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No one on Qing Jing Peak was prepared for the change after Ning Yingying’s Shizun fell ill.
No one had known what to do when he fell ill for the first time, either. He had lain in the bamboo house for days, burning with the kind of fever that might kill a man if it lasted long enough; and then, on the fourth day, he went very still and cold, and his heartbeat grew so sluggish that Mu-shishu had to shock it back to life with his cultivation.
He opened his eyes on the morning of the fifth day: and against all odds, none of Shen Qingqiu’s disciples have heard a harsh word from him since.
Everyone was fonder of Shizun after that fever. He was kinder, and warmer—even to Luo Binghe, whom Shizun had been downright cruel to during the first year of his disciplehood. A few weeks later, Shizun rescued Yingying and her shidi from a skinner demon on their first night-hunt away from Cang Qiong, and he gifted A-Luo a new instruction manual to help clear the blocks in the latter’s cultivation.
After that, he went into seclusion in the Lingxi Caves: and not three months later, he fell ill again.
Poison, Ning Yingying heard the qianbeis at Qing Jing whispering to one another, as Mu Qingfang and his disciples flew in and out of the bamboo house. The demon that Luo Binghe defeated at the invasion of Qiong Ding had worn armor laced with poison; and when he sprang up to strike A-Luo from behind, Shizun threw himself between them and shielded A-Luo from the blow.
He wasn’t ill for long that time. According to Yue-shibo, Shizun woke up two days after the attack, unchanged save for the residual effects of the poison in his blood: but no one was allowed to see him save for Mu Qingfang, two of his senior disciples, and Yue-zhangmen. Stranger still, Shizun never set foot out of the bamboo house, though the Qian Cao disciples had said that he was well enough to walk.
“Shishu, may this disciple please go in to see Shizun?”
Ning Yingying pauses on her way to the practice halls. Luo Binghe is standing in front of the bamboo house again, clutching a tray laden with tea and warm porridge: and just as he did the last six times A-Luo tried to get into the cottage, Mu Qingfang only smiles and takes the tray from A-Luo’s hands.
“Not yet. But he is all right, I swear it—and very grateful for Shizhi’s cooking,” Mu-shishu says gently. “I will bring the tray out to you after your Shizun has eaten.”
With that, he turns and vanishes into the house. Luo Binghe droops like a wilted flower, his lip trembling: and then he turns around and wanders slowly back towards the kitchen.
A moment later, Mu Qingfang reappears on the porch of the bamboo house and calls out to Ning Yingying.
“Your Shizun would like to see you,” he tells her, when she skids to a halt in front of him: for though Shen Qingqiu had long since told the disciples not to run on the mountain for fear that they would fall all the way down it, Ning Yingying worried more for her Shizun’s sake than even she guessed until this very moment. “Go inside.”
Ning Yingying bows and does as he bids her.
Stepping into the bamboo house is much like stepping into a library. Shizun has accumulated all manner of bestiaries and botanical texts since the last time she was here, and left them lying about on tables and windowsills with dried flowers and strips of paper tucked between the pages to mark where he stopped reading. She even spots an enormous bookshelf through the open door to her Shizun’s bedroom: though she cannot tell if those books are new, having never entered the bedroom before.
“Yingying,” he calls. “Is that you? Come in.”
Yingying shakes herself and hurries into the inner chamber. When she enters, Shen Qingqiu is sitting up in an armchair by the window, drinking tea with A-Luo’s luncheon tray on a little table at his elbow. He looks much the same as usual, in Ning Yingying’s opinion: for even the faint bruises beneath his eyes hark back to the days before that first fever, when Shizun went to the brothels down the mountain when he was weary of his duties as Peak Lord.
Shizun is not yet wholly recovered. But he certainly isn’t ill enough to stay shut up in the bamboo house all day with a blanket wrapped around him, so why—
“This master requires Yingying’s assistance,” he tells her: and the pitch of his voice is off in some way, though Ning Yingying cannot tell exactly how. “With dressing.”
He stands, letting his blanket slip down onto his chair.
All of a sudden, Ning Yingying finds that she knows exactly why Shizun would need her help with dressing.
* * *
“So, so…it just happened? Just like that?”
The two of them had adjourned to Shen Qingqiu’s dressing table, so that Shizun could observe Ning Yingying’s hands reflected in the table-top mirror while she bound half of his hair into a loose knot at the back of his head.
“It did not just happen,” Shizun sighs. “This is the way I was born. When I came to Cang Qiong, I learned how to transform my body with my cultivation; but your Mu-shishu has warned me that the transformation will revert without warning every so often, now that part of my spiritual energy must be used to suppress the poison. That means I will be obliged to go out of doors and night-hunt in this body sooner or later, so I decided to learn how to dress and comport myself as a woman—without attracting undue attention, due to any strangeness in my manner—before leaving the bamboo house.”
Ning Yingying nods slowly. “Is that why you wouldn’t let A-Luo in? Even though you agreed to try his cooking?”
“What agreed ? I was lucky to try it. Your shidi is an excellent cook—as you’ll find out some day, Yingying. Binghe’s only made porridge for me, so far, but I’m sure he’ll make your favorite shrimp jiaozi if you take him along to share them with you in town.”
He would? Yingying frowns. Shizun had eaten all the meals that Luo Binghe sent up, so A-Luo must be a good cook: but somehow, she doubts very much that he would ever make anything for her. He must have eaten those dumplings with her no less than five times while Shizun was cultivating in the Ling Xi Caves, and he never seemed remotely inclined to learn how to make them himself.
And then Ning Yingying looks into the mirror, and gasps aloud at the vision reflected therein. “Shizun! You’re so pretty!”
“Yingying, really—”
“No, you are!” And he is . Shizun was handsome in his man’s body, but Ning Yingying thinks he looks downright lovely in this one. His eyelashes are a little longer, and the new roundness about his mouth and eyes lends his face an air of sweetness that could make him the envy of every woman from here to the capital, if he wore it the right way.
“You need a green buyao to go with your robes,” she decides at once, for there are three rich sets of jade-green women’s robes laid out on Shizun’s bed, and Yue-shibo had apparently been kind enough to send him an entire case full of fine ornaments when his plight first became known to the other Peak Lords. “And maybe a touch of kohl, too? For your brow-mole?”
Shizun makes a half put-upon, half indulgent face that Ning Yingying rightly reads as if you like, Ying’er, and nods.
“I suppose I should learn how to do make-up sometime,” he sighs, as Ning Yingying snatches up the kohl pencil and starts darkening the pretty brown freckle on the inside of his left eyebrow. “This teacher is grateful for Yingying’s instr—ah, Yingying. Don’t you think that’s a little too dark?”
“But it’s more eye-catching that way. No one will be able to look away from you when you’re like this.”
“Yingying, the point was for this master to appear in such a way that he would not attract…oh, very well. Carry on.”
She busies herself with the pencil, and then with a small pot of rouge to brighten Shizun’s lips and cheeks: not to redden them, as the women in Ning Yingying’s family always did on special occasions, but to smooth away the lingering pallor left by his illness. After that, she guides him out of his chair and helps him into the finest of the three silk gowns on his bed; and then she rifles through Yue-shibo’s jewelry case and emerges with a simple jade Guanyin suspended on a silver chain.
“I like that one,” Shizun says approvingly, when she holds the necklace up for him to see. “Help this teacher put it on, and that will be all.”
Yingying fastens the chain at the nape of Shen Qingqiu’s neck; and then he rises to his feet and walks clumsily back to the mirror, where he freezes in shock at the sight of his reflection. Ning Yingying bounces up and down on her toes, biting back a grin as one of Shen Qingqiu’s hands drifts up to touch his cheek: for though he has not spoken, Yingying is sure that Shizun likes what he sees.
“Ah,” she hears him murmur at last, as if he had completely forgotten that Ning Yingying was still beside him. “That’s—it looks more natural than I expected.”
Shizun still looks very much like himself: which, upon reflection, surprises Ning Yingying immensely. In a way, seeing Shen Qingqiu thus arrayed is like the first glimpse a white snow fox in the wintertime, when one was accustomed to watching it hunt in its early-autumn coat of red and orange.
He frowns at the image in the glass for a moment, as if he had spotted something amiss: and then, to Ning Yingying’s chagrin, he removes the beaded buyao she used to fasten his bun and replaces it with a wooden one carved to look like a spray of green plum blossoms.
“I’ll save the jade one for a special occasion, but the rest is perfect,” he observes, as Ning Yingying begins to pout in spite of herself. “You did wonderfully, Yingying.”
At this, Yingying cheers up almost instantly. “Thanking Shizun!”
“Don’t thank me yet. This teacher will require your aid again sooner than either of us would find convenient, I fear,” Shizun says, laughing. “Go out and play with your shixiongdi for now, but be ready to come back to the bamboo house when I call. You can send Binghe in on your way out.”
But Ning Yingying is not summoned back to the bamboo house to help Shen Qingqiu change his clothes again, even after her fellow disciples start wandering back to the dormitories for bed. Ning Yingying hangs about the yard near Shizun’s front gate, until she realizes that her shifu must have figured out how to manage the new clothes on his own and gone to bed early.
And then— oh. There is A-Luo, outlined against the warm yellow glow issuing from Shen Qingqiu’s front door: and in front of him, Shizun, neatly dressed in a man’s white zhongyi and sleeping trousers.
In the weeks that follow, Yingying is not called upon to wait on her Shizun again: or at least not as she was on that first day, when Shen Qingqiu had needed her to tie his ruqun and drape his shawl just so, and do up his hair in the style preferred by cultivating women who had passed the age of thirty without taking a husband. It is A-Luo who slides the green plum-blossom pin into Shizun’s bun when Without a Cure strikes in Liu-shishu’s absence, and A-Luo who fastens Yue-shibo’s jade Guanyin about Shizun’s throat when Cang Qiong receives reports of a mountain demon that drank the blood of male farmers and loathed the taste of women’s flesh.
In Yingying’s opinion, these duties are Luo Binghe’s by right, since Shizun allowed him to move into the side room of the bamboo house and take on the task of cooking for him. Ning Yingying had rather liked dressing Shizun up, but she didn’t take nearly as much pleasure from the job as A-Luo does; and nor does she have the slightest desire to accompany Shizun disguised as his husband, as Luo Binghe is required to do on their last scheduled night-hunt before the Immortal Alliance Conference.
Of course, Ning Yingying was aware of Luo Binghe’s feelings for their Shizun by then. He had clung to Shen Qingqiu’s side like a limpet for the past three years, nestling ever closer to his beloved until it seemed downright wrong to see Shizun going about his duties without A-Luo trailing behind him. Ning Yingying waves them off on their journey to Jinan with a light heart, knowing that A-Luo will likely indulge himself enough for a lifetime on this trip.
But to her dismay, Shizun is a pale shadow of himself when they return, and A-Luo is worried to distraction by Shizun’s newfound reluctance to part from him: for he has always liked A-Luo to be near him, but never like this— as if he feared that A-Luo might be stolen away from him if they parted for even an hour.
Perhaps Shizun had known, Ning Yingying thinks later, when Shen Qingqiu staggers out into the garden behind his cottage and makes a little sword-mound for A-Luo with the shards of Zheng Yang. Perhaps he knew that the end of Luo Binghe’s time was coming, young though he was when the demons in the Jue Di Gorge stole him away from his martial family—and knew that he would lose him, though none of the great sects had lost a disciple of A-Luo’s caliber since the death of Huan Hua’s Su Xiyan eighteen years ago.
Yingying rarely sees her Shizun, after that.
He no longer teaches the senior disciples, though teaching was one of his greatest joys before A-Luo passed away. When Shizun is at home, he stays shut up in the bamboo house for days at a time, imbibing nothing but tea and cold water and calling Luo Binghe’s name at odd hours; and when Shen Qingqiu can bring himself to leave the house, he leaves Cang Qiong behind altogether and spends weeks wandering away from the sect with Peak Lord Shang.
Even in the midst of her grief, Yingying finds herself wondering at Shizun’s friendship with Shang-shishu. Shizun had not liked him before that first fever, and seemed mostly indifferent to him afterwards: but now, it seems as if no one can draw Shizun out of mourning better than Shang Qinghua.
Ning Yingying tries to stay out of Shen Qingqiu’s way, now that she knows that someone is looking after him. She is painfully aware that the mere fact of her presence reminds Shizun of A-Luo, since Ning Yingying was the person that Luo Binghe had liked best after him: and so, she does not speak to him directly until the sixth month after A-Luo’s death, when a blushing Ming Fan comes to find her in the library and explains that Shizun needs her help in the bamboo house.
“He— changed again. You know,” Ming Fan stammers, as Ning Yingying looks up from the healing text she was reading. “I can’t help him, not when he’s like that; and Liu-shishu isn’t here, so Shizun will have to wait until his meridians clear up on his own before he can change back. But he’s supposed to leave with Shang-shishu in less than an hour, so Shimei should help him dress and do his hair.”
Ning Yingying nods, her heart aching. The short walk to Shen Qingqiu’s cottage feels sad, and lonely—even though Ming-shixiong is walking beside her, keeping up a steady stream of chatter about something one of the new junior disciples did that morning. But she is glad of his presence, especially when she steps over the threshold of the bamboo house: for with their shidi lost to them, it feels as if that first step into Shizun’s abode had fallen upon Luo Binghe’s grave.
“Shizun,” Ning Yingying calls out, her voice trembling. “Shizun, this disc—I’m here.”
“Come in,” she hears Shen Qingqiu answer. “Close the door behind you, Ying’er. You’re letting the cold air in.”
She finds him sitting by the window in his bedroom, just as he was on that sunny day when Ning Yingying was first called upon to help him in this way. Just as she did then, she ties a green qun skirt about his chest and winds his hair into a pretty bun— not the one Luo Binghe used to do for him, though A-Luo was somehow better at styling Shizun’s hair than Yingying has ever been with her own. Ning Yingying intends to complete her task without reminding Shizun of A-Luo at all, if such a thing is possible: and in keeping with her goal, she selects the rest of Shizun’s outfit from among the things that A-Luo had not favored for him. A-Luo liked to dress Shizun in sable furs in the winter, so Ning Yingying produces a white rabbit-fur cape that had been given to Shen Qingqiu as tribute and then promptly forgotten at the back of his cupboard; and then she brings out the apple-green buyao for his hair, since A-Luo preferred the wooden pin that looked like a plum-blossom branch.
“Where’s your muff?” she asks, after she slips a pair of silver rings into Shen Qingqiu’s ears—for A-Luo had pierced his ears at his request about a year ago, and Shizun seemed to want to keep the piercings from healing over. “You didn’t lose it, did you?”
Shen Qingqiu makes a soft sound of bewilderment before gesturing at the door to the receiving room.
“It’s somewhere out there,” he says vaguely. “I had it on when I went to meet your Shang-shishu for breakfast, and I don’t think it fell off on the way.”
Ning Yingying nods and hurries out to look for the muff. To her relief, she finds it lying under Shizun’s guqin table, streaked with dust but otherwise no worse for wear; but then, she hears Shen Qingqiu speaking in the bedroom—and not to her.
Ning Yingying’s heart sinks. She hates it when Shizun calls out to A-Luo, since it meant that he had forgotten that A-Luo was dead, and been forced to remember all over again—but this time, Shizun’s voice is angry, as if he were arguing with someone.
“Scenario pusher?” he hisses, from just out of Ning Yingying’s field of view. “What do I need a scenario pusher for? There’s no one here!”
I’m here, Shizun, Ning Yingying nearly says: but at the last instant, she bites her tongue and remains silent. Shizun is still talking in the bedroom, growing more annoyed by the minute; and at last, Ning Yingying works up the courage to poke her head around the door.
She catches him in the act of turning away from the window, red-eyed, as if whoever—or whatever —made him angry was standing right outside it. He takes a step forward, seemingly blind to Ning Yingying’s presence on the other side of the door—and then he stumbles, catching his toe in the trailing hem of his gown, and falls to the ground with a clatter that shakes the bamboo house up to its roof.
When his arm strikes the floor, something bright shoots out of his sleeve and hits the opposite wall; but Ning Yingying only has eyes for Shen Qingqiu, rushing to his ride and pulling him upright before he can rise under his own power.
“I’m all right,” he assures her, patting her on the arm. “I tripped, that’s all. I expect I’ll never get used to these clothes.”
Ning Yingying nods and looks about for the trinket that had fallen out of Shen Qingqiu’s sleeve. She finds it under the dressing table, lying between two balls of dust that would have sent Luo Binghe into paroxysms of horror if he were here to see them: and then she gasps aloud in shock, for the pendant cupped between her palms is A-Luo’s jade Guanyin.
Yingying could recognize it anywhere: for the Guanyin is false, like Ming-shixiong said, made of serpentine instead of green jade. Shizun would never have bought a thing like this in a hundred years, and certainly no one would dare gift it to him: so for all these years that the Guanyin was lost, did Shizun…
Has Shizun been keeping it, all this time?
“Shizun,” she hears herself gasp, as if from very far away, “Shizun, A-Luo’s necklace…were you the one who found it, on the day we fought with Ming-shixiong?”
Shizun nods. “Yes.”
“You…you didn’t give it back to him?”
“I ought to have,” Shen Qingqiu says slowly. “It might—well, who knows if it would have helped matters. But in the end, I…I couldn’t.”
And then, just like that, Ning Yingying’s heart breaks in two.
Poor A-Luo! Poor Shizun! she thinks, nearly on the verge of tears. A-Luo would have been so happy, if he only knew—but now he’ll never know, and Shizun—!
“You should go,” Shizun murmurs, and the look in his eyes is almost painfully gentle: as if he were pitying her for something, though Ning Yingying cannot fathom why. “It’s getting cold, and Ming Fan must be waiting for you. Go on.”
Ning Yingying nods and cups her hands: but then she notices the pale skin at Shizun’s throat and draws up short. She had forgotten about the necklace Yue-shibo gifted to Shizun all those years ago, though she remembered his earrings; and in spite of herself, she finds herself recalling the day that Shizun and A-Luo left for their last night-hunt together. A-Luo fastened the necklace about Shizun’s neck at the door to the bamboo house before they boarded their carriage, as if he had wanted all of his shixiongdi to witness his privilege in being permitted to do so; and now, the hollow of Shizun’s throat looks sadly bereft without the necklace there.
Shizun probably left Yue-shibo’s necklace in its box on purpose, but…
“Shizun?”
“Mm?”
“May this disciple help you put A-Luo’s necklace on? Please?”
Shen Qingqiu goes utterly still. He opens his mouth and closes it again, like a carp caught out of water; and then he nods almost imperceptibly, and lays the false-jade Guanyin in Ning Yingying’s outstretched hand.
“All right,” he whispers. “This teacher will permit it. But be careful; it’s not as hardy as true jade, and that…it’s all I have left.”
And with that, he picks up his qiankun bag and melts into the deepening twilight outside the house, leaving Ning Yingying behind in the bedroom with tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.
Shizun wears the Guanyin almost constantly for the next two years and a half: when he sleeps, when he trains at Bai Zhan with Liu-shishu, and even when he goes on journeys away from Cang Qiong, though he grows anxious about losing it every now and then.
The next time Ning Yingying sees him without it, the autumn leaves are thick upon the ground, and Luo Binghe has come home.