The Jade Valley Sect's invitation had been extended, as these things often were, in the specific spirit of a host who invites guests they do not want because declining to invite them would have looked worse. The letter had been exquisitely worded: gracious, formal. The faint but unmistakable atmosphere of we would prefer you didn't come, but here is your invitation.
Lan Qiang had accepted immediately, which He Renxiao appreciated.
Across the square, one of the Jade Valley disciples, a young woman with sharp eyes and sect colors worn with precision.
Her companion, a male disciple with a senior rank badge and the expression of someone who had been told to be diplomatic and was trying, said something to her in an undertone. She did not change her expression. She was still counting.
Neither of them, He Renxiao noticed, were the one who mattered.
The one who mattered was standing slightly apart from the rest of the Jade Valley delegation, near the base of the ceremonial platform, with a paper cup of something warm held in both hands and his eyes tracking across the festival crowd with the quiet, unhurried patience of someone who was looking for something specific and was in no particular hurry to find it.
He was, objectively, not very tall. Taller than He Renxiao, which admittedly did not require tremendous effort, but only slightly so, and He Renxiao registered this with a feeling that was half indignation and half, inconveniently, something else he didn't bother naming.
The boy's hair was white. Not the pale blond-white of old age or illness, but a clean, deep white, like snow that hadn't been touched yet, pulled back and secured with a black headband that sat across his forehead with the composed simplicity of something that hadn't needed to try.
His robes were Jade Valley grey, but he wore them slightly differently from the others, with the unselfconscious ease of someone who had been wearing those colors long enough that they were simply his and not a costume. His face was turned slightly away.
Then the boy turned, and He Renxiao could see it clearly.
He Renxiao looked at him. His brain, which had been moving along perfectly reasonably until that moment, did something strange. Not recognition, exactly, but the feeling that precedes recognition: the way a word sits on the tip of the tongue before the name comes.
He Renxiao looked at that face, the clean lines of it, the particular stillness in those eyes, the something in the set of his mouth, and thought: I know you. And then thought: no, I don't. And then thought: do I?
The boy's gaze moved across the square in the methodical way of someone conducting a survey and arrived, briefly, at He Renxiao.
He Renxiao did not look away in time.
For approximately two seconds, they looked directly at each other. Then the white-haired boy looked elsewhere, with the serene unhurriedness of someone who had simply completed that particular task and moved on to the next, and He Renxiao found himself looking at the nearest paper charm stall.
"That's Feng Wangji," Mo Shuyi said, arriving beside He Renxiao with the unnerving timeliness he sometimes demonstrated. "Young master of Jade Valley Sect. He arrived two days ago. I'm told he's quite accomplished."
"Are you," He Renxiao said.
"Third on the sect ranking. Fifthteen years old. His spiritual root is said to be a dual-element variant, which is --"
"I didn't ask, Shuyi."
"I know," Mo Shuyi said, and there was something in his voice that was not quite teasing and not quite something else, landing somewhere between the two. "You were looking."
"I was looking at the festival," He Renxiao said, with great dignity, and walked toward the chestnut stall before Mo Shuyi could say anything further.
Mo Shuyi watched him go. Then he looked across the square to where Feng Wangji stood, still holding his paper cup with both hands, still watching the crowd with that quiet, unhurried attention.
He had not looked back in He Renxiao's direction. But Mo Shuyi had the particular feeling, one he couldn't have justified if asked to, that Feng Wangji was aware of exactly where He Renxiao had gone.
He filed that away. Mo Shuyi had a very organized mental filing system, and a great many things in it were labeled, quietly: things to keep an eye on.
—----------
By midday, the festival had found its full rhythm. The drums had been joined by strings and a high flute somewhere on the eastern side of the square, and the music moved through the crowd like something alive, widening smiles past the point of intention. The Azure Cloud Sect disciples had distributed themselves across the stalls with the natural entropy of a group that has been told they can relax and has chosen to interpret this instruction liberally.
Li Yuan had located an enormous pile of winter pears and was engaged in a slow and sincere negotiation with the stall-keeper about whether it was reasonable to buy seven.
Mo Shuyi stood nearby, having quietly ensured that Li Yuan had enough coin for seven pears, watching the exchange with the benign patience of an shixiong who has learned to pick his battles.
He Renxiao stood a few steps away from both of them, eating chestnuts from a paper cone, watching the ceremonial platform in the center of the square.
Lan Qiang appeared beside He Renxiao without announcement, as he had the habit of doing, with a cup of warm tea produced from somewhere unspecified. He stood at He Renxiao's shoulder and also watched the priest, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
"Do you know the legend behind the festival?" Lan Qiang asked eventually, quiet and even, the way he asked most things.
"The mountain spirit," He Renxiao replied. "The offering. I heard Mo-Shixiong's version this morning."
"Mo Shuyi's version is accurate as far as it goes," Lan Qiang allowed, which from Lan Qiang was a form of high praise. "But the older account is more specific." He took a sip of tea. The priest in the square was still speaking.
"Three hundred years ago, so the account says, there were two cultivators born in this village. Twin brothers, some versions say; others say not brothers, only mirrors of each other. But they were born of fire and ice, their cultivation cores. But regardless of their differences.. They cultivated together from childhood, and over time their spiritual energy became so deeply aligned that they could sense each other across distances. They could feel the other's state of being like a second heartbeat."
He Renxiao ate a chestnut and said nothing, which was his way of listening.
"They were separated," Lan Qiang continued, "by the kind of circumstance that separates people when the era is turbulent and the roads are long. One went north. The other south. And neither of them, after the point of separation, could tell whether the other was still alive, only that something continued to pull, like a compass finding north, like water finding the low place." He paused. "Neither of them ever stopped moving toward that pull. The festival commemorates the night they found each other. Or the night they were said to have found each other. The historical record is, as these things often are, ambiguous."
He Renxiao was quiet for a moment. Then: "What does the ambiguity suggest?"
Lan Qiang turned and looked at him with the expression that He Renxiao had come to understand meant his Shizun was deciding how much of a thought to share. "It suggests," Lan Qiang said carefully, "that the finding may have taken more than one life."
He Renxiao looked at the lanterns. He ate the last chestnut in his paper cone. He thought about saying something, and then didn't, which seemed like the better choice.
"Is that why the Jade Valley Sect hosts it," he said instead, which was a different kind of question, and both of them knew it. "Because of the twin cultivators?"
"Jade Valley claims descent from one of them," Lan Qiang said, and there was something in the line of his expression that was not quite amusement and not quite anything else He Renxiao could name cleanly. "Whether or not that claim is supportable is, again, a matter the historical record declines to resolve."
"Conveniently," He Renxiao said.
"Mm," said Lan Qiang, which meant: yes, very conveniently, and I thought the same thing.
—-----
The music changed in the early afternoon.
The drums and strings and flute had been pleasant, the sort of festival music that sits in the background and makes everything feel slightly more festive than it otherwise would have. But somewhere around the hour when the light began to go amber and the crowd had settled into the comfortable middle stage of a festival, a single performer took a position near the ceremonial platform and began to play.
A pipa. Old style, the ornamentation on the body worn smooth at the places where the player's hands moved most, the strings thick. The performer was a woman, middle-aged, with her hair wrapped and her eyes closed, playing without sheets or direction, from a place that clearly had nothing to do with memory. The melody she played was simple. It moved the way water moves over familiar stones: unhurried, inevitable, each note precisely where it had always been.
He Renxiao stopped walking.
He had been making his way from the chestnut stall toward where Mo Shuyi had finally wrangled Li Yuan away from the pear negotiation, and he stopped the way a person stops when they walk into something that doesn't physically exist. His feet simply declined to continue. The paper cone was still in his hand. The crowd moved around him, not noticing.
He knew this song.
Not from childhood, not from training, not from the Azure Cloud Sect's formal music curriculum. He knew it from somewhere else, somewhere further back: from a room with paper walls and candlelight, and a smell of sandalwood, and the particular warmth of being close to someone who was alive in a way that made you aware of being alive yourself. He knew it from his first life. From the brothel where he had grown up, which was gone now, burned in the war that had taken everything that was not first taken by other means. He knew it from the hands that had taught it to him.
His first life wife's hands.
She had played it on cold evenings, her fingers finding the strings with the ease of long practice, and she had taught him the melody in sections, making him repeat each phrase until he had it, correcting his grip with a patient firmness. She had sung the words sometimes, softly, not for performance but for themselves, and He Renxiao had not always listened to the words, had often listened instead to the quality of her voice, which was unremarkable and completely specific and entirely hers.
He Renxiao had barely known her when he had married her. She had been promised to him by a family ever since he became a general in the light of the sun—a virtue, a true hero. Why? Because what good general didn't have a wife? He would sail across the sea and back for her, but he never truly felt anything for her. She was little more than a close friend.
They had a son together as well—though it never came across to He Renxiao as to how. They had never slept together—never even shared a bed. But low and behold—little Xiaoxiao was born. He Renxiao didn't question it, and only raised him as his own till the end of his miserable life. Or what He Renxiao considered the end of his miserable life when Mo Shuyi took him prisoner.
He could not have described that quality now. But standing in the middle of the Pinefrost Festival with the melody coming at him across three hundred meters and one full lifetime of distance, He Renxiao found that his chest remembered what his memory couldn't hold cleanly.
His vision had gone the particular quality of almost-unfocused. The lanterns blurred slightly at their edges. The crowd noise had dropped, somewhere in the processing of his own head, to something distant and irrelevant. He stood there and he listened to the melody. He could not have said when the tears started because he hadn't noticed them starting.
He noticed them now. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand, quickly, but the system was working imperfectly today. He wiped again.
"Renxiao."
Mo Shuyi's voice, close. He Renxiao did not turn.
"I'm fine," he said. His voice was steady. He had worked very hard at having a steady voice over the course of approximately two lifetimes, and it mostly cooperated.
Mo Shuyi said nothing, which was, He Renxiao thought distantly, the correct response. He simply moved to stand beside He Renxiao, close enough that the warmth of him was present at He Renxiao's shoulder, and stayed there. He did not ask what was wrong. He did not offer reassurances. He just stood there, which was, He Renxiao found, more difficult to ignore than any of the other options would have been.
Li Yuan appeared on his other side a moment later, and He Renxiao felt the small, brief pressure of his brother's hand touching his wrist once and then withdrawing. Li Yuan also said nothing. They stood together, the three of them, while the pipa player finished her piece.
They had their own theories, He Renxiao supposed.
That was fine. Some stones were his to carry alone.
He Renxiao exhaled. Folded his paper cone in half. Looked at the nearest stall, which was selling small carved wooden animals, and focused on them until the present reasserted itself over the past with appropriate firmness. "I want to see the lantern release," he said, with reasonable calm. "What time does it start?"
"After the ceremony," Mo Shuyi said, without missing a beat, and the normalcy of his tone was, He Renxiao thought, a form of kindness that neither of them would ever directly name. "Another two hours, approximately."
"Good," He Renxiao said, and walked toward the wooden animals stall, and the others followed.
—------
Lan Qiang had been standing slightly apart from the group when the music began. He had a habit of creating small distances. He had been listening to the ceremony speech with approximately a quarter of his attention.
He had seen He Renxiao stop.
He had watched the paper cone go still in the younger male's hand, watched the quality of his attention change from the scattered alertness of a young man at a festival to something fixed and inward.
Lan Qiang did not go to stand beside him. Mo Shuyi and Li Yuan had already moved, and adding himself to that arrangement would have been, he judged, too much. He Renxiao bore witness badly when there were too many witnesses. He bore it well enough when there was just enough to remind him he wasn't alone.
But Lan Qiang listened to the song.
And as he listened, something happened in his own expression. He listened to the melody move through the festival air, unhurried, inevitable, each note precisely where it had always been.
He knew this song too.
He had learned it, or heard it, in a context so far removed from a mountain festival and a pipa player that placing it here required a specific, particular act of will. He knew it from a different time. He knew it from a person whose name he had never said aloud to He Renxiao, whose existence he had never acknowledged, because acknowledging it would have required explaining how he knew, and explaining how he knew would have opened a conversation for which Lan Qiang did not yet have the right words.
He exhaled once, slowly, through his nose. He held his tea with both hands. He watched the pipa player finish her piece and bow to the scattered applause of the crowd.
Later, when the afternoon had settled into the particular tired warmth of a festival past its midpoint, Lan Qiang found himself walking alone along the eastern edge of the square where the crowd thinned and the lanterns swayed in an unimpeded wind. He walked without destination, which was unlike him, but the afternoon seemed to require it. He thought about many things, and then fewer things, and then, without fully deciding to, he began to hum.
The melody was the same one. The pipa player's melody, or rather the melody that had preceded the pipa player's melody by approximately one lifetime. He hummed it quietly, under the sound of the festival, into the empty cold air of the eastern path where no one was walking, because no one would hear it there.
He had thought no one was there.
He Renxiao was there. He had taken the eastern path for the same reason Lan Qiang had: because it was empty. He was sitting on the low stone wall that ran along the edge of the square, looking up at the lanterns, and he had heard his Shizun's footsteps coming along the path and had been about to announce himself when the humming began.
He Renxiao went very still. He did not announce himself.
He listened to his Shizun hum four bars of a melody that had belonged to his dead wife in his previous life, in a voice quiet enough that it could only be heard because the wind had cooperated, and then the humming stopped, because Lan Qiang had looked up and seen him.
They looked at each other for the length of time it takes for a very large and complicated question to form, press against the inside of a person's teeth, and then be swallowed back down because neither party was not ready for it yet.
"Shizun," He Renxiao said.
"Renxiao," Lan Qiang said.
A pause.
"It's getting cold," Lan Qiang said finally, which was true, and was also not what either of them was talking about. "The lantern release will begin soon. We should find the others."
"Yes," He Renxiao agreed, and stood, and followed his Shizun back toward the square, and neither of them said anything further about the melody.
But He Renxiao didn't let it go. Quietly, carefully, in the part of him that had learned to keep records of things that didn't yet have explanations.
He filed it next to the way Mo Shuyi watched him sometimes, next to the particular way Lan Qiang's expression had shifted when he took his pulse, next to the feeling of looking at Feng Wangji's face across the square and experiencing the particular vertigo of a name sitting on the tip of his tongue with no memory attached to it.
—---
The light went amber, then pale violet, then a deep winter blue. Torches were lit along the edges of the square. The drum beat changed to something slower, something that breathed rather than drove. The crowd gathered around the central clearing where the priest stood with his hands raised and spoke the formal words of the ceremony in the old dialect, his voice carrying with the practiced ease of three hundred years of repetition living in his bones.
Each person in the crowd held a lantern. They had been distributed at the start of the ceremony, small and light, the frames of thin bamboo and the paper panels in red or white. He Renxiao was holding a white one. He had taken it without looking, which meant, he supposed, that the lantern had been a white one by whatever logic governed these things.
Things unsaid.
The priest finished the ceremonial words. The drums stopped. For a moment the entire square was quiet in the specific way that only happens when a very large number of people decide, simultaneously, to be silent.
Then the lanterns rose.
It happened all at once, or almost all at once, the way a flock of birds lifts from a field, staggered by fractions. The light went up in sheets, red and white, rising into the deep winter blue of the sky with the unhurried intention of things that know exactly where they're going. He Renxiao tipped his head back and watched them go. The reflection of the lanterns in the eyes of the people around him turned everything amber. The warmth of the light pressed gently against his upturned face.
He exhaled slowly and let the lantern rise from his hands.
He watched it go, smaller and smaller, joining the stream of white lights ascending toward the mountain above the village, and he thought, clearly and without trying to stop himself: I hope you hear it. Wherever it went. Whatever happened to you. I hope you hear it. And then: I'll do better, this time. I'll be enough.
Beside him, Mo Shuyi released his lantern, a red one, and watched it rise without speaking. His expression was the particular expression of someone who has something private happening inside them and has long since learned to give it no surface.
He Renxiao glanced at him once. Mo Shuyi glanced back. Neither said anything, and neither of them needed to.
Li Yuan's lantern was also red. He held it longer than the others, turning it over in his hands with a care slightly unlike his usual handling of things, and when he finally released it he watched it rise with an expression that was, very briefly, genuinely soft.
Then he noticed He Renxiao looking at him and rearranged his face into something more compositionally detached. He Renxiao looked away and pretended he hadn't seen.
Across the clearing, at a slight distance from the Jade Valley delegation, Feng Wangji stood with his lantern held in both hands at chest height, not yet released, watching the other lanterns rise with an expression that was quiet and impossible to read clearly from a distance. His white hair caught the rising light and held it. He did not release his lantern for a long time. When he finally did, He Renxiao wasn't watching anymore, and so He Renxiao did not see the direction Feng Wangji watched his lantern travel, or the expression on his face as it went.
He did not see that Feng Wangji's lantern and He Renxiao's lantern rose on the same current of air, side by side, and that they drifted in the same direction as they climbed, toward the same part of the sky, two white lights ascending into the winter dark together. If anyone had been watching both at once, it might have seemed less like coincidence and more like memory.
—----
The festival did not end so much as it exhaled. The crowd thinned slowly, vendors closed their stalls with the unhurried efficiency of people who had done this before, the musicians packed their instruments, and the torches were left burning at their posts, still illuminating the empty square in warm orange circles.
The lanterns were long gone, scattered across the sky and thinning toward nothing, though if one looked carefully at the horizon above the mountain, there was still a faint warm smear of light: the afterimage of a hundred small flames finding their way upward.
The Azure Cloud Sect walked back to their cabin in the particular comfortable silence of people who have spent a full day together and run out of things that need saying.
Li Yuan walked slightly ahead, eating his hard-won pear with the focused satisfaction of someone who had negotiated for it over an extended period and intended to enjoy it thoroughly.
Mo Shuyi walked slightly behind He Renxiao, as was his general habit. Lan Qiang walked at the center of the group, equidistant from everyone, as was also his habit.
He Renxiao did not speak on the walk back. He walked with his hands in his sleeves and his gaze on the road ahead and his mind doing the quiet, organized work of sorting through the day's events and placing each of them where it needed to go.
The song.
His Shizun's humming.
The feeling of looking at Feng Wangji's face.
The white lantern, rising.
He placed each carefully, the way one places things one expects to need again.
He was the last to go to bed. He sat for a while in the main room with the window open, letting in the cold air and the last faint sound of the festival: a drum still going somewhere in the village, unhurried and slow, counting something out. He thought about his wife, which he usually avoided, because it was the kind of thinking that did not have a productive end and led mostly to a variety of feelings he did not have adequate management strategies for.
But tonight the thinking came anyway, softly, without the usual resistance, like a door that has swollen shut in the cold and then finally gives way.
He remembered her hands on the pipa strings. He remembered the back of her neck. He remembered the way she had explained things, with a patience that was not placating but genuine, the patience of someone who found the process of explaining interesting rather than obligatory.
He remembered, specifically, that she had told him the song meant something: that the original words were about three people who had been separated and spent their lives moving toward each other without knowing that was what they were doing, and that the point of the song was not that they found each other but that the moving had never stopped.
He had not asked her who had taught her the song.
He wondered about that now, sitting in the cold dark of the cabin with the festival drum still counting out its slow measure in the distance. He wondered whose hands had taught those hands. He wondered where the song had come from before it came to her. He wondered why Lan Qiang knew it.
He Renxiao closed the window. He went to bed.
Sleep came, which it sometimes did and sometimes didn't, and then the dream came after it, which did not always follow the same rules as sleep.