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Their flight from Four Seasons Manor came to a rather anticlimactic end not far down the road. “All right, enough,” Yun Shuying said, and hooked his ankle out from under him. Her hands, though, guided him carefully to the ground when he failed to catch his balance. “If you’re too tired to counter that, you’re too tired to travel,” she told him.
Mo Weixu was silent. Once, he had not feared the sharpness of his own words, but these days they crammed into his throat and stopped there, unable to escape. Instead, he sat where she had put him, watching through half-closed eyes as Shuying set up camp.
“You can tell me, you know,” Shuying said as she poked the first flames of their night’s fire. “I know I’ve never asked, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hear it.”
Mo Weixu tried to speak, and coughed instead. He hunched and pressed his mouth into his elbow, chest spasming, wondering if it was the aftereffects of the poison or the thing that had been choking him all these years, that had kept him turning their journeys away from Mount Qingfeng and whatever was left there.
Yun Shuying was watching him, eyes unreadable, when he finally looked up. “I liked that you didn’t ask. It was like it didn’t matter,” he rasped.
“It doesn’t, not to me. The past is the past.”
Mo Weixu closed his eyes. “That was why…I trusted you. After—”
He took a shuddering breath. For a moment, he was there again on the slopes of Mount Qingfeng, the last of his strength seeping into the soil with his pooling blood. He was watching as his father’s face twisted in disgust, as if every measure of warmth and pride he had ever shown Mo Weixu evaporated in an instant.
Yun Shuying rose and offered a hand. He looked at it blankly, then she stuck it more insistently in his face and he realized she wanted to help him up. He took it, his limbs heavy as they moved to the fireside. He watched the flames flicker and catch on wood until their restless motion grounded him in the present.
“Who is Mo Huaiyang?” she asked at last.
Mo Weixu looked up at her, blinking. “You never even heard his name?”
Yun Shuying shrugged. “Should I have?”
He shook his head. It had been a relief to be so disconnected from the sects, from the martial arts world in general, when he had first joined Yun Shuying, but the depth of her ignorance of their workings still sometimes surprised him. His father’s reputation had been a cornerstone of his life for so many years. “I suppose not. He was the leader of the Gentle Wind Sword Sect…and my father.”
There was a look Yun Shuying got when she was putting pieces of a puzzle together. She wore it now, her brows drawn together as she looked past him. “He planned the attack that destroyed Ghost Valley,” she guessed. “And…your shidi?” She glanced up, and her gaze flickered when he nodded. He had guessed as much, but the way the boy at the manor had talked confirmed it. “I’m sorry. You must have loved them both.”
His breath caught at that. He didn’t want to think about loving his father—although of course he had, of course. Loved, obeyed, admired, trusted. “My father was a very…inflexible man. He built himself up as a pillar of morality and expected that we all would follow his path without straying. If anyone willingly associated with evil, he, too, must be evil.”
“And your shidi was betrothed to a ghost.”
Mo Weixu nodded. “She didn’t seem like a ghost—she was a little wild, but she was funny, and touchingly pleased to be treated as family. Weining loved her. I worried he was going to just mess around forever, but we saw he could be serious, if it was for her.” He swallowed hard. “After we found out what she was, they ran off together. Ghost Valley was going to host the wedding; my father was furious.”
There was a spray of sparks as Yun Shuying poked a stick into the fire, then let it fall onto the flames. “I see,” she said. It was a neutral response, an indication she was listening, but it stuck like thorns under his skin.
“You don’t,” he said harshly. “It was worse than you’re thinking. My shishu tried to stop him; my father cut him down as if the years of friendship between them were nothing. He killed disciples who protested. I wasn’t there to see it firsthand, but I held Fan-shishu through his last breath, and then I followed my father down the mountain.” He swallowed hard. Even thinking of it still made him want to retch—not just the bloodiness of the whole thing, but the coldness. “He said I could duel him, if I thought I had a right to challenge him. I think he meant it as a mercy; I don’t think he could bring himself to kill me outright.”
Yun Shuying went very still. Mo Weixu knew she had understood; she had been the one to find him, barely clinging to life at the side of the road. He looked up, meeting her eyes, and was comforted to find fury burning there, hotter even than their campfire. He liked her anger. It was so often born of a desire to make the world more fair than it was. He liked it even better now, when, still, all he could find for his father was a hollow kind of horror.
“The martial arts world is nothing but cliques, and blame games, and grudges held against anyone associated with someone who wronged you,” Yun Shuying muttered eventually, her mouth twisting in distaste. “This Wen Kexing, he’s just as bad.”
“He seemed…deeply hurt,” Mo Weixu said, marveling a little. The renowned Ghost Valley Master had been near tears even in his rage, and a once-friend of Cao Weining’s had still called him shishu and ordered him to back down without fear. “I almost envy him, having a target for his anger.”
“You don’t mean that,” Yun Shuying said in disbelief. “You never get angry.”
He shrugged. He had spent plenty of time angry since she had found him—angry at the wrong things, in the wrong proportions, never in a way that was worth showing, even if he could force the words past his teeth or the violence into his hands. “You’re right. I don’t mean it, but not for that reason.”
It was only the third time Mo Weixu had ever approached Four Seasons Manor, and he felt more uneasy than ever. His last visit had been for dinner only—one that went better than he and Zhang Chengling had feared, but worse than Yun Shuying had hoped.
The Manor might be Zhou Zishu’s again, but in Mo Weixu’s mind, the whole of Kunzhou was marked out as Wen Kexing’s territory. To enter it, even with an invitation, went against all of his instincts. The leaves were turning, though, and they had promises to keep.
“You’re still sure about wearing that?” Mo Weixu grumbled to Yun Shuying, falling back on old habits of seniority.
Yun Shuying looked down at herself, then raised an eyebrow. He took her point. Her layers of deep grey and washed-out indigo were no different than any other clothes she owned; her hair, twisted half-up and held with a simple wooden pin, was also no different. He matched her, these days. Still, the urge was there to fuss, to urge decorum, to tease. He summoned a proper smile from somewhere. “They’ll think you weren’t raised properly,” he tried.
“I wasn’t,” she said lightly. She looked as if she was about to fling a quip back, then reconsidered it and fell silent instead. He squinted up at the sky, wrestling down a spiky feeling he didn’t want to give any attention. The next line of the call-and-response should be, You’re just afraid they’ll know you weren’t either.
The ghosts of his sect loomed too close for comfort right now for that joke. He wished she would make it anyway; it would be a perverse kind of comfort. Some days he envied her, not knowing who her people were. Some days he wished he had never told her about his.
“It will be good to see Chengling,” he tried.
Yun Shuying’s smile made her look as young as she really was.
The gate of Four Seasons Manor opened to them all too soon, and they received as formal a welcome as could be expected from this sect. Mo Weixu glanced at Wen Kexing throughout, unable to help it. It was like sharing a room with a venomous snake; you wanted to make sure its fangs didn’t come near you.
Their eyes caught only once. There was a flicker in Wen Kexing’s gaze—not the killing fury, but something dangerous, all the same.
Last year, on the road, Zhang Chengling had issued an invitation.
“Mo-da-ge, there’s something I’ve been wanting to mention to you.”
Zhang Chengling’s cheeks were red, his eyes hazy; they had all overindulged a little, safe in an inn on the edge of nowhere. Yun Shuying had dozed off hunched over the table, which Mo Weixu suspected was more due to exhaustion than drink.
“Mm?” Mo Weixu prompted.
“About graves,” Zhang Chengling said.
Mo Weixu grimaced. The grave-digging at the end of this mess had been the worst part, but there were few enough standing and able to dig. It wouldn’t be his first or his last time, but it didn’t surprise him that it was bothering the kid. “They’re at rest now,” he said.
Zhang Chengling frowned. “No, not about that. Cao-da-ge. Cao-da-ge’s grave. He’s buried at Four Seasons Manor—I don’t know if you knew that. You could come with me and see him when I go back.”
“Don’t,” Mo Weixu said.
“We wouldn’t even have to tell shishu!” Zhang Chengling’s hand pulled at his sleeve, his face full of sincerity, and Mo Weixu went rigid.
A series of images flashed through his mind: the table upset, jars shattered, wine spilling across the floor. Zhang Chengling’s shocked face, falling away from him. Yun Shuying rudely awoken by the noise. Mo Weixu standing tall, his hand still outstretched, a figure of stern fury.
He turned his head, clenching his jaw. He didn’t even want it to happen, but the possibility of it lived under his skin. You look like her, not me, his father had often told him. Junior disciples had grumbled, after catching the sharp edge of his tongue, Like father, like son. Fan-shishu would just shake his head and say that he should focus on being Mo Weixu.
And what if Mo Weixu looked too much like Mo Huaiyang after all, underneath?
A hand landed on his back, bringing him back into the moment that was real. Zhang Chengling patted him a few more times. “I’m sorry, I won’t bring it up again. But the invitation is open.”
“Thank you,” Mo Weixu said.
In the end, he helped Yun Shuying up to bed, and then Zhang Chengling, and no wine at all was spilled.
The path through the trees was marked with bedraggled strings, once bright white but smudged with time, the occasional flag of ribbon flying in the breeze. Sunlight twirled through the filter of the leaves as Mo Weixu allowed his hand to follow the trail of the string, his feet a heartbeat behind.
“We keep the path clear, so you shouldn’t have any trouble,” Zhang Chengling had told him at the top of the trail. He had not asked if Mo Weixu was sure he wanted to go alone, but he had felt the younger man’s eyes on his back as the yawning orange tunnel of the trees swallowed him.
When he stepped into the sunlight at the end, he expected only stone and sky for company. Instead, he saw a figure trailing peacock-blue sleeves before he even caught sight of the two stone mounds beyond.
Wen Kexing.
Instinct froze his footsteps, but curiosity held him there, one hand tucked at the small of his back. Zhang Chengling had never told him what, exactly, Gu Xiang had been to Wen Kexing; he wasn’t sure if Wen Kexing’s grief was for all of Ghost Valley, or the single ghost Mo Weixu had known. But here he was—tending to both graves.
The wind picked up, blowing a flurry of flame-bright leaves over Mo Weixu’s head. He remembered that he was neither a statue nor one to intrude on another’s grief. He turned, but a voice cracked across the clearing: “Wait.”
Mo Weixu’s head snapped up, his body taut as a bowstring. But Wen Kexing was still on his knees, twisted to look at him. He lifted one hand. “Mo Weixu. Come.”
It took a moment for the scrambled urgency of the last few moments to pass. He almost retreated into the trees after all, but Wen Kexing waited, twitching his fingers slightly when he grew impatient.
He took a hesitant step, and then another, until his toes stopped a pace short of the magnificent cloth spread carelessly over the white dust of the clearing. He could half-see the graves he had come to visit, but Wen Kexing took all of his attention. Mo Weixu swallowed dryly and met the other man’s eyes.
Perhaps it was only the height difference with Wen Kexing seated, but his upturned face looked vulnerable, almost childish. Mo Weixu realized with a start that they were about the same age—somehow this had never occurred to him in their previous meetings, where Wen Kexing had loomed larger than life, the Ghost Valley Master more real than the man.
“Sit,” Wen Kexing invited, shifting sideways. “There’s more than enough room for two.” He patted the ground beside him.
Just like the walk across the clearing, Mo Weixu concentrated on the mechanics to calm his racing thoughts: bending, one knee on the ground, then the other. Settling onto his heels. Then, the reason he had come. The first slab, carved with Cao Weining’s name.
The sight of it struck him hard. There had never been one moment of realizing, Weining is dead. He had woken to a world where it was likely his shidi lay at the top of a pile of familiar bodies, and the assumption had proven correct in time. But this was real in a way that simple knowledge wasn’t. He reached out to touch the engraved 曹, distantly registering that his fingers shook.
“By now,” Wen Kexing said, “perhaps they’ve been born again. They’ll find each other again, but they’ll have forgotten who they were raised by, when they were Xiao Cao and Ah Xiang. Maybe they won’t be raised by monsters, this time.”
Mo Weixu stiffened, something hot and unpleasant coursing through him. “I won’t talk about this with you.”
“It’s only the truth,” Wen Kexing said.
He could feel his body again, blood pulsing under his skin, muscles tense, all of it too loud. The anger that had been coiling around his heart for years bubbled up again, trapped just beneath the surface. “He wasn’t raised by monsters. He was loved.” He thought of Fan-shishu, and watching the light in his eyes go out.
Wen Kexing laughed. “Did it help?”
Did it help.
Did it help? The people who loved Weining had done everything they could for him. To brush them aside because that had not been enough to save him was to spit on their sacrifice.
Something snapped. Mo Weixu found himself on his feet, fists clenched and shaking by his sides, as Wen Kexing went sprawling in the dirt, with no memory of the time in between. Wen Kexing smiled up at him, sharp and ugly, and picked himself up. “This is what you want?” he said.
Mo Weixu could not find words. They were somewhere far away, much less immediate than the buzzing energy in his limbs. It was almost a relief, to finally find that the violence could escape the cage of his mind after all. How fitting, that it was Wen Kexing who had finally pried it loose.
Giving into inevitability, Mo Weixu threw himself at Wen Kexing, fists first.
Wen Kexing rolled away from that first attack with ease, and then he was on his feet. He turned Mo Weixu’s blows aside smoothly, all their power wasted on empty air. “Fight back,” Mo Weixu snarled. “What kind of Ghost Valley Master are you?”
But Wen Kexing wouldn’t. He seemed to slide out of the path of every punch and kick Mo Weixu aimed at him, twisting and twirling like a leaf on the wind. Mo Weixu knew what he was doing. This wasn’t the Ghost Valley Master at all, but Wen Kexing of Four Seasons Manor, putting four years of training in its martial arts into practice specifically to make him look like an idiot.
He forgot where they were until he nearly stumbled over one of the grave markers—not the one marked Cao Weining, he realized, panting, but Cao-furen. The shock was as good as throwing a bucket of water over him. He stumbled to his knees again, staring at it.
“So she married him,” he said. “So she married him after all, despite—” To his horror, his voice choked off there. He had not known if the tears would come or not, finally seeing these graves. He felt stripped bare with a witness to this reaction.
Wen Kexing drifted closer, but Mo Weixu made no move to hit him again. “No,” he said, his voice heavy. “Ghost Valley was invaded before the wedding. Ah Xu, Zhou Zishu, gave her the marriage in death she never got in life.”
Silently, Mo Weixu traced the characters, as he had Weining’s name. He remembered the one New Year she had spent with them; the first of many, Fan-shishu had insisted at the time. Mo Weixu hadn’t been sure of her yet, even as he couldn’t help liking her. “She was sweet,” he said. Wen Kexing snorted, but Mo Weixu just swallowed, and swallowed again. “I liked her,” he said. He turned, looking up into Wen Kexing’s face. The other man studied him, not quite readable, something sharp and coiled just behind his eyes.
There was only one thing he really wanted from Wen Kexing.
“Did you kill my father?” he asked.
Wen Kexing’s smile was a naked blade. “Yes.”
Mo Weixu clenched his fists in his lap, breathing through the tightness in his chest. Wen Kexing tilted his head, birdlike. “Are you going to strike me or thank me?”
There was no answer for that. Whatever comes, you face it like a man, his father had said once. Head up. No flinching. Mo Weixu let his head drop, his face twisting. Wen Kexing knew the very worst of him; Wen Kexing had met his father, and killed him. What was the point in putting a brave face on it?
The peacock-blue skirts appeared in his field of view, and then Wen Kexing knelt in a whisper of silk. He put a hand on Mo Weixu’s neck, and he had a sudden vision of Wen Kexing snapping it as easily as a twig, Mo Weixu falling helpless to the side. Finishing the job his father had started. Instead, his thumb rubbed a soothing pattern there against his skin, a touch so tender it tore something loose inside Mo Weixu.
He cried out, and Wen Kexing didn’t try to muffle it for him with a comforting shoulder. He didn’t embrace him. Mo Weixu shook to pieces at long last, held up, it seemed, only by the hand that had killed his father.
When it had run its course, Mo Weixu wandered away without a word, following his ears to a stream. He washed his face in its piercingly cold water, slowly settling back into his body. No coming back from this, probably. He had attacked Wen Kexing in his home and then, perhaps more unforgivably, cried on him at the grave of his—something.
He found himself drawn back to the graveside, regardless. Wen Kexing had waited for him. He turned as Mo Weixu returned, giving a small, polite smile. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said.
Mo Weixu frowned at him. Riddles. Wonderful. He waited.
Wen Kexing sighed and ambled over, folding his arms as he looked Mo Weixu up and down. “Ah Xiang was loved. Yes, even in Ghost Valley,” he said, as Mo Weixu went utterly still. He sighed, and Mo Weixu saw again that deep, lingering pain he had glimpsed on their first meeting. “I raised her. She kept me human; I wanted to give her the chance to be human in the first place. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t save her.”
“‘Did it help?’” Mo Weixu quoted. It hadn’t been a barb aimed at him. He closed his eyes.
“A question without an answer,” Wen Kexing said quietly.
All this time, Mo Weixu had been measuring himself against his father. It was obscurely comforting to stand—if only for a moment—in the same category as Wen Kexing instead. He laughed bitterly, realizing. When Wen Kexing raised his eyebrows, he said, “I was thinking how strange it is to prove my father right,” he said. “I do have sympathy for the ghosts’ master.”
Wen Kexing laughed as well, his a bark of surprised mirth. “So you do! Mo-xiong,” he said, with a sly curl of amusement over addressing him so familiarly, “I think we had better drink to that. It would be stranger if we didn’t, after this.”
Mo Weixu blinked at him. “I punched you,” he said.
Wen Kexing shrugged. “Ah Xu tried to hit me with a sword. More than once. If I let a little thing like that get in the way, I’d be drinking alone. Come on. We don’t even have to tell anybody you hit me.”
With deliberate effort, Mo Weixu relaxed his shoulders. He considered whether it was a good idea. To his surprise, he found that with the defensive tension gone, the rest of him felt surprisingly…not good, but clean. As if some blockage had been swept away. He didn’t feel half a second away from violence anymore. He didn’t feel numb, either. “I could be convinced,” he said.
“I’m very convincing,” Wen Kexing said. “Come on, let’s not keep the kids waiting any longer.”
Mo Weixu got very drunk. He had no troubling thoughts of tables overturned or friends hurt.
He did fall off a roof. Mo Huaiyang’s son would never. He took a perverse pleasure in the fact, even though he knew he would be hearing about it for years to come.
“He wouldn’t have stopped hitting you,” Mo Weixu said to Wen Kexing, deep in the armpit of the night. Wen Kexing just laughed lightly.
“You didn’t mean any harm,” he said. Mo Weixu put his head down on the table. This was too much to contemplate, and his head was very heavy. A hand rested, very briefly, on his hair. “I can tell when someone wants to kill me, you know.”
Mo Weixu had raised his hand. The world hadn’t ended. The rest was for another day’s him to figure out.