" ... make you soup," A-Cheng tells her, and they both pretend that sitting is for leisure and not because he leans too heavily on Suibian, which he is using as a cane. Her baby brother, who had grown up chock-full of energy, so much that it was always spilling out of him in the shape of frustrated impatience, is now reduced to a wisp of himself. Like one of A-Xian's ghosts. Both of her brothers, ghosts. Maybe it's in the family line.
She sits and lets herself be served. It's good — it's really good. "A-Cheng!" she cries, unable to mask her own surprise. "You've been practicing!"
"Yours is better," he mutters, his cheeks pinking. "I can't get it spicy enough. They don't have the right chilis up here. I tried to grow them but they wouldn't take. The soil's too rocky."
"I'll bring you some from Lotus Pier," Yanli promises him, reaching out to give his hand a squeeze. "Next month."
A-Cheng hums, gifting her a half smile. "And in two months you'll have soup you could much more easily make yourself over the course of an evening."
"I couldn't," she corrects. "Soup made for you by someone who loves you is special. I couldn't make it myself, no matter how much time I had to do it."
He shakes his head but doesn't argue. She doesn't know whether it's exhaustion or the nature of the temple that has calmed his temper; but in thirteen years, A-Cheng has become much more even-keeled, she thinks. Not placid, certainly; not distant or removed. But less willing to fight over what doesn't matter. Less willing to expend precious energy where it isn't necessary.
Now, he leans back on his elbows and blinks up at the sky, letting the sun warm his face. "Are you keeping up with your meditation?" Yanli asks, keeping her voice light. "I've been doing some reading, and maybe — "
"A-jie," he interrupts. He's heard this before. "I wake up. I meditate. I can feel Wei Ying's core growing stronger and still can't access it. I receive treatments. I read. I receive treatments. I garden. I receive treatments. I help with temple duties that don't require much movement. I receive treatments. I make the new arrivals redecorate the entryway according to where the sun is. I receive treatments. I write letters. I receive treatments."
"You cook," she reminds him, gesturing toward the soup.
He quirks a dust-dry smile. "I cook. I receive treatments."
They're quiet for a moment. Yanli wants to know and doesn't want to ask, but many years of sect leadership have taught her to force the issues she'd rather soothe and bury: "Does he answer? The letters?"
A-Cheng rolls his eyes. "Yeah. With bullshit."
She ruthlessly ignores the bloom of disappointment in her stomach. Even if A-Xian's letters were full of truth, they wouldn't include any news of A-Ling. He's too smart for that. "I'm sure he doesn't want to burden you."
"More than he already has, you mean."
"No. That's not what I mean." A-Cheng looks away from her, plucking grass from the ground and ripping it into distracted pieces. Yanli feels something slip away, some measure of ease between them, and struggles to get it back. "A-Cheng. Back then ... we were trying to save your life."
His smile has turned bitter when he looks back at her. "I don't think you were," he tells her, voice quiet in its conviction. "I think you were both trying to barter back a normalcy that I couldn't have given you. Even if the transfer worked like it was supposed to. You needed me to be fine."
Yanli sits back on her heels, stunned into silence. It's rare that A-Cheng argues with her; it's rarer still that he ... that he expresses anger at her. Anger, between them, has felt untouchable. A sword blade still too hot to wield. A nameplate in the shrine that they can bow towards and tend to, but only ever shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing ahead and not acknowledging the ghosts kneeling with them.
Once a month, they sit in the sun and pretend that things are what they were: her the indulgent older sister, him the spoiled baby brother on whom she dotes.
In a softer world, a more generous one, she'd have spent the whole of her life indulging him; in the world that is, she'd have died young if she hadn't learned how to love with closed lips.
This is one of the hard lessons that Jiang-zongzhu has learned, sitting in rooms full of powerful voices that could turn against her with little prompting. She doesn't know, maybe will never know, what lessons Jiang-daozhang has learned, meditating in his temple, dependent on its willingness to give of itself to keep him alive.
"Neither of you asked me," A-Cheng says now. His voice is calm, almost detached; like he's said this before, like he's practiced it. "It could have killed him. It almost did. It made him into — I know he doesn't tell me shit, I know things are bad and I can't — and there's nothing I can do from here. I'm worse than mediocre, I'm useless. And if you had asked, I would have said no."
"You were incoherent, A-Cheng. How could we have asked?" Yanli reminds him. She doesn't like to think of that those days; not here in the sunshine. There had been a string of such unbearably dark years, first her parents, then her brother, then the war. Her husband. Her son.
And, of course, A-Xian, to whom Yanli does not allow herself to write. From whom she receives no letters. He has what is most precious to her; she trusts that he will guard it. Every day she looks at herself in a mirror and thinks I could go, and every day she puts on her robes and doesn't.
The best, the kindest, the safest thing she can do for A-Xian is never, ever speak to or acknowledge him except to mute and dismiss the threat of the Burial Mounds and the people living in it. The best, the kindest, the safest thing she can do for her son is pretend that he is dead.
The best, the kindest, the safest thing she can do for her baby brother is hold onto Yunmeng and keep his temple safe from those who would seek the power of the immortal who leads it, on whom he depends for survival.
When A-Cheng doesn't answer, she adds, not unkindly: "You woke up. On the way. You woke up and you looked at me, and you said," she doesn't choke up, "'Kill me, a-jie. I'd rather die.'"
"Then you should have let me! At least it would have been my choice."
"Sometimes you don't get what you want, didi," she finally snaps, and he meets her gaze, visibly startled. As if he hadn't started it. "Fine. Your choice was to die. Mine was not to let you. I don't regret it. I would make it again and again and again. I'd have ripped my own core out and given it to you if it would have been of any use."
He blows out a long tumble of breath, looking away. They have never been good at fighting with each other.
"We're what's left," Yanli reminds him, exhaling. Yanli and A-Cheng have lost all the same things. But it is true that the losses were ones Yanli chose for both of them. Just because she wasn't spared the loss doesn't mean it didn't — mean something. That she was the one who'd gotten to pick. She sighs. "We're all that's left. How can you ask me not to try everything to keep you whole?"
"Don't be kind about it," A-Cheng complains. She can see the tired slump in his shoulders. "I know you mean it but you do it on purpose, too. No one can argue with you when you're so kind."
Yanli smiles, taking a bite of her soup. "Jiang-zongzhu is sure she has no idea what you mean," she says primly, but at his look bursts into giggles. They put the anger in its box, and the box back into the shrine. Maybe one day, Yanli thinks, they can take it down and examine its contents. For now, she keeps her voice bright, and light, the way it was before she grew in herself the gravitas she needed to be taken seriously. "All right. All right. Enough. It's not the life either of us wanted, but it is the life we have. Let's forgive, okay?"
She has a flash of memory: the three of them, before she'd stolen A-Xian away and hidden him from her mother in the temple. A-Xian and A-Cheng bickering, both of them waist-deep in one of the lotus ponds they'd tackled each other into. Yanli had run down the pier and leapt over their heads, pulling her knees into her chest as she flew, splashing them both on landing. When she'd emerged, laughing, the sun bright on her shoulders, the future clear and easy, she had said, Ha! Ah, now all of us are wet, aren't we. So let's forgive, okay?
She had thought if only she could cut herself the same way her brothers were cut, they could heal together, and the binding would be stronger than the original wound.
She had thought a lot of foolish things, when she was young.
A-Cheng lets himself be pulled in, to rest his head on her shoulder. The fight has gone out of him: it burned hot and fast when he was young, and burns faster now that he isn't. "All right," he mutters. "Let's forgive, a-jie."
She runs her fingers through her little brother's hair. He closes his eyes in the sun, already tiring, even just sitting. She gives him a boost of energy, which he acknowledges only with a flicker at the corner of his mouth. "You can give it to me whenever you want," he tells her, without opening his eyes. At her questioning reply, he cracks one open in a friendly glare. "The letter, for A-Xian. You never ask about them, and you did this time. So there must be something you want to know, or say."
"I came to see you," she tells him, an old anxiety suddenly plucking at her robes, handed down to her after many beratings from her mother: that Yanli played favorites. The same favorite as her father.
Yanli gave birth and said the baby died. Yanli handed that baby to the Yiling Patriarch and not to her brother, safe in his temple: she knows how this looks. She knows how A-Cheng must see it. She knows he will not listen to her say A-Cheng you aren't well enough without hearing A-Cheng you aren't strong enough. But she —
"I know," A-Cheng answers, disrupting her thoughts. "You came to see me. And you need me to do something for you. I know."
"It's not — "
"A-jie," A-Cheng interrupts, and now he's laughing a little, sitting up. "You have come every month for thirteen years. You aren't good enough at subterfuge for me to think it's all been to deliver a letter now."
Yanli smiles at him. She hears Sang-di's voice in her head: Jiang-zongzhu. We have both had our loved ones taken from us. We both want them back, in whatever shape they come in. But my gifts and yours are not the same.
Yanli isn't good at the art of scheming, it's true. She doesn't know how not to love and believe in the people she knows, in the people she must trust in order to perform her job. This has helped her, over the years. Her open face, her earnest affection: people like Sect Leader Jiang. They trust her.
They tell her things.
Sect Leader Jiang is very good at keeping secrets. Everybody knows this.
It's funny, Sect Leader Lan had murmured to her over tea, before the meeting adjourned and his brother set off to find the Yiling Patriarch. Back during the war — Wangji was ... a bit infatuated, I think, with Wei Wuxian. But I don't know why I'm telling you this, when you have enough of your own troubles with the Yiling Patriarch. I just … I worry about him. You know.
The smile he'd given her was kind. The smile she'd given him in return was kind, too.
They were all so very kind to one another.
She strokes A-Cheng's hair again and murmurs, "Ah, didi. That's true. Very well. But I don't have a letter for A-Xian, as it turns out. The letter I have is for Wen Qing."
-
The fearsome and terrible Yiling Patriarch does not wake until, at the earliest, si shi. The rest of the Burial Mounds residents don't bother being quiet; they rise during chen shi and clatter their way to eat outside when the weather is nice. Lan Wangji suspects that they are loud specifically to rouse Wei Wuxian, in fact; he has noticed A-Qing and A-Zhen talking loudly, and incorrectly, about farming techniques, until Wei Wuxian stumbles grumpily from the Demon Subdue Palace, hair mused, lips puffy and pouting, to grumble things like, "No, no, what are you talking about, you can't plant lotus in August you have to plant it in May — "
"Ohhh, in May," A-Yuan will say, nodding knowledgeably as he tucks a steamed bun into Wei Wuxian's hand, patting his head. "Guys, it's May when you plant lotus seeds."
Wen Qing will roll her eyes. A-Qing will roll them too, in perfect imitation.
Lan Wangji has plans to get everyone up at a reasonable hour, but he recognizes that this will not happen overnight. He begins instead to wake the children earlier by increments; Wei Wuxian is more of a gradual system. Lan Wangji wakes him promptly at mao shi with the resigned understanding that he will not fully rise until breakfast is served.
The routine goes like this: Lan Wangji awakes promptly at the start of mao shi. He goes to the Demon Subdue Palace to begin the arduous process of waking Wei Wuxian, pausing on his way to greet Wen Qionglin and discuss how he spent the night over a cup of tea. Lan Wangji has come to find Wen Qionglin an excellent, quiet companion. They part ways, Wen Qionglin to wake his sister ("I'm the only one brave enough; anyway, she can't kill me, I'm already dead") and Lan Wangji to rouse Wei Wuxian.
Sometimes, when the light is right, hitting the edges of the sleeping roll and casting delicate shadows on the room, Lan Wangji will find himself standing in the doorway for a moment. Looking at him.
My brother, Sect Leader Jiang had said, but Lan Wangji understands, in the early dawning light, that what she had meant was a man. Just a man. Small, in the shadows. He sleeps curled up tightly, like he doesn't want to take up space, or perhaps like he doesn't want to be seen. I sleep at night. Do it then.
Lan Wangji could, is the thing. Wei Wuxian sleeps with no defenses. Even his flute is all the way across the room, thrown beside whatever experimental talismans he'd been working on before he stumbled into bed.
He has absolutely no sense of self-preservation whatsoever.
Lan Wangji is here to spy on him, and Wei Wuxian knows this. At any time Lan Wangji could depart and tell the other sects that the only people living at the Burial Mounds are untrained children and a demonic cultivator who sleeps so soundly that not even the sound of Yuyu and A-Ling shouting at each other over who gets to feed the bunnies wakes him.
Wei Wuxian knows this, and he sleeps anyway. Doesn't startle at mao shi when Lan Wangji begins the long process of waking him. Instead, he makes these small, grumpy sounds as Lan Wangji squeezes his shoulder, shaking it, "not yet, Lan Zhan, okay? Five minutes," but it's never just the five minutes. It's five minutes, and then five more, and five on top of that. Lan Wangji is not in the habit of indulging laziness, but sometimes he is distracted, by other tasks. Sometimes, when the circles under Wei Wuxian's eyes are so dark they look like shadows, Lan Wangji abruptly decides it is not worth his valuable time to drag the Yiling Patriarch out of his bed. This man, who sleeps, defenseless, who trusts Lan Zhan to wake him and trusts that he will be the one who does.
Lan Zhan surely has better things to do, if he could remember what they were.
Lan Wangji shakes him awake for the first time, then meditates in the door of the cave; shakes him awake again, and goes to gather the children, who tumble sleepily out of bed, rubbing their eyes, and sit quietly for the breakfast that Wen Qionglin has prepared; shakes him awake again, and greets Wen Qing, who is sharp-edged and quiet in the mornings, before tea, though she rises without complaint; shakes him awake again, and nods to the children that they can make noise again, now that the meal is finished, and eventually their voices spur Wei Wuxian into the light, blinking beneath a mess of tangled hair.
(Once, mid-shake, Wei Wuxian had reached up and wrapped his fingers all the way around Lan Wangji's wrist, pressed his mouth to the pulse point, and murmured, "er-ge, shhh, lay down here, quiet time," which made made Lan Wangji yank back like he'd been bruised.
"Ridiculous," he'd snapped, touching his wrist.)
After the meal, Lan Wangji conducts lessons with the children. He has purchased six qins and six swords, all of them white, designed with the Lan cloud motif. None of the blades have any spiritual power; the children aren't far along enough for that, and won't be for many months. But they are fine swords. They will be good for teaching. And it will be good, he thinks, for them to have something defensive — even a blade without any power in it can make cuts.
Of course, the swords and their forms are for later. Theory first, application after. They spend the morning and early afternoon on a blend of cultivation theory and qin practice, a chorus of surprisingly lovely voices once they stop using them to irritate the hell out of everyone around them. Yuyu, though young, will be a beautiful soprano, Lan Wangji thinks.
Mianmian is still too young, but she sits on Lan Wangji's lap while he plays, watching his hands with a tiny little furrow in her brow.
They break for lunch at wei shi, and Lan Wangji gives the children over to Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing, who put them to work farming and doing necessary tasks around the settlement. Lan Wangji tried initially to help, but nobody would let him.
"You're Xiansheng," A-Ling tells him, sounding appalled. "You can't do manual labor."
"Yeah, Lan Zhan," Wei Wuxian pitches in, grinning, the bridge of his nose smattered with sun, robe sleeves rolled up just passed his elbows. It makes something go dry in the back of his throat. Lan Wangji is, of course, too busy to think about it. "We could never ask the venerated Second Jade of Lan to dirty his hands in our radish fields."
"No person's labor is worth more than any other," Lan Wangji says, and the kids all sing-song, "Rule two thousand, four hundred, and ninety six!" back at him.
Trust the Yiling Lans to turn dutiful scholarship into a tool for spite.
So Lan Zhan spends wei shi and half of shen shi on his own cultivation, and preparing lessons for the following day. Sometimes he spends it writing, making more progress on the song he still hasn't named than he's made in years. The back half of shen shi he leads guided meditation for the children, which he is horrified to learn they've never done.
Wen Qing uses the meditation period to go back to her dwelling and work on whatever it is she works on in there; no one has volunteered it to Lan Wangji, and he hasn't asked. The closest he's come to a hint is when A-Ling accidentally let slip that sometimes she took blood from him, but when pressed for the reason, he'd shrugged and said, "How should I know? Doctor stuff," and that was that.
Sometimes Wei Wuxian joins them in meditation. Lan Wangji watches him fold into a seated position and settle, quiet, still. It is odd to see him this way. Even in sleep, he moves. Sometimes his whole body and sometimes just his brow, but there is no natural stillness in Wei Wuxian. In meditation, he looks — uninhabited. As if his spirit has left his body entirely. Lan Wangji doesn't know how he feels about it.
"Do you like it?" Lan Wangji asks once, as the children are hustled off to clean up before dinner. "Meditation?"
Wei Wuxian leans, pliant and loose-limbed, against a tree. He folds his arms across his chest and grins, light and easy. Everything about him is light and easy, when he wants it to be. Lan Wangji doesn't yet know whether this is because he wants people to underestimate him, or whether it is because he wants to shape the world into something softer by treating it with gentle hands. "I didn't used to," he admits, before leaning in, like he has a secret. Despite himself, Lan Wangji feels himself leaning back, keeping the words close and quiet between them. "But I like it better now."
Lan Wangji pulls back, feeling his ears go hot. "Ridiculous," he says.
"No, no, I mean it," Wei Wuxian promises, but he's laughing, his eyes scrunching as he watches Lan Wangji tug at his sleeves, straightening them. "You have a very soothing voice, Lan Zhan. I've always thought that."
Lan Wangji raises his eyebrows. "Always," he repeats, dubious of this time period.
"Yeah. Back during — you remember. After dinner you'd play your qin. Sometimes you sang. I, ah," he breaks off laughing, scrubbing at his nose. Embarrassed, Lan Wangji thinks. "It was nice. It helped me sleep."
Lan Wangji thinks of all the mornings that he has tried and failed to convince Wei Wuxian to rise at a civilized hour. He says, "Experience has taught me that Yiling-laozu has no trouble sleeping."
The look Wei Wuxian gives him is very dry. "I have no trouble being asleep," he agrees, and then shrugs again. Lets his own problems slide off the dip of his shoulder. "It's the falling asleep that gets me."
"Mn," says Lan Wangji, for lack of anything else.
"I liked the song, back then," Wei Wuxian goes on. "What was it, do you remember?"
Lan Wangji does remember: he wrote at night, and wrote by playing. He played and waited for the notes to come to him, and sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn't. It feels — something tightens in his chest, to think that he had been playing all that time for Wei Wuxian. That he had plucked the strings for the love of the sounds they made, and those sounds lulled Wei Wuxian's restless spirit to rest.
Strange, he thinks.
"It is good for practice," he dissembles. This is not a lie. The song is complex. It's good for his fingers, to sometimes stumble across the strings.
Wei Wuxian hums. "Well, it was nice," he says again. "It sounded sad. Or ... not sad. Like — like whoever wrote it was waiting for something. Sad waiting. But it was good. I liked it."
He breaks off with a soft laugh, hand at the back of his own neck. When Lan Wangji hadn't been paying attention, Wei Wuxian had become beautiful in the afternoon light. His hair falls over his shoulder in a soft, warm river. The pink sunset plays along the ridges of his mouth, lights the gentle fire in his eyes. A dangerous time to meet the Yiling Patriarch, Lan Wangji thinks.
Sad waiting, he muses, and hears himself say out loud: "And what are you waiting for, Wei Ying?"
The name surprises both of them. Wei Wu — the Yiling — Wei Ying's gaze skitters to him, eyes widening. For a moment, they just look at one another, Lan Wangji at his qin, Wei Ying with his hand wrapped around his dizi. They haven't played together. Lan Wangji suddenly longs to know what it would be like if they did.
Music cultivation requires no spiritual tools, only regular instruments. The power is in the song. It is in the intention of playing the song. It is in the weaving of your own desires into the notes. Spiritual songs work on the power of your — of —
Of your sad waiting.
"A dinner that's not radish-based," Wei Ying jokes. "Lan Zhan, sometimes I dream about pork and lotus soup. One day the lotus plants will actually sprout, and then we can have it. I'll have to take a lot of nighthunting jobs to pay for the pork, but it would be worth it to die of some dumb ghost curse if it meant my last meal could be pork and lotus soup."
Lan Wangji frowns. "You do not have to die for soup," he says flatly. "Soup can be fairly easily obtained without need for human sacrifice."
Wei Ying laughs.
Wei Ying ... often laughs at Lan Wangji. At the things he says. As if — as if he thinks Lan Wangji is funny.
No one ever thinks that Lan Wangji is funny, except his brother. They think Lan Wangji is cold. Sometimes they think he is stuffy. Sect Leader Su, whom Lan Wangji would rather die than call Su-zongzhu and instead refers to exclusively as "you," once said that Lan Wangji was "arrogant and stuck up." And that was to his face.
But Wei Ying laughs. Lan Wangji doesn't know what to make of this.
"I forget that you're rich," Wei Ying says, lips still curled up. "Okay, fine. Bring the Yiling-laozu some soup, Lan-er-gege."
"I will bring enough for everyone," Lan Wangji says, because this sentiment feels important. There is something he is trying to make Wei Ying understand, but he isn't even sure he knows himself what it is.
Wei Ying laughs again. "Of course you will," he says, and gives his head a rueful shake.
-
Xian-gege hasn't taken a job in two months. Two. A-Yuan doesn't know why, but he knows that there have been plenty of rumors about nighthunts for hire in Yiling, and Xian-gege hasn't gone.
A-Yuan is curious, but doesn't ask. He's afraid that asking will remind Xian-gege, and then Xian-gege will go, and A-Yuan doesn't want him to. None of them ever want him to go, and he insists on going anyway. This is part of being a grown-up that A-Yuan has not quite figured out; why they all insist on doing things that they do not want to do, even when, in A-Yuan's opinion, they don't really have to do them.
"Qing-jie says it's because Xian-gege likes to suffer," Zizhen says, leaning back on a rock by the stream and soaking in the sun. Technically jiujiu is supposed to be watching them, but A-Qing had distracted him by pretending one of the bunnies was sick so they got to come alone. A-Yuan feels bad about lying to jiujiu, but sometimes you have to do a little bad thing in service of a big good thing.
"Xian-gege doesn't like to suffer," A-Ling sniffs. "Nobody likes to suffer. Suffering's the worst."
"When have you ever suffered?" A-Qing asks derisively, splashing him. "Name one suffering."
A-Ling considers. "I get no respect," he decides eventually, which, in A-Ling's defense, is pretty true. But then, in A-Ling fashion, he immediately ruins his good point by following it up with a very dumb point, which is: "Plus, my parents are dead."
"All our parents are dead, water-brain,"[2] Jingyi says, and hooks him into a headlock, dunking him. A-Ling struggles for a second, and at A-Yuan's look, Jingyi lets him go. "You're no fun, shixiong," Jingyi grumbles.
A-Yuan pats the rock beside him and A-Ling scrambles up onto it, taking refuge between A-Yuan and Zizhen. "Not Yuan-er!" A-Ling protests, even as he squats behind Zizhen's shoulders. "Xian-gege says he's his real mom."
A-Yuan, A-Qing, Zizhen and Jingyi all look at each other. There's a long beat of silence.
"Uh," says Jingyi eventually. "You know that ... like ... Xian-gege can't really ..." He trails off, looking at A-Qing for help.
She huffs. "Xian-gege can't give birth to a baby, he's a boy," she explains briskly. "Only girls can have babies." She looks at the others. "You're welcome, by the way. As per usual, you guys get off easy, and my life sucks."
"No way. I'd totally have a baby if I could," A-Yuan says, patting A-Ling's head. He's really very cute, actually, once you get past how annoying he is sometimes. He doesn't mean to be a brat, it's just his personality. "They're so cute and little. Remember Mianmian when she was still small?"
"Spoken like someone who's never seen childbirth," A-Qing says.
"You've never seen childbirth," A-Yuan points out.
"I meant that Xian-gege's probably his real dad," A-Ling interrupts, pouting. "I know that boys can't have babies. I'm not stupid."
"You're a little stupid," Jingyi tells him, not unkindly. "It's okay, though, you're only ten. When you're as old as me you'll be smarter."
A-Yuan bites his lip and doesn't say anything. He tries not to think about it — that he was here first. That Xian-gege always only says I birthed you from my own body whenever anybody asks how A-Yuan turned up. Everyone else has ... something, of their parents. A reason. Even A-Qing, who had two sets of parents before she ended up here, knows what happened. Her first ones died in a fire. Her second ones found her and brought her here.
But A-Yuan — was born here, maybe.
There was a while where he'd thought ... it seems stupid now, but he'd thought maybe Qing-jie was his mom. That maybe she and Xian-gege had been in love, or, or, she loved someone else, or … A-Yuan doesn't know about these things. But maybe he had a whole set of parents, right here in the Burial Mounds, and they didn't tell him because they didn't want his siblings to feel left out.
He's Qing-jie's favorite, after all; everyone knows it. She tries to pretend like he isn't, but he knows he is. It's the way she looks at him, sometimes. Like A-Yuan is a secret she's keeping.
"... keep getting older," A-Ling is saying. "So I'll never be as old as you."
"Huh, good point," Jingyi says, stroking his chin thoughtfully, then shrugs. "Guess you'll never be as smart as me, then."
A-Ling splutters furiously, and at Jingyi's cackle he stands up on the rock and goes hurtling off, tackling Jingyi into the water. Jingyi ducks behind A-Qing, scrambling up onto her back, as A-Ling tries to reach around her to get at him. She holds A-Ling back with one strong arm on his forehead.
Zizhen lolls his head to the side, squinting in the light. "You okay?" he asks A-Yuan quietly.
"Mn," A-Yuan says, and then feels himself flush. The others already make fun of him for imitating Xiansheng, but he can't help it. He likes Xiansheng. He thinks Xiansheng is cool. "Just thinking."
"About whether Qing-jie and Xian-gege are your real parents?" Zizhen guesses. Zizhen's always been too observant by half, A-Yuan thinks. You can never have any thoughts around him without him guessing them. "I guess it's not impossible. Although the idea of them making a baby is kind of hard to imagine. And gross. It is also very gross to imagine."
A-Yuan makes a face. "I don't think ... I don't think that's it," he admits, quietly enough that the three roughhousing siblings in the water don't hear him. "They don't seem like ... but. I mean, I had to come from somewhere, didn't I?" He shrugs.
"Yeah," Zizhen agrees. What A-Yuan likes best about Zizhen is that he takes everything in stride, and never judges you too much. "Maybe it's just one of them. Maybe Xian-gege or Qing-jie had some great love before they came here, and that's how you were made. But they died. Like, maybe Xian-gege had a wife, and then when she died, he couldn't protect her, so he vowed nothing like that would ever happen to you and that's why he became the Yiling Patriarch."
A-Yuan levels Zizhen with a look. No judgment from Zizhen, but he does have a tendency toward an over-romantic imagination, in A-Yuan's opinion. "He became the Yiling Patriarch because the rest of the cultivation world was trying to exterminate Qing-jie and jiujiu and he wanted to protect them. Everyone knows that."
"Yeah, but how'd he learn the ghost stuff?" Zizhen returns. He sits up on his elbows. "Yuan-er, I've been thinking about it. Everyone says Xian-gege is bad because he does weird demon stuff, right? But how'd he learn how to do it? Like, where was he before he came here? Who was his Xiansheng?"
"Baoshan Sanren."
"Baoshan Sanren doesn't teach demonic cultivation, shixiong, she's a daozhang."
"What, then?" A-Yuan returns, raising his eyebrows. "You think Xian-gege got sick of living a happy, utopic life inside the temple and decided one day, hey, what if instead of being a proper cultivator, I leave and do, like, the one thing guaranteed to make everybody hate me?"
Zizhen opens his mouth, then closes it again, then says, "Okay, well, to be fair, that does sound like Xian-gege." A-Yuan cedes the point with a wince. "But my theory is that Xian-gege had to leave the temple, because he fell in love with someone, and their love was forbidden, so they had to run away. I'll bet she was a demonic cultivator."
A-Yuan blinks. This is a lot of information to take in.
"That's the dumbest crap I ever heard," A-Qing says, and when A-Yuan and Zizhen turn, she, Jingyi, and A-Ling are no longer splashing around in the water, but have come over to stand by the rocks. A-Qing wrings out her hair and ties it up deftly; A-Ling settles in front of her comfortably and she begins the slow process of untangling his unruly locks, which sometimes curl and cling when they're wet. "Xian-gege didn't run off from the temple with a demonic cultivator, because he invented demonic cultivating. That's why they wanted him for the war. Everybody knows that."
"Nobody knows that!" Jingyi protests. "Who told you?"
"Just somebody," A-Qing mutters. "I don't know. Someone in town, maybe. I hear things."
"What else do you hear?"
"Xian-gege showed up out of nowhere to help the major sects win the war against Qing-jie's sect, but then once the war was won they worried that he'd use the same tactics to turn against them, especially once he made a big stink about all the work camps and stuff. So he and Qing-jie and jiujiu escaped to the Burial Mounds, and people pay him money to hunt stuff because they think he's, you know, bigger and scarier than the stuff they pay him to hunt." She pauses thoughtfully. "Also, weird people used to come around and ask him to take them on as students, but Xian-gege always said no, and this made them mad because they thought he was hoarding all the power for himself. So that's why everyone hates us, because they went around saying bad stuff."
Jingyi snorts. "Xian-gege won't even teach us how to do cool stuff, what makes strangers think he's gonna teach them?"
A-Qing shrugs, tugging her hand through a stubborn knot in A-Ling's hair. He grimaces, but doesn't complain. "I dunno. They all think he's this big scary monster. It's really funny. When Yang-ge found out where I live he asked about Xian-gege's secret Wen army, can you believe it?"
"Is that us?" Zizhen wonders. "Are we the secret army?"
A-Ling makes a face. "Xian-gege doesn't need an army. He has jiujiu."
"Who's Yang-ge?" A-Yuan asks, quietly. "Is he the one you sneak out to see?"
A-Qing's lips go tight. Jingyi jokes blithely, "Oh yeah, A-Qing's boyfriend."
"He's not my boyfriend," A-Qing snaps, voice sharp. Sharp enough that A-Yuan knows she's not kidding. That it's not something they should joke about. "He's nobody. It doesn't matter."
He pats her hand where it's tightened painfully in the hair on top of A-Ling's head. "Okay," he says, soothing, and elbows Jingyi hard, when he looks like he's going to protest. "You can have friends outside of us, a-jie. It's fine. I know it's hard being the oldest and not having anybody to talk to."
A-Qing huffs. "Whatever," she mutters. "I'm not first disciple, you are."
"Wisest and oldest aren't the same thing," A-Yuan jokes, grinning, and the tension breaks as A-Qing laughs. "Just because I'm the smartest and the most knowledgeable — "
"You're not!" A-Ling interrupts. "A-Yi's the best at music. Xiansheng says he has a natural inclination."
Jingyi preens, tossing his wet hair over his shoulder with enough of a flourish that it flings water onto the rest of them. "It's probably because I'm the only real Lan," he sniffs, and this reminds A-Yuan of why they wanted to leave jiujiu behind in the first place: Xiansheng.
"Do you think Xiansheng is really going to make us part of his sect?" A-Yuan asks, and holds his arms open for A-Ling to snuggle into when he shivers a bit, still wet. A-Qing and Jingyi scramble up onto the rock, stretching out to get as much sun as they can. "Do you think if he does that means we have to leave?"
Zizhen hums. "I happened to overhear him and jiujiu the other day when they were having their morning tea quiet boy time," he confesses, and then holds up a hand when A-Yuan and A-Ling open their mouths. "I know, I know. Eavesdropping is forbidden. But it wasn't really eavesdropping! I was lying in bed, exactly where I was supposed to be, and I just happened to be feeling very, very quiet as I ... listened to the world around me. Isn't Xiansheng always saying we ought to pay attention to our surroundings?"
A-Qing looks impressed at this reasoning. "Anyway, Xian-gege says broken rules are only a problem if you get caught," she points out. "So I say we give Zizhen a pass and congratulate him on very nobly confessing to his crime."
A-Yuan is aware this is probably not in the spirit of the rules, but after all, he's sure whoever wrote them would understand if they had the proper context, so he agrees on letting Zizhen's eavesdropping go with a nod.
"Great. So," Zizhen continues, "I was paying attention to my surroundings and I happened to hear jiujiu talking about how much he'd liked Cloud Recesses when he was there, I guess like a hundred thousand years ago before the war and stuff, because it was so peaceful and quiet and Xiansheng said: well, you are always welcome to come back. And jiujiu said but Lan-er-gongzi, I'm dead, and Xiansheng said, nevertheless, you know, in that voice he does when he's being stubborn, and jiujiu got really excited thinking about it and talking about the trees and how nice the air was and then he said, but I can't go, of course, because of the children, and then! Xiansheng said, word-for-word, I swear, but they are Lans; of course they will come too."
The four of them gasp.
"We can go to Cloud Recesses?" A-Yuan repeats. "Like, the real one? Where — where all the real Lans are?"
"I don't think Xiansheng has really thought this through," Jingyi says dubiously. "Us? In Cloud Recesses? Didn't jiujiu say it was peaceful there? Because two days ago Qing-jie said we were 'worse than a herd of yaoguai,' which, like, I didn't even know they came in herds."
"They don't, dummy," A-Qing tells him distractedly; she's thinking hard, A-Yuan can tell. "So Xiansheng wants to bring us to Cloud Recesses. And he wants jiujiu to come, which means — it's forever, probably, right?"
Zizhen shrugs. "Jiujiu got emotional, which made them both embarrassed, so they switched to talking about the bunnies."
"Cool," A-Ling says. "We're gonna belong to a real sect! Maybe people will stop wanting to kill us so badly now. Maybe they just want to kill us for normal reasons, like stealing, or burning stuff down by accident."
A-Qing scowls at him. "First of all, that was once, so get off my back about it, and secondly, it's not cool," she tells him. "It's terrible. If he takes us back to Gusu, you're all going to have to be sect cultivators."
"What's so bad about that?"
"Uh, hello? Sect cultivators are the ones who killed Qing-jie and jiujiu's clan, and also, incidentally, were the members of their clan who went all crazy and got everyone murdered in the first place! Plus, there's no way they let Xian-gege in. He's the Yiling Patriarch. You think the Gusu Lan are gonna let the Yiling Patriarch just, like, live in their house, blaspheming all over the place?"
A-Yuan furrows his brow. "But Xiansheng isn't like that," he defends. "He wouldn't bring us somewhere that wasn't safe. He loves us."
"Listen up, stupid egg," [3] A-Qing snaps. "My a-die and fuqin got offers from like a hundred sects who wanted them to join, and they always said no. They told me that sects were just politics in disguise."
"Well, I want to go, politics or no politics," A-Ling says, folding his arms across his chest, stubborn. "I hate living in the Burial Mounds. All we eat is radishes and the air tastes bad and everyone hates us and we're poor. Just once I want to have a bath that's a real bath that's hot. I want to use real soap. I wanna smell like Xiansheng did when he got here."
Zizhen grins, a little. "Yeah, Qingqing, not to mention your marriage prospects would really improve. As of now you're gonna have to marry, like, some corpse that Xian-gege animates for you."
A-Qing yanks his ear hard enough to make him help. "Shut up," she orders. "I'm never getting married, first of all, and if I do, it'll be because I feel like it. I don't need some dumb sect telling me to marry into some other dumb sect for better rice, or whatever. I know a scam when I see one and marriage is definitely a scam."
"All our marriage prospects would dramatically improve through sect association," A-Yuan interrupts, before anyone can tease her. "A-Ling's right. It would be nice to live in a real house, don't you think, shimei?"
A-Qing opens her mouth, then hesitates. She looks at the three of them with an expression that A-Yuan can't decipher. He forgets, sometimes, that she remembers a lot of her life before coming here. She had her a-die and fuqin. Not for very long, he doesn't think, maybe even less than a year, but she still had them. She remembers them.
She misses them, he thinks.
"If Xiansheng takes us back to Gusu," she says now, voice quiet, "there's no way Xian-gege could come. Maybe they'd overlook jiujiu and Qing-jie, since jiujiu is dead and Qing-jie's a doctor. But not Xian-gege. He'd hand us off to Xiansheng and we'd never see him again."
The four boys go quiet. That's not a good trade, A-Yuan thinks. Xian-gege is gone a lot, and sometimes trying to love him feels like trying to hug the wind, but he's theirs, and they're his, too. A-Yuan knows that nobody belongs to anybody but you can belong with people, he thinks, and they all belong together. He saved them, didn't he? So they have to save him, too.
"Unless," says Zizhen, and they all look at him.
"Unless?" asks Jingyi, starting to grin.
"Unless Xian-gege was made into a Lan, too." Zizhen has a look in his eyes that makes A-Yuan nervous and excited in equal measure.
A-Qing's eyebrows raise. "And how are you planning to do that?" she asks. "Make him start attending classes? Start calling him Lan-gege?"
Zizhen makes a dismissive pffft sound, waving his hand like he's fanning smoke out of his face. "There are three ways of joining a sect," he reminds them. "The first is to be born into it. The second is to accept an invitation from a Clan Leader. And the third ... "
A-Yuan gets it, all at once. "No way," he says. "They'd never."
Jingyi, looking absolutely delighted, smacks a big kiss onto Zizhen's cheek. ("Gross," says Zizhen, happily.) "They totally would," he argues. "Come on. You've seen how Xiansheng looks at him."
"Xian-gege is always trying to get his attention," A-Qing muses. "I don't even think he notices he's doing it, but it's super obvious and embarrassing. For the rest of us. Xian-gege doesn't appear to feel shame."
A-Yuan thinks about it. He thinks about how Xiansheng had looked when jiujiu brought Xian-gege back, limp in his arms. How he'd sat for days and days beside his bed, playing spiritual songs and feeding Xian-gege spiritual energy. He thinks about how Xian-gege's eyes are always darting toward Xiansheng and then away, how he seems to turn his personality up several percentages whenever Xiansheng is around.
He thinks about how lately, at night, Xiansheng will sit outside the Demon Subdue Palace and play calming lullabies, which he claims is for his own qin practice but which A-Yuan suspects is to help Xian-gege sleep.
He thinks about Xian-gege putting off taking a new job. Putting it off, and putting it off, as if he worried that when he came back, something would be gone, or lost.
"Oh," he says. "Is that — what it looks like?"
A-Ling kicks his foot against the rock. "I don't get it," he whines. "What are you guys talking about?"
"The third way to enter a sect is to marry into it," Zizhen tells him, almost patiently.
"So?"
"So, rice bucket,[4] if we want Xian-gege to come to Cloud Recesses, then he's got to be a Lan, and if we want him to be a Lan, he's got to marry somebody who's already a Lan. Then they'd have to let him in."
A-Ling blinks. "So ... " he says slowly, "so ... we're going to get Xian-gege to marry Xiansheng? But how do we do that?"
Zizhen's worrying grin is back. "A little thing I like to call romance," he says, and rubs his hands together.
-
Two and a half weeks ago, a letter arrived for Wen Qing. This was notable because letters never arrive for Wen Qing, since Wen Qing is, as far as she knows, is one of the three most hated people in the universe.
The letter said: Wen-guniang. I could not write my brother about this, because he would have prevaricated and ignored it. Once A-Xian loves you, his vision clouds. He cannot see when we have done wrong. There is a cultivator sent by the major sects to spy on the Yiling Patriarch, because they are growing restless with the desire to bring him to heel. I think this cultivator volunteered because he believes that there is good, in A-Xian. You of all people know that he's right.
Wen-guniang, I know that you love my brother, and that he trusts you. His heart is easily swayed. He loves so fully. He will give up anything, suffer any cost, for those who have a piece of it. I do not know what life is like in the Burial Mounds but I beg you to take the caution with this cultivator that my brother will not take. I trust this cultivator's intentions, and his good heart, and even his affection for A-Xian, but I fear his loyalty and his rigid understanding of the world will hurt not only yourself, your brother, and A-Xian but also the other one with you, whom I love.
I know your judgment is sound and your eyes sharp. I beg you to use both, and say nothing of this letter to my brother, whose goodness is matched only by his stubbornness.
The letter was not signed, but then, Wen Qing hadn't needed it to be. She recognized Jiang Yanli's handwriting from their days at Cloud Recesses, and even if she hadn't, there are only two people in the world who would call Wei Ying brother, and only one of them who would know anything that is happening in the major sects.
It would figure that Jiang Yanli, after years of silence, would write not to her brother but to Wen Qing, and write with the news that things are worse than even Wen Qing had thought, and Wen Qing is not an optimist.
In some ways this was nothing she hadn't already known: that Lan Wangji had been sent by the sects, that sentiment against the Yiling Patriarch was rising. But if it is bad enough for Jiang Yanli to write in caution, then it must be ... very, very bad.
She hasn't said anything, to Wei Ying or Lan Wangji. She had intended to, at first; but then a line from the letter had caught in her mind. His affection for A-Xian. She has watched Lan Wangji with the children, and with her brother. She has watched him on his own. And she has watched the way his eyes follow Wei Ying whenever he is in the vicinity. The way his face turns toward him, like a sun-starved flower.
She has watched the way Wei Ying looks toward him and away, the way he teases with a near-desperate edge, looking for attention. The way he settles when he receives it.
The problem, Wen Qing has decided, is twofold: first, that both men are too stupid to realize what is happening, and second, that the kids are up. to. something. Wen Qing doesn't know what exactly, or why, or what the timeline of their plotting is, but they're up to something.
It's the little giveaways, at first. They start behaving, for one thing, and not just for Lan Wangji. When A-Ning tells them to wash up for dinner, they go without complaint, and come back with sparklingly clean complexions. For another, they take every possible opportunity to drag Wei Ying into Lan Wangji's business, begging Lan Wangji to teach him how to feed the bunnies and insisting on helping to clean up after dinner so that they can be left alone at the table, lit with candles and the setting sun. Jingyi is on a campaign to get Lan Wangji to teach Wei Ying how to braid better. You can practice on Xian-gege, he had insisted, and when Wei Ying pointed out that it would be difficult to learn if he couldn't see what Lan Wangji was doing, Jingyi had pressed his hand to his chest and crooned, You feel it, Xian-gege. You just have to let yourself feel what's happening.
A week ago she found Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian standing, bewildered, by the stream, having been abandoned by the children to what she can only describe as a devastatingly romantic picnic. There were fucking peach blossom petals strewn around.
And of course, there is the fact that they have started referring to one another as Lan.
"Well, we are, aren't we?" A-Ling asks grumpily as Wen Qing gently draws a little blood from him. He's gotten very brave about it; he doesn't cry anymore. She's not sure whether this is a good thing or not, but either way, she needs the blood. It would be better to have some of Jiang Cheng's, or even his sister's, but Wen Qing is used to working in suboptimal conditions, so poor little A-Ling has to donate instead. "I'm Lan Ling. Why shouldn't they call me that?"
"I didn't say they shouldn't," Wen Qing tells him peaceably. A-Ling is the easiest of them to get secrets out of. You just have to ask the right way. "I think it's nice."
She ties a piece of fabric around his bicep and pulls it tight, to cut off some of the sensation and make it hurt a little less. She can heal him up after, but sometimes she likes to be a little gentle. He likes being pampered. Anyway, today she wants to study his meridians — she'd thought maybe the problem was in the blood, perhaps a coagulation around Jiang Cheng's golden core that blocked him from accessing it. But lately she's been toying with the idea that rather than it being an issue of something physically blocking access, it's to do with a mismatch between how Wei Ying's core was accessed by his body versus how Jiang Cheng's is trying to.
Different sects cultivate differently, which means their qi acts differently in the body. It's not that the qi is different, just that they use it differently; in which case, a core transplanted from one body to another would need to be carefully adjusted and connected to ease the transition.
This would be so much easier if she just had access to her books.
"You do?" A-Ling asks guilelessly, perking up. She uses the distraction to cut a small slice into his arm and collect a small bowl of blood. She hands him the second bowl and they trade off positions, used to the routine of it, as she takes the first over to her work station.
"Sure," Wen Qing tells him. "Sit still, if you move too much it will flow too quickly. We don't need to take too much."
"I know, Qing-jie," A-Ling grumbles. "I've done this, like, a million times."
"Speak precisely," she scolds, and A-Ling automatically straightens his posture. "So what made you all decide that now was the right time to begin going by your proper names, Lan Ling?"
"No reason," he says, too-quick.
"Hmm," Wen Qing replies, and puts a drop of blood onto the bed of herbs she'd prepared earlier. It flares briefly, then sizzles out. Different hm. Not what she'd hoped. "You've learned all your Lan rules, now learn one from the Wen: all mountains begin as a single stone."
A-Ling frowns. "Bowl's full," he says, holding it out, and then, "what's that mean? About the stone?"
Wen Qing takes the second bowl of blood and sets it down, going back to A-Ling and untying the fabric. She presses her palm against the cut and sends him spiritual energy until it heals, good as new. "It means," she tells him, "that everything has a reason."
She levels him with a look. A-Ling squirms under it for a minute, then blurts, "It's just that Zizhen heard Xiansheng talking about Cloud Recesses and we thought maybe we could go too so if we started being real Lan maybe Xiansheng would take us."
Wen Qing waits. When no more information is forthcoming, she flashes a few needles.
A-Ling wilts. "No offense, Qing-jie, but living here sucks," he says. "I don't want to grow old in the Burial Mounds."
Wen Qing is not expecting the way she feels it in her gut. It's nothing she didn't know. Of course the children aren't happy here. It's the Burial Mounds. They live in caves. Their father-figure won't admit that he's their father and the whole world wants them dead. Hardly a child's dream.
She knows it is possible for them to love each other, and her, and still want to leave. Nothing can grow properly in the Burial Mounds.
But it had been so peaceful, for a while. Difficult, yes. Often unpleasant. But peaceful, and warm, comforting. Safe.
"I see," she says, voice clipped to keep the emotion out of it. A-Ling flinches, and Wen Qing feels herself soften. She gives his head a fond pat. "Ah, don't look at me like that, Lingling. I understand."
A-Ling's lower lip shakes a little. "You'll come too, right Qing-jie?" he asks, tremulous. "You and jiujiu? Xiansheng said you could."
Oh, Lan Wangji, she thinks, is that your plan? To take us all to Cloud Recesses and hide us?
Jiang Yanli was right: his heart is good, but his understanding of the world is flawed. The Lan are just as capable of atrocities as anyone else. Wen Qing learned the hard way not to blindly trust the goodness of your clan and your relatives. She learned the harder way that not even three thousand rules can prevent one clan from wiping out the survivors of another.
The children should go. The children will be safe, she thinks; no one knows who they are or how they were raised. But of course the adults can't come. The Lan name will protect the kids and damn their guardians, and they have always, always known this.
"And I am sure he meant it," Wen Qing agrees, faking good cheer. She is sure that Lan Wangji meant it, is the thing. But she is not sure that someone as honorable as Lan Wangji would have the political savvy to realize that not even his promise would be enough to stop either tongues or swords from wagging in their direction. "Now, that's your job done today. You've done very well."
He pinks under the praise, chest puffing out. Wen Qing sees so much of his father in him. It's easy to forget: that A-Ling isn't her real nephew, isn't Wei Ying's real son. That none of the kids are theirs. Wei Ying is always talking about how much of Jiang Yanli there is in A-Ling, but he never really knew Jin Zixuan, other than — she is told — a few terse meetings during the war and one notable incident regarding soup and mistaken identity. But Wen Qing had been a student with him, at Cloud Recesses. They'd ... been friends, kind of, insofar as either Jin Zixuan or Wen Qing had been friends with anybody, which was to say they both agreed that the other was bearable company and often sat next to one another in lectures.