver and sharpened myself. I’d learned on my own herbs, the week my leg was in splints, that the roots were where a herb kept everything. Tear a root and the plant bled its strength out through the tear like water from a cracked jar; I’d ruined a dozen good stalks before I’d understood it. Since then I’d dug every herb I owned with my soul force laid along the blade and round the roots like a glove. Lately, in the cave, I’d drawn a hair-thin line of soul force four hundred times in a night. I knelt in Ye-shishu’s dirt, wrapped the first root in soul force and lifted it whole. Then the second. Then the third.

When I stood up with all three in my hands, roots and all, with nothing on them but a little crumb of earth, Ye Han was standing beside Ling Xiao at the end of the row. I hadn’t heard him come. He was looking at my hands.

“Have you tended herbs for your shifu?” he said.

“No, Ye-shishu.”

“For anyone?”

“No, Ye-shishu.”

“Then where did you learn to lift a root like that?”

“From a book,” I said. “It said the roots were the most important part and broke most easily. It said soul force would hold them. So I tried it.” I made my eyes as round as I could. “Did I do it wrong?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ling Xiao’s mouth go up at one side and stay there.

Ye Han looked at me for a long moment. He had a still face, but it wasn’t an empty one; a thought went on behind it, slowly, like weather behind a hill. Then, for the first time, the corner of his own mouth moved.

“No,” he said. “You did it right. Most people I’ve had here couldn’t do it right with a year’s practice.” He looked at the herbs in my hands, then at me again. “Would you like to come here? Not as a disciple. I know you have a shifu. To help. A few days in ten, in the fields. Fifty merit points a day, and whatever you learn.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Fifty merit points a day was more than twice what a day of scrubbing the hall earned. And whatever I learned. In this place. With this man, who’d looked at a root and known what it meant.

“Think about it,” said Ye Han. “Three days.” And he went back to his seeds.

Ling Xiao walked me back to Capital Peak with his hand in the small of my back the whole distance, through the middle of the afternoon, past every courtyard where anybody might be standing. I didn’t notice. I was doing sums. Fifty merit points a day, three days in ten. The fields. Level-four seed, level-five seed, perhaps one day level-six. Ye-shishu’s hands, stained to the wrist.

By the time we reached the gate of Capital Peak I’d spent the fifty merit points eleven different ways. I’d forgotten entirely what it would look like, Lin Xiao’s three prize herbs going home in a Capital Peak girl’s hands with Lin Xiao’s hand at her back. Other people hadn’t.

Shifu sent for me before I’d had time to put the herbs away.

This time it wasn’t the study. It was the Assembly Hall of Capital Peak, full. Kong Wen sat in the high chair. On the benches down either side sat all my seniors: Fang ChenYue, Fu ZiLin, Wu Yan with his careful eyes, NanGong-shijie with her severe knot of hair, Zhao DaZhou, Mao Can. Zhao-shishu sat with his ledger on his knee. Beside him sat two older men I’d never seen, in the rich blue robes of Capital Peak’s elders, who looked at me as though I’d been sent to them for pricing.

“Young Seven.” Kong Wen’s voice was grave. “I hear Ye-shishu of Yun Shui Peak has asked you to work with him. Is it true?”

It had been two hours. Two.

“He asked me to think about it, Shifu.”

Somebody on the benches drew a breath. Kong Wen held up a hand.

“Tell us what happened. All of it.”

So I told them. Not all of it. I left out how long the digging had taken, the trowel and the four hundred cuts in the cave; I said I’d read about soul force and roots in a book and tried it, which was true as far as it went. When I’d finished, nobody spoke for a while.

“You’ve been very fortunate,” said Kong Wen at last. He said it gently and sadly, as though fortune were a weight I’d have to bear. “Ye-shishu has never taken anyone onto his peak. Never. But XiaoMo, you’re a level-one mage. Everything on Yun Shui grows at level four and above. What could you do there that would repay what he’d give you?” He let that sit. “If it were your Da Shixiong,” he said, “or your Second Shixiong…”

Fang ChenYue’s head came up. Kong Wen looked at him, once. He looked down again.

I looked at my shifu. I looked at the two elders on either side of him, with their satisfied, expectant faces, waiting for the small grateful girl to understand what was being asked of her and give it up with tears in her eyes. And I understood a number of things at once.

I understood that Ye Han had never in twenty years let anyone onto his peak who hadn’t caught his eye himself. Kong Wen had been trying to get his two best disciples onto it for years and failing. I understood that Kong Wen couldn’t put them there himself. Only one person could open that door now. She was standing in the middle of his Assembly Hall in a plain blue robe with earth still under her fingernails. And I understood that he thought I was too young, too grateful and too stupid to know what my yes was worth.

“Shifu’s right,” I said.

The two elders smiled.

“I’m only level one. I’d waste it.” I put my hands together. “Da Shixiong and Second Shixiong would do far better. I’ll tell Ye-shishu so when I go back.”

“Good,” said Kong Wen. “Good girl.” He sat back. The whole hall sat back with him. The meeting was over.

He didn’t ask me for the herbs. That surprised me. Instead, as I was leaving, he had Zhao-shishu give me three boxes of white jade, each as long as my forearm, cool to the touch without being cold. “For when you’re a level-six mage,” said Kong Wen, kindly. “To keep your herbs in, until then.”

I knew what they were. I’d read about them in the library: boxes cut from jade fine enough to hold a herb’s strength in without leaking, for the highest herbs, for level seven and above. Each of them was worth more than everything I’d earned at the Spring Pavilion put together. They were the price of my yes.

At the door he called after me. “XiaoMo.” I turned. He wasn’t smiling now. In the high chair, with the elders gone quiet on either side of him, he looked tired, and older than I’d thought him. “If there is ever a thing you need from your shifu,” he said, “one thing, whatever it is, come and ask me for it.”

I bowed. I put it away with the boxes. A promise from a man who’d just bought me was still a promise, and I knew exactly what it was worth: one thing, whatever it was. I meant to choose it very carefully.

He’d have been surprised to know how much he’d overpaid.

Fang ChenYue found me at breakfast the next morning. He came and sat across the table from me with a face like a man who’d come to confess a crime.

“Xiao Shimei. About yesterday. You mustn’t do it. Not on our account. If it’s a matter of Shifu—”

“It isn’t,” I said. “Da Shixiong, I’m level one. You and Second Shixiong have been level four for three years. You’ve been stuck there for two. Go to Yun Shui. Learn everything he knows. Come back and teach me.”

He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were wet. He didn’t let them spill; he’d had a long apprenticeship in not letting things spill. “Xiao Shimei,” he said, “you’re too good.”

“I’m not good at all. I’m investing.” I pushed my bowl across to him. “Eat my egg. I can’t face it.”

He laughed, a little shakily, and ate it. When he got up to go, he turned back.

“Your Second Shixiong asked me to give you a message.”

“Yes?”

“He said,” said Fang ChenYue, with great care, “that you should mind your own business.”

“And?”

“And that he owes you one.” Fang ChenYue paused. “He said it twice, Xiao Shimei. I’ve known him since we were boys. I’ve never heard him say it once.”

I watched him all the way across the hall. At the door Fu ZiLin was waiting for him, tall and cold, with his face like a frozen lake. As Fang ChenYue reached him, Fu ZiLin looked over his shoulder, straight at me, across the whole length of the canteen. He held the look for a moment. Then he inclined his head, perhaps half the width of a finger.

I went back to my rice. In Fu ZiLin’s language, I was fairly sure, that had been a speech.

Ling Xiao took me back to Yun Shui two days later to give Ye Han my answer.

The child met us again at the barrier and left us again at the edge of the estate. This time Ye Han wasn’t in the stone house. We went looking for him through the fields and found the hut where he kept his tools at the far edge of the level-five terraces, a small square building of wooden boards with its door half open. We were still twenty paces off when Ling Xiao stopped dead, caught my arm and put his other hand over my mouth.

He didn’t say anything. He stood with his head a little on one side, listening. I listened too. I couldn’t hear a thing but the wind in the herbs and a bee somewhere. He stood like that for the time it takes to say a long sentence slowly, then another. Then he took his hand away from my mouth and stepped back onto the path as though nothing had happened.

“There’s someone with him,” he said, low. “One of Tang Fan’s. He’s been sent to make sure Ye Han doesn’t take you.”

“Why?”

He gave me a look that said Must I? “Because whoever stands at Ye Han’s elbow learns what grows on this peak, and how, and where it goes. Tang Fan likes to know who stands at people’s elbows. He’d like it to be someone of his. Tang YunQi, for preference. Failing her, anyone but you.” His mouth went thin. “He says your background is doubtful. A village girl nobody knew, who came up with nothing and now has the Da Shixiong’s ear. He says, for all anyone knows, you might be a spy.”

I stared at him. “A spy? For whom?”

“He didn’t say. I doubt he’s decided.” Ling Xiao took my arm again, lightly. “Walk. He’s leaving by the back. Don’t look.”

I didn’t look. I walked beside him down the path towards the hut with my heart going hard and my face perfectly pleasant. I thought about Tang Fan’s kind, lined face turned towards me in the arena, his eyes resting on the jade at my waist. He’s begun to wonder. I’d thought, then, that he was wondering about Lin Xiao. I hadn’t thought he’d get round to me so soon.

Ye Han was standing in the doorway when we reached the hut. His face was as still as ever.

“Well,” he said. “Have you decided?”

“Yes, Ye-shishu.” I put my hands together. “I’m more grateful than I can say. I’m going to say no.”

He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look anything. “Because your shifu wishes it.”

“Because I’m level one, Ye-shishu. I’d waste your time. And because I have two shixiongs who wouldn’t.” I lifted my head. “Fang ChenYue and Fu ZiLin. They’ve been level-four mages for three years. Da Shixiong is the most patient man on Capital Peak. Second Shixiong is the most exact. He measures water by the drop. Da Shixiong talks to every plant he passes as if it might answer. They work best together.” I said that with a perfectly straight face. “If you take one, Ye-shishu, I really think you ought to take both.”

Ye Han looked at me. Then he looked past me at Ling Xiao.

“It’s true,” said Ling Xiao. I nearly turned round to stare at him. “I’ve met them both. Fang ChenYue is good with people; you won’t have to explain a thing to him twice. Fu ZiLin won’t talk to you at all, which I expect you’d prefer. And he’s careful. Neither of them has ever let anyone down that I’ve heard of.” He smiled his public smile. “They’re Capital Peak’s best. And they’re Kong Wen’s, not Tang Fan’s.”

There was a silence. In it, something happened behind Ye Han’s still face, slow and deep, like a stone settling in a river.

“I’ll test them,” he said at last. “Both. If they’re as you say, I’ll take both.” He looked at me again. This time the corner of his mouth went all the way up. “And you, You XiaoMo. You’ll come anyway. Not to work. When you like. Bring your questions.”

On the way down the hill, out of the barrier and back into thin ordinary air, I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then I said, “You backed them.”

“I backed you.”

“You said they were Kong Wen’s, not Tang Fan’s. To Ye Han. Out loud.”

“Ye Han already knew whose they were. He just liked hearing someone say it.” He glanced down at me. “Besides. Your two shixiongs on Yun Shui means your two shixiongs owe you a debt. Kong Wen owes you three jade boxes’ worth of gratitude he doesn’t know he owes. Ye Han likes you. And Tang Fan’s man went home with nothing.” He sounded satisfied. “I thought that was a good afternoon’s work.”

I stopped on the path and looked up at him.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.” I started walking again. “I’m adding it up.”

He came that evening.

I’d been waiting. I hadn’t admitted it to myself, but I’d eaten my dinner early and washed my face and sat on the edge of my bed with the three level-six herbs on a cloth beside me. I’d been waiting. When he came in without knocking, as he always did, I stood up. He stopped just inside the door and looked at the herbs, then at me.

“I’m going to plant them,” I said. “And the cave herbs, all of them, the ones I know and the ones I don’t. Tonight.” I held out my hand. “You can come in. If you like.”

The pocket is mine. Entry by invitation only. I’d written it into the Deal myself, in my best characters, in the Najia, with my leg in splints. I’d taken him in once, the night he’d looked at the teardrop. He’d never come in without being asked. He’d never asked.

He looked at my hand for a moment. Then he took it.

The pocket at night was the same as the pocket by day. That was one of the things I liked best about it; it had no night, only a soft even light that came from nowhere in particular and lay on everything alike. The lake was flat and green and still. My meadow ran down to it, with the beds I’d cut and the level-two seedlings in their rows; and along the shore, white and enormous and absurd, rose the hill of ice. A thousand and seven sculptures, piled up like a quarry, with a woman on top, waving.

Ling Xiao looked at it for a long moment.

“You’ll want somewhere to keep that,” he said. “Out of the weather.”

“There isn’t any weather.”

“Out of sight, then.” He looked round, slowly, at the meadow and the lake and the light. “A roof. Walls. A floor that isn’t grass.” He turned the idea over, as he turned everything. “A house.”

“I don’t know how to build a house.”

“No,” he said. “I do.”

I looked at him. He was looking at the meadow by the lake, measuring it, in a way I knew from my own face in the mirror. I didn’t say anything. I put it on the list.

Then we planted.

I’d chosen the spot already, the best ground I had, by the lake where the soil was darkest. I’d dug the beds that afternoon. I knelt and made the holes, a hand’s depth, a hand’s width apart. Ling Xiao knelt across the bed from me in his white robe with his sleeves pushed back, which I’d never seen him do. He handed me the herbs one by one: the Jade Whorl Lily from the woman’s skirts, the feathery dark one from the horse’s chest, the three from Ye-shishu’s field, all the rest, the ones with names and the ones without. He held each one by the stalk while I firmed the earth round the roots. He didn’t get any dirt on his robe. I didn’t know how.

The pipa flower I planted last, by itself, at the very end of the row, nearest the water.

“You know what it is,” I said. I didn’t look up. “You stopped in front of it, in the cave. You looked at it for a long time.”

“I’ve seen one before,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere it shouldn’t have been either.” He handed me the trowel. “Plant it deep. It likes its feet wet.”

So I planted it deep. When I’d done, I sat back on my heels and looked along the row. A stalk of every kind I had, thirty-one kinds, from level four to level six and some I couldn’t name, all standing up in my dark wet ground by my green lake. In a month, if the lake did for them what it did for everything else, some of them would seed. In a year I’d have a field. In five I’d have more level-six herbs than Yun Shui.

“Your breakthrough,” Ling Xiao said.

I looked at him. He was sitting back on his heels too, his hands loose on his knees.

“You wanted to ask me. In the cave. You didn’t, because you were busy.” He was watching the row of herbs, not me. “You emptied yourself to the bottom and didn’t drink. You slept two days. When you woke you’d doubled. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how it’s done. For mages, most of the time. You press on the walls until they won’t take any more pressing. Then one day the wall gives. It needed a push. Running dry was the push.” He picked a crumb of earth off his knee. “It’ll get harder each time. The walls get thicker. You’ll need more pressure, and longer. But you’ll find it.” He looked at me then. “You’ll refine level two now. Easily. You were ready a week ago.”

I sat in the dirt and looked at him.

He’d just told me something I’d wanted to know for a week, freely, without a price, without a joke, without making me guess. He’d knelt in my mud for an hour and held my herbs while I planted them. He’d stood in front of a lamp a yard from Elder Xiao’s men and let them look straight through him to keep me hidden. He’d stood in Ye Han’s hut and said Kong Wen’s, not Tang Fan’s out loud. He’d put a thing in me I didn’t understand. I hadn’t forgiven him for it. I didn’t know if I ever would.

And I was going to do this anyway. I’d been going to since the path down from Yun Shui. Perhaps since the cave.

I got up on my knees and leaned across the bed of herbs. I put one hand flat on his chest to steady myself, and kissed him.

He went absolutely still under my hand. I felt it, the stillness, right through him, as if I’d frozen him. His mouth didn’t move. For one long moment I thought I’d got it wrong, that I’d misread every tell he had, like a fool, like the first time. Then I felt his heart go under my palm, once, hard, like a fist against a door.

He kissed me back.

It wasn’t like the other night. It wasn’t careful and it wasn’t greedy. It was slow and wondering. He didn’t put his hands on me at all. They stayed on his knees. I could feel them there, tight. He let me lead. I didn’t think he could have done anything else. I took my time about it, because I could. For once I had every single thing I wanted in front of me and nothing to count. When I’d had enough, or nearly, I took my mouth away and sat back on my heels in the mud.

He didn’t move. He looked at me as though I’d hit him.

“This one,” I said, “isn’t going on your account.”

His lips parted. Nothing came out of them. I’d never seen that before either: Ling Xiao, with nothing to say.

I got up, brushed off my knees and walked down to the lake to wash my hands. I left him kneeling there by the herbs in his clean white robe. Behind me, for a long time, there wasn’t a sound. Then I heard him laugh, low, almost under his breath, as you laugh when a blow has knocked the wind out of you and you’ve just found you can breathe again.

Under my breastbone, the warm point lay quiet and steady and pointed back up the bank at him. I didn’t look at it. I washed my hands in my own lake, slowly, finger by finger, and let it point.