I’d told Dong Jiu I’d be back next month. That had been six weeks ago.

It sat at the bottom of my list all the way down to He Ping on the bird, under everything else, where I’d put it on purpose so that I wouldn’t think about it. I thought about it anyway. I’ll ask for you. I’d said it to a boy with red ears who’d been made a fool of in front of his own shop for a customer in a plain robe. He’d looked at me as if nobody had ever said such a thing to him in his life. Then I’d gone back up the mountain and broken my leg and moved fifty barrels and watched a man’s memories eaten and emptied an ice cave. And not come.

“You’re frowning,” said Ling Xiao, beside me on the bench saddle.

“I’m doing accounts.”

“You’re always doing accounts. You don’t always frown.” He turned his face into the wind. “Whose?”

“Mine.”

He didn’t ask anything else. He’d been like that since the pocket: quieter, closer, less inclined to make me pay for what he wanted to know. I didn’t trust it. I liked it. I didn’t trust that either.

The Spring Pavilion first. That was business. Business came before debts that weren’t written down.

The manager had had the step scrubbed again. When I came in under the green sign he was behind his counter. He looked up, and his whole face changed: not a smile, but the look of a man who has been waiting for a particular cart on a particular road and has just seen its dust. He came round the counter. He bowed to me. Then he saw who was behind me, bowed again, lower, and took Ling Xiao to the best chair himself.

“Miss.” He came back. “Your master has been busy, I hope?”

“My master has been ill,” I said. “He’s better now.”

I took the bottle out of my bag and set it on his counter. Not a cloth twist this time. A proper bottle, white porcelain, stoppered and sealed with wax. He looked at it, then at me, then broke the seal with his thumbnail and tipped one pill onto the black cloth he kept on the counter for the purpose.

It lay there. Deep dark blue, like the sea a long way out. Perfectly round. It had a shine on it that wasn’t polish, and a smell, when it touched the air, as clean as snowmelt.

The manager didn’t say anything. He picked it up between two fingers and held it up to the window. He held it there a long time. Then he put it down gently, as if it might bruise, and looked at me over it.

“How many?”

“Ten.”

“All like this?”

“All like this.”

He let his breath out through his nose. He’d been forty years on North Street; I’d known from the first day that he could see a pill. “I’ve seen two of these in my life,” he said. “Both at auction. In HunJi. One went for fifty-five gold and the other for sixty-two.” He turned the pill over with one fingertip. “I can give you forty-five.”

“Fifty,” I said.

“Miss, I have to sell them. I have to make something.”

“You’ll sell them for sixty to the first rich man’s steward who walks through that door and smells one. And you’ll be the only shop in He Ping that’s ever had them, and every steward in three towns will know your name.” I folded my hands on the counter. “Fifty. And first refusal on the next ten. That’s my master’s price.”

He looked past me at the best chair. Ling Xiao was sitting in it with his legs crossed and his eyes half shut, as though he’d been brought along to carry the bags and was finding the shop very dull.

“Fifty,” said the manager. “And first refusal.” He sighed. Then he smiled, suddenly, all the way up into his eyes. “Your master drives a hard bargain, miss. I’d like to meet him one day.”

“He doesn’t go out,” I said.

Five hundred gold. I put it in my bag a little at a time, in front of him, without counting it, because he’d already counted it twice and I’d watched him do it. Then I asked the thing I’d come to ask.

“Is there an auction house in He Ping?”

“Here? No, miss. Not for anything worth selling.” He was putting the pills away in a drawer with a lock on it. “HunJi. Three days east by carriage. The Seven Stars hall there sells everything worth having on this side of the mountains.” He glanced up. “If your master has more like these, that’s where he should go.”

I thanked him. On the way out, Ling Xiao fell in beside me and said, without looking down, “After your exam.”

“What?”

“HunJi. I’ll take you. After your exam.” He held the door. “You can sell your ice there, too.”

Madam Su was in her shop under the red silk, with her sleeves pinned back, threading combs onto a board. She looked up when the bell rang. Then she put the board down, slowly, and wiped her hands on her apron.

“You,” she said. “In the blue. With no name.”

“I’m sorry I’m late, Madam Su.”

“Late.” She came round her counter. She was as small and square and quick as I remembered, with the coin-sized scar on her wrist and the heavy brows. “You’re a fortnight late, girl. Your month was up before the plum rain.” She looked at me hard. “Your jars sold.”

“Both?”

“The first in four days. The second in six. Old Chen’s wife, for her knuckles. And the widow from the tea house, for a burn on her arm the size of my hand.” She held up her own wrist with the old scar on it and turned it so I could see. “I used the last scraping on this, before I sold the jar. Look.”

I looked. The scar was the same shape. But it was paler, flatter, the shiny pucker of it gone soft at the edges. Not gone. Better.

“I had women in here every day for a month asking for more,” said Madam Su. “Every day. And I had to tell them I didn’t know when. I didn’t know who. I didn’t even know the girl’s name.” She folded her arms. “Your share’s in the drawer. Two-thirds of two jars. It’s been in the drawer five weeks. I don’t keep other people’s money in my drawer, girl. It makes me nervous.”

I took the six pots out of my bag and set them on her counter in a row.

They weren’t the steeped balm I’d left with her. They were the good stuff, the premium: soul-drawn Contusion essence, worked into clean tallow with lake water from my pocket at one part in fifty, faintly green as the inside of a cucumber. I’d marked each lid with a single character in my best hand. Su.

“These are better,” I said. “Much better. Try one.”

She looked at the lids. She looked at the character on them. For a moment her mouth went soft at one corner, which I hadn’t expected. Then she opened one and put her finger in it and rubbed it into the back of her hand, slowly, as she had the first time. She held her hand up to the light from the door.

I knew what she’d see, because I’d seen it on my own hand and on my own leg. Not a miracle. The skin taking the light differently. Smoother. Brighter. As though somebody had wiped a pane of glass you hadn’t known was dirty.

“Visible,” I said. “That’s what it is. Not better. Visible. A woman puts this on and her husband notices across the room. Her friends notice. They ask her where she got it.”

Madam Su was looking at her hand.

“How much?” she said.

“Fifteen gold a pot. You sell them for whatever you like.”

“Fifteen!” She put her hand down. “Girl, the best face cream in this town is four.”

“The best face cream in this town is lard and rose water. This isn’t.” I didn’t move. “Six pots. Fifteen each. And you’re the only shop in He Ping that gets it, for as long as you want it. If anyone else asks, I’ve never heard of you.”

She looked at me for a long moment with her quick black eyes. I looked back. Then she held out her hand across the counter, palm up, as she had the first time, and I put mine in it.

“Twelve,” she said. “And you give me your name.”

“Fourteen. And I’ll give you my name when you’ve sold all six.”

She laughed. It came out of her like a cough, short and surprised. “Done,” she said. “You’re a dreadful girl.”

“I know,” I said.

The furniture shop was three doors down from the river, where it had always been. The sleek attendant with the oiled hair was at the front, talking to a lady in green. He looked round when I came in. He looked at my plain blue robe and started to look away. Then he looked at the man behind me in white, and at the jade at my waist, and stopped looking anywhere at all.

“Is Dong Jiu here?” I said.

He was. He came out of the back with sawdust in his hair and a plane in his hand. When he saw me he stopped dead and went red from his collar to the tips of his large ears.

“G-guest,” he said. “You came back.”

“I said I’d ask for you.” I didn’t say I was sorry I’d taken six weeks; I could see from his face that he hadn’t thought I’d come at all. “I need something made. Not out of your stock. To my sizes.”

“Yes, guest.” He put the plane down. “What sizes?”

I told him. Drying racks, open-sided, twelve of them: six tiers each, the tiers a hand and a half apart, the slats spaced to a finger’s width so the air could get through. Birch, if he had it. Pegged, not nailed, so they could be taken down flat. I said it all once, quickly, as I’d said my list the first time, and watched his face.

He shut his eyes. His lips moved. Then he opened them and said it all back to me: twelve, six tiers, a hand and a half, a finger’s width, birch, pegged, flat. He didn’t miss a thing.

The sleek attendant had gone very quiet behind us.

“Ten days,” said Dong Jiu. “I’ll do them myself. In the evenings.” He hesitated. “Guest, they’re for drying herbs. A lot of herbs.”

“Yes.”

“Is it for your master?”

I looked at him. He looked back, red to the ears, but steady.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s for my master.”

Dong Jiu nodded slowly. “Then I didn’t make them,” he said. “And I didn’t see you. And when somebody comes to fetch them, I won’t see him either.” He glanced past my shoulder at Ling Xiao, and away again quickly. “Will it be him?”

“It will be him.”

“Then I definitely won’t see him,” said Dong Jiu, with feeling.

I paid half on the counter, in gold, and watched the sleek attendant’s face while I did it. Then I took Dong Jiu’s hand, sawdust and all, and shook it as you’d shake the hand of a man you meant to do business with for a long time.

“You’ve got a remarkable memory,” I said. “Don’t let anyone here tell you otherwise. And don’t let them take your commission.”

He went red again, all the way down. Outside, on the street, Ling Xiao said, “You’ve bought yourself a carpenter.”

“I’ve bought twelve racks.”

“You’ve bought a carpenter,” he said, “who’d walk into a fire for you and not ask why. That’s worth more than racks.” He looked down at me sideways. “You do this a great deal, you know. Pick up people nobody else wants.”

“I don’t. I invest.”

“Hm,” said Ling Xiao.

There was one more shop. I’d walked past it on every trip down the mountain and never gone in: a tailor’s at the corner of the market, with bolts of silk stacked in the window like the layers of a cake and a robe on a stand in the doorway, the green of new leaves over water. I’d stopped in front of it the first time with eleven copper in my sleeve and walked on. I stopped in front of it now.

“Go in,” said Ling Xiao.

“It’s twenty gold.”

“You have five hundred in your sleeve.”

“I have racks to pay for. And jars. And—” I looked at the robe. Under the green was a white underlayer, and the sleeves were lined in a darker green that would show when I lifted my hands, and the ends of the sash were worked with small leaves so fine I’d have wanted a lens to count the stitches. Every robe I owned was sect-issue blue and had belonged to somebody before me. “You’re taking me to HunJi,” I said, to nobody in particular. “To an auction house. I can’t sell anything to anyone looking like the girl who sweeps the Hall.”

“No,” Ling Xiao agreed gravely. “That would be bad for business.”

I went in. The tailor measured me with a knotted string and her mouth full of pins and took the robe in at the waist while we waited, and I paid her twenty gold without arguing over a single copper of it, which Ling Xiao noticed and didn’t mention. I came out with it folded in paper under my arm. He didn’t offer to carry it. He knew better.

“It’s a business expense,” I told him.

“Of course it is,” said Ling Xiao.

On the bird home I counted. Five hundred gold from the Spring Pavilion. Eighty-four from Madam Su, with my share of the old jars left in her drawer against the next six. Half of twelve racks, out. Jars, wax and a second trowel from the market. Twenty for a robe, out, filed under HunJi. And a thing I couldn’t put a number to, which was Madam Su’s face when she saw her own name on the lid of a pot.

I didn’t write that one down.

Then I went into seclusion. For three months the world went on without me.

It came to me at dinner. That was the arrangement, though nobody had made it: I’d come out of my room at dusk, blinking, with my hair tied up anyhow and my fingers stained green, and walk down the steps to the canteen. When he was on the mountain, he’d be there. He wasn’t on the mountain half as often as I’d have liked. At a table by the window, with two bowls in front of him and an expression of polite interest, as though he’d been passing and happened to sit down. The canteen had long since stopped going quiet when he came in. It went quiet when I did, now.

He chose what I ate. That was in the contract. On the first night it was bitter melon, stir-fried with black beans. On the second night it was bitter melon in a clear soup. On the fourth night it was something green and stringy I’d never seen before and couldn’t name. When I’d eaten it all out of pure spite he said, “Good. That was bitter gourd leaf. Nobody eats that,” and looked pleased with himself for the rest of the meal.

He brought the news with the bowls.

Ye Han had tested Fang ChenYue and Fu ZiLin together for a whole day in his fields. At the end of it he’d said nothing at all and given each of them a hoe. Fang ChenYue had written to Kong Wen. Fu ZiLin had written to nobody. They went up to Yun Shui three days in ten now and came back with earth under their nails and an air about them that Capital Peak couldn’t decide whether to envy or resent.

“Tang YunQi went up there,” said Ling Xiao, on the ninth night. “To Yun Shui. With a letter from her father.” He turned a piece of melon over with his chopsticks. “The child at the barrier read the letter. Then he slapped her.”

I put my bowl down. “He slapped her?”

“Once. Very hard. On the cheek. In front of her two friends.” Ling Xiao ate the melon. “Apparently there are rules about who gets through that barrier and how, and nobody had told her the child was older than her father. She’s confined to Heaven Peak. Tang Fan didn’t say a word.”

I picked my bowl up again and ate a piece of melon. It was bitter as gall. I didn’t mind it at all.

On the fifteenth night he told me about Elder Jiang. They’d closed the matter. The sect had decided he’d been killed by demons, on his way west on sect business nobody remembered giving him. His name had gone up on the wall of the Assembly Hall with the names of the honoured dead. “Elder Xiao made a speech,” said Ling Xiao. “It was moving. He looked at me all the way through it.”

On the twentieth night he didn’t come. On the twenty-first he came late, with dust on the hem of his white robe and a smell on him I didn’t know, smoke with a sour edge under it. I didn’t ask. He told me anyway, after a while, in pieces. The sects had made a joint campaign against the demons in the mountains to the north, eight sects together, thousands of practitioners, the Tian Xin Sect’s own Warrior Division among them. They’d marched up into the passes. The demons hadn’t been there. Then they had. It had gone badly. Luo ShuHe of the Qing Cheng Sect, whose name I’d last heard from a demon in a He Ping street, had held a gorge for a day and a night with forty men and brought thirty of them home. Now his was the only name anybody wanted to say.

“And you?” I said.

“I was at the back,” said Ling Xiao. “Carrying bags.”

I looked at him across the table. He looked back with perfect innocence.

“You didn’t do anything,” I said. “On purpose.”

“Lin Xiao is very strong,” he said. “He isn’t that strong. And Tang Fan was watching.” He pushed my bowl towards me. “Eat.”

He kissed me before he went, most nights. Not at the door, where anyone passing might have seen; at the table, once the bowls were stacked, leaning across it as if he were reaching for the teapot. The first time I let him. The second time I told him it was going on his account. By the tenth I’d stopped naming a price, and he’d noticed, and had the decency not to say so. I kept a column for them at the back of the log anyway. I never totalled it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped counting the days. That had never happened to me before, in either life. I counted the dinners instead. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty-two. He brought my racks from He Ping on the thirtieth day of my seclusion, in the dead of night, twelve of them flat-packed and pegged and smelling of new birch. He stacked them outside my door, knocked once and went away. He didn’t come in. He didn’t ask to come into the pocket either. I carried them through myself, one at a time, and stood them up in a row by the lake. I laid the first harvest of my level-four herbs out on them to dry. They fitted to a finger’s width.

And in between, I worked.

The first level-two pill I made was a Spirit Gathering Pill, the simplest of them, three herbs and a long slow fire. I’d read the recipe a hundred times. It took me the whole of the first day to make one. It came out low grade, grey-green and lumpy, with a crack across one side. I sat and looked at it and nearly cried with happiness. Level two. A level-two pill, made by me, in a body that had tested green.

The second day I made four. One of them was mid grade. By the end of the first week I was making ten a day and distilling them twice. By the end of the first month I’d stopped counting grades, because they were all top grade, every one, deep and clean and shining. I counted passes instead. Three. Four. And then, on the night he finally looked at my vessel and said You can, five, with a full cup of lake water and nobody knocking.

Ling Xiao took the first top-grade one off my plate at the twenty-sixth dinner, without asking. He held it up to the lamp. Then he ate it, slowly, with his eyes shut.

“Well?” I said.

“Five passes,” he said, without opening them. “And you were tired on the fourth.”

I hated that he could tell. I loved that he could tell. I ate my bitter melon and didn’t say anything at all.

In the pocket, the herbs I’d planted by the lake grew as if they’d been waiting all their lives for somewhere to grow. The level-fours seeded in a month. The level-fives in six weeks. The three level-sixes from Ye-shishu’s field put up seed-heads in the eighth week. I picked every one of them by hand, laid the seed out on the new racks to dry and planted it: a row, then another row, then a whole bed. The Jade Whorl Lily from the woman’s skirts opened its bud in the tenth week. It was white. It smelled like rain on hot stone. I sat beside it for an hour and did nothing at all.

The pipa flower didn’t seed. It didn’t grow either. It stood at the end of its row with its feet in the wet ground by the lake, exactly as tall as the day I’d planted it, its red petals curled in on each other like a fist. Every few days I knelt down and looked at it. It never changed. But it never died, either. And once, in the eleventh week, when I touched one of its petals with the tip of my finger, it was warm.

The thirtieth dinner was the night before last.

He’d chosen bitter melon, of course. Stuffed, this time, with pork, in a broth with ginger. I ate all of it. When I’d finished I put my chopsticks down side by side on the edge of the bowl and looked at him across the table.

“Thirty,” I said.

“Thirty,” he agreed.

“The contract’s complete.”

“It is.” He looked at me with his chin on his hand. “Shall we draw up another?”

“With a term this time,” I said. “A proper one. With an end date. I’m not having another contract that runs on for ever because you keep going away.”

“Then put a term on it,” said Ling Xiao. “I’ll sign anything you write.” He smiled. “As long as I can read it.”

I didn’t answer. I got up and went back to my room. He let me go. But I could feel him watching me all the way up the canteen steps. The warm point under my breastbone turned to follow him the whole way, like a cat at a window.

That was the night before last. Now the exam was three days off, and I was standing in my pocket by my lake, in the soft light that came from nowhere, with my hands tucked in my apron and earth on my knees.

In front of me ran the beds.

They went round the lake in rings, the way Ye-shishu’s went round his level-sixes: level two on the outside, then three, then four, then five, each ring breathing inward onto the one it held. At the heart of them, nearest the lake, in the dark wet ground where I’d knelt with Ling Xiao three months ago and planted thirty-one stalks, stood a bed of level-six seedlings a hundred long. Green and fine and shining, each with its own small haze of white mist over it like breath on a cold morning. Grown from seed. My seed. By my hand.

Ye-shishu had spent a lifetime on a mountain guarded by ten elders and a barrier, growing level-six herbs that came up top grade one time in a hundred. I’d looked. I’d counted. I had a hundred level-six seedlings. Every one of them was misting like a top-grade herb at harvest. They were eight weeks old.

The books in the library said a mage’s soul was like a sea that took in a hundred rivers. They said the purer the soul force of the mage, the closer the mage stood to the herb, and the better the herb would grow. I’d read that a month ago and thought it was poetry. I stood by my lake now and looked at my seedlings misting in the light. I didn’t think it was poetry any more.

I’d come up this mountain wanting to pass an exam, and then to make a living, and then not to be anybody’s. I’d wanted level two because they’d told me I couldn’t have it. I’d wanted money because I’d had none; a room of my own because I’d never had one in either life; a door I could shut.

I had those now. Or I would, in three days.

What I wanted next was this. All of it. Every herb that grew on the continent and some that didn’t, in rows by my lake, misting. The best herb grower the world had ever seen, and nobody knowing it but me. And one other person, perhaps. If he paid.

Three days.

I knelt down at the end of the row, by the pipa flower, and put my hand on the earth beside it. It was warm. It was always warm there. Then I got up, dusted off my knees and went to make the pill I’d take into the exam.